No, you don’t see.
“Pollo al Marsala, I cook that for you.”
My Italian lacked, but I knew enough to know pollo had something to do with chicken.
“Mr. Sinclair’s favorite,” she said. “It is nice romantic dinner.”
“Oh, no-no.” I shook my head, making it clear that romance was not on the agenda. She ignored the protest and reached for the small crucifix hanging around her neck. I should have known better. Sophia was a devout Catholic and didn’t approve of a woman sleeping in Greer’s house without a wedding ring on both of our fingers. The only reason she tolerated me was because she’d witnessed my descent into a very dark place and approved of Greer’s participation in my recovery.
“Candles, wine, I take care of this,” she said.
I went with it. If it got him here, that’s all that mattered.
“Perfect. Thank you, Sophia.” For insurance I added, “Would you mind calling Greer at the club to let him know you’re making his favorite? I’d hate to see him work late and miss dinner.”
Sophia was an important part of Greer’s household, keeping the wheels greased while he maintained his cover life. I knew he wouldn’t insult her by standing up a meal made especially for him.
“I’m sure he’d feel awful if he missed it.”
She nodded, assuring me that she’d take care of everything and make sure he showed up for our romantic evening.
I wasn’t snooping. I was just looking for something to read or kill time before dinner. Greer’s library was impressive. Mountains of books on everything from cooking to politics lined the shelves from floor to ceiling. The collection on organic gardening made me wonder if I knew him as well as I thought, but the section on artisan cheese making made me wondering if I knew him at all.
“Who are you, Greer Sinclair?”
It was possible that he actually read them all, but it was just as likely that they served more as props to legitimize the space. Even without the books, the patina of the old wood and grand architecture made for a spectacular man cave.
The centerpiece of the room was an elegant mahogany desk. Six feet long with carved legs that tapered toward the floor, it was a writer’s dream. I ran my hand over the burl veneer covering the three drawers along the front, all of them locked. “What are you hiding, Greer?” It had an age-appropriate leather top divided into three sections, each framed by a strip of finely inlaid wood. Most of these old desks lost their original leather tops from a hundred years of use, but someone took good care of this one.
As I felt along the edge of the old leather, I detected a slight bounce at the end of one of the sections. I pushed gently and heard a click. The panel popped up and revealed a compartment under the top of the desk. I raised it with one finger, careful not to disturb whatever was underneath. The space was just deep enough to store the thick envelope tucked inside. Any deeper and it would have obstructed the drawer from pulling out. Obviously, that envelope was meant to be hidden in case someone picked the lock on the front drawer.
Sophia peeked through the library door. “You want tiramisu or cheesecake for dessert?”
She startled me and made my mouth water at the same time. I discreetly dropped the leather panel. Sophia was loyal, and I had no doubt she’d tell Greer if she caught me snooping around his desk.
“Just looking for something to read.” I spread my hands on top of the desk so she could see that they were empty and not where they shouldn’t be. “Whichever is easier.” I preferred the tiramisu.
Her right brow raised as her eyes scanned the room. “I make tiramisu,” she said before retracting her head from the doorway.
When I heard her back in the kitchen, I pulled the envelope out and placed it on the desk. I stared at it and debated whether or not to open it, but my need to know what Greer was hiding overruled etiquette. I opened the flap and pulled out a stack of papers and photographs. I wasn’t surprised to see more pictures. Greer had already shown me enough of them to comprise a photo album. But what did surprise me was how many more there were. His obsession with my mother was starting to feel creepy, but as I flipped through the dozens of photos and snapshots, I realized they were all pictures of me. The one that took my breath away was a picture of me sitting on the steps in front of an old white house—the house where I lived with Ava after we left New York. I was seven, maybe eight years old.
There were letters mixed with the photographs, each of them addressed to Greer, checkpoints letting him know we were fine. Each was signed with a single letter—A. Ava had been in constant contact with Greer the entire time.
Pressure obstructed the back of my throat as my chest seemed to drop into my stomach. A memory of Ava with a camera, smiling at me from behind the lens as she participated in the staging of my life, filled my head.
I shoved the pictures into the envelope and placed it back under the hidden panel. Greer’s stash of secrets was growing. That was his business, except for the fact that a lot of those secrets involved me. That made his business my business.
The revelations kept surfacing as my mind worked around everything I’d seen or been told since the day I stepped off that plane. Greer knew Ava faked her own death, and that meant he made the choice to leave me behind. Maybe he didn’t know at the time that I was the golden child—the brass ring. Well, he knew now, didn’t he.
A single tear rolled off my chin. A good sob would have been perfectly justified, but I allowed myself just one.
Sophia was assaulting an onion on the chopping board when I walked into the kitchen. I offered to help and she handed me a head of lettuce and said, “Break. Don’t cut,” as her hands demonstrated. The rest of the salad was already in the bowl, so it took about a minute to complete the task.
“Done. What’s next?”
She looked at me over the top of her glasses and paused before pointing to the dinner napkins on the counter. “Fold.”
