Chapter 37

 

Jared

 

 

"What do you think?" said Cara, looking at him over the breakfast bar. "You've known us both. You've slept with us both."

"Maud?" he said, not that he needed to ask.

"Is she my mother?" asked Cara.

"Oh, hell, sweetheart," he said. He wanted to say, decisively, that she was not, that she could not be, and that she was no longer part of their lives and should not be part of their thoughts or their conversation, either. It was frustrating, he thought. He had a chance at something new and amazing with this young woman. He had known that the moment he saw her at Vincent's, walking across the patio. He had not been looking for someone, he had not been expecting someone, he thought he was content with his life as it was until he saw her. And now he had her, and a chance at a life fuller and happier than he had ever expected.

And there, standing in the way, was Maud, Maud who had offered only a part of herself to him, Maud who had deceived and used him for years, Maud who claimed him, and not only him. She claimed, of all things, the girl he wanted, who wanted him, who deserved a clean fresh start with him.

"I don't know," he said. "I honestly don't. I don't know what to think about any of this."

"You must have an idea," said Cara. "You must know if I resemble her, somehow, if maybe what happened was that you saw I was a little like her, so you thought – "

"I saw you were you," said Jared, "special and unique and exactly what I need in my life. That's what I saw."

Cara poked at the salad. She had done the cooking tonight, with new recipes she had sought out on the screen, an answer, he feared, to Maud's lack of cooking skills. Maud was alive, he thought, whether or not that had actually been Maud in the woods with the blond man; she was alive in their minds and interfering even with their dinner. "She has my coloring, kind of," said Cara, "according to Sofi, anyway. Blue eyes. She's a little taller than I am. I don't know what kind of a person she is. What is she like?"

"Cara – "

"What I was feeling," she said, "right from the start, right when we first met, and it seemed so good and so right and I just – plunged in. I do that. I didn't stop to think that maybe you weren't ready yet, you weren't quite over Maud."

"Oh, hell." Jared put down his fork; Cara's dinner was good, but Maud's company was not. "All right, sweetheart. Maud; you want to know what she was like? I'm not sure I can tell you; I'm not sure, now, how honest she ever was with me. I can tell you what I saw while I was with her." He paused, gathering his thoughts; Cara waited with blue eyes fastened on his face. "She was attractive. Highly intelligent. She started out as a client, you know. She was thirty years older than me, sophisticated, experienced, but she had a quality of – someone just beginning to explore the world. Interested in everything. Enjoying what she found, relishing it. She never seemed to lose that.

"My attorney," he continued, "said she was a shark, could have bitten me in two, which is true. She'd inherited her husband's businesses, and she ran them better than he did, from all I ever heard. She didn't talk about business with me very much, but I remember some very shark-like attacks on rivals; I remember thinking I wouldn't care to be a competitor. On the other hand, if someone needed her help, someone she knew, sometimes someone I knew, actually, people you wouldn't think she'd care about, she'd throw all of her resources into it; I've seen her do that, often, very often. She was clever, witty, fun to be with. I enjoyed her company. She was never boring. She was never predictable. She was always interesting."

"Did she go to concerts with you?"

"Yes, but formal music bored her. She liked popular music. She was a good dancer."

"I don't know how to dance," said Cara, stirring the salad she had barely touched.

"I do," said Jared. "I would love to teach you." She glanced at him quickly, flash of blue eyes and half a smile.

"What else did she like?"

"She was the ultimate urbanite, I always thought," he said. "Perfectly at home in the city, comfortable in any city setting. Malls, night clubs, galleries; she was sort of lukewarm about the theater. She liked driving in the country, and she'd get out of the car and stroll on established paths, but she wasn't comfortable hiking or fishing. I did take her camping once, and she stayed awake all night listening to the vicious wild animals stalking us; I took her home at first light the next morning." He and Cara had already been out at Blue Fish Lake, where he had learned, to his delight, that she was an experienced hiker, and eager to try camping, if not fishing. Gina didn't like fishing either; her sympathies had always been with the fish. Maud had not cared for any of it. She would eat the fish he caught if he cleaned them, preferably out of her sight, and cooked them.

"I never imagined," he said, "that I knew all about what she was doing; she had her clubs, she served on the board of any number of charities and foundations, and she had her businesses. She would be gone for days at a time dealing with this sort of thing."

"'Did you think she might be unfaithful?"

