Countdown: Steele

by Boniface, Allie

  She’d spoken with surprising calm, her eyes lidded with fatigue but lucid. He swung into the long driveway. No other vehicles in sight. The gate opened without a sound, and he realized one of the guards had been watching for him after all. Inside, silence greeted him, and the interior of the place spooked him. A faint acrid scent reached his nostrils, like the wallpaper itself was crumbling to dust with each day that passed. The power had come back on at some point, but that was almost worse than the pitch black of night. Now lamps threw garish light in the parlor and the foyer. He took time to turn them all off.

  Here, he thought, looking down at the white marble. And there, on the carpet. He’d held Kira beneath him, breathed along the stretch of her neck, tasted her and fallen to a place he’d never dreamed existed. Kira March. Isabella Morelli. Whatever the hell her name was, she’d wound herself around his heart so tightly he wasn’t sure he’d ever come up for air—or ever want to.

  He couldn’t stop looking over his shoulder as he climbed the stairs to the second floor. He wasn’t superstitious, but this place closed him in and sent shivers down his spine. He’d never noticed it before tonight, but sadness and despair cloaked this house. Whatever had chased away Kira had sealed the door shut behind her and entombed Francesca in all the years since. Get the DNR form and get out. Anything you want to know, she’ll tell you. Maybe. And right now, he didn’t really care if she did or not.

  He made his way back into Francesca’s bedroom. With the sunrise, he could make out the spill of blood on the carpet, a shredded piece of bed sheet, a pair of scissors tossed to the side. He could almost see Kira there, kneeling beside her grandmother and binding wounds in the dark. His chest tightened with spent emotion.

  He pulled open the office door and felt along one wall for a light switch. An enormous desk sat in the middle of the room, covered with dust. He ran his finger along the top and left a trail. Ghosts. Every damn room he walked into, ghosts. The drawer slid open easily, and the key lay on top of a pile of papers. He flipped through a couple of them, but they were just old correspondence with some television and radio stations, dated ten years earlier.

  Two armchairs flanked a giant oil painting on the far wall. A fur wrap hung on a coat tree, and sitting in perfect alignment on the floor were three pairs of men’s shoes. Edoardo’s? Steele frowned. Edoardo was famous for jet-setting between continents, not returning to his boyhood home. Maybe Francesca had entertained a male guest or two in recent years after all.

  He opened the closet. Inside, more men’s clothes hung in a row, with more shoes on the floor below them. He checked the labels—all designer, of course—but dated a decade or two. Why does Francesca have Edoardo’s clothes in her office? He thought for a minute and then let it go. Movie stars had strange habits.

  His cell phone buzzed with a text from his father. Where are you?

  Steele’s shoulders tensed. Kira asked me to come back to the house.

  Who’s Kira?

  Steele grinned in satisfaction. For once, he knew something his father didn’t. Isabella. It’s what she goes by now.

  Hurry back. I want to get this wrapped up.

  Nice, Dad. Steele certainly hadn’t gotten his compassion from his father. On my way, he typed before he returned the phone to his pocket. The red light flickered, indicating a low battery yet again.

  He found the drawer with the files easily and carried it over to the desk. When he set it down, dust motes scattered everywhere. One thin folder, and two that were much thicker. None had any kind of label. He sat with all three in his lap.

  The first folder held receipts of varying sizes and amounts. Dates ranged from 1972 to just last year. Some were so yellowed and wrinkled that the print had long since faded. Others looked fresh, the totals on them reflective of the marked-up designer items still sold on Rodeo Drive. Some handwritten, some printed on purple carbon copy, others computer-generated. If he put them into chronological order, he imagined they would form a sort of history: the rise and fall of a screen siren. He leafed through them all, making sure a DNR form hadn’t snuck its way in. Then he set the folder aside and opened the second.

  He knew at once he’d found the right stack of papers. A thick stack of insurance forms, rubber-banded, lay on top. Flipping through, he confirmed the rumors of Francesca’s extensive plastic surgery. Nose job. Boob job. Lifts and tucks of various body parts. He recognized the names of almost all the doctors listed as either high-end cosmetic surgeons or psychiatrists from all over the globe.

