“Meet SJ 11pm, Nov 17th, Boardwalk, Shooting Gallery. Come Alone. Good Luck—AC.” Cecelia realized with a start that the meet was scheduled for tonight. She wasn’t sure how Agnes Chiostro had known to send the telegram to the hotel, but Cecelia supposed she was a witch; maybe she’d read that in some tea leaves. Or maybe she’d read something in the newspapers about the attack and called the hospital. Either way, Cecelia wasn’t about to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth.
“What’s that?” Sue asked.
Cecelia tucked the telegram against her body to keep Sue’s big hands away from it. “Just a card from the hotel.”
“Looked more like a telegram to me.”
“It’s nothing important, just an old friend saying hello.”
“I bet.” Sue’s face darkened for a moment. She had tried to get Cecelia to identify her attackers and file a police report, but Cecelia had steadfastly refused to do so. The last thing she wanted was to have to go down to a police station and then a courtroom. In time, once she took care of Sylvia Joubert, she might catch up with Gert’s cousins and settle that score too. Until then, let them think they’d gotten away with it, just as her foster father thought he’d gotten away with his crimes.
Sue took her arm and gently gave her a push forward. “Come on, let’s get you to bed. You’ve exerted yourself enough already.”
“Right,” Cecelia said. She let Sue guide her to the bed; she knew she would exert herself a lot more before the night was over.
***
The biggest problem would be to get rid of Sue—or so Cecelia had thought. Since they’d checked into the Rampart Arms, Sue hadn’t let Cecelia out of her sight except to use the bathroom. Even then Sue hovered around the area; she knocked on the door when she thought Cecelia took too long.
Cecelia took so long because she worked to conceal a knife on each forearm. She was forced to go back to steak knives taken from the room service cart during dinner. There wasn’t any tape in the room, so Cecelia had to rely on strips of cloth taken from one of her dresses to tie the knives to her arms. That would allow her to sneak the knives out of the room and to the meet with Joubert.
As a weapons dealer, Sylvia Joubert might decide to search Cecelia or have some backup to do it for her. Cecelia counted on her appearance as a poor little immigrant girl. In this regard she hoped her scars and cane would make her seem even more pathetic, enough that Joubert would underestimate her—right up until Cecelia slit the bitch’s throat.
She stepped out of the bathroom, and found Sue pacing; she looked more agitated than usual. Sue checked her watch. “Are you going to be all right here for a few hours?” she asked.
“Sure. You got a hot date or something?”
“I need to go back to the plant, make sure things haven’t gone to hell.” From what Sue had said during Cecelia’s recovery, the situation at the plant had stabilized since she and Gert were let go. Everyone liked young Emily Cabot, who had quickly moved from the floor up to Mr. Dugan’s office for clerical training. This didn’t come as a surprise to Cecelia, who knew the kind of intellect Cabot’s granddaughter would possess. “You’re sure you’ll be fine?”
“I’ll probably just get some shut-eye.” To this end Cecelia had put on her robe; her original plan had been to fake going to bed, wait for Sue to be lulled into a false sense of security, and then either sneak past her or knock her out. It would be far easier if Sue left on her own.
“Well, all right. I’ll be back later. Want me to pick you up anything?”
“No, I’m fine. Thanks.” She allowed Sue to give her a gentle hug. Then the older woman hurried out the door.
Cecelia waited in bed for ten minutes, just in case Sue forgot something and came back. Once she was reasonably sure she was in the clear, Cecelia dropped the robe and grabbed her cane. She hobbled as fast as she could to the elevator; she let out a startled gasp when she saw the operator by the console. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m a little jittery. Lobby, please.”
When the doors opened onto the lobby, part of her expected to find Sue there, to trap her as if she were a teenager sneaking out past curfew. She didn’t see anyone she knew in the lobby and tried to relax. “Good evening, ma’am,” the doorman said.
