Axis Mundi was gorgeous in the same way I imagined that the palace at Versailles and the Taj Mahal were gorgeous, although I’d never been to either of those places. To give you an idea of how my mind worked, though, instead of fixating on the many beautiful plants and trees that I couldn’t identify anyway, I took notice of all the security cameras hidden in birdhouses, mounted on outdoor lanterns, and attached to power stakes in the gardens that greeted me at the gate and followed me a half mile to a huge house on a hill.
I parked behind Melissa’s car. She and Fisk were already standing in the driveway and speaking to a man who wasn’t much older than we were. When I approached, Melissa introduced us.
“My brother Kurtis,” she said.
I offered my hand. He ignored it.
“I hear you’ve been speaking to that bitch Brooke St. Vincent,” he said.
I probably should have defended the lady’s honor, yet what was the point? She took three-point-seven million off the sonuvabitch. His attitude wasn’t going to change no matter what I had to say.
“I’d like to speak to your father,” I said.
“About what?”
“Whom. About whom.”
Kurtis moved in close, violating my personal space on purpose. I pretended not to be annoyed.
“If you know where Hayley is, why don’t you climb in that piece of shit Camry of yours and go get her?”
I thought of many different ways I could have answered him, except half of them would probably have brought Fisk into the fray, and I wasn’t ready for that yet. Before I could think of a verbal response, though, the huge front door of the house opened and Maura came out. She sprinted to where we were standing, a difficult and unseemly thing to do in heels and a skirt.
“Taylor,” she said, “did you find my daughter? Where is she?”
“Do you know this man?” Kurtis asked.
“He’s the private investigator I hired.”
“Father said—”
“I don’t care what he said.”
Both Melissa and Kurtis took a step backward as if they had never heard such defiance coming from her before.
“No outsiders,” Kurtis told Maura. “That’s what he said.” She wasn’t listening. Instead, she rested a hand on my forearm.
“Taylor, please.”
“We need to talk,” I said. I gestured at Fisk. He was leaning against the car, his arms crossed over his chest. He seemed bored until I added, “We need to talk in private,” and then his eyebrows curved upward and his expression changed to one of curiosity.
“This way,” Maura said. She continued to hold my wrist as she led me into the house. Melissa and Kurtis followed behind. Fisk remained with the car.
I had never gone without. My old man had made a good living, so growing up I always had what I needed—a nice house, good food, clean clothes, money in my pocket. Yet sitting in the Guernsey living room, I felt poor.
“What is it you want to tell us?” Kurtis said. “Be concise.”
“Where’s your father?”
“Talk to us. Then we’ll decide if you get to see Father.”
“Where’s your older brother?”
“San Francisco on business. What difference does it make?”
Maura spoke softly. “Have you seen Hayley?” she asked. “Is she safe?”
“For now.”
“What does that mean?” Kurtis said. “For now?”
“Five people are dead. All of them had hurt or were threatening to hurt the Guernsey family. Convince me that Hayley won’t be number six.”
Maura was on her feet. “What?”
“I told you in my office this morning that someone had tried to kill her twice. Weren’t you listening?”
“Yes, but—”
“But what? Someone tried to kill Hayley. Prove to me that it wasn’t you and I’ll bring her home.”
I meant for my words to be both accusatory and shocking, and I expected a loud and angry response. What I received was silence and blank stares. It turned everything inside me to ice, even my thoughts.
Kurtis moved to the huge window and looked out. Fisk had stepped away from the car and found a bench overlooking the grounds. Nothing in his face or posture revealed how he felt or what he was thinking.
“He couldn’t do that,” Kurtis said. “Not to Hayley. Never to Hayley.”
“Are you talking about Fisk?” I asked.
“Fisk doesn’t take a deep breath unless the old man … No, I don’t believe it.”
From their sudden fidgeting, I gathered that neither Maura nor Melissa supported Kurtis’s opinion. Finally Melissa said, “It could have been a mistake. You know Father never actually speaks the words when he wants something done. Even when he’s talking to us, he just sort of lets his instructions be known in a way that allows him to declare later that he never said to do what he wanted done.”
“It has to be a mistake,” Maura said. “Yes, a mistake. My baby.”
“Are you telling me the sonuvabitch out there actually kills people for that old man?”
“We don’t know for sure what he does,” Kurtis said.
“Father wants something and the person he wants it from either suddenly gives in or disappears,” Melissa said. “How often has that happened over the years? A dozen times?”