"No. To tell the truth, it never crossed my mind. I wouldn't have been in a position to object, anyway," he added. "During the Agency years. I don't think she was. But," he added, "I do wonder now what other life she was living, while she was tending to her business. A complex woman, many layers, most of them hidden from sight. A lot of secrets."

"Obviously," said Cara, stabbing a lettuce leaf.

"Wundra said it," Jared reminded her. "We don't know for sure about any of this. Terry seems to have met with the blond man, and he said the woman with him claimed to be your mother, but this is how he understood it. He may have gotten it wrong. She may have lied to him. The same is true of Sofi; I can see she's upset about that woman with all the jewelry Terry identified as her real mother, but we have only Terry's word, second-hand. We need to talk with Terry, when he gets back, and we need to talk with these people. And when we do," he added, "we need to remember they aren't necessarily telling us the truth."

Cara nodded, studying the lettuce impaled on her fork. "You're right, of course."

"Of course," he agreed, but she didn't smile back at him. "Hell, sweetheart," he said, "if you want the truth – I resent what's happening. How these people – how Maud, if that's her, is making you feel. Putting doubts into your mind."

"They're in your mind too."

"I have doubts about Maud," he said frankly. "I have doubts about what I know and believe about her. I don't have any doubts about you, Cara. I don't have any doubts about us. I knew right at the start. So did you, sweetheart. I don't want you to have any doubts now."

"I don't doubt how I feel," she said. "I know I love you."

"Then we're fine. Because I love you," he said, and took her hand over the breakfast bar.

 

Jared came awake abruptly. The bedroom was dark and quiet, with the faint glow of the clock face and the starlight from outside; Cara slept with her head on his shoulder, his arm around her, and he tried not to wake her by moving. He felt the light breeze from the open windows, smelled the fresh summer night. Everything was just as it should be.

But something had woken him.

He lay still, listening, watching, and he heard it, what had brought him out of his dreams, the rattle of the metal mesh screen around the back porch. Something bumped lightly against it and his mind had interpreted it as a potential threat.

He looked over Cara's sleeping head and saw something small blundering in the dark, a bat, perhaps, or a night bird, fumbling around the screen and the supports. Nothing could get in unless it was small enough to fit through the mesh, or dexterous enough to open the screen door. His mind was working overtime on threats and mysteries, rousing him for a wandering night creature. Vampires and werewolves, he thought, not for the first time.

Cara drew in a sharp breath and sat up, hand to her head. "Sweetheart?" he said, startled.

"Headache," she said. "I was – it hurts! All of a sudden!"

He sat up and reached for the remote for the lights, and remembered how she had avoided the light back at her house. He put the remote down and reached for her, instead, drawing her head back to his shoulder very gently, putting a protective hand over her hair. "We have some of those pain killers left," he said. "I can get you the bottle."

"I didn't like them," she said, muffled against him. "They made me feel dopey and sick. Like those trauma pills."

"Did they help the pain?"

"Not much." She buried her face, avoiding even the dim starlight. "I don't understand," she said. "I never have headaches like this."

"Maybe there was some damage from your fall that Dr. Frank didn't find." That wasn't a good thought at all; his mind blundered around hairline fractures and brain damage and various other serious and fatal disorders, and he reached for his phone. "I'm going to call Ollie," he said. "Or Evvie. No, sweetheart, they may have some ideas what's wrong, and they may have something that can help you. They made a cough syrup for Gina that actually worked, when nothing Dr. Frank prescribed could."

"I don't want to bother them."

"I don't want you in pain," he said, and scrolled for Ollie's number.

They weren't asleep at the Bahtan house. He could hear music in the background; he could hear a certain amount of laughter, and the sound of a male wailing. "Oh, yes, I am glad you called," said Ollie. "Clena and I will be over at once." Brief pause. "Wundra and I will be over at once," she amended, Clena evidently being busy at the moment. He grinned and put the phone down on the night table and lay Cara carefully against the pillows while he got up to put on his pants.

"Can you hand me that housecoat?" Cara asked him, holding her head with one hand and pointing at the dispirited striped thing on the arm of the recliner from her house. He got it, making a mental note again to do something about replacing the thing, and helped her sit up and get her arms through the sleeves. She winced as she faced the illuminated clock face. He could do something about that, he thought, and went to run a washcloth under the cold water.

She had it over her forehead and eyes by the time Ollie and Wundra arrived, tapping lightly at the front door and tiptoeing through the living room, so he felt safe in turning on the lamp by the bed, as long as he kept it low. "Do not hover," Wundra said to him sternly, and he grinned and backed off as they bent over the bed, making reassuring noises as they felt her head and peered into her eyes.

