Crimson Rain

by Meg O'Brien

  She knew that Angela might not be at Saint Sympatica’s any longer. But that day in August was Angela’s birthday, too, and finding her was a chance Rachel had to take. If her sister had been adopted and was living somewhere else, she would try to make the people there tell her where Angela was.

  She had gotten a friend to cover for her at camp that aftenoon, and had thumbed a ride to Saint Paul. Her mother would have died if she’d known about it—not just that she was going to see Angela, but that she was alone at night on the road, at the mercy of strangers. Rachel herself was scared to death as it grew dark that night; she had to keep telling herself she’d be all right, that if anything bad happened, she had the steak knife from dinner the night before, right there in her backpack.

  She recalled now that a truck driver, a nice woman who had taken to the road herself in her teens, dropped her off at Saint Sympatica’s. How she had made her way inside without being seen, however, was still a blank. She remembered standing outside on the lawn, in the dark, waiting for the lights to go out. It had seemed peaceful there, the August air soft and warm. Lightning bugs lit up the shrubbery, and frogs somewhere nearby sent out their ribbit songs.

  Then, suddenly, there was a boy. She remembered that now, too. But who was he? What was he doing outside while the orphanage was dark and everyone else was apparently in bed? Had he been the one to tell her where Angela’s room was? Rachel couldn’t remember. She did remember finding Angela in a room, with a man pinning her to the bed. Angela crying softly, begging him to leave her alone.

  Oh, God. Was it true that she, Rachel, had killed that man? The one Angela called “Dr. Chase”? Vague bits of memory were coming back. She saw herself running across the room, screaming silently, deep in her heart, as she beat on the man’s back with her fists. And then she remembered blood. Blood all over the place.

  There was something else, though.

  “Angela,” she said uncertainly, “who was that boy?”

  Angela gripped the wheel and looked straight ahead. “What boy?”

  “There was a boy, wasn’t there? That night at Saint Sympatica’s?”

  “No,” Angela snapped. “There was no boy.”

  “But I think I remember seeing someone—”

  “Look, you want me to leave you right here on the side of the road? For God’s sake, shut up, Rach! Stop being an idiot.”

  It was a full half hour later when they reached the outskirts of Spokane. Angela pulled off onto a narrow side road. She stopped the car, slipped the knife she’d had the night before out of her jacket and turned to Rachel, resting it against her cheek.

  “Last stop, little sis. You know, I’m kind of sorry it has to be this way.”

  She pushed Rachel forward and slid the tip of the knife down her back till it came to the rope that tied Rachel’s hands. Cutting through it with a sawing motion, she said, “You know what you have to do. Right?”

  Rachel rubbed her wrists and nodded. “Right.”

  10

  That morning, Paul sat with Gina at the breakfast bar, waiting for the coffee to brew. Paul was across from her, on the stool usually filled by Rachel. He took both her hands and told her how sorry he was that they’d drifted apart—not only the past few months, but the past several years.

  “I don’t know why we’ve been going our separate ways instead of growing closer,” he said. “I just know it isn’t right. And I know it’s been my fault. Gina, I want to start doing better. Whatever’s happened, whether Rachel’s been kidnapped or she’s just gone away, I have to believe she’ll be back. And when she does comes back—” his voice broke “—I want our daughter to know that her parents are together and behind her, every step of the way. I…I want you to know I’m behind you, too.”

  Once he’d begun speaking, Paul hadn’t been able to stop the words from pouring forth. He felt drained, as if he’d run a marathon.

  Gina’s eyes shifted away from his.

  “You, uh…you want that, too, don’t you?” Paul asked uneasily.

  “Well, of course I want us to be united for Rachel,” Gina said. “I…I’m just not sure it isn’t too late, Paul. For us, I mean.”

  The color drained from Paul’s face. “Are you saying you think it’s over? That we should separate?”

  She bit her lower lip. “No. I mean, I just don’t know. It’s hard…it’s hard to know what to do, with Rachel gone. It just doesn’t seem like the best time to make a decision like that.”