Her point was made. Trying to help a cook like Sophia was absurd. I got out of her way and planted myself on the sofa to wait for dinner. I dozed off, waking some time later to the distinct smell of Greer. He was staring at me when my eyes opened, and a giant butterfly flapped its wings against my belly while the memory of the last time we were on the sofa together circled my head.
“All better?” he asked.
My eyes adjusted as I realized he was on his haunches, hovering about a foot above me. I sat up. “How long have you been watching me?”
“Dinner is ready,” Sophia announced.
“Thank you, Sophia,” he replied without answering me or taking his eyes off of mine. He stood, giving me room to do the same, and we headed for the kitchen to help bring plates into the dining room. Sophia had already taken care of that, including lighting candles on the table.
“Why don’t you stay and have dinner with us, Sophia,” I said. The look on Greer’s face was making me uncomfortable. We shared meals with Sophia often, but the idea of doing so tonight apparently wasn’t what he had in mind. He gave me a disapproving look, but Sophia took care of the awkward situation by politely declining the invitation.
As she left for the evening, I stood across the kitchen island like a little girl waiting to be told what to do next.
“Dinner?” He motioned toward the dining room and followed me in. The room was dim, illuminated more by the candles than the chandelier. “I can turn the lights up if it makes you more comfortable,” he said. Sophia’s motives were obvious and like a horse sensing a timid rider, he’d picked up on my nervousness.
“What makes you think I’m uncomfortable?”
Greer walked over to the table and pulled out a chair. It took me a minute to realize he was being a polite host and the chair was for me. I slid into the seat as he picked up the napkin from the table, shook it open, and placed it in my lap. His eyes were glued to mine through the entire clumsy ritual of date night etiquette.
“Thank you,” I muttered.
He walked to the opposite side of the
table and rolled his sleeves to his forearms before sitting down.
“Wine?” he asked.
“No, thank you.”
He proceeded to pour the Pinot into my glass.
“I said I don’t need any wine.”
“Yes, you do.” He continued to fill my glass to just below the rim.
“Trying to get me drunk?”
“Why would I do that, Alex?”
I looked down at the napkin twisting between my fingers—caught in a death grip under the table—and tried to steady the tremors running through my hands.
“Maybe we should just eat and pretend,” he said with an emphasis on the latter.
“Pretend? About what?”
He was leaning back in his chair, with his body fully open in a posture that suggested he had no inhibitions about where this was going. “That we’d both like to forget about dinner and continue with that conversation we never seem to finish.”
My breath caught as a flash of heat spread through me. I tried to look away, but he refused to let me, forcing my eyes in place so he could continue with the visual foreplay. Maybe it was me. I expected that arrogant grin of male satisfaction to cross his face, but other than a slight part of the lips, his mouth remained still. It was his eyes that became the storyboard.
I managed to snap my eyes from his, focusing on one table implement after another until the blood rushing through my ears slowed to a mild pulse. “Really Greer, your timing sucks.” I stared down at my empty plate and then raised my eyes to his.
The left edge of his mouth moved along with his very active jaw muscle. He could smell my nerves.
We continued to gaze at each other in silence for another minute before he reached over the table for my plate. I couldn’t possibly eat all the food he piled on top of it, but I was relieved to have something to focus on other than him. He waited for me to take the first bite before putting a forkful in his own mouth. Two bites later, my fork was resting on the plate. Not for lack of deliciousness, but because the tension was so thick I could have spray painted the air and marveled at the graffiti for days.
“Not hungry?” he asked.
I grabbed the overfilled glass of wine and quickly drank half of it. The rush of liquid courage dulled my nervousness.
“Would you please stop looking at me like that?” I said as I pushed my fork into the tender flesh smothered with mushrooms and sauce.
“Like what?”
The last time I answered that question I stuck my foot down my throat. “Never mind.” I shut my eyes for a moment to cleanse the awkward thoughts running through my head. When I reopened them, a smile was spreading across his face as he began to laugh.
“What’s so damn funny?” I could feel my skin turning five shades of pink.
He combed his fingers over the top of his head as he composed himself. “Why don’t we just enjoy this beautiful meal Sophia prepared for us, get drunk, and then see what happens.” As I digested the thought and tried to come up with a clever response, he leaned into the table and said, “I’ll be nice. I promise.”
We resumed our dinner in silence, which neither concerned nor distracted Greer in the least. He seemed to enjoy watching me eat. Either that, or he was fascinated by the way I suddenly got my appetite back and inhaled my meal. By the time I finished the mountain of food he’d served me, I was looking for more and absently scraping the plate with my fork, sucking the sauce off the edge of my finger.
Greer got up from the table. The silence in the room amplified the sound of his shoes hitting the floor as he slowly walked around to the back of my chair. I froze and fixed my eyes on the empty plate in front of me as the heat from his body reached mine. His hand appeared in my peripheral vision. It moved past my arm, past my plate, and in the direction of the last piece of chicken on the serving platter. He spooned the food onto my plate, and then took the napkin from my lap and wiped a drop of sauce from my chin.
I thought I might combust from the furnace burning inside of me. As he walked back to his chair, the flame lowered to a more tolerable flicker. I managed to eat part of my replenished food before putting my fork down.
“Are you finished?” he asked.
I swallowed my last bite. “Yes.”