“Could you call a cab for me?” she asked. He tipped his cap to her and two minutes later opened the door to help her into the cab. She gave him a dollar, which she hoped was enough of a tip, her knowledge on this somewhat out of date.
“Take me to the boardwalk,” she told the cabbie and then once more tried to relax. She had been on meets like this hundreds of times in her career; there was nothing different about this one. Except that she was in another girl’s scrawny body. Except that she carried a pair of steak knives tied to her arms instead of her real knives. Except that she might be going to meet the mother who had abandoned her a century ago. Other than that it was perfectly normal.
Rampart City’s boardwalk had once been a main attraction along the lines of Coney Island in New York or that other famous boardwalk in Atlantic City. Then came the Depression, followed by the war, both of which left people with far less disposable income for Ferris wheels, carousels, and roller coasters. The boardwalk would hang on for another fifteen years before it shut down and was finally destroyed in the early ‘70s.
At the moment, the boardwalk was dark and deserted. Blackout regulations had shut the place down at nights, which only further put a dent in the boardwalk’s business. “You realize they ain’t opening until tomorrow morning, right?” the cabbie asked.
“I know. I’m meeting a friend.”
“Oh, I see.” The cabbie gave her a wink. It wasn’t likely he did understand; he probably thought she’d come here to fuck someone in the funhouse or hall of mirrors. Cecelia paid for the fare and then stepped out of the cab.
With a deep breath, she began to walk along the deserted boardwalk. Once the cab’s lights disappeared, she had to rely on only the occasional streetlamp, which gave everything an orange glow that reminded her of the bridge under Robinson Park where Gert’s cousins had beaten her. She supposed a similar fate could be in store for her if the Joubert sisters had set a trap for her.
Cecelia limped past the closed-up carnival games on the midway and tried to remember which one was the shooting range. She supposed that was Joubert’s sense of irony that they discuss a weapons transaction by a carnival game that involved guns. Cecelia would have scheduled the meet someplace where it would be easier to run should things get ugly. The boardwalk left only two directions, unless you wanted to jump into the harbor.
The lighted end of a cigarette told her she was near the right place. Cecelia let the cane drop and then hugged herself as if she were cold. In reality she slipped her hands under her sleeves to the knives tied on her forearms. She loosened the knots enough so that one good tug would free them.
As she closed in on the abandoned shooting gallery, she saw a bulky silhouette puffing on the cigarette. Was this Sylvia Joubert or a henchman? Cecelia braced herself for someone to jump out of hiding and hit her on the back of the head, or perhaps to just shoot her outright.
The silhouette stepped into a pool of orange light and Cecelia froze. She stared blankly at the woman she’d come to meet, who stared back just as blankly.
Cecelia broke the silence. She asked in a tiny voice, “Sue? What are you doing here?”
“Maria? You’re the one Agnes said needed my help?”
Cecelia’s brain had turned to mush; it took almost a full minute for her to catch up. “Sue Johnson isn’t your real name, is it?”
“No. My real name is Sylvia Joubert.”
“Why all the secrecy?”
Sylvia shrugged inside the peacoat she wore over her Harmon-Farmer work shirt. “I promised my sister I wouldn’t fight in this war, not on the frontlines at least. My real name has a little baggage attached to it, as you might imagine.”
Cecelia’s legs wobbled; she wished she’d kept the cane to keep herself
upright. She finally squatted down to her knees and buried her face in her hands. “It can’t be you. You can’t be Sylvia Joubert. Not you!”
She felt Sue’s hand—Sylvia’s hand, she amended to herself—on her shoulder. “Maria, what’s going on? I want to help you—”
This sparked Cecelia’s courage enough that she managed to rip one of the knives from her forearms. She spun around clumsily and held the knife up at Sylvia, who only frowned slightly at this. “I don’t need your fucking help!” Cecelia stumbled up to her feet, but still kept the knife out at arm’s length. “I didn’t come here to get your help. I came here to slit your fucking throat!”