  His hands tightened. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  She looked at him, surprised. “I…I don’t want to lose you, either,” she said hesitantly. “It’s just that…oh, Paul, I just can’t think right now of anything except getting Rachel back.”

  “Of course,” he said. “You’re right, I’m rushing things. We should take it day by day.”

  She nodded, looking down at their intertwined hands. “Day by day.” A tear fell on one of her hands, and Paul lifted it to his cheek and held it there.

  The rich scent of French roast filled the room and Gina stirred. “The coffee…”

  Paul squeezed her hands and put them gently back onto the breakfast bar. He went to get the pot and filled both their cups. He had barely finished pouring when the phone on the kitchen wall rang. He grabbed it, hoping it was Rachel.

  “Paul, you’d better get over to Soleil,” Daniel Britt said, his voice shaking. “There’s been some trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Just come on down. Trust me.”

  The tone of Daniel’s voice filled him with dread.

  “Is it about Rachel?”

  Daniel seemed bewildered. “Rachel? No. But Paul? You need to see this.”

  Paul told Gina that something was wrong at Soleil, then kissed her on the cheek and said he’d let her know what had happened. She hugged him.

  “Call me right away,” she said. “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  It took him less than fifteen minutes to make it from home to Soleil. What could have happened? he asked himself over and over as he pulled into his personal parking space in the back. Did it have something to do with Rachel, after all, and Daniel just didn’t want to tell him?

  When he walked through the door, Annie gave him a strange look. “What’s up?” he said tersely.

  She seemed nervous, unable to meet his eyes. “Daniel asked that you wait for him here, Mr. Bradley.” She pushed a button on the phone and, over the speaker, Paul heard Daniel answer.

  “Mr. Bradley is here,” Annie said.

  “Tell him I’ll be right out,” Daniel answered.

  Annie hung up and again she gave Paul a look that seemed to him almost pitying. Oh, dear God, he thought, don’t let it be Rachel.

  “Just tell me,” he said harshly. “Whatever it is, just tell me.”

  She stared down at her desk, then looked up with relief as Daniel rushed in.

  Seeing Paul, he slowed down and took a breath. “I am so sorry,” he said. “Paul, I am truly sorry.”

  Paul’s fear mushroomed. He followed Daniel through the large front room to the door of the Crystal Cave, his feelings fluctuating between relief and dread.

  It’s not Rachel. It’s bad, though.

  Daniel opened the door to the Crystal Cave and Paul stood on the threshold, stupefied.

  Glass littered the floor. Hundreds of glittering pieces, thousands of them, shattered to bits. Not a single plate, cup, glass, or vase remained on the shelves. Instead there were mounds of shards, glistening in the light like an ugly crystal beach, stretching from wall to wall.

  Without thinking, Paul took a step forward. He felt pain crease his ankle. Looking down, he noted that blood was seeping through his khaki pants. He was standing in a foot-high mound of glass, barely identifiable except that he thought he saw part of a Chihuly sea form wedged up against a Gallè vase.

  As if from a distance he heard Daniel say, “Don’t go in there, Paul. It’s not safe.” He tugged at P
aul’s arm to hold him back.

  But Paul didn’t have to go in. He knew nothing was salvageable. Like Humpty-Dumpty, there would be no putting these pieces back together again. All these beautiful, irreplaceable pieces of artwork, some of it created by masters hundreds of years ago, destroyed forever. He felt a thrust to his heart, a blow that physically pained him.

  “Who did this?” he whispered. “Who would do this?”

  “We, uh…we don’t know,” Daniel said. “It…it was like this when Annie got here this morning.”

  “The security alarm?”

  “Disabled.”

  Paul turned to him. “No one knows the code except you, Annie, Janice and me.” He broke off. “Where is Janice?”

  “She called in sick today. She has the flu.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  Daniel nodded. “They’re sending someone.”