  He whistled. “What a life.”

  Next he found lab reports, with abbreviations he couldn’t decipher. A couple of unfilled prescriptions. A faded blue certificate listing Francesca as the adoptive mother of Edoardo Gianni Scarpello, dated almost thirty-eight years earlier. At the very bottom, he found the DNR form, paper clipped to a single sheet of stationery.

  “In the event I become incapacitated and can no longer survive on my own...” the note began in small, blue script. Without reading the rest, he took both pieces of paper, folded them in half, and slid them into his back pocket. He replaced everything else. Sunlight filled the room, slipping its way between the cracks of the curtains. He was finished here. And Kira waited.

  The third folder lay in his lap. He picked it up without opening it. Then curiosity got the better of him, and he lifted the cover to peek inside. Strange forms in a language he didn’t process at first. He flipped to the second page, then the third. Edoardo’s adoption? He caught a date in the top corner of one page, but the print swam before his eyes. That’s not right. He looked at the next page. This one had an English translation, but the print had faded, and he had to hold it close to make out what it said.

  Born this date: Isabella Antigone Morelli.

  Father: Edoardo Gianni Morelli

  Steele’s pulse quickened. Here it was, after all: the identity to Kira’s birth mother. For an instant, he wondered if he ought to put the paper back in the folder, bury it in hats and scarves and leave history alone. But he couldn’t.

  Mother: Francesca Joanna Morelli.

  Francesca? Disappointed, Steele dropped the paper. He should have known they wouldn’t list the real mother. Everyone knew Francesca had gone to Egypt that summer. Clearly she’d gone to the hospital and made sure the official paperwork protected her son and granddaughter before they returned to this country.

  He replaced the birth certificate. He supposed it didn’t really matter. It was a detail so far in the past. A yellowing envelope fell to the ground, and pictures spilled onto the carpet. He leaned down and grabbed them. More black and whites, like the ones in the kitchen. More pyramids in the background. More shots of Edoardo, holding a camel’s lead, grinning under a coconut tree, standing with a heavily pregnant woman.

  That was Kira’s mother. It had to be.

  Steele stared. She stood in the shadow of a roofline and wore a floppy straw hat and sunglasses. She was a good twenty-five years younger, with round cheeks and dark hair. But he still would have recognized her anywhere. With her arms encircling her swollen belly, Francesca Morelli stared at the unknown photographer, the secret of her daughter—and her daughter’s conception—safe from the Western world.

  Until now.

  JACK WARREN LIT A CIGARETTE and yawned. “Should be home sleeping.” No one heard him; he was the last reporter stuck outside the Morelli place. The movie star’s head had been found hours earlier. And Francesca Morelli was comatose in some private stars’ hospital in the town. The rest of Jack’s counterparts from WKYX and the Napa Valley Times had taken off an hour ago. Only his boss over at the Sonoma Sun had ordered him to stay. For what? He’d already taken an entire roll of film of the outside of the house, the lawn, and the splash of light when the front door opened and Steele Walker rushed into his sweet yellow ride and barreled toward town. Since then, the only thing Jack had seen was a couple of swallows flapping around a birdbath. He finished his cigarette and peered through the trees. Suppose I could see if any do
ors are open.

  Steele had driven back through the gate and parked right outside the front door less than an hour ago, which was the real reason Jack had hung around. Why had the guy returned? Jack lifted a brow. Might as well pass the time by seeing if he could poke around and find out the reason.

  He hiked around back of the house and found the shallow spot in the water that Mirables from The Chronicle had mentioned last night. A branch caught his pant leg, and he had to pull hard to get it free. The ground turned soft, and his designer shoes sank into the mud. “Shit.” When he finally stumbled through the moat, he found himself soaked up to his knees. Gotta get the Sun to give me a clothing allowance. He clambered up the bank on the far side and shivered. The rising sun had disappeared, obscured by clouds. He frowned. No—not clouds. But something hazy covered the first-floor windows of the house. Fog? He looked around. Wouldn’t be strange, up here in the Napa hills.