“Why? Maria—”
“My name is Cecelia. Cecelia Romeau.”
“Should I know you?”
“No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”
Sylvia casually tossed her cigarette aside. This made Cecelia want to stab her even more; she wanted her despicable mother to show some goddamned fear before she died. “I’ve never met a Cecelia Romeau.”
Cecelia thought back to the story Sue had told her in the hospital, about the baby she’d given away; when combined with the archivist’s story, Cecelia knew she was that baby. “No, you’ve never seen me before, but you ruined my life. You’re the reason I ended up in that terrible place, with that awful man. The things he did to me—it’s your fault!”
She lunged forward, but the tears in her eyes threw off her aim. Sylvia stepped aside and then locked both meaty arms around Cecelia’s shoulders. Cecelia kicked and thrashed, but just as with Gert’s cousins there was no escape. She let out a final scream of rage before she went limp in Sylvia’s arms.
Her mother made the kind of cooing noise her first mother—the one she had thought of as her real mother—had made when she was a baby. “It’s all right. Take it easy. We can work this out.”
Cecelia shook her head and began to sob; she didn’t care anymore how pathetic she looked. “It’s too late,” she mumbled. “Too late.”
Sylvia turned Cecelia around to look her in the eye. “Talk to me, Cecelia. Tell me what happened. Who hurt you?”
“My foster father.” Between her sobs she described the abuse her foster father put her through, culminating with her escape that Christmas Eve night. “An old woman saved my life and helped me, but the baby was dead.”
“I’m sorry, Cecelia. If I had known—”
“You could have stopped it. You let it happen!”
“Cecelia—”
Cecelia reached for her other knife. “I killed him and now I’m going to kill you!” She slipped the blade beneath Sylvia’s arms and then pressed the edge to her mother’s throat. She would kill the mother who had abandoned her, who had refused even to look at her, who had given her away to another family like a sack of old clothes.
She couldn’t do it. When she looked at Sylvia’s eyes, she saw those of Sue Johnson. Sue, who had taken Cecelia into her home and given her a job when no one else would have. She had defended Cecelia to the security guard, Gert, and finally Mr. Dugan. Cecelia thought of when they’d eaten lunch by the harbor and the dinner at Malloy’s.
Then she remembered when she woke up in the hospital. There was Sue again, by her bedside to comfort her about Maria’s dead baby. Sue had paid for her hospital care and made sure the doctors and nurses treated her nicely. Sue had put Cecelia up in the Rampart Arms because she didn’t want Cecelia to climb stairs with her bad leg.
Sue Johnson had been the mother Cecelia had craved since the fire had taken Mama and Papa away. And in the way Sylvia looked at her so sadly, Cecelia knew Maria Costopolous was the daughter Sylvia had always craved, the one she’d given up because she was afraid she wouldn’t be a good mother. Cecelia let the knife drop and pressed her head against Sylvia’s chest. “Why did it have to be this way?”
Sylvia patted her back gently. “I don’t know, kid. Life is really fucking cruel sometimes.”
Cecelia wasn’t sure how long they stood like that on the boardwalk with her mother comforting her. Though one hundred seventy years old, Cecelia felt like a child again; she wanted only the safety and security her mother’s body represented. But she could already feel herself slipping away, being pulled out of Maria’s body, back to her own body, in her own time.
“I don’t want to go,” she said.
“Then don’t.”
“I have to. I can’t stay.”
“Cecelia—”
She felt the pull grow stronger. “You were wrong,” she said.
“About what?”
Cecelia looked up at her and smiled through her tears. “You would have been a great mother.”
And then she was gone.
***
The first sign that Cecelia was back in her own time was the buzz of the klaxons inside the archives vault. The second was the hard, cold slab of rock beneath her. The third was the soft voice of the young Asian woman who worked in the archives saying, “Careful. Don’t sit up too fast. There might be some displacement.”
