The Night Inside

by The Night Inside (epub)

  “I’m sorry. Sara, sit down, please.” She sank back onto the vinyl bench and ran her hands through her short hair.

  “You’re right. It’s just so hard to believe. She was so straight it was unbelievable. Maybe somebody just stole the earrings. Maybe it was someone else that you saw.”

  “Someone who just happens to look like you?” he countered and she sighed, abandoning the comfort of the idea of theft as quickly as she had clutched at it. “When did she disappear?”

  “I’m not sure. The last time anyone saw her was at a class back in March. I’d called her a couple of times but there was never any answer. Then I got a call from her friend Carla, wanting to know where Ardeth was. Nobody had seen her, or heard from her, in almost a week. Carla and I reported her missing the next day.”

  “What did the police say?”

  “What could they say? She’s a grown woman, she could do what she wanted. They checked her apartment, her bank account. Nothing was missing. They put out a report and asked a lot of questions, searched a lot of ravines. I told them Ardeth would never disappear like that. She was too responsible, too predictable. You know what the sergeant told me when I said that people like Ardeth just don’t disappear? He said, ‘Ms. Alexander, people like your sister are exactly the type of people who just disappear.’ But after a while, they stopped looking very hard. They think she’ll turn up as a Jane Doe in the morgue someday.”

  “Well, at least you know she’s still alive. And she’s here somewhere.”

  “And she’s in trouble. I know she is.”

  “Why not go back to the police? I’ll tell them who I saw.”

  “And let them think she had something to do with your friend’s death?” Sara challenged him. “Why should I do that? If she’s in trouble, I’m not going to make it worse by dragging in the cops. I’m going to find her myself.”

  “You don’t know what kind of trouble she’s in. Maybe you should just let it be,” Mickey suggested carefully.

  “She’s my sister. She’s all the family I’ve got left. I want to find out what happened to her.”

  “Sara . . . maybe she doesn’t want to be found. She’s been here all along and she’s never called you.”

  “Then she can tell me that herself. I’ve got a right to that much from her.”

  “How are you going to find her?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I’ll think of something. If you saw her, someone else must have. Someone else will.”

  “Oh, shit,” Mickey swore suddenly, glancing at his watch. “I’m late for a job, I’ve got to go.” He started pulling on his jacket and fumbling in his pocket for change for their coffees. The money clattered on the Formica tabletop as he stood up. “Sara . . . good luck. I hope you find her.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And,” he paused, “if you’re ever in the market for a guitarist . . . oh hell, that’s an opportunistic thing to say.”

  Anger flared up inside her for a moment, then died. She smiled sadly. “Nature of the business. Give me your number.”

  He scrawled it on the napkin she extended, then dashed out of the diner. A moment later, his face appeared in the half-open window beside the booth. “Sara, listen, I’ve got it—a way we can find your sister. I’ll come by The Gold Rush tonight and tell you, OK?” Before she could do more than nod, he was gone.

  Sara stared at the number on the napkin for a moment, then looked around at the diner’s clientele, eyes searching each feminine face, seeing Ardeth’s eyes in one, the line of her jaw in another. From Mickey’s description of the woman with the earrings, Ardeth had changed so completely it would take recognition that subtle to find her. For two months, she had searched the streets for the sister she remembered and might have walked by Ardeth without a second look.

  Black hair, white skin, wild, spooky eyes. It was not the sister she knew. Not straight, dependable, dull Ardeth.

  And face it, that’s what you thought of her. Hell, that’s what she thought of herself. Was it the old image she’d rebelled against? Sara asked herself. You always told her to. Told her to loosen up. To risk something once in a while.

  I did, I know I did, she thought in sudden despair, but oh Ardy, I didn’t mean for you to risk everything.

  Chapter 23

  She was near.

  He had wandered up from his usual haunts farther south, pretending that he might make it to the central reference library before it closed at nine o’clock, but knowing in his heart that it was her scent on the breeze that drew him.

  Stay away from her, Rozokov told himself. There was someone asking questions of the old men at the Salvation Army shelter yesterday. Ambrose Dale’s great-great-granddaughter has not stopped looking for you—and you have not found a way to stop her. Until then, you have to stay away.

  He walked up Yonge Street, feeling her presence somewhere to his west. Preoccupied by his awareness, he was standing at the great glass doors of the library building before he realized that it was dark and empty. He paused for a moment, hand on the door handle, staring at his reflection in the glass. You are being a fool, he told the ghostly figure there, and if you persist in it, it will not be Jean-Pierre who goes down in flames this time. It will be you. Or it will be Ardeth.

  “Sorry, you just missed us.” The voice from his right made him jerk around, hand tightening so hard around the door handle that he heard the glass rattle in reaction. A young woman stood there and he realized that she must have been sitting in the shadow of one of the scraggly trees the city planted in granite post in fragile, futile defiance of the concrete that seemed to cover everything else. “I was just trying to sort all this out so I could carry it home.” She gestured to the collection of magazine-filled shopping bags piled at the edge of the planter. “Sorry if I startled you.”