“We’re discussing your stepsister, your daughter,” I said.
“Don’t you think we know that?”
“How long has Fisk been employed here?”
“Eleven years or so.”
He started at about the same time that Charlie O’Brien was found dead in a hotel room in San Francisco, I told myself.
“Not long after that there was a man my father couldn’t come to an agreement with.”
“What happened to him?”
“He was killed in a hit-and-run accident.”
“This is insane,” Maura said. “No one is trying to hurt my daughter. It’s all … Taylor. Take me to her, please.”
“I need to speak to your husband first,” I said. “Where is he?”
Kurtis gestured at a spot outside the window.
“In the maze,” he said. “He spends more and more time in there.”
“How do I get in?”
“We’re not allowed to tell you. Or anyone else. Father’s orders. It’s where he hides from the world.”
“What is wrong with you people?”
I left the house and moved across the manicured lawn toward what seemed at a distance like a giant wall of green. The Guernseys watched me do it from their window. I passed Fisk sitting on his bench. He watched, too.
As I approached, the wall became a hedge about eight feet high and far too thick to see through. I pulled my cell from my pocket as I approached it. I set it on speakerphone and held it in front of my chest so the Guernseys wouldn’t see me using it. I called Alex.
“Hi, Taylor,” she said.
“Hi. Put Hayley on the phone.”
A moment later, Hayley said, “Taylor, it’s me.”
“How do I get through the maze?”
“The maze? At Axis Mundi, that maze?”
“Yes. How do I work it?”
“It’s easy, except … First of all you need to go through the right entrance. The one facing the lake. There are four entrances, but the one facing Lake Minnetonka is the only one that leads to the center. All the others will have you going in circles.”
I changed my route so that I was angling toward the corner of the maze. Lake Minnetonka glistened beyond. I turned when I reached the corner and hugged the wall until I found the correct entrance.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Once you enter, you go right-left, right-left, right-left three times. Do you get that? Three right-left turns.”
“I get it.”
“After that it’s left-right, left-right, and left-right three times. Three left-right turns.”
“Okay.”
“That will take you to the center.”
“Sounds simple.”
“Yet people mess up all the time. Stepfather loves it when they do. He enjoys laughing at them. You need to be careful when you reach the center, though. You need to remember which opening you used. There are four exits leaving the center of the maze, and only that one will let you out.”
“Thank you, Hayley.”
“Taylor? My father built that maze.”
“I’ll talk to you soon.”
It sounded simple, yet it wasn’t, mostly because the path through the maze was narrow and the walls were high. The sun was thinking of setting, and I was engulfed in shadow. I couldn’t even see the turns until I reached them, but by adhering strictly to Hayley’s instructions I reached the center. The sun still had purchase there, and I could easily discern a fountain surrounded by marble benches. Robert Paul Guernsey was sitting on one of the benches. His shoulders were hunched, his hands were folded together on his lap, and his head was hanging low as if he were wrestling with thoughts of a deeply serious nature.
“Mr. Guernsey,” I said.
He turned slowly toward me. His eyes took a few moments to focus. I don’t know what I had been expecting. What I found was a dilapidated old man with nothing left but hunger.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
“Do what?”
“Walk the maze.”
“Was it supposed to be hard?”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Taylor.”
“I know you. The private investigator.”
“That’s right.”
“You have something that belongs to me.”
“What would that be?”
I wanted him to say the name of his stepdaughter. Instead, he answered, “Stolen files.”
“No. I don’t have those.”
“Liar.”
“It’s true. What I do have…”
“Hayley.” His voice caressed the word, and for a moment his humanity peeked through. It was like someone had opened a door to a dimly lit room and quickly closed it, again. “I gave her everything. Money. Clothes. The best schools. A car. My parents couldn’t give me a car. I had to buy my own. I was twenty before I learned to drive. What did Hayley do with all that I gave her? Nothing. She squandered every opportunity, just drifting through life without a care.”
“She’s eighteen years old. That’s her job.”
“I was born in the middle of the Great Depression, Taylor. Do you know what that means? Of course not. People today have no idea. My family lived in a shack without heat, without lights, without food more often than not. I used to help my father pull a wagon down the street searching for scrap iron that we could sell for pennies to the government during the war. When I was eighteen I was breaking my back building roads for the park system under the Mission 66 program. No college for me. Now look what I got. What I built. What do you say to that?”
“I don’t mind ambition,” I said. “Ambition is a good thing. Except when someone else is forced to pay for it.”
