How could I explain to him that even in that moment of horror I was happy, exhilarated, relieved at the opening of my inner eye?
And that Erik Wolf, charging around the room and giving orders, desperately trying to keep everyone safe, was bathed in a beautiful green-blue light, glimmering with overtones of gold.
Chapter 12
Night of Revelations
Domo was putting pressure on my wound with the napkin. “How did this happen, Hana?”
I focused on my brother’s concerned face and took a deep, calming breath. “All right, don’t freak out. Someone shot me.”
“What?” yelled Domo and Margie in unison.
“Look in the gazebo. There’s this hole in the window and lots of webbing around it. And I thought I had been stung by a bee, or that my strap popped off and somehow whipped me. But neither of those would explain the blood,” I said, ruminating.
“How can you be so calm?” Margie cried, patting ineffectually at my stockinged feet.
I leaned my head against the wall. “Because he’s gone.” It was true; I had felt the misery recede soon after the chaos began.
Erik ran up with a woman I had never seen. The halo of light was still around him; I squinted in its glare. “Hana, this is Dr. Angela Stevens. She’s going to look at your injury.”
I nodded, and the woman bent down and removed the towel. She poked me for a moment, one time painfully, and then said, “Well, good news. You’re missing a divot of skin there, which is why it’s bleeding so much, but it didn’t penetrate you at all. A surface wound. The bullet skimmed across the top of your shoulder. You don’t need the emergency room, but I do recommend disinfecting that area and using a good butterfly bandage to make sure it heals with minimal scarring. I might have something in my car I can give you.” She looked up at Erik. “Can I go to my car?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. So she’s okay?”
“She’s A-okay. Just a surface wound and lots of bleeding.”
“Thank God. I appreciate it, Doctor.”
She stood and gazed down at me. “That dress, on the other hand, might be a casualty. What a terrible loss.” She shook her head. “Let me know if you need anything else, Detective Wolf.” She waved at me and moved back into the noisy crowd. Erik left too, with a promise to return shortly. The panic had lessened and now the hum of activity was more about curiosity and adrenaline.
I wondered what Runa and Thyra would say if they saw the dress. They had given it to me believing I would take good care of it . . . I sat up straight. What if it hadn’t been a gift, but a loan? The dress was torn and covered in blood!
Katie and Eduardo appeared, looking worried. I saw them speaking to Erik, who was sort of yelling at them. Then, chastised, they came toward the wall where Domo, Margie, and I sat in a daze. Katie knelt down and stared at me. “What in the world happened here? Are you okay?” She gave me one of her Katie hugs, but made sure not to touch my left shoulder.
“Long story,” I said. I was suddenly very, very tired. “And, yes, I’m okay. I wonder if there’s any punch left?”
“I’ll get some,” Eduardo said, and he darted away.
“Where were you?” I asked Katie. “I was worried about you.”
She looked at the three of us, wincing slightly. “Okay, I don’t want to hear about how immature I am.”
“No promises,” Domo said as he studied the hand Margie had tucked into his.
“Eduardo and I were in the lobby, and then we went down that little hallway that leads to the bathrooms. There’s a janitor’s closet there. We peeked inside; it was actually kind of a big room. Anyway, Ed pulled me in there and started kissing me.”
“So you were making out in a janitor’s closet while the rest of us stampeded around like spooked horses?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I turned my head to study her bright eyes. “Was it good?”
She smiled. “Yes. Very good. We’re back together.”
“Oh, I’m glad, Katie. I think we’re going to see a whole new Eduardo.”
She nodded. “Or maybe more dimensions of the same old Eduardo. Which is fine with me.” She sighed, then looked back at me and my bloody dress. “This is really scary, Hana. Does Erik think this was a random crackpot?”
I shrugged. “I assume so.” I glanced at the windows, where red and blue lights made the scene both surreal and safe. The crowd seemed to be edging toward the door. “I think they’re letting people go.”
They were. Within half an hour everyone had been allowed to leave after showing Erik or one of the police officers their IDs and jotting down their contact info. Dr. Stevens returned with a little medical bag and brought me to the washroom, where she painfully sanitized my wound and then carefully bandaged it. “There. That should minimize scarring. You can shower, but you’ll have to leave this shoulder out of the spray. Don’t get it wet for a week or so. Then you can take the bandage off. Come see me if you’d like. Here’s a pain pill that should make you feel fine until morning. And I’ll include a couple more for tomorrow. Here’s my card, should you have any questions.”
I took the pills and the card, thanked her, and trudged back to the nearly empty ballroom. Cassandra Stone stood with some of the artists near the dais, packing up the equipment from their Kodaly presentation. She looked at me with a haunted expression, but then someone claimed her attention and she turned away again.
Domo and Margie approached me. “Hana, do you want to stay at my place tonight?” Domo said. “You’ll be safe there; it’s a secure building.”
“No, I’m okay. I need to feed my cats, and I have a pretty early event at the tea house.”
My brother looked uncertain. “Is Erik going to stay with you? Because I don’t want you to be alone, Han.”