  Rozokov let go of the door handle and felt a smile beginning on his lips. It was well past nine and full night was on the city, touching even this brightly lit thoroughfare. And this young creature was apologizing for startling him. Even as it amused him, it reminded him achingly of Ardeth and her odd courtesies to him in the strange hell of the dungeon. “That is quite all right. I was overly optimistic.” He looked at her more carefully, sensing something familiar in her voice and the way she pushed her tortoiseshell glasses back up her nose. “You work here, do you not?”

  “Yeah. I stayed tonight to finish some work . . . and collect these.” She gestured to the magazines again. “They let me take them home after the microfilm versions come in.” She shifted forward a little, studying him curiously. “I’ve seen you here a few times. You’re the one who actually reads things.”

  “The literate bum. Not just one looking for a place to sleep.” The faint light did not completely conceal her blush.

  “Well, you know, a lot of you . . . of them . . . just sit around and . . .”

  “I know,” he rescued her, suddenly glad he was wearing relatively clean clothing tonight and he had forgotten his shambling, swearing ritual in his concentration of Ardeth. He glanced at the collection of bags. “Do you have to carry all those?”

  “Well, I thought I could. I don’t live very far away. Just over in Rosedale.” She gestured with her head. How young was she? Rozokov wondered suddenly, still uncertain about the signs of passage in this new world. Younger than Ardeth, surely.

  “I am passing that way myself,” he lied. “It would be my honour to escort you.”

  She laughed uneasily. “Are you really going that way?” she asked and beneath the light tone he recognized the threads of caution, uneasiness and fascination that he had so long ago learned to exploit.

  “I am a gentleman of leisure, as you can see. I have no previous engagements and Rosedale is as pleasant a destination as any. But you are quite right to be concerned about being escorted by a stranger. So permit me to introduce myself. I am Dimitri Rozokov.” It felt good to say his name again. Even the foppis
h bow he finished with felt good, a moment of the humorous frivolity that he had so long denied himself.

  Her giggle signalled her surrender, her inability to fear for long anyone who spoke with such elaborate and foolish gallantry. “I’m Eleonora Holmes. But since the great-aunt they named me for is safely dead, I usually go by Ellie.”

  They collected up the bags, two each, and she led him up Yonge towards the city’s most expensive neighbourhood. It had been that in his day as well and he remembered watching the mansions there glow like jewels against the trees and the darkness, recalled the long lines of carriages drawing up to release their impeccably dressed cargo at the doorsteps of the city’s elite.

  Beneath the streetlights he could see that she was younger than he had thought, no more than twenty. Her auburn hair was long and loose, framing an oval face with a wide, full mouth and narrow, brown eyes. Her features were almost anonymously pleasant but the animation in her face as she talked fascinated him. She punctuated her comments with grimaces and grins, her weighted hands coming up as if she was used to gesturing with them and even the heavy bags could not stop her. She wore black pants and a loose, sleeveless tunic caught at her throat with an ornate, glittering brooch.

  She was nervous, careful to keep distance between them and talked to hide it. In quick succession, he discovered that her father was a lawyer, her mother a hospital administrator and her brother a stockbroker. She herself was going into her second year at university and her future appeared to be the central concern to the rest of the Holmes family. “Of course, Dad would love it if I were a lawyer, Mom would prefer a doctor and Paul just doesn’t want me to embarrass him too much at his old alma mater.”

  “And what do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know yet. I like working at the library, even if the pay makes my parents cringe. I’m majoring in biology at university and I like that. That’s my problem. I find everything interesting. Sometimes I wish I was one of the people who knew from the time they were five they were going to be a neurosurgeon.”

  “Curiosity is a rare trait. You should value it,” he commented and he caught the edge of her careful glance.

  “What about you? What did you want to be when you were young?”

  “Not what my father wanted me to be.” She grinned and turned a corner, leading him off Yonge and onto a side street without seeming to notice it.

  “And what was that?”

  “A good son. One who stayed home and had sons to carry on the name.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I left. I travelled and studied and . . .” he caught himself abruptly, remembering suddenly that this was not Ardeth and they were not in the asylum, where all lies were meaningless. He was walking into the wealthy heart of the city, dressed as a vagrant, with a child whose blood drew him as much as her charm. It was madness. This was no half-conscious wino, no drugged prostitute. If he bungled this, he might as well raise one of the strange bright neon signs above his head and wait for Havendale to get him. And he had told her his real name.

  For a moment he almost dropped the bags and fled. But the hunger for blood was a sharp ache in his gut, the hunger for her careless, casual youth even stronger. The wildness, the intoxication of his dark power, was much older than the caution to which he had schooled himself a hundred years ago. You might chastise Ardeth for it, he thought ruefully, but cannot even kill it in yourself.

  “Mr. Rozokov?” Her voice was hesitant, hovering between sympathy and fear.

  “And that was another country, in another time,” he finished at last and managed a smile.

  “What happened to you?”

  “That I should end up like this? It is a long story and not a very interesting one, I am afraid. Why not amuse an old man by telling him what else about the world you find fascinating?”

