The Lady Vanishes

by Nicole Camden

  The apartment was essentially one big room with some half walls to divide the space. The ceiling was sixteen feet high with open ductwork and lights that came down from long extensions. The kitchen was separated from the living room by a small bar with cherry-red stools, and tall cabinets separated the kitchen from the two bedrooms and the bathroom on the other side. There were actual walls separating the bedrooms and the bath, but the walls didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. Sometimes her sister could get . . . vocal . . . when she had overnight guests, which was why Regina slept with earplugs.

  She noticed as she came into the kitchen that her sister hadn’t done the dishes as she’d promised she would that morning, and sighed. Picking up El Greco’s bowl, she filled it with kitty crunchies and set it down for him. He began eating like he hadn’t been fed in ten years, though looking at him you’d know he hadn’t missed a meal in a long time.

  Regina scratched his ears and stood, walking out of the kitchen and toward her bedroom. Celeste followed.

  “I can’t go out with you tonight, Celeste.”

  “It’s Friday. Why not?”

  “I have a date, actually.”

  Celeste stopped. Regina ignored her and opened the door to her bedroom, which was also on the river side, but had no balcony. Celeste’s room was bigger, but it was on the back side of the apartment. They shared the bathroom, a connecting door inside each bedroom.

  Regina’s room was orderly—she was hardly ever in it—with a queen-size bed covered in an ancient quilt that had been her grandmother’s, and shelf after shelf of books, most of them medical textbooks, but there were a few romance novels scattered around. She usually left them on the bookshelves at the hospital when she was finished for the nurses and parents to read. There were pictures of her and Celeste in frames on the shelves, of Celeste and their grandmother, but not one photograph of their father. They’d all been boxed away and put into storage. She set her bike helmet, backpack, and jacket on a small armchair covered with owls and then went to her closet, throwing the doors open.

  “With who?” Celeste sat on Regina’s bed, clearly recovered from her surprise. Regina didn’t date all that often. During college, she’d been too busy working to pay for school and rent and food for her and Celeste, and then she’d been working and busting her ass in medical school while paying for Celeste to go to college, and then she’d been a first-year physician and working more hours than she’d known existed in a week. Things had been calmer since she’d accepted the position at Boston Children’s, but it had been a long road.

  “A professor.”

  “Ugh.” Celeste wrinkled her nose. “Dull and poor. You are insane.”

  Regina ignored her, though she felt a slight twinge of agreement. Corbin Gould was a professor of history at Harvard and an intelligent man, but she was not that attracted to him. She’d met him the previous Saturday when she’d ridden her bike over to Harvard to talk to a former teacher and had stopped for a coffee at the Starbucks on campus. He’d been there, standing in line for a scone and tea.

  He’d asked her to join him at a table, a short, stocky man with a slightly receding hairline and crooked teeth. His smile was nice, though, and he’d been direct and confident. She’d refused, politely, but had agreed to go on a date the following Friday. Now she was almost dreading it.

  “Quit judging my taste, judger, and help me pick out something to wear.” He was supposed to arrive at her apartment at six thirty, so she had only a little over an hour to get ready.

  “For the professor?” Her sister snorted. “Just put on anything halfway decent, and he’ll probably be slobbering all over you.”

  “Celeste, you better be polite. If you embarrass me, I will watch musicals at full volume the next time you’re having sex.”

  “Kinky,” Celeste retorted, unfazed, but she scooted off the bed and stood next to Regina to analyze the contents of the closet.

  Regina hadn’t spent a lot of time or money on her wardrobe. She had two designer dresses that had belonged to her mother and hadn’t been auctioned off, but they were far too formal. Everything else was mostly work or casual wear.

  “We’d be better off looking in my closet.” Celeste frowned, glancing down at Regina. Regina was three inches shorter, curvier, and dark-haired whereas her sister was blond. Sometimes Regina wondered if her mother had found someone on the side the year before Celeste was born.

