Page 67 of Edge of Secrets

Chapter Twenty-Four

Nell

I kept my face averted so I didn’t have to see the bodyguard Wesley’s sympathetic glances. My stores of dignity and restraint had been completely exhausted by the last scene in Duncan’s apartment. Now all I wanted was to crawl into a hole.

Funny. That was exactly the scenario I had in store for myself, once I collected this letter—if I accepted Duncan’s help. Huddled in a hole. Cloistered in a hotel suite with the blinds drawn. I supposed I should be tough and brave and refuse to do it—but that would mean fleeing New York, starting over. Abandoning everything I’d worked so hard for in the last decade.

But once I got my degree, what could I do with it, if Snake Eyes was still out there hunting me? Even if I changed my name and ran, I would still be barred from teaching literature. Colleges and universities would be the first place any fool would look for me. Snake Eyes was no fool.

No, it would be waitressing for me if I had to go into hiding. Or being a cashier, or an office temp. I’d survive, of course. I always had. But oh, God. All those years of study. All that work. Up in smoke.

I swallowed back my tears. I had to be practical. Break this problem into pieces, and tackle the pieces one at a time. I could not control the future, but I could do something useful right now.

Finishing my thesis. That was within my power. Maybe this mess could even be an inspiration. The poets I studied were all heart-hungry, lovelorn. Bleak despair was the very stuff of creativity. Look at Emily Dickinson, the Brontës. There’s a long, noble literary tradition of hunger for love and sex being sublimated into deathless art.

Perhaps, like them, I could salvage something from the wreckage of my emotional life. Transmute pain into work. I was unemployed, homeless, rudderless. Too scared to walk out on the street by myself. My days would be long, silent, boring. What excuse did I have now not to hunker down and write a kick-ass thesis?

I grabbed my black shoulder bag and unzipped the central pocket where I kept my laptop. It was not there. I’d forgotten it.

Shit, shit, shit. I blew out a shuddering breath through trembling lips at the idea of having to face Duncan’s rigid face, blazing eyes, and cutting remarks again in order to retrieve it.

Maybe I could have it sent over by courier. Uh-huh. With what cash? The cost of that courier would go right onto Duncan’s personal account. Ka-ching, ka-ching.

And my debt to him was already crushing.

My laptop was gone, but the cell phone he’d given me was there. He wasn’t going to call me on it. I slid it into the side pocket of my pants.

Onward. I dragged out the folder where I kept my tattered notes, outlines, and ideas. I turned to a fresh sheet in my notebook and dug out a pen. I could scribble on paper the old-fashioned way.

By the time we pulled up in front of Elsie’s house, I’d roughed out a pretty acceptable main thesis paragraph for “Sex, Desperation, Despair, and Death in Nineteenth-Century Women Poets.”

Wesley got out and opened the door for me, peering around the deserted block. Nothing moved on the narrow lane. We climbed up Elsie’s porch, which was nearly identical to Lucia’s. I rang the bell, and waited. And waited. I rang again, then knocked. “Elsie?” I called. “Are you in there? It’s Nell!”

Still no answer. Wesley muscled me behind himself, holding up a very large pistol.

“Nell?” It was Elsie, all right, though her voice was muffled behind the door. It sounded higher and thinner than usual.

“Elsie?” I knocked again. “Is everything okay?”

“Ah ... yes, honey, everything’s fine,” Elsie quavered. “Come on ... come on in. The door’s unlocked.”

I reached for the door handle, but Wesley gently pushed my hand away and pushed the door open himself.

I stood on my tiptoes and looked over his bulky shoulder as he peered into the dim interior, through the foyer.

Elsie stood across the room, in the entryway to the kitchen. Wesley started inside just as I registered the look on the old lady’s face.

The pallor. The stiff, frozen expression. The staring eyes.

I knew that look. Oh, God. Oh, no. “Wait!” I lunged after Wesley’s coat, trying to yank him back?—

Thhhpt—the clap of a silenced gun. Wesley grunted, spun, and crashed heavily to the ground.

The room boiled with black-clad masked men, leaping for me. A burlap bag whipped down over my head. I struggled and screamed in airless darkness that stank of mold and rot, arms and legs flailing?—

A sting, like an insect bite in my arm, a sickening weakness swept through me with horrible quickness?—

And it all went away.

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