Black as Night: A Fairy Tale Retold (8 page)

“Actually seems calmer here after the traffic in Rome,” Fish said jokingly, holding onto the door and the back of the seat. “Why do you have the keys to Blanche’s house?”

“Her mom gave me a set when I watched their house for them over New Year’s, before I took off for Europe,” Bear said. “Don’t you remember?”

Fish shook his head. “I don’t know why I’m surprised. I’ve seen that pile of metal you carry around in your pocket. Looks like you’ve kept every key that’s ever passed through your hands.”

“It’s been useful,” Bear said, feeling heaviness come over him again.

“I’d rather just stick with my set of skeleton keys,” Fish said. He glanced at his brother, and attempted to change the subject. “Father Raymond said an international trip changes a person forever. So, do you feel changed?”

“I probably won’t notice until this crisis is over.” Trying to take his mind off the tension, Bear looked out the window at the passing buildings. “One thing for certain—most structures over here are pretty ugly by comparison with some of the old buildings I saw in Germany and France and Italy. Could you believe the beauty of some of that stonework in Venice?”

“Stonemasonry and stone carving is a dying craft in America, or so I’m told,” Fish observed. “Even if we wanted to make buildings like those, we wouldn’t know how.”

“That’s a shame,” Bear said, and turned that thought over in his mind for the rest of the ride.

As they pulled up at their apartment building, Fish said suddenly, “Blanche was watering our plants for us. I wonder when the doorman saw her last.”

“Nobody gets by Ahmed,” Bear agreed. They had known the doorman since they had been children. “He notices everyone who comes into the building.” He got out of the taxi while Fish paid the driver, and hurried inside to speak to the short Arabian man in his dark green doorman’s uniform.

“Ahmed, have you seen Blanche Brier lately?” he asked, forgetting that the man would be surprised to see him after so long an absence.

The man started and dropped his eyes. “No,” he said. “I have not seen her since Friday.” He seemed distinctly uncomfortable.

“When you saw her, did she seem—upset or anything?” Bear asked, a bit awkwardly.

“No, she—well, she seemed as she usually is,” the doorman said. “Excuse me. I must go speak to the manager.”

Fish raised an eyebrow as the man hurried off. Bear was bewildered.

“Something’s bothering him,” Fish remarked, getting into the elevator, lugging his bag. “Not at all like him.”

“I should have at least said hello first,” Bear recollected his manners. “Maybe I just startled him.”

“Humph.”

The elevator reached the top floor, and Fish pulled out his own keys authoritatively. He unlocked and opened the cream-paneled door to their penthouse apartment and then paused, as though he was an animal who had caught a strange scent.

Bear passed him with barely a glance around. “Grab your car keys and let’s go.”

He hurried up the staircase that curved around the living room to the loft bedrooms at the top, tossed his luggage in his bedroom, and, rummaging around in his top dresser drawer, retrieved his key ring, which he had left here while he had been gone in Europe. As Fish had remarked, it was pretty heavy. One of these days, he should thin it out…

“Bear,” Fish said from downstairs. “Something’s wrong. Look around.”

Struck by his voice, Bear walked to the staircase balcony and looked down at the beautifully furnished apartment that had been his mother’s, now a significant part of their inheritance from her. It was a gracious living space, which his mother had designed herself and poured out her artistic talent into creating. Bear had been grateful that his father hadn’t changed it during the time when it had been in his possession.

“What’s wrong?” he asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know—yet,” Fish said, striding past the exquisite European Madonna panel hanging in the entranceway. He paused and looked around the living room as though he were afraid to go in, in case he tripped an unseen alarm. “My antennae are going crazy. Someone’s been here since I left.”

“Blanche has—” Bear said, and, spurred on by a sudden worry, he turned and searched through the bedrooms and bathrooms on the top floor, looking for what he dreaded finding—Blanche’s body, wounded or even dead. But there was no sign of her.

He returned from his hurried search, telling himself to calm down, only to find his brother prowling through the rooms like a wary cat sniffing a strange dog.

“Something is wrong, but I don’t know what,” Fish was saying to himself again.

“Is something missing?” Bear asked, coming down the steps.

“If so, I haven’t figured it out,” Fish said. He stared at the rose-brocade antique sofa and suddenly crossed the oriental carpet and pointed.

“Someone’s been under that sofa cushion,” he said softly.

Bear looked at the seat cushion. It was slightly askew. Feeling odd, he looked at the ivory chaise lounge. The seat cushion there was also slightly lifted, as though it hadn’t been put back correctly.

