But she didn’t.
When we returned home from the tavern, I made straight for Amy’s room. I opened the door to her wardrobe and looked quickly through it. Nothing appeared to be missing. If Amy had run off, it was in the clothes she was standing up in.
On my instructions, French had already made up the bed and tidied the room, removing the gown I had cast off so hastily the previous evening and returning it, freshly pressed, to my room. I stared at Amy’s bed for a few moments, reliving the terror of waking up to an intruder in my bed.
I shuddered, shook off the recurring panic, and approached the bed. Kneeling alongside, I lifted the quilt, untucked the sheet, stuck my hand inside the slit in the mattress and began rooting around. Amy’s iPhone was still there. That settled it, at least in my mind. If Amy had planned to leave with Drew, there’s no way she would have left her iPhone behind.
I turned the phone on, and was rewarded with a thin line of red on the battery indicator – the iPhone still had some juice – but the message, NO SIGNAL still taunted me. I turned the phone off to conserve what little power remained, then tucked it into my pocket.
I needed to tell Jack about Amy’s disappearance – I couldn’t cover up her absence for very much longer – but decided that could wait until dinner. In the meantime, I opted for a stroll, leaving the house by the back door.
At one time, William Paca’s garden would have overlooked the Severn River, but now it overlooked the Naval Academy. Damn. Would everything remind me of Drew, and of Amy?
I wandered down to the middle terrace where I hoped that the geometric preciseness of the heirloom rose garden would help order my mind.
It didn’t. It only reminded me of Amy Lowell’s heart-wrenching anti-war poem, ‘Patterns,’ a poem I’d memorized in high school, snatches of which began to float about my head, bringing tears to my eyes. I walk down the garden paths, in my stiff brocaded gown. With my powdered hair and jeweled fan. I shall go up and down, in my gown. Gorgeously arrayed, boned and stayed. For the man who should loose me is dead. In a pattern called war.
Eventually, I found myself drifting down to the lower terrace, skirting the fish pond, and meandering along serpentine paths, each turn bringing into view a fresh bed of native plants. At one point, the path paralleled the wall that separated the garden from a three-story apartment building so far from the Paca House that I wondered if it might be out of range of the LynxE cell phone jamming equipment. All the time I’d been walking, Amy’s iPhone had weighed heavily in my pocket. I brought it out then, and switched it on: NO SIGNAL.
I was about to switch it off, when I noticed that the fan-shaped wireless signal strength indicator was displaying a single bar. I walked a little distance along the wall and the indicator jumped to two bars. I tapped the Settings icon and discovered that Amy’s phone was picking up an unprotected wireless signal – hellcat3 – that was apparently leaking from an adjacent apartment. My heart fluttered. I couldn’t telephone Paul, but maybe I could email him.
Holding the iPhone in front of me, blessing hellcat3, whoever he (or she) was, and praying that the iPhone’s battery wouldn’t die, I began wandering along the garden wall like a prospector with a metal detector, searching for a stronger signal. Just outside the privy, I got three bars, so I ducked inside and hooked the door shut behind me.
It was dark inside the one-holer, muggy and slightly fetid. I opened up the email app and with my thumbs literally flying over the virtual keyboard, composed a message to Paul – subject URGENT from Hannah – hoping that the unfamiliar address won’t get caught up in his nitpicky spam filter. ‘Need to talk. Critical. Look for message in bottle on back wall.’
I pressed SEND, held my breath until I heard the comforting swoosh of the email going merrily on its way, then leaned against the wall of the privy, weak with relief.
I was about to send a second message as an insurance policy, when the screen faded to black.
I pressed the ON button. Dead as a doornail.
As oppressive as it was inside the privy, I remained there for a few minutes more, holding the dead phone, contemplating the bucket of dried corn husks that served as our toilet paper, and wishing I were back in the land of quilted Charmin. Even the privy seemed preferable to facing Jack Donovan – and Founding Father – with the truth about Amy.
I sensed Karen before I saw her, standing behind me, hands on hips, watching in mild amusement as I rummaged among the items on the pantry shelves in search of a bottle the appropriate size and shape to hold a rolled up message. I was holding an empty gin bottle – square, and with a pig snout top – but it was too big and the mouth too small for my purposes.
‘Can I help you find something, ma’am?’
‘Guilt’ might as well have been written in letters two inches high across my forehead. ‘An empty bottle,’ I said, ‘for some experiment that Gabe is working on.’
‘He’s not going to be blowing things up, is he?’
I laughed. ‘I don’t think so. It’s something to do with, uh, sympathetic inks.’
‘Lord, what’s that?’
‘You write with something like lemon juice or vinegar and it’s invisible until you hold it up to the heat. Most of these bottles are too big.’
Karen chuckled at the foolish amusements of the idle rich, ambled over, lifted the gin bottle out of my hands and set it down. She reached behind a crock and came out holding a brown bottle about the size of an old-fashioned Coca-Cola bottle, only square. The mouth was a little small, but if I rolled the message up tightly, like the size of a pencil, it might just fit.
‘This isn’t an original, is it?’ I asked, worried that if Paul had to break the bottle to get the message out he’d be destroying a priceless antique.
‘Heavens, no. Look on the bottom where it says ‘Made in China.’’
‘Ah, well, that’s a relief.’ When I sniffed the bottle, it smelled like my grandmother’s Christmas cookies. ‘What was in it originally?’
‘Vanilla. We use a lot of that around here.’
I tucked the bottle into my pocket and followed Karen back into the kitchen where a roast duck rested on a platter, wreathed with perfectly round potatoes the size of golf balls. ‘I’m sorry if Founding Father’s tea party upset your schedule, Karen.’
‘I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t an inconvenience, but that’s what slaves are there for, right? To be inconvenienced.’
‘Is dinner ruined?’
‘Oh, Lawsy, no!’ She beamed. ‘Youse dealin’ wif a pro, Miz Hannah.’
I laughed out loud. ‘How on earth do you manage to keep a sense of humor with all the thankless, back-breaking work we ask you to do?’
Karen shrugged her broad shoulders. ‘It is what it is.’
‘When this gig is over, Karen, have your girl call my girl. We’ll do lunch.’
I trotted up to the library and sat down at the desk, grateful that everyone else seemed to be occupied, so I had the room to myself, except for the watchful eye of the SelectoZoomMini, of course. I made an elaborate show of extracting a fresh sheet of paper from a drawer and smoothing it out on the blotter. A small glass vase held three goose quill pens. I took my time selecting one of them, then uncapped the ink bottle. I dipped the pen in, and began to write, carefully at first, keeping my pressure light so the ink wouldn’t squirt out all over the page on the first ‘D’ of Dear Paul. One line, then two, using round letters, drawing rather than writing them.
After thirty minutes, I was done.
I waited for the ink to fully dry, then folded the letter once and tucked it into my pocket. Aiming a self-satisfied smile at the camera, I left the room.