  Then he smelled smoke.

  It was creeping its way around the first floor, licking at the doors and windows. Its acrid smell burned the back of his throat as he got closer. “Holy shit.” Was Walker still in there? He peered through the closest window and could make out what looked to be the kitchen. Candles were set around the room, one fallen onto its side. Flames licked at the table, the curtains, the walls themselves.

  “Jesus.” Jack’s feet slipped on the grass, and he fell to his knees. He reached in his pocket for his cell phone and realized he’d forgotten it back in the car. “Hello?” he shouted. “Anyone hear me?” He rose, tripped, and fell again. This time he wriggled away from the house on his heels and elbows. The smoke was growing, pouring out any cracks it could find. He held his breath as his eyes began to water.

  “Walker? Walker! You still in there?” He choked on the words. No one answered.

  Jack covered his eyes as he scanned the grand mansion, all the way up to the roof. He hoped to God Steele had gotten out the front door, because it was only a matter of time before that fire found its way upstairs and started eating away the entire house from the inside out.

  7:00 a.m.

  Kira took a deep breath and knocked as she fiddled with the bandage that had replaced the IV needle on her hand. Twenty-five years old, and still she didn’t have the courage to simply open Francesca’s door and walk in. She knocked again and turned the knob.

  “May I help you?” the nurse inside asked.

  “I’m Isabella Morelli.” God, she hated saying that name out loud, as if it validated what she’d been trying to forget all these years.

  “You’re her granddaughter?”

  Kira nodded. She’d lied about the answer to that question enough times in her life. Only Dr. Meadham knew the truth about her real relationship to Francesca Morelli—the scarred, ugly truth. And he’d been sworn to secrecy decades ago.

  She studied the nurse for a moment, from her mousy brown hair, clipped back from her face, to the pale blue rubber shoes beneath her pale blue scrubs. No flicker of recognition there. No expression at all.

  “She’s still unconscious. Still critical. But you can come in if you want.”

  “Thanks.” The nurse left her alone and she sank onto the leather chair beside Francesca’s bed. This room looked much like her own, with its plush guest furniture, fresh flowers, and artwork on the walls. She pinched the skin on her leg as her eyes filled. Her gaze moved over the bed and away again. It was exhausting, hating her own mother.

  “Isabella, wait,” Edoardo pleaded. “You don’t understand. You need to understand. It wasn’t what you think.”

  “Then what was it? You’re telling me that you slept with her? With your own mother? And she’s my mother too?”

  It couldn’t be.

  It was.

  “We didn’t know,” Edoardo tried to explain. “It was a masked ball, and with so many people there— so much happening all at once...” His face had twisted into an expression she couldn’t read. “I didn’t even know Francesca was in the country. We hadn’t spoken in months. We were both filming in different places. The morning after it happened we looked at each other and thought all the things you’re thinking now too. More. Worse.”

  He tried to reach for her, tried to calm her. But Kira had thrown herself onto the floor at that point and screamed terrible things, scratching at the carpet and dragging her nails along her own face. She’d shoved away the hand he tried to touch her with—the same hand he’d touched his own adoptive mother with—and only when he’d left her alone did she sit up and try to breathe.

  I never really drew a full breath again, after that.

  She stared at Francesca’s shrunken frame under the sheet. She looked dead already. Maybe she was. Maybe the moment she’d heard of Edoardo’s kidnapping, she’d gone away to a place inside her mind. Egypt. Or Italy. Or the night she made a mistake and seduced her nineteen-year-old son.

  “Why didn’t you just get rid of me?” Kira whispered. She couldn’t imagine making that kind of fatal mistake and then growing the evidence inside her belly for nine long months.

  “We never even considered it,” they tried to tell her. “We’d screwed up. Badly. But we didn’t think pretending you didn’t exist would have solved anything. And we loved you, from the minute you were born. That was all that mattered.”

