Dark Sky

by Carla Neggers

  The local theater was performing As You Like It, and Wendy had been dying to go. She couldn’t believe her father was offering to take her. “But you hate the theater—”

  “No, I hate musicals. That last play you dragged me to was a musical.” He gave her a dry smile. “I can handle Shakespeare.”

  “I’d love to go. Thanks, Dad.”

  He seemed almost relieved, and Wendy felt a twinge of guilt at how hard she could be on him sometimes. He was making an effort to understand her. He got back in his cruiser, promising to take her to dinner before the play.

  Later that afternoon, her grandparents and uncles all decided to hire Matt, and Sam offered to let him hook his trailer up at the cabin off the dirt road by the lake. Matt snapped up the offer. Wendy joined her uncle, walking over to the cabin and getting it ready while Matt drove there, his camper grinding on rocks in the steep driveway. But he made it up the road, and he seemed grateful to have a place to park himself for the next few weeks.

  He pulled Wendy aside before she left. “Didn’t get any work done on those college essays, did you?”

  She shook her head. “I’ll work on them tomorrow.”

  “Ah, yes. There’s always tomorrow. Sure you want to be a doctor?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Then I guess writing those essays should be easy.”

  She didn’t respond, just pointed to the door of the small cabin. “I put a jug of cider in the refrigerator. You can put it in your camper fridge if you want. It’s not pasteurized, but none of the apples were drops.”

  “I’m not an expert on apple cider. Thank you, Wendy. I appreciate your help today.”

  When she got back to the house, she got ready for dinner and the play, and, for the first time since her mother had left for Nova Scotia, she didn’t feel unwanted and out of place.

  The first of October had arrived in Washington, D.C., with a wave of oppressive heat and humidity that took even seasoned Beltway types by surprise.

  Mia O’Farrell tried not to look as if she wanted to run back into the air-conditioned White House. She was Boston Irish. She melted in the heat.

  Her boss, John Wesley Poe, the president of the United States, didn’t even seem to notice the temperature, never mind feel it. He was, Mia thought, a handsome man. She doubted she was the only one who sometimes forgot just how handsome he was, possibly because he was also so smart and charming—and powerful. It was his surroundings more than the man himself that reminded her of just how powerful he was.

  She took a breath, feeling her blouse sticking to her back. But it wasn’t just the heat that had her sweating.

  She had to tell him about Ethan Brooker.

  She was slim, green-eyed and smart. It would be false humility to pretend she didn’t know she was smart. She’d attended Harvard on a full scholarship and graduated magna cum laude. Her father, a house painter, had tried to get all the Sherwin-Williams Dover White out from under his fingernails before attending her graduation ceremony. Her mother, a housewife who did her ironing to soap operas, had cried.

  Mia had earned her master’s and doctorate at Columbia, and when she was hired to work at a prestigious Washington think tank, she thought she’d found her home.

  Then the White House had called.

  And now, six months later, she was scrambling to dig herself out of the biggest mess of her life.

  “The mission was a success,” she told President Poe.

  Brooker and his team had rescued Ham Carhill and spirited him to the American embassy in Bogotá, where, emaciated and terrified, he nonetheless provided the details to a plot that involved the kidnapping and murder of a dozen innocent Americans working in Colombia, and even more innocent Colombians. Forewarned, authorities were able to avert further disaster.

  Mia still didn’t know if Ham’s kidnappers had realized just who they had detained. A rich Texas adventurer, yes, but a Carhill? A brilliant man who’d been passing on valuable information to the U.S. government for much of the summer? Ham Carhill had an uncanny ability for ferreting out names, addresses, accounts and plots. He could see patterns and connections others missed.

  Mia figured his kidnappers hadn’t a clue that he was a national security asset—thank God.

  Yet in the nineteen days of his captivity, they’d made no ransom demand for his release—at least Mia wasn’t aware of any. They could have been taking their time to make their next move, but the absence of a ransom demand was just one of the things about the entire situation that didn’t add up.