He reached across the table and slid my plate toward him with his index finger. He finished off my remaining chicken in two bites. “Wouldn’t want to offend Sophia,” he said as he slid the empty plate back to me. “Dessert?”
Sophia’s tiramisu was tempting, but my stomach was preoccupied with all that flapping. “Maybe later.”
“What would you like to do now?” he asked. “Is this the part where we finish that conversation?”
“I need to tell you something,” I blurted out. It was now or never, and never was inching up fast.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Greer shut his eyes and sighed. “What could possibly top off the last twenty-four hour, Alex?”
I struggled with the last minute choice to speak or keep silent. Once spoken, the words were out there in the universe for any interloper to intercept. Maybe if I omitted names, the fact that Maeve Kelley left behind a secret letter, might remain a secret.
My eyes dropped to the table as my mouth opened to speak, but as I focused on the object in front of me, I stopped.
“Alex?”
I barely heard Greer speak as I stared at the pattern on my dinner plate. Thick swirls of gold had circled my meal like a gilded ormolu frame. But as the food disappeared and the inner edges of the gold were revealed, the plain white porcelain in the center of the plate stood out as the real work of art.
“Alex? Are you listening?”
What was it Constantine said to me?
Why is it you never listen? Yes, that’s what he’d said to me the night before. It appeared that neither Greer nor Constantine thought much of my listening skills.
Maybe you haven’t been looking the right way.
The only sound resonating through the room was the sound of my own voice telling me I’d missed what was right in front of me. The glass fish tank circling me vibrated as Greer rattled away, and Constantine’s residual advice kept flying up against the clear walls.
I blinked as I slipped back to the here and now. Greer’s eyes deadlocked on mine. His irritation was replaced by a frozen stare honing in on my soul through the lenses of my eyes.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Trust me on this, Greer. Just once.”
Constantine was right. I wasn’t listening. I needed to take one last look at the letter, only this time I’d listen—with my eyes.
Greer didn’t stop me as I got up from the table and reached for my plate, the instinct to clean my mess always present. He reached across the table and caught my wrist as he shook his head. “Go.”
Location is everything, especially for unlocking secrets that might change the world, so I chose the desk near the window to exploit the last sliver of light cutting through the room. The envelope sat on the desk in front of me for a good ten minutes before I finally opened it and gently removed the letter. It was written on parchment and had a large watermark in the center that took up most of the page. I hadn’t paid attention to it before because the color was barely a shade darker than the rest of the paper. The design was clearly Celtic. Not surprising since my mother was from Ireland. I must have read the damn thing a hundred times since Hazel gave it to me. I read it top to bottom, left to right, backward and forward, looking for something hidden in the words. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized a message hidden in the words was much too obvious. My mother was smarter than that. Maybe it was the watermark all along. Maybe the symbol itself was the clue.
After reading it for the hundred-and-oneth time and staring at the watermark for some sort of epiphany to kick in, I started to doubt my intuition and wondered if it really was nothing more than a goodbye letter with some motherly advice. I got up for a glass of water and some ibuprofen. My forehead burned like f
ire from the tension building behind my eyes. I sat back down with my glass and looked out the window in front of the desk. A pigeon looked back at me through the glass like it was waiting for me to figure out the obvious. “What are you trying to tell me?”
The tension increased until I wanted to scream at the bird on the ledge. I know. I’m stupid. The pigeon bobbed its head once before flying away and abandoning any faith that I’d figure it out.
I rubbed my eye sockets hard enough to see stars. “You win. I give up.” My hand swung from my eyes, a simple act of moving my limb from point A to point B, but the glass of water disrupted its path. It was one of those moment when your brain realizes what’s about to happen, but the signal doesn’t make it to your limb fast enough to abort the movement.
“No!” The water spread like a shadow over the letter. I blotted my shirt sleeve over the paper, absorbing as much liquid as possible before the words turned into distorted blobs of ink. “This is not happening.” When I lifted my arm, the edges around the ink were a little fuzzy, but I could still read the words.
I looked at the wet paper in front of me and noticed that the watermark looked different. My head tilted as I studied the faint symbol, trying to put my finger on what was different in the way the lines flowed. The borders of the letter were darker, and the intricate lines of the central design muddied into a solid shade of beige. Ironically, the watermark didn’t like water.
“I’ll be damned.” A smile spread across my face as an image of Edgar Rubin’s ambiguous vase came to mind. The message had been in front of me the entire time, waiting for me to see past the predictable interpretation of what we’re conditioned to perceive. I was finally listening—with all my senses. As I skimmed the words again and stopped to slowly read the last few lines, I realized just how clever my mother was. Good thing I had a memory like an elephant and a fascination for oddities.
My mother used to take my hand as we ascended the steps to Ava’s shop. Let’s go feed the soul, baby. I don’t know how I forgot that, but lucky for me I ended up in the two places that were once my homes. If I’d been less predictable, her plan would have failed. The thought made me shudder. Something had been waiting to be found for twenty-one years, and by sheer luck or the carefully orchestrated plan of a powerful witch, I knew where to find it.
The Amulet Thief (The Fitheach Trilogy Book 1) Page 24