  Paul’s eyes fixed on something long and dark in the rubble. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a tire iron,” Daniel said. “I walked in a little at first, but then I realized I shouldn’t disturb anything until the police got here. I did get a good look at the tire iron, though, and I think that must be what they used.”

  Paul turned on his heel as anger set in. “I’ll be in my office,” he said.

  Once there, he called Gina and told her what had happened. She was as horrified as he was. “I can’t believe it!” she said. “Oh, Paul, I’m so sorry.”

  They talked a few minutes more, then he called Duarte and filled him in.

  “I heard,” Duarte said. “There’s a car on the way. I was just getting ready to leave here.”

  “Al? This was done deliberately. It looks like they even left the tire iron they used to smash everything.”

  “Hang tight,” Duarte said, and hung up.

  Paul put the receiver down and rubbed his face with his hands. He kept seeing it—all that beautiful glass, like so much refuse now.

  He would have to call his insurer. But it wasn’t the cost of all the breakage that mattered. It was wondering who in the name of God would do such a thing.

  Angela? It popped into his head without conscious volition.

  A long-forgotten scene came to him, from the early years with Angela. She was sitting in his lap and he was reading to her. “Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall…” When he came to the end, she had asked, “Who are all the king’s men, Daddy? Why can’t they put Humpty together again?” And he had answered, “I’m not sure, Angel. Maybe they didn’t care enough.”

  “Do you care about me, Daddy?” Angela had asked in that sweet, high-pitched voice. Her eyes—so like Rachel’s in their light hazel color—had darkened with tears. “If I fell down, would you care?”

  He had kissed her on the forehead and said, “Of course I would, Angel. I would never let anything happen to you. I promise.”

  Oh, God. He had failed her. He had broken his promise, and she had suffered for it.

  Daniel stood at the door. “The police are here. They want to talk to you.”

  “Tell them I’ll be right out,” Paul said. Casting an eye around his office, he wondered what he’d been thinking all these years. The hard work, the long days spent putting together the business, traveling around the world looking for antiques and pieces of art. Leaving his family, leaving Rachel…

  It all felt like dust on his tongue now. Nothing had gone right. Nothing was the way it had been planned. If there is such a thing as karma, he thought—what goes around comes around—this must be it.

  When Paul walked into the reception room, he was brought up short by the look one of the two uniformed cops gave him. It seemed cold and laced with suspicion. The questions were even worse, as if he might have done this thing himself to collect insurance. He answered their questions and told them as calmly as he could that he had no idea who might have done it. That was something he’d talk only to Duarte about.

  Dammit, anyway! Where was he?

  The cops wanted to know Janice’s home address and phone number. Annie, innocently enough, had told them that Janice almost never took sick leave. Since she hadn’t come to work on the one day the vandalism took place, she was suddenly under a cloud of suspicion.

  Poor Janice. She was hardworking and loyal. She’d never do a thing like this. He tried to tell them that, but they said only that sometimes those are the ones you had to watch out for. The “least likely suspect.”

  They took information from him, Daniel, Annie and the other floor clerks as they began to arrive. They told everyone not to touch anything until the detectives arrived.

  Paul was impressed by the thoroughness of the two officers, and he wondered if they were always this careful. It wasn’t until Duarte and another detective came through the front door that he realized Duarte must have given them a heads-up.

  Duarte spent a moment with the two cops and spoke to the other detective, leaving him to handle things. Gesturing to Paul, he said, “Let’s take a look. We can talk in your office.”

  Paul led the way, stopping at the door to the Crystal Cave. He didn’t want to look in, and in fact dreaded having to see it again.

  Duarte whistled. “Holy God. Whoever did this was one angry sonuvabitch.” He glanced at Paul. “Or bitch.”

  He didn’t go in, but followed Paul down the hall to his office. “You got any coffee?” he asked. “Any that’s thick and black?”

  “I’ll see.” Paul called up to the front and asked Annie if she would bring them both coffee. “Yesterday’s, if you have any left over.”