“What did my worthless children ever pay? Nothing. I provided them with everything. Without me, they’d starve. They’d be on welfare like all those other losers.”
“From what I’ve seen, you took more than you gave.”
“You’re a fool, Taylor. Hayley, too. I could have raised her up to be a goddess among men. When I’m gone she’ll have more money than a goddess.”
Wow, I thought but didn’t say.
“What did she do?” Guernsey said. “She tried to blackmail me.” He punched his chest twice with such force that I was sure he hurt himself. “Me.”
“She most certainly did not,” I said. “Absolutely not. The two men who did try to blackmail you and your lawyers were friends of Hayley’s, that’s true. They used information that they picked up from her to decide what law firms to hack, that’s also true. But when she discovered what they were doing, Hayley stole the files and went on the run. I was there when they tried to force her to return the information. She refused, and they nearly killed her.”
Guernsey’s voice, never very loud, became even softer. “I didn’t know,” he said.
“Now they’re are dead. Someone shot them. Who could have done that, I wonder.”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Who tried to kill Hayley?”
Guernsey rose from the marble bench. For the first time his face looked as if there were life in it.
“What did you say?” he said.
“You heard me.”
“Are you blaming me?”
“Are you to blame?”
“Hurting Hayley, that wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“If you say so.”
“What do you want, Taylor? Money?”
“What is it with you Guernseys that that’s the first question you always think of asking? I’m trying to protect your stepdaughter. The question is, am I protecting her from you?”
He moved quickly toward the exit, much more quickly than I would have expected from a man his age. He slowed considerably, though, by the time we departed the maze. Midway across the empty lawn, he had to pause a few moments to catch his breath. He took my arm without asking, and I helped him to the house. His wife and children came out to greet him, but he brushed past them, told them to stay back, and kept moving until he reached the bench where Fisk was sitting. Guernsey gripped my arm tightly either for support or out of anger, I couldn’t tell which.
“Tell me about this,” Guernsey said.
Fisk was staring at me when he spoke. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“Hell there ain’t.”
“I did what I’ve always done, what you pay me to do. I solved your problems.”
“My stepdaughter wasn’t one of them.”
“I never went near Hayley, never threatened her, and I wouldn’t have even if you told me to. There are things I won’t do. I told you that when I took the job.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Fisk rose slowly from the bench and moved close. The old man gripped my arm tighter.
“I would never hurt that girl,” Fisk said. “Not for money and not for you.”
The thing is, I believed him. I believed every word he said. Guernsey, though, didn’t seem to.
“You’re fired,” he said.
“What did you say?”
“I want you out of here. You have one hour to pack before I call the police and have you arrested for trespassing.”
“After everything I’ve done for you, this is how it ends?”
Guernsey’s grip grew tighter on my arm. Fisk’s eyes kept flicking over me as he spoke, as if he knew I shouldn’t be hearing what he had to say, yet he couldn’t help himself.
“I took care of that kid with the camera like you wanted,” he said. “Made it look like an accident. The memo writer, that goddamned PI—I told you not to hire him. I told you he’d only get in the way, and he did. Now you do this?”
“Your services are no longer required,” Guernsey said. “Don’t worry, Mr. Fisk. You’ll be well compensated.”
Fisk glared at me as if he thought I was his replacement.
“I had better be,” he said.
Fisk walked into the house like a man in a hurry. Guernsey turned toward his family. He continued to hang on to my arm.
“Maura,” he said.
Maura came forward. The others remained where they were. He whispered to me as she approached. “She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen when we married, and now look at her, pumped so full of plastic.”
“Guernsey, you’re a fool,” I said.
His face clouded with anger, yet he didn’t release my arm until Maura drew near. Then he took hers.
“We’re bringing Hayley home,” he said. “Aren’t we, Taylor?”
“If she’s willing,” I said.
“Please, Taylor,” Maura said. “Please.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“Tonight? Please, Taylor.”
“Probably tomorrow. I’ll call.”
“In the meantime, Maura,” Guernsey said, “what’s the name of that young policeman you’ve been spending time with?”
“Robert Paul, you don’t think…”
“Now, now, honey. I know all about him, know how you hired him to watch out for Hayley. If things went beyond that, I’m just too old to care. But I need to talk to him. Now, honey.” Guernsey stared at the entrance to his house. “There’s something I need for him to do, unless … Mr. Taylor? Are you for hire?”
“I have way too many clients already,” I said.