  Nor was Mia certain she entirely understood Poe’s close interest in Ham Carhill’s predicament. She’d begun to suspect the president’s commitment to the rescue mission had more to do with Ethan Brooker than with anything or anyone else.

  “Mr. Carhill?” the president asked.

  “He’s safe, sir.”

  “Major Brooker and his team?”

  “Everyone’s okay. There were no deaths or serious injuries to any of our people.”

  “That’s good.”

  Poe studied her a moment, seeming to measure her mood. In his late fifties, he was a self-made millionaire and the former governor of Tennessee, but he never forgot his humble origins on the Cumberland River, found as an infant on the doorstep of the family home of two sisters. Violet and Leola Poe had never married, never lived anywhere but Night’s Landing. They took him in and raised him as their own. With his polite manner and soft middle Tennessee accent, his tenacity and toughness often went unnoticed at first.

  “Why don’t you look relieved, Dr. Farrell?” the president asked her quietly.

  Mia looked out at the green, perfect lawn and fought an urge to run. She didn’t belong here. She was too naive. She didn’t have any political aptitude—she tried to be, even when she was keeping secrets, a straight shooter.

  “There’s been a wrinkle, Mr. President.” She shifted her gaze back to the powerful man who’d placed his trust in her. People said her eyes were unflinching, even at the worst of times. She was thirty-two, but felt older. Seemed older. She didn’t even try to smile. “A small one.”

  President Poe put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “In this job, Mia, there are no small wrinkles. Tell me.”

  Five

  Ethan tossed his cigarette on the sidewalk across from Juliet’s building and ground it out under the toe of his boot, the last of the pack he’d allotted himself for the duration of the Colombian mission.

  He’d flown from Bogotá to Miami to D.C. to New York in the past twenty-four hours, and he looked the part. He hadn’t shaved, showered or slept. He and his team had plucked Ham Carhill out of the mess he was in two days after Ethan had met Juliet at Federal Hall. Ham had been free for almost a week. He’d given Mia O’Farrell and her people whatever information they needed and was whisked away, supposedly safe and sound, recuperating from his ordeal with his family in west Texas.

  No one seemed that interested in tracking down the people who’d kidnapped him.

  Two guys were at the camp when Ethan and his team had arrived. Low-level thugs. One fought and was killed, the other ran off into the mountains. It wasn’t within Ethan’s mission objectives to go after him. Ham’s safety—the information he had—was paramount.

  But no Bobby Tatro.

  After delivering Ham to the American embassy in Bogotá, Ethan took off on his own. For three days, he tried to pick up Tatro’s trail. He only ran into rumors, more questions, and far too many people who wouldn’t talk at all.

  Juan, the new doorman, had told Ethan that Juliet was at work. To be expected, he supposed, but Juan could have been nicer. Ethan had cheekily walked across the street and lit his last cigarette, but the doorman didn’t seem to give a damn. A useless protest. On the other hand, he had to allow that he looked more like one of the USMS’s most wanted than the friend of a marshal.

  A small, dark-haired girl in a sweatshirt with a peregrine falcon across the front stumbled out of a cab with a huge tote bag and an overstuf
fed backpack. Ethan almost trotted across the street to give her a hand, but the doorman—friendly Juan—ran out to help. She couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen.

  She and Juan, carrying both the tote bag and backpack, disappeared through the glass doors.

  Ethan flagged the girl’s departing cab. Although it was not even two o’clock, he had an evening flight to D.C. for an early morning meeting with Dr. Mia—and a lot to do between now and then. He’d have to lure Juliet away from her marshal’s desk or take the bit in his teeth and try to see her there.

  The clock was ticking. They needed to talk.

  Wendy decided she loved her aunt’s doorman and her building and everything about New York. She had just introduced herself as Wendy Longstreet, Juliet’s niece. “I know Juliet’s at work,” she told Juan. When she’d recognized his accent, she tried speaking Spanish to him, but he was so much faster and more fluent—once they got past her name and what a pretty day it was, she was mostly lost and had reverted back to English. “I was hoping I could leave my bags here and come back later.”