  Kira wrapped her arms around herself to stop the shaking. At eighteen, after discovering the truth, she’d cut off her hair, tattooed her body, pierced herself over and over again, as if the pain of mutilation would make her into something else. Someone else. She couldn’t understand it. She’d never understand it.

  She spent the first six months wandering the towns of Western Europe and staring into mirrors, trying to find the flaws she now knew existed under her skin. Tainted blood. Twisted genes. No wonder she always felt slightly off, askew in the world. More nights than one, she slid a knife along her wrists and wondered how long she’d feel pain before the bleeding took her into sleep.

  Distance, remarkably, had saved her. She pored over American papers every day, waiting for the rest of the world to discover what she already knew. It didn’t. After a while, the paparazzi stopped following her from hotel to restaurant and back again. She found brief comfort in the beds of men who didn’t care who or where she’d been before. And when her name finally vanished from the gossip columns, she traveled for another few months through rustic towns and dusty roads until she no longer hated the person who looked back at her from the mirror.

  Finally, she returned to California, following the pull of something she couldn’t name. Finding Scotty and Isha and Felix had been a godsend. They’d given her a new life. They’d rescued her without realizing it and changed her from Isabella Morelli into Kira March entirely.

  Until now.

  Now the same man who’d given her breath lay dying, or maybe dead, halfway around the world. And the woman who’d given her life lay near the end of her own. “They’re my parents,” she said aloud. It didn’t matter the combination of factors that had made that fact true. She couldn’t erase it. And she was done mourning it.

  She dug out her phone and checked three different news sites. No confirmation. No new pictures. She closed her eyes. She hadn’t prayed in so long. Twenty years, maybe. She wasn’t even sure anyone up there would remember her name. But her father needed all the help she could summon.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please let him be okay.”

  Francesca murmured something, and Kira pitched forward in her chair. “What?”

  But it was nothing, just a sigh or a squeak in response to the strong sedatives. Kira’s head throbbed as she sat there, staring at the woman who’d raised her in a lie. And then her thoughts went to places they shouldn’t. Her mind’s eye called up pictures of Francesca and Edoardo at the ball, both in costume, both caught up in the revelry and the alcohol and the drugs and the immense, illicit high of the party. Both giving in to temptation and desire and darkness.

  Kira shifted in her chair. The picture changed, an
d now she saw the morning after, the realization when the masks came off. Mother and son in bed together. Averted glances. Awful silence. The realization that twenty-four hours had changed everything.

  She pressed her fingertips to her temples. She’d grown up believing a fairytale and lived a life that existed only in movies. When that shattered, she crept around like a lost child, searching for a truth that had never been hers in the first place. But she couldn’t go back. She couldn’t change it.

  She did know this much: she had to stop blaming them, or she’d spend the rest of her life one step from the nuthouse. She ran her hands through her hair and rubbed her eyes. She couldn’t spend any more time trying to understand their relationship. Neither could she shift the root of her misery to them. The desire that had brought her into the world, the understanding and patience that had raised her, even the weird karma that had brought her to this moment, wasn’t wrong or right.

  It simply was.

  “I forgive you.” The words sounded awkward spoken out loud. Forgiveness was a silly thing, not the right thing, not what she meant to say. But it made her feel better all the same. “I know you didn’t mean to. It just happened.”

  She laid one hand on the bed near Francesca’s. “I’m sorry I didn’t come back before,” she whispered. “I just couldn’t deal with it. When you told me, it destroyed me.”

  Kira thought of Steele then, and her fingers folded around her pendant. Know thyself. It was written on the Oracle at Delphi. It was tattooed across her hip. As much as she’d tried to pretend it was a trendy phrase, or a connection to her father in the darkest days, it was something else, too. Her cheeks warmed, and she pictured Steele again, watching her across the kitchen table, taking her photo in the parlor, kissing her with a mouth that made her into someone else entirely. Not Isabella. Not even Kira. But someone different and new, a woman she wanted to know. A woman she didn’t fear becoming. Kira shook her head. Knowing herself hadn’t happened until she’d met someone who forced her to look squarely at herself. Imagine that.