I patted his arm. “I’m sure he is. If not, I’ll have him drop me at Mom and Dad’s.”
“All right. Call me if you need anything.”
Margie had grown quiet; her burst of extroversion was at an end. “It was fun, Hana. Before all this. Thanks for inviting us,” she said in her small voice.
They left, followed by Eduardo and Katie, who were holding hands.
Greg Benton appeared in the doorway, and Erik talked briefly to him. Then Erik, glowing with residual gold, walked to me where I stood leaning against a table. I moved into his chest and his arms wrapped around me. “Let’s get you home,” he said.
I nodded. We didn’t say much in the car, although he reached for my hand. His hand was warm. I closed my eyes.
As we neared my apartment, he said, “Are you all right? Emotionally, I mean?”
“Yes. I’m very curious, though. I mean, I’m hoping I wasn’t a particular target—”
I felt the tension in his palm, then turned to see it in his face. “What?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We can talk about it tomorrow.”
“No, don’t be silly. What’s on your mind?”
He pulled into my lot and parked the car. Then he turned to me, his face solemn. “I’ve been going over this in my head. It’s like a nightmare. I can see it still: something dawned on you, one of your moments of wisdom, and then your ankle twisted and you bent forward.” He leaned toward me and lightly touched my bandage. “And the bullet grazed you here.”
I nodded, remembering.
“But if you hadn’t twisted, Hana, and your shoe hadn’t given out, it would have struck you here.” His finger moved down and pointed at my heart. “My fear is that he actually had excellent aim. That it was just you he wanted to shoot.”
At first this struck me as almost funny, and a short laugh burst out of me. “What in the world would make me a target? I don’t—do anything.”
He knew what I meant, and he shook his head. “I don’t know. And why at the dance? You were probably moving around on your own for much of t
he time these last few days.”
“Yes. That is really scary in retrospect. I mean, yesterday I was driving in my car alone, and marching up the library steps—”
“Right, the library.” He thought about this. “What were you doing there? I mean, besides getting those images of Kodaly?”
“I asked for information about Békéscsaba or Keszthely. Towns in Hungary.”
“Why those?”
I let out a long sigh. “You’d better come in. This is a long story. Maybe we should have a midnight snack.”
“Okay.” He got out and came around to my side; he helped me out of the car and pulled me against him. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Hana. Not now that I’ve found you.”
“Good. I don’t want anything to happen to me,” I joked. We walked hand in hand to the door; little Iris the gatekeeper had long since gone to bed and was probably dreaming of being a pirate the next day. Halloween.
Wolf unlocked my door and we mounted the stairs. Inside, he fed my complaining cats and I went into the bathroom to view the damage to my dress. As I had feared, it looked even worse under the bright lights. The bodice looked redder than delicate frothy chocolate, and the pretty skirt had a six-inch tear. I peeled it off and took a quick rinse in the shower, leaving my shoulder out of the spray as instructed. Then I put on some pajamas my mother had made me: cream-colored flannel, patterned with smiling cats. They felt particularly cozy on this cold night. I combed my hair, stepped into slippers, and went back out to Erik, who was looking at his phone.
“We don’t have a man yet, but we do have his footprints,” he said. “That’s good.”
I sat down beside him and he smiled at my outfit. “Very cozy,” he said. He sniffed near my neck and said, “And fragrant.”
“Mm. Kiss me.” He did, eagerly, and I slid my arms around him. For a time, it was just us, warming each other. Then I pulled away and said, “You need to know some things, I guess.”
“Okay.”
“First, we have to go back to 1960, when a little baby disappeared in the town of Békéscsaba. His mother was shopping; she left him in plain sight on the sidewalk, in his stroller, and he disappeared.”
He stroked my hair. “And why do we need to go to 1960 Hungary and this little town?”
“Because the police couldn’t find the baby. They had no leads. Someone sent them to my great-grandmother.”
He sat up straight, his eyes wide. “Your little Natalia? From the picture?”
“She was twenty-seven then. Grandma was four.”
His eyes remained wide as saucers. “Your Hungarian women found the baby.”
I nodded. “Told the police where he was, at least. Natalia said she saw a blue barn and some other details.”
“So you were asking about that in the library, along with—what other town?”
“Keszthely. Kodaly loved it; I think he was born there. Look at my painting.” I pointed to the wall. “That’s the Keszthely of his memory. Oh, and at the dance, remember all those Kodaly paintings? Remember the one of the happy mother, reaching for a baby?”
“Yes—I wondered why you were so moved by that one.”
“That was Kodaly’s vision of Henrik Sipos’s reunion with his mother. Henrik is the baby from back then. He lives in Riverwood, and he loves my family, for obvious reasons.”
“And Kodaly knew the story?”
“Yes. They met each other in some Hungarian circle or other, and Henrik ended up telling him about his town and his story.”
“Okay. Were these the only things you looked for at the library?”
I hesitated. “Well, Kodaly’s paintings.”
“Yes.”