"You should perhaps have Dr. Frank check again," Ollie said, "because he has a scanner, and can see better any injury, but I do not find anything myself."

"Nor I," said Wundra. "You say you do not have migraines?"

"No, never," said Cara. "Could I just start to have them, all of a sudden?"

"I think it related somehow to your head injury," said Wundra.

"Should I take her to Emergency?" asked Jared.

"No!" said Cara, with determination.

Wundra and Ollie looked at each other. "I do not think they could do more than we do," said Wundra, and Jared heard the front door open; Clena, in a gauzy drape with a flower at her waist, just above her large Bahtan breasts, tiptoed into the bedroom with a pill bottle in one hand. The three of them conferred in whispers, and Jared ventured back to the bed and put the cold washcloth back over her eyes; she held it with one hand and groped for him with her other hand. He caught it and held it.

"Dr. Frank," said Clena, "in the morning. I will call him myself, and let you know." Which was one way to make sure Cara saw Dr. Frank; left to herself she would probably not call, especially if her headache had gone away.

"So we will try one of these," said Clena, pulling a large blue pill out of the bottle. She eyed Cara, frowning, and broke the pill in half. "We will try half of one," she said, "as you are not big, and one of us will stay to watch you tonight, that you are having no bad effects."

"I will stay," said Ollie.

"I'm already here," said Jared, "and I can watch, if you tell me what to look for."

"You can't stay up all night," said Cara. "None of you can."

"I was planning to stay up all night," said Ollie firmly. "I shall just do it here instead of at home."

In the end she went out to the living room, where she could have a light and the latest Inspector Whitmore mystery, and Jared sat up against the headboard holding Cara, because she seemed more comfortable in his arms. Dr. Frank's pills hadn't done much for her; half of Clena's blue pill took the edge off the pain, she said, and the other half had her asleep in twenty minutes, and he held her and watched her breathe and thought about falls and talking flies and little things bumping against the screen in the middle of the night, and hoped that Dr. Frank would find something simple and easily treated and ordinary. He would settle for migraines. If it did turn out to be migraines, it looked as if the Bahtan sisters had something that would work for her.

 

Cara's head was better the next morning and over breakfast she made a spirited attempt to talk them out of calling Dr. Frank, but Clena had already done that and his receptionist, Rose, had made time for her in the middle of the morning. Ollie went home; she said she was going to bed, but Jared suspected she was planning to check on the Bahtan house guest first. Evvie arrived, looking fresh and bright of eye, and announced that she had all the information from Clena and she was coming to Dr. Frank's with them.

And Sofi crossed the lawn as they got into Jared's car and climbed into the back seat with Evvie. "You were loud last night," she told Jared. "Issio and I Heard you clearly; we would have come, if Ollie and Wundra had not. I am by no means sure you should not have taken her to Emergency."

"It's just a headache," said Cara. "We're making too much fuss over just a headache."

"We cannot be too careful," said Evvie, and Sofi nodded agreement. Backing out of the car port, Jared reached out to Sofi and realized that she, too, was uneasy about the headache; there was something about it that bothered her, just as it bothered him. He thought of the fall, but something in his mind hinted that it might be more than that, or something very different, and Sofi felt much the same, he saw.

Dr. Frank thought, since he couldn't find anything on the scan, that it might be migraine, which had many triggers – allergies, hormones, stress. Sofi snorted. Jared thought of Maud, thought of her constant intrusion into their life together, and took it a little more seriously. There was stress. It was up to him to find a way around it, he thought.

It would help if they could corner that blond man and find out just who he was and what he was doing in their woods. Failing that, it would help if no one mentioned the name "Maud" for at least the next month.

The office nurse, Lana, offered a prescription for the same pain killer Cara had had before, and when Cara refused it, she offered a prescription for another. "Our blue pills were helpful," said Evvie, and showed her noter to Dr. Frank, listing the ingredients; he read it over, and shrugged.

"If it helps, go ahead and take them," he told Cara. "I've had good luck with what these girls come up with. I haven't had any bad reactions, at least."

"And the headache is gone now," said Cara. "That's all I care about."

Jared checked with his work team; they were all there, recording what they could find inside the first arch, cracks, centuries of dust, splatters of mud, glyphs. They had it all in hand, Ott assured him; if he had personal business to tend to, he could do it with a clear conscience.