  “She’s expecting you?”

  Well, no. “I’ll call her—”

  “You can call her now. If she gives me the okay, I can let you into her apartment.”

  “That’s not necessary.” Wendy had counted on her aunt not being around, since there was still plenty of time for her dad to drive down from Vermont to collect her. He wouldn’t approve of her trip to New York, even less the way she’d gone about it. She smiled at the doorman, in case she’d been too brusque. “I’ve got a few things I want to do in the city this afternoon.”

  She thought she sounded mature and reasonable, but Juan looked suspicious, or perhaps just more official. He was about five-six, probably in his midthirties. His hair was very black and straight, and he had bulging muscles, like a weight lifter’s. Wendy felt slight next to him. She’d pulled her hair back into a ponytail.

  “I can hold your bags for you here, but I’ll have to check them out,” Juan said.

  “Oh, sure. No problemo.” Gad, she thought. That was stupid. She felt herself blushing. “I’m sorry—”

  He laughed and said something in Spanish that she didn’t catch, then motioned for her to open her bags. She knelt on the cool, golden marblelike floor and unzipped the various compartments on her backpack. The lobby wasn’t very big. It had a glittering chandelier and mirrors, and there were curving stairs with a beautiful wood banister and a brass elevator on the back wall. Wendy had desperately wanted to see it before her aunt had to move out.

  Juan dutifully peeked at everything in her backpack but didn’t seem concerned about what he might find.

  A thin, beautiful woman in black jogging pants came off the elevator, two small dogs yipping at her side. Wendy didn’t recognize the breed. Maltese, maybe? “I’m expecting a FedEx delivery this afternoon,” she said breezily. “Keep an eye out for it, won’t you, Juan? You’re a doll. Thanks!”

  She was through the door and down the steps with her little dogs before Juan could answer. Four more tenants had strolled into the building, each with a greeting and a reminder for Juan to tend to something.

  “I don’t think I could be a doorman,” Wendy said with a smile.

  “You get used to it.”

  He looked in her tote bag, filled with snacks—Wendy didn’t trust the train to have food she’d eat. She’d hitched a ride to Rutland with a friend and got on the train there instead of in White River, because it was a shorter ride—five hours instead of seven—and would take her along the Hudson River. And also, she thought, because she was less likely to run into a Longstreet.

  She hadn’t run away. Not at all. She’d left a note for her father telling him what she was doing. But, as Matt Kelleher had reminded her when she’d helped him pick pumpkins, she was almost eighteen. She wasn’t twelve, and it was time she stopped being treated like she was.

  Juan moved aside her iPod, exposing the library book she was reading. Embarrassed, Wendy bit her lip, hoping she wasn’t blushing. She’d figured out an hour into her train ride that it was a young adult novel. Way too young for her.

  He pointed to a small tin. “What’s that?”

  “Loose-leaf tea,” she said, lying. The tin contained Teddy’s ashes. She couldn’t bear to bury them yet. She was afraid if she left them behind in Vermont, her father would dump them in the compost pile. He’d liked Teddy, but he wasn’t sentimental about a dog’s ashes.

  “I thought it might be jewelry,” Juan said. “Girls your age love sparkly things, don’t they?”

  “Some do.”

  “That’s a pretty necklace you’re wearing.”

  Wendy self-consciously fingered her small polished rose quartz and silver chain. “I made it myself. It’s not worth anything. I don’t like fancy gems.”

  Juan grinned at her. “No diamonds and emeralds for you, Miss Wendy?”

  “Not for me, no.”

  “Your aunt doesn’t seem the type, either, but you never know. She could have a soft side that likes a little luxury, huh?” His dark eyes twinkled at his own teasing as he set her tote back next to her backpack. “You have ID? I have to ask.”

  “Oh—um—yes.” As she unbuttoned the small quilted bag she’d made last year from scraps of vintage fabric, she noticed her hands were shaking. She wasn’t used to people searching her bags and asking her for ID. She found her driver’s license and handed it to the doorman, whose thick hands, she noticed, were very steady. “It’s a terrible picture, I know.”