  “The officers won’t let me leave the room,” Annie said.

  Duarte barked to the two cops through the speaker phone, “You think she’s gonna smash the pot, for Pete’s sake? Let her do it!”

  He and Duarte sat in silence as a Seth Thomas clock on a bookcase ticked the minutes away. One, two, three…

  Paul drummed on his desk, while Duarte wiped imaginary crumbs from his tie, which hung loose around his neck. Finally Annie appeared with two cups, one fixed the way Paul liked it and one black as pitch. Duarte sipped that one and closed his eyes, saying dreamily, “Perfect. Marry me, Annie.”

  She blushed and left the room without turning around, just backing away like a subject before a king. Paul had never been able to break her of that habit, no matter how hard he had tried. Annie was only in her thirties, he guessed, but she read only Regency romances on her lunch break, and in her heart she was from another century. That was what made her such a trustworthy receptionist. Her instinct for antiques was so good, she was able to weed out nonvaluable pieces from valuable ones before they ever reached the back rooms.

  When she was gone, Duarte took another gulp of the coffee, then set it down on a piece of scrap paper on Paul’s mahogany desk. “Wouldn’t want to ruin this great finish,” he said. “Which reminds me. You think you could get me a new desk? A new old one, I mean? Something nice. Not so scratched up.”

  “I could,” Paul answered with an attempt at a smile. “But if you doodle on it the way you do the one you’ve got, it won’t be nice for long.”

  Duarte nodded. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Oh, well. It was just a thought.”

  He gave Paul a sharp look. “You think Angela did this?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. What do you think?”

  “Well, we’ve got to check out your staff. Especially the ones you say have the security code. Of course, any of your employees could have left the alarm off before they went home last night. Deliberately left it off for somebody else, that is. There could be two of them working together. You know who was the last to leave?”

  “No,” Paul said. “But Al, we’re like a family here. I trust the people who work for me. I can’t for a minute believe any of them did this.”

  “Maybe not,” Duarte said. “But we’ve got to question them, anyway. Meanwhile—” he took a deep draft of coffee “—we haven’t got a lead on Angela. Or Rachel. Not a clue. Plenty of false alarms, but nothing’s panned out.
I’m sorry.”

  Paul shook his head. “I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m so damned worried about Rachel, and now this—” He broke off. “I didn’t want to say it, but actually I’m pretty sure Angela did this.”

  Feeling a bit foolish, he told Duarte the Humpty-Dumpty story. “It may sound silly, but I think she was sending me a message. I’m not exactly sure what the message was, unless she just wanted to torment me with the fact that she was here and could destroy me, my business…whatever.”

  He couldn’t bring himself to voice his worst thought. Rachel. Was Angela telling him she could destroy Rachel…or that she already had?

  “Maybe it’s just part of the whole package,” Duarte said. “See, the thing is, Rachel’s been gone, what, four days now? And there hasn’t been any ransom note, no contact from a kidnapper. Now, either she’s gone off by herself, the way we talked about, or the evil twin—sorry—grabbed her and she isn’t interested in ransom. She just wants you and your wife to suffer.”

  Duarte sighed. “Paul, I don’t think that little girl of yours—Rachel, I mean—would have done this to you. I don’t think she’d have just gone off without telling you, or at least calling. I’ve seen a lot of teenagers who do that sort of thing when they’re pissed off at their parents. But Rachel? She’s not a teenager. Besides, she didn’t seem the type.”

  Paul tried but couldn’t meet his eyes. “You think Angela’s got her, don’t you?”

  “I know you don’t want to believe that, and I can’t blame you. But we gotta be realistic about this. It’s time to move forward, Paul.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’ll get an APB out on Rachel, and I’ll notify the FBI we’ve got a probable kidnapping.”

  “It’ll be all over the papers,” Paul said. “There’ll be crank calls, too, won’t there? People claiming they’ve seen her.”

  “A lot of false leads,” Duarte agreed. “Are you saying you’re not up for it?”