Cara insisted she was doing very well, and to prove it, she and Sofi sat down with noters to discuss information they were assembling for a mutual project; it sounded to Jared as if they were talking about putting together an article. Sofi, with her degree in literature, would be an ideal partner for Cara, he thought.

And it would help to keep her mind off Maud, which was good. He settled down with his own notes and an increasing sense of irritation; he wanted the mystery solved, and he wanted Maud safely in the past, a sweet memory, a wistful ghost in the back yard, not a living presence interfering with his life now.

Ollie caught up on sleep in the afternoon, and appeared in the evening to join the gathering at the picnic table with a bottle of the big blue pills. She had missed the rites of early summer during the night, but she had had some private time this morning and she was perfectly happy with that. "Start only with half a pill," she told Cara, "but if it does not take away the pain, take the other half. You are, as so many of us, drug resistant."

"I must be. Nothing much seems to work on me."

"These pills will always work," said Ollie with cheerful confidence.

"They seemed to last night," agreed Jared, and Mimi handed Ollie a glass of wine over the picnic table and offered one to him; he shook his head, lifting the bottle of good Zamuaon beer Issio had produced for them this evening. Mimi laughed and offered the wine to Cara.

"I don't think I had better, with the pills and that headache," she said.

A downstairs window on the east side of the Bahtan house, right in Jared's line of sight, edged open; apparently it didn't have a repeller, or the repeller had been turned off from the control panel inside. A long Bahtan leg, naked, came through the opening, then a second leg, then a torso, mercifully clad in shorts, blue striped ones. Finally a pair of arms became visible, and a long Bahtan head with a pair of brown horns. The whole figure slithered into the mass of flowers and vegetables that filled the yard; the tops of the plants waved as something stealthy crawled through them toward the front gate.

The gate opened, very slowly and quietly, propelled by a single Bahtan hand, and there was a pause. Ollie drank her wine, looking idly at the Monopoly board, and no one else around the picnic table said anything, although Jared saw several pairs of eyes shifting to the house across the street, where they could see a horn, and then a second horn, and a pair of eyes peering out around the gatepost.

"Hey!" shouted a voice from inside the house; he thought it was Wundra.

The male sprang through the gate and galloped, barefoot, at a high rate of speed, up the street to the Hardesty house; circling to the north of the house, he headed for the woods. Wundra and Evvie flew out of their front door, arms waving, and Ollie lifted her glass for one more drink and put it down on the table. "Please excuse me for a minute," she said politely, and then she took off across the street, joining the pursuit behind her sisters. They ran around the corner of the Hardesty house and were gone into the sunset.

"Summer," said Mimi cheerfully. "The season of love."

"Personally," said "Clyde, "I'm waiting for that D'ubian It. It's out here somewhere, you know." He was ready, too; he had the butterfly net beside him, and he had his barbecue fork beside the net, prepared for capture or combat, whichever seemed the most useful.

"No one has seen it yet?" said Jared. It wasn't around his house, but Clyde had flowers and bushes where it could hide, and he was right beside the D'ubian half-a-house. And Al was just across the street, but he, too, shook his head.

"And I'd notice it," he said. "Nasty mouth on those things."

Somewhere in the woods a male Bahtan screamed, and three female Bahtans cheered.

"Where will we put it when we catch it?" inquired Lillian, on a practical note. "It's too big for one of your jars, Issio."

"I thought, should we succeed in capturing it, we would place it into a large jar and transfer it to a glass case," said Issio from his lawn chair. He had finished his bottle of beer, and Jared passed over his half-empty bottle. It had a fine flavor, but half a bottle was about all Jared cared to drink, and Issio took the remaining half according to their private habit. "Very good," he said to Jared. "Half a bottle for you, a bottle and a half for me, and both of us happy."

"A glass case?" said Mimi.

"Yes, we have several such in the biology lab, keeping various reptiles in their preferred habitat," said Issio. "I do not know what habitat this creature favors, other than the D'ubian house where it may cause trouble and disruption, but no doubt we can find this out."

The moaning sounds from the woods north of the Hardesty house became much louder; around the corner of the Hardesty porch came Evvie and Ollie and Wundra carrying the recaptured male among them. Evvie and Ollie each had a foot, and Wundra had both wrists; the male bucked and twisted and moaned as they bore him down the street to their front gate, still open. Clena ran out of their garden to hold open the door as her sisters brought their prize up the walk and into the house, and then, with a wave to the neighbors, Clena followed them inside and shut the door.

"Must be bedtime," murmured Clyde, and Mimi snorted and turned her back on him.