“Maybe Blanche was looking under the cushions for something she dropped,” Bear suggested.

“The pillows,” Fish pointed at the two dark velvet pillows thrown haphazardly on the floor next to the mosaic-inlaid coffee table. “What girl leaves sofa pillows like that?”

“Blanche was the last person who had access to this place, right?” Bear asked. “You haven’t called in a housekeeper or anything?”

“Not since I left, no,” Fish said. “No point in cleaning a house no one’s living in, is there?” He glared around the room. “Someone’s ransacked this place and put everything back,” he said. “
But why?
”

“And how would they have gotten in?” Now on his guard, Bear stepped into the kitchen to see if anything was amiss. He looked at the herbs growing in the carved boxes arranged at the base of the kitchen’s floor-to-ceiling windows. The ones Blanche had been watering. They looked slightly askew, as though someone had dug them out of their pots and dropped them back in without much care. “Look at these.”

Fish fingered the plants gently, and then got up. “Check out that cabinet door,” he pointed. The cabinet door over the refrigerator was slightly open. “Not shut right. And neither is that one over there,” he said, pointing to another cabinet over the sink.

There was a knock on the door, and Fish and Bear instantly pivoted towards the door. Bear’s heart pounded as he walked to the door and opened it.

“Arthur Denniston?” asked the tall, brown-haired man who stood there, pulling out a badge. There were two other men behind him, hands in their jackets, possibly covering their weapons.

“Yes,” Bear nodded almost automatically.

“I’m Morris Tang, special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration.” He looked at Fish. “Are you Benedict Denniston?”

“That’s correct,” Fish folded his arms. “Is there a problem?”

The man gave a wry smile. “You are the owners of this apartment?”

“Joint owners, yes,” Bear said.
It’s either bad news, or trouble
. At first he had thought it was bad news—had Blanche been found dead? —But the sight of plainclothes policemen gave him an entirely different feeling. He had been here before.

“I’m here to advise you of the fact that federal agents found caches of controlled substances hidden in the cushions of your living room furniture this past Saturday, August the seventh,” the man said. He pulled out a photograph, and Bear saw a picture of a man standing in front of their apartment door, holding up a plastic bag containing dozens of blue and pink pills.

“What the heck—” Bear said angrily. He glanced at his brother’s face, and saw Fish had gone pale.

“Oh my God,” Fish said quietly. “I didn’t think it was this.”

The agent looked at them carefully. “The pills in the photograph are metadylene-dioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, otherwise known as Adam, or Ecstasy. MDMA is an illegal substance on the federal schedule. As the owners of the apartment, the government is holding you liable for the contents. I have arrest warrants here for both of you.”

Bear felt a rush of strong emotion, which he crushed quickly and forcefully. “The drugs aren’t ours,” he said. “I’d like to call our lawyer. Someone’s framed us.”

Again.

Chapter Four

Having fled down the labyrinthine ways, breathing hard, knowing it was a risk to come here, she hurried up to the house and knocked on the door.

A nurse came to the door, not—she noticed—the same nurse that had been there last time. His nurses had been changed again.

“Is Ms. Fairston in?” she asked cautiously.

“No ma’am,” said the nurse, looking at her suspiciously.

“Can I see Mr. Fairston? Please? It’s very important.”

“He’s not seeing anyone.”

“Please. He told me to come and see him. Tell him Blanche is here.”

“Just a moment.”

Waiting, the girl unaccountably shivered in the summer’s heat, praying that her chance would succeed.

In a few minutes, the nurse returned and said, “Come with me.”

She followed the nurse across the black-and-white marble-tiled floor and up the steps.

“How is he?” she whispered.

“As well as can be expected for a man in his condition. I’m told he hasn’t been out of bed in a month.”

Then she’s been told wrong
, the girl said to herself. But as usual, she was silent.

She walked over the thick carpet of the hallway, trying to stop her hands from trembling. If only she still had her purse to hold onto. She had been fortunate to find a few subway tokens in her pocket for the ride over.

The nurse led her into the small bedroom at the back of the house where a television chattered, and left, shutting the door behind her. The girl noticed that she barely glanced at the frail figure on the bed.
Not good help
, the girl thought, leaning over to straighten the twisted pillows on the bed.

“Blanche. It really is you,” Mr. Fairston said, blinking his left eye and twisting to sit up. Only one side of his face was active. The other side was frozen, motionless, a prefigurement of death. With his left hand, he turned off the television with his remote. “What happened to your hair?” He spoke with difficulty, but the girl