  “I have a cashmere wool dress that’s a little short on me. I’ll get it. And my knee-high boots, though those are probably wasted on the professor.”

  Regina thought about protesting, but didn’t have the heart for it. Her sister’s endless flirtations and chasing after men for money resulted in an astonishing number of presents. Celeste had the wardrobe of a socialite, if not the bank account.

  Regina went to turn on the shower, and after a few minutes of waiting for the water to warm up, Celeste appeared with a gorgeous forest-green cashmere dress with long sleeves and fawn-colored knee-high boots. The outfit screamed high-class and expensive, not exactly the look she was going for, but it also looked comfortable and warm, two things Regina required of her clothing.

  “Thanks, Celeste.” She touched a sleeve of the soft fabric. “It’s beautiful.”

  “I know,” Celeste agreed smugly. “I’ll put this stuff on your bed.” She turned to leave.

  “Okay,” Regina replied. “Oh, and Celeste?”

  Her sister stuck her head back in the bathroom, which was just beginning to fill up with steam. “Yeah?”

  “It’s still your turn to do the dishes.”

  Celeste shook her head. “I’m letting you borrow my clothes. Get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  Regina considered that. It didn’t really seem fair, since she paid the rent and most of the bills, but the dress was beautiful. Regina thought she might just keep it.

  “Fine, but if you make a mess while I’m gone, you have to clean it up.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Celeste waved a hand. “I’m probably going out tonight, anyway. Don’t wait up for me.”

  Regina sniffed. “Maybe you’ll have to wait up for me.”

  “Not likely.”

  WHEN MILTON SHAW ARRIVED HOME at his brownstone on Beacon Hill that evening, he immediately walked past the curving staircase that led up to the second floor and down a long hallway to a door on the end—his office. Formerly the library of the stately brownstone, it had an enormous stone fireplace, large leather reading chairs, and walls lined with bookshelves, a good many of which had been in the library when he’d purchased the house. The rest he’d added in the ten years he’d lived there. Roland said the place looked like Edgar Allan Poe’s grandfather could have lived there. Milton didn’t care. He loved this big moody house with its high ceilings and ornate fixtures.

  His desk, a beast of a thing with carved wooden legs as big around as those of a baby elephant, had three enormous monitors that came on as he sat down—motion-activated, hell yeah, he never grew tired of it. He’d already googled Dr. Regina Burke on his phone during the limo ride back home. He’d read her short bio on the hospital website—she’d been hired several months earlier—and several of her publications about the treatment of specific types of cancer in children, and found about thirty articles on her father, Carter Burke, who’d been indicted for embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars.

  Now, in the multiscreened luxury of his office, he pulled up everything he’d found earlier and more. Carter Burke had been indicted, but he’d fled the country, leaving behind his wife and two daughters, sixteen-year-old Regina and ten-year-old Celeste. There was a photograph of the girls—Regina looking grimly serious even then—holding hands at their mother’s side on the steps of what looked like the courthouse.

  He found a small article about her mother checking into rehab several times before the woman finally died of an overdose, and how all her family
’s assets were seized and sold at auction. He read through the list, which was extensive. Her father had owned a yacht, sixteen cars, an office building, two warehouses, and several homes, but once the liquidation was complete, the girls were penniless and had moved into their grandmother’s house until she passed away a year later. Damn, he’d thought his childhood was difficult.

  He kept reading, scanning the articles while his nimble fingers flew over the keyboard as if he and the machine were one, which was close enough to the truth. Other than magic, computers were his world. He, Nick, and Roland had made their first several million for their company, Accendo, by inventing an encryption software for the masses, one that disguised protected content as banal emails with nothing more interesting than recipes for banana pudding. Unlike most encryption tools, theirs hadn’t been vulnerable to the security hacks that every good developer figured out early on. They’d made a fortune, and so had the many people who had used their tool to hide illegal activities. Including, it seemed, Regina’s father. In one article, the Feds speculated that Carter Burke had used Accendo’s encryption tool to hide the transfer of millions of dollars to the Caribbean.

