“What?”
“Words do nothing for what you’ve been forced to carry around inside.” She leaned across the table, drawing in so close Kirsten could not help but breathe her spiced perfume. “Listen, my sister. I know you. So very, very well.”
Erin turned away momentarily, and spoke to the hovering waiter. “Bring us a selection of whatever is freshest and best.”
“Of course, Ms. Brandt.”
Erin stripped the foil from the champagne bottle and expertly twisted out the cork. “I love doing this, releasing the night’s music. Why should I allow a strange man to have this pleasure?”
She poured them both a measure, then raised her fluted glass by the stem. “To sisters bonded by what the world will never understand.”
Kirsten listened to the crystal bell and sipped from her glass. She tasted only bubbles.
Erin raised her chin until the faint cleft was accented. The skin of her neck drew tight as an artist’s line. She kept this position as she set down her glass. Her dark eyes targeted Kirsten along the bore of her nose. “I know,” she murmured. “It’s so hard to speak of, all you have inside, all you’ve been forced to choke off. No words will ever do.”
Kirsten drank once more, swallowing tiny fragments of air her lungs could not find.
“How do I know? Because it has happened to me. I said we are sisters, did I not? The world has hurt and cheated and stolen from me as it has from you.”
Kirsten looked out the window, down to where the tide of wealth and people passed beneath her. Try as she might, she could not convince herself the night’s gaiety was any more real than smiles off a backlit strip of cellotape. She sighed. Perhaps the only way to endure it all was through finding a comfortable lie.
Erin reached across the table and gripped Kirsten’s hand with both of her own. “Let me be your voice. Let me sing my arias for both of us. Let me shout the pain. Then, when we are alone, let us find one another in the intimate sharing of our secret.” Fiercely she clenched Kirsten’s hand, though her voice remained an enticing murmur. “Shall I tell you what that secret is?”
A shadow appeared and hovered by their table. They looked over together to find a nervous young man in the Savoy’s uniform of starched shirt and tails. He handed Erin an engraved calling card. “Excuse me, Ms. Brandt. But the gentleman says it is most urgent.”
“Impossible. The man is utterly impossible.” Erin tossed her napkin aside. “Forgive me, my dear. This will require two seconds only.”
Kirsten tried to lose herself in the champagne and the theater outside her window. But this unbidden space could not have come at a worse time. Now that she was alone, she could not help but acknowledge the inaudible lament. This was not working. Her mental confusion was a serrated blade sawing at the night’s façade.
She found herself recalling the high school guidance counselor who had helped her graduate early. Such memories were normally dreaded events, yet this image merely came and spoke and lingered, like a dawn delayed by a passing storm. Once a term she and the counselor had held the same terse conversation, a ritual between two people who were almost but not quite friends. The counselor asked Kirsten if everything was all right. Kirsten always gave the required answer, that she was fine, her home was great, her parents the best. Then the counselor spoke the words that echoed now in the smoke and the chatter and the clink of fine crystal. Know when to ask for aid.
So ask she did. Then and there. Her eyes were wide open, yet she saw nothing save the vague reflection of a lonely young blonde in the window beside her. Kirsten stared into a candlelit gaze of empty confusion and spoke the words. Help me.
So swiftly it could only have been in response, a barrier rose between her and the opulent chamber. The unseen curtain blanketed even sound. Kirsten stared anew at her reflection, this time searching with the honesty of total isolation. Her reflection said nothing. Merely waited.
She knew then what it was she needed to apprehend. Softly she spoke the words, You do not belong here.
Her translucent apparition stood up, and she rose as well. The image guided her out of the restaurant. She walked down the stairs and through the fancy foyer and out the front doors. She thought perhaps she caught sight of the apparition in the window of a departing taxi, moving so swiftly Kirsten had no choice but accept that she was both alone and where she should be. She looked up in time to see Erin return to the table, sit down, drink from her glass, and laugh at something the waiter said. At home in a realm from which Kirsten had been forever expelled.
CHAPTER 20
The night progressed at the creeping pace of finely tuned torture. Kirsten fought her bed until it could hold her no longer. She dressed and went for a walk. But the night tracked her every move. Defeated, she returned to the stale room with its bleak lighting. There should have been some reward, some offering of peace for turning from Erin’s lure. Instead, the ghouls of her past gibbered and shrieked in panicked fury. And right alongside this clamor was the truth she could no longer escape. She longed desperately for Marcus. She craved his voice, his touch, the smell of him. The strengths and the weaknesses, the wounded gaze, the resolve. Yet she feared him as much as she yearned for him. Probably more. She could hear him now, speaking in that soft tone that left her quivering with hunger and terror both.
Her desire for Marcus was an affront to all the rules she had used to rebuild her shattered existence. She survived by never, ever wanting anything this much. Most especially a man.
Finally at five in the morning she reached for the phone. Which meant it would be midnight, Rocky Mount time. But that could not be helped.
Deacon Wilbur answered on the second ring. He sounded instantly awake, in the manner of one who had fielded his share of late-night entreaties. He brushed aside her apology. “Where are you, daughter?”
“London. Can I speak with Fay, please?”
There was the rustling and the murmurs, and a longer pause than Kirsten would have expected. Then Fay demanded, “You really in England like my man says?”
She heard another phone click off, and realized the old woman had moved to another part of the house. “Yes. I’m sorry about the hour.”
“You forget who you’re talking to here. Ain’t that long ago, a night without the midnight alarm was so rare we talked about it for days. We still keep the old coffee sitting on the counter.” There came the sounds of a door shutting and a microwave fan whirring. “Marcus’ granddaddy used to like me to drop half an eggshell into his pot.”
“It sounds horrid.”
“Adds a certain tang, is all. If the pot’s been sitting all day the brew don’t grow so bitter. I ’spect after a while, the taste is just natural. You perk every cup up fresh, I suppose.”
Kirsten sighed her way down to the floor by her hotel bed. “Usually.”
The oven timer pinged. “I’m glad you called, child. I didn’t have any right talking to you the way I did.”
“We both know that’s not true.”
“Well now.” Fay took a noisy sip. “You’re not running scared, are you, honey?”
Kirsten was trapped, not by this woman, but the day. “All my life I’ve made it work by not caring too much. Not showing too much. Not talking too much.”
“Let’s see what you got going into this. You lost both your folks, isn’t that right?”
“When I was twenty.”
“You’re a pretty lady. You must’ve had yourself other men friends along the way.”
“I don’t even want to talk about them.”
“So your trial runs didn’t turn out that well.” Another sip. “Not too far back, your best friend Gloria went and got herself killed over in China. Now you’re living down here in a strange place without any family of your own. And you’re looking at life with a man who’s carrying his own set of scars.” A tight trace of humor colored Fay’s words. “I’d say you’ve got every reason to be scared.”