  “Nobody takes a good picture for their license.” He glanced at it, then handed it back. “I’m sorry. It’s because I don’t know you and you leave your bags here—”

  “I understand.”

  Actually, she didn’t. But Juan was being so nice, and obviously the extra security was something he was required to do, so Wendy decided not to make a big deal of her objections.

  He jumped forward, opening the door for someone else coming into the building. “I’ll take good care of your bags,” he called back to Wendy, then told her in Spanish to have fun in New York.

  She scooted past him and another tenant, a middle-aged man this time, then trotted back down the steps. Her legs felt jittery from all the exertion that morning, but she wasn’t hurting anymore. Feeling dismissed, she stood in the middle of the sidewalk and squinted up at the blue October sky. No clouds. In Vermont—

  You’re not in Vermont.

  It was only one-thirty. At least four hours before Juliet would get back from work.

  The Museum of Natural History was within walking distance of her aunt’s building. But Wendy was starving. She wondered if there were any vegetarian restaurants nearby. She could probably find something vegan at any of New York’s numerous diners, but her stomach churned at the prospect of eating next to someone gobbling a rare hamburger.

  She debated going back to her aunt’s building for her iPod. She could listen to music and walk around in Central Park—it was a gorgeous day. But she didn’t want to get lost in the park. That sounded dangerous. She decided to get something to eat and check out the museum.

  After a couple of blocks, Wendy was so hungry that she ducked into a diner without even thinking about meat-eaters. She sat on a red vinyl stool at the counter. She was sure she could smell raw meat but tried not to think about it and ordered a salad, asking the waitress if she could substitute chickpeas for the cheese. The waitress didn’t even bat an eye. It was as if Wendy’s request wasn’t unusual at all.

  New York was so great.

  A man sat down on the stool next to hers, his elbow brushing her arm as he reached for a plastic menu. He ordered a turkey club.

  Gross.

  He was very good-looking. He reminded her of Johnny Depp. Not Johnny Depp when he was playing the pirate in Pirates of the Caribbean, but the character he played in Chocolat, which was her mother’s favorite movie. Sexy, earthy. He had dark curly hair and pale gray eyes. Then she noticed a jagged white sc
ar on his jaw and quickly glanced away, wondering if he’d think she’d been staring.

  The waitress plopped down a plastic bowl of salad in front of her. It was mostly iceberg lettuce, with a few dry carrot scrapings, half a radish, a green pepper ring, two cucumber slices, a cherry tomato, and chickpeas that were straight out of a can.

  A chickpea fell onto the counter and rolled toward the Johnny Depp-looking man. He picked it up as if it was an errant golf ball and grinned at Wendy. “One got away.”

  “That’s okay.” She felt awkward but didn’t know what else to say.

  He popped the chickpea into his mouth. “Chickpeas are an acquired taste, don’t you think?”

  “Especially plain. They’re great in falafel or hummus.”

  “Ah.”

  She didn’t know if he was teasing her.

  “Is that a hawk on your sweatshirt?”

  “A peregrine falcon.”

  He seemed to sense her hesitation. “You’re not from New York, are you?”

  “Vermont,” she mumbled.

  “The Green Mountain State. Leaves changing up there?”

  She nodded. “Especially in the mountains.”

  “Must be crawling with—what do you call them? Leaf-peepers, something like that?”

  “That’s right.”

  The waitress slid his turkey club over to him. Bacon fat poked out from the edges. Wendy couldn’t bear to look at it. Meat had become very unappealing to her.

  “You okay?” the man asked.

  She took another bite of her salad. “Just not as hungry as I thought.”

  She paid her bill from cash in her quilted bag and slid off the stool, smiling shyly at the man, who was shoving a triangle of his turkey club into his mouth. He winked at her, and she reminded herself not to judge him just because she’d given up eating animal products.

  “See you around, Wendy.”

  “How—how did you know my name’s Wendy?”

  He shrugged, swallowing his bite of sandwich. “You just told me.”