  Perfect. Well, maybe she wouldn’t make that connection.

  He stood up from his chair and paced, absently picking up a deck of cards from a nearby shelf and shuffling them rapidly. Shit. She was a serious person. She wasn’t someone a man took out for a good time and nothing else.

  He performed one trick, shooting the cards in the air and making them disappear, and then another, thinking the whole time, turning the problem over and over in his brain. He liked her—she’d totally stepped up and taken care of her family. She was obviously intelligent. He was attracted to her, really attracted, like toss-her-over-his-shoulder-and-stuff-her-in-the-back-of-his-limo attracted. He couldn’t do that, though. People frowned on that.

  He made the top card appear to float in midair, hovering just above the deck.

  I’ll just talk to her, he thought. I’m going to the hospital on Monday, anyway. I’ll go, and I’ll just introduce myself as myself.

  She’d seemed attracted to Shaw the Magician—maybe he could get her attention that way.

  His phone rang, and he frowned, depositing the cards on his desk and pulling it out of his pocket. “Hello?”

  “Milton?”

  It was a woman’s voice, sounding just a little uncertain, and he remembered with horror that he had a date tonight with a lovely woman named Michelle, whom he’d met at a fundraiser for literacy.

  “Michelle,” he said, wincing, putting a hand to his head. He was an idiot, a complete idiot. “I’m sorry. I got tied up with something.” True enough, he supposed.

  “That’s okay. Did you need to reschedule?”

  Milton wanted to. He most definitely wanted to, but in the background he could hear the clink of glasses and the sound of voices, and knew she was probably already at the restaurant.

  “No, I’ll be there in”—he glanced at his watch—“fifteen minutes. I’m so sorry to keep you waiting.”

  She didn’t hesitate to assure him that it was fine. Her voice was even teasing as she ended the conversation by saying, “I bet you’re worth waiting for.”

  He made a face—he couldn’t help it. He knew he was good-looking, but no woman had ever said that crap to him until he became stupidly wealthy. “A beautiful woman should never be kept waiting,” he quipped back, and wanted to smack the phone against his forehead. He sounded like a douche-canoe. He was a douche-canoe. He’d completely forgotten about one woman while fantasizing about another.

  She laughed and said, “I’ll see you soon,” and hung up the phone.

  “God,” he groaned and punched the number of his driver, Shane.

  “Shane,” he said as soon as the man picked up the phone. “I forgot I have a date. Can you turn around and come back for me?”

  Shane didn’t answer right away, but then his South Boston accent came through the line: “Sure, boss. I’m on my way back now.”

  “Great.” Milton hung up the phone again.

  Glancing down at himself, he realized that he was still in the suit he’d been wearing at the hospital. He could wear it, he supposed, but it was a little too formal for a date, even at one of his favorite restaurants, a four-star French restaurant in the lobby of the Hotel Commonwealth.

  He wondered if Dr. Burke liked French food. An image of her tasting their famous fondant au chocolat floated through his mind; he could see those luscious lips parting, her eyes closing in ecstasy as the melted bittersweet chocolate slid over her tongue. His dick stirred, and he groaned. He needed to get a grip.

  REGINA WASN’T SURE how Celeste had managed it, but by the time Corbin showed up at her door, flowers in hand, her sister had convinced Regina to put on just a little more makeup and let her hair fall in long waves around her shoulders.

  “Rose-Lindsey has been telling you to go out, get a life, right? Well, you need to make an effort, even if this guy is the snore of the century.”

  Regina wasn’t sure if it was the logic of the argument, which was true enough, or the memory of the magician and the tingle of awareness that had lingered all afternoon, but she’d taken her sister’s advice.

  When she opened the door, Corbin looked astonished, his mouth falling open a little, and Regina smiled. It wasn’t every day that she made a man’s jaw drop. Though to be fair, she rarely gave them the chance.