  Her lip curled for a moment, halfway between pout and scowl, then her mobile features cleared. “I don’t think you’re nearly as old as you let on. And you’re the most interesting thing around at the moment. If you don’t tell me about yourself, I’ll just make it up.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “All right.” She squinted at him theatrically for a moment, not even noticing that a man walking his dog across the street had given them a long, lingering look. “I’d say you’re from Europe somewhere. Your family was probably wealthy, or noble, if you were supposed to carry on the family name. When you left home your father disowned you.” She managed that much correctly, Rozokov had to admit, but then the tale spun out into tragic, secret loves and scheming brothers out to ensure that he remained disinherited. “So here you are, stuck in Toronto, reading the newspapers to try to find some clue to the whereabouts of your long-lost love. How did I do?”

  “Perhaps you should be a writer instead of a biologist?” he suggested with a laugh.

  “Dad would love that. Writers make even less than librarians.” She paused suddenly, standing at the head of a short driveway. “We’re here.” Her voice sounded bewildered and uncertain.

  Rozokov surveyed the house for a moment, looking for windows fringed with light, or the shadow of a face watching them. There was nothing but a lamp set over the front doorway. Behind the veil of cedar hedges that framed the front lawn, he could hear faint noises from the house on the right, but the one on the left was silent and still. “My parents aren’t home yet. But they should be in a little while.” The words came out in a rush, as if speed could disguise the lie.

  “I’ll leave you here then,” he said but did not put down the bags.

  “Are you hungry? Thirsty? I could . . .”

  “I am not hungry.” His own lie came out so much more smoothly.

  “I’d invite you in but . . .”

  “I understand. I could be anything. It might be dangerous.” She teetered there for a moment longer, torn between her fear and her curiosity, between a thousand warnings and her belief in her own invulnerability.

  “If you’re a thief, it doesn’t matter. Everything’s insured. And . . . I don’t think you want to hurt me. Do you?” She looked at him, dark eyes intent, features for once still and open.

  “No, Eleonora Holmes, I don’t want to hurt you.” That, at least, was the truth.

  So she opened the door and let him in.

  The house was cooler than the air outside, chilled by modern machinery and the stark white of the walls. Everywhere the light touched, metal and leather gleamed. Black furniture and chrome shelving stood in glacial elegance against the walls, set off with large paintings in icy blue. Ellie looked around the open living room and sniffed. “Maybe not,” she decided. She switched off the light and led him down to the kitchen. “You’re sure you don’t want something?”

  When he declined, she unlocked the back door and ushered him out onto a screened porch. “How’s this?”

  “An admirable compromise,” he observed and her brows lifted curiously. “I am not exactly ‘in’ the house. In case your parents have any injunctions about strange men.”

  “I’m an adult,” she said, stiff and dignified. “They don’t make rules like that.” She settled onto a wicker divan and watched as he sat down beside her. The trees and hedges grew tall and shadowing back here, he noticed, and behind them was a high wooden fence. Their voices might carry as a murmur to anyone outside in the yards surrounding them but surely would not penetrate houses with windows all closed to keep in their artificial air. She had not turned on the porch light. There was a long silence, not entirely companionable. “What are you doing here? Why did you come with me?” Ellie asked at last.

  “I thought that I would enjoy your company. I was right. And,” he paused, momentarily reluctant to use the truth as part of his seduction. “And you reminded me of someone.”

  “Your long-lost love?” There was a grin in her voice but he could almost hear it fade, just as he saw it slip from her face. “Is she dead?”

  “Afte
r a fashion. She was young and loved learning, as you do. I spend my time in the company of old or lost men . . . or in no company at all. There are times when I need youth and life.”

  “I knew you weren’t as old as you pretend to be.”

  “I am much older than I pretend to be. That is why I need what you have so much.”

  “Do you want to fuck me?” The obscenity came out sharp and jagged, as if she used it as a defense against him.

  “I am long past that, I am afraid. But I would like very much to kiss you.” She sat still for a moment then shifted to face him.

  “All right.” He felt the breath of the words as much as heard them. He put one hand against her hair and leaned over to touch her mouth. For a moment, her lips were tense against his, then they softened and she returned the kiss. “Do I kiss like her?” she asked when he lifted his mouth.

  “No. You kiss like you.”

  “My parents are up north. They’re not coming back tonight.”

  “I know.” This time her mouth was waiting for him.

  She was not much like Ardeth after all. Her body was rounder, her breasts fuller, her passion more vocal. When he slid his teeth into her throat, he put his hand over her mouth to hold in her cry and she bit the edge of his palm. Her blood was unutterably sweet, fresh with her youth and spiced with forbidden fruit.

  Sated, he drowsed against her longer than he had intended. At last, he eased his arm from beneath her head and sat up. She stirred, eyes opening slowly. “Shh.” He put his hand against her lips. “You are very tired. It was a long walk home with all those bags.” His thumb shifted to smooth the frown forming between her brows. “You were so tired that when you got home, you came out here and fell asleep. You had a dream.”

  “But . . .”

  “Just a dream, that’s all. Just a dream that you will forget in the morning.”

  “Don’t want to forget,” she managed mutinously, fighting the lull of his voice and the drowsiness in her limp body.