“And I asked for books about psychic ability.”
“What?”
“I just—I figured I should try to tap into what I have. Cassandra found a whole pile for me.”
“Cassandra, huh? So she probably put two and two together. What if she told other people? There are already rumors about your family in the Hungarian community. That could easily spread. Now maybe the artists know, too. And some of their friends. It’s out there.”
“She did mention something—” I thought back to our conversation, trying to reclaim her words.
“What?”
“Something about how the Hungarian community had been buzzing about our family. About psychic ability.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Not ideal, but so what? Who cares? I’ll never meet those people.”
He pointed at my bandage. “Maybe you already did. What if the guilty person heard that you were researching Kodaly’s birthplace? Asking to see a visual of Kodaly’s stolen painting? And then insinuating, without intending to do so, that you had psychic ability? What if someone didn’t want to take that chance?”
“Wow.” I slumped back on the couch. Oddly, I felt more relieved than terrified. If the person had an actual motive for singling me out, that was better than someone just randomly stalking me. “This is good, Erik. It means that you catch him, and this is all over.”
“But it also means that until I catch him, you are in danger. So you are not going anywhere alone. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” I sat for a moment, feeling safe but also constrained. How long would I have to worry about going outside?
I sighed. “Would you like some stuffed cabbage?”
Despite everything, I saw HFG in his eyes. This was Domo’s acronym for a term he had coined: Hungarian food greed. I laughed and said, “I’ll warm it up.”
Soon we were snuggled on the couch, watching an old movie while we dug into my warmed-up töltött káposzta and some Hungarian bread.
When we finished eating, Erik took our plates to the kitchen, then came through the doorway. He had long since removed his jacket and tie, and he had rolled up the sleeves on his brown shirt. He looked wide-awake, despite his very long and intense evening. He paused a moment to text someone on his phone. Then he came back, plopping down beside me.
I leaned back on the couch. The pain pill had worked so well that I didn’t feel my shoulder at all.
I flicked off the movie with my remote. “It was kind of boring,” I said.
“It was really boring,” he agreed. He waited until I looked into his green eyes. “So this book you took out—is it helping you at all? I mean, to come to terms with your—inner power?”
I reached up to stroke his cheek. “I haven’t read much. But I did an inner eye exercise of my own invention, and I listened to some self-help guru at the tea house. Then I read a chapter of the book. None of those equals deep research, but, you know what? They did help me. A lot. I’m starting to get a better sense of my own instincts, and what they mean. At the dance, there was a moment that I felt terrible. Miserable. I couldn’t find any happiness. Remember, I told you?”
“Yes. When was that, do you recall?”
“About an hour before the shooting. We were just all at the table. Maybe he was marching around outside.”
“Maybe.” He pondered this. “But the feeling didn’t stay?”
“No. It faded. But it came back right before I felt the bullet.”
He stiffened with the memory. “You said, ‘Oh no.’ I thought you meant your shoe.”
“No—I think I was trying to tell you something.”
“Huh.” He sat back on the couch. “Then what were you laughing at?”
“What?”
“When I pointed you out to Domo, you were laughing. Like someone had just told you a hilarious joke or the best news.”
“It was the best news. The best ever.”
“What?” He looked genuinely confused.
I crept closer to him. “Everything was kind of in slow motion, from the time you knew something was wrong. I saw the realization dawn on your face. And then you were d
ragging me, and pushing me down, and lifting your badge and shouting to everyone. You were everywhere at once. You were magnificent.”
He shook his head. “I was doing my job, Hana.”
“But you didn’t see what I saw: an amazing blue-green light, like the sea in the sunshine, surrounded by a glittering gold.”
“What?” Awareness dawned, and his eyes widened. “In the room? Or around me?”
“Just around you, Erik Wolf. I still see the gold edges now, like someone cut you out of some magical paper.”
We looked at each other for a long moment; at first it seemed he didn’t believe me. I waited until he saw the truth.
Until he smiled.
He pulled me onto his lap. “What if you hadn’t seen it? Were you not going to tell me that you loved me?”
“Don’t be silly. I’ve known that I love you for weeks.”
He stared at me, stunned. “So why not say it back to me?”
I smoothed his hair. “Because I wanted to say it here, where you first kissed me.”
“Say it, then.”
“I love you.”
“Say it again,” he said, lightly touching my mouth with his fingertips.
I slid off his lap. “I will, but I have another special place that I want to say it.”
“Oh?” He smiled lazily.
“Yeah. Come with me.”
I led him to my bedroom; the cats followed us, ready to cuddle up for the night.
I said, “Sorry guys, not right now,” and I closed the door.
Chapter 13
Sárkány the Dragon
I woke up smiling. I wondered if in fact I had smiled in my sleep all night long. Erik Wolf was not beside me, but my cats were, staring at me with reproachful eyes that spoke of morning hunger. I donned a robe and went out into the hallway. Erik was on the phone, but his face lit up when he saw me, and I’m sure mine sent light back to him.
Death of a Wandering Wolf Page 14