  “Thank you,” she told him, gesturing to the flowers, and he remembered to hand them to her. “I’ll just go put these in some water.”

  She motioned for him to come inside. “This is my sister, Celeste,” she said, nodding in the direction of Celeste, who was sitting on one of the bar stools in jeans and one of Regina’s old Harvard sweatshirts texting someone. Celeste didn’t believe in going out before 11:00 p.m. “Celeste, this is Corbin Gould.”

  “Hi,” Celeste replied, and hopped off the stool. She marched over to Corbin and took his elbow. “Why don’t you have a seat here with me while she puts those in water?”

  Regina eyed her sister as she set the flowers on the counter. She wasn’t entirely sure what Celeste was up to, but she had a bad feeling about it.

  Mentally shrugging, she turned her back on the living room to locate a vase.

  “So, where are you taking my sister?” she heard Celeste ask.

  He gave the name of a restaurant that Regina had never heard of, but that wasn’t really a surprise. When she wasn’t at the hospital, she ate at home.

  “Oh, you don’t want to go there tonight. I heard their head chef was fired for banging the owner’s wife on the prep counter.”

  Regina closed her eyes as she reached for the vase she wanted. Awesome. She didn’t doubt the story was true, but Celeste didn’t need to provide that much detail.

  “Celeste, I’m sure wherever we decide to go will be fine,” Regina said hastily, putting the vase in the sink and filling it with water.

  “That’s because you eat tacos out of a truck,” Celeste cut back.

  Since this was true and not really an insult, Regina just muttered, “Those tacos are good.” She cut the plastic wrap from the bouquet, which was a mix of red and white roses and carnations. Not her favorite, but it was a nice gesture.

  Suddenly the memory of the magician, holding the paper flower out to her, flashed in her mind. She touched her chest absently, as if she expected the flower to still be there.

  “You’ve made a good decision,” Regina heard Celeste say, and she quickly stuffed the flowers in the vase, banishing thoughts of the magician.

  “What decision?” Regina asked them warily. Corbin looked a little shell-shocked but amused, his gaze occasionally falling to where Celeste gripped his elbow.

  “Ah,” he said, clearing his throat, “Celeste convinced me that the restaurant in the hotel where she works is excellent, and
she was able to get us a table.”

  So that’s what she’d been doing on her phone. Why? Regina wondered.

  “Is that right?” She gave Celeste a narrow-eyed glare, sister-code for What the fuck are you up to?

  “That’s right,” Celeste said sweetly. “Now you two run along and have a nice time.”

  Regina still didn’t trust her, but she went to get her good coat out of her room. When she returned, Corbin was standing at the door eyeing Celeste, who stood two inches taller than him barefoot.

  Regina shrugged into her coat as she walked toward them, flipping her hair out from under the collar and removing the gloves from her pockets.

  “Ready when you are,” she told Corbin, raising an eyebrow at the two of them.

  “Great.” Clearing his throat again, he asked Celeste, “Are you sure you don’t want to come with us?” Regina nearly chortled. Celeste appeared to have made another conquest.

  Her sister looked astonished, flushing a little—which served her right—but she recovered with a smile.

  “I’m sure. I already have plans, but you two have a nice time.”

  Regina shook her head. This evening was already turning into a farce; whatever plot her sister was hatching probably couldn’t make it any worse.

  “Stay out of trouble, Celeste,” she told her sister as she walked out the door but without much confidence. Some women seemed born to get into trouble, while she seemed born to try and fix it.

  With a resigned smile, Regina turned to the very nice man who now seemed to have something of a crush on her sister. He offered her his elbow and she accepted graciously as they made their way down the steps. She was so hungry she’d go out with a damn moose at this point, even if the moose had taken a liking to her sister.

  MILTON STEPPED OUT from the limo onto the sidewalk outside the red-canopied entrance to the restaurant at Hotel Commonwealth. Pedestrians strolled along the wide sidewalks, most of them couples, and laughter floated from the covered patio.