“Displacement?” Cecelia asked, surprised after all this time to hear her own voice, not that overly perky voice of Maria Costopolous.
“You’ve come back from a long way, haven’t you?” the archivist asked.
Cecelia’s eyes blinked open. The archivist looked down at her with concern. Cecelia smiled at this, considering she had tried to kill the woman however long ago it had been. “Yeah, I guess I have.” The archivist put a hand to Cecelia’s back to help her sit up. Cecelia’s head throbbed as if someone had hit her with a frying pan, but when she put a hand to her temple, she felt her own wavy hair. “You don’t have a mirror, do you?”
“No, my purse is upstairs.”
“Could you tell me if I look the same?”
“Yes, just like when you took off your mask.”
“When I tried to kill you.”
“That too.”
“Now I suppose you’re going to kill me.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because I almost killed you, your girlfriend, and your doctor friend.” Cecelia moved her neck slowly to take in the rest of the vault. She didn’t see Emma Earl anywhere. “Where is she?”
“She’s still gone. Do you want to stand up?”
“No, I think I’d rather lie down. You don’t have a bed here, do you?”
“That’s upstairs too, where I live.”
“That’s fine. The rocks will be good for my posture.” Cecelia groaned and then lay back down on the floor. A moment later the archivist stuck something soft beneath her head, which she realized was her mask, balled up to form a miniature pillow. “Thanks.”
“You’ve been gone for two days,” the archivist said. She slid over to sit with her back against some of the shelves.
“You’ve been here the whole time?”
“There’s nowhere else to go, not until the quarantine is over, when Emma gets back.”
“Great.” Cecelia sighed, not surprised that what had been months to her had only been two days in the real world. That was magic for you. “So we could be stuck here for a while then?”
“Maybe. Or maybe not.”
“I don’t suppose you at least brought a deck of cards?”
“No.” When the archivist held up a knife, Cecelia thought the archivist would slit her throat. Instead, the woman sketched out a grid on the floor. “You know how to play Tic-Tac-Toe? I’m a little rusty, but I used to play all the time when I was little.”
Cecelia shook her head slightly; they hadn’t played a lot of games at the orphanage. “Never really played much of it myself.”
“It’s pretty easy to learn. Do you want to be X’s or O’s?”
“X’s are fine.” The archivist explained the rules and then beat Cecelia in three straight matches. By the fourth one Cecelia had the basic strategy figured out and managed to eke out a draw. “I guess it is kind of fun—”
“Akako. That’s my name.”
Cecelia held up a hand for Akako to sh
ake. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
“Even though I tried to kill you?”
“Yes. I didn’t get to know your mother really well—she didn’t like me much—but you seem an awful lot like her.”
“I don’t want to talk about her.”
“Do you mind if I ask where you went?”
“The past.”
“How far past?”
“Do we have to do this now? Can’t we play another silly game?”
Akako shrugged and then scratched out another grid. While they played, Akako said, “I was just curious. I thought I could add some notes to my index. Most of the spells down here have a really vague description.”
Cecelia sighed again. Before she’d gone back into the past she probably would have slit Akako’s throat just for some peace and quiet. Now she was grateful to have someone to talk to about what she’d seen. “I went back to the ‘40s. Only I wasn’t me, I was some girl named Maria. And a very nice lady helped me out and we became friends.”
“And that nice lady was her, right? Your mother.”
Cecelia ignored the pain in her head as she sat up. “How the hell do you know that?”
“Because the spell was called ‘Unfinished Business.’ What more unfinished business could you have than your mother?”
Cecelia put a hand to her face but didn’t cry. Maybe that was because she was herself again, not fragile little Maria. Or maybe she had already cried herself out in the past. “Yes, she was the one who helped me out. But she didn’t know who I was. She was just being nice.”
“Sylvia always acted tough, but underneath she could be very sweet.”
“Then why did she abandon me?”
Akako considered this for a minute. “Maybe she thought you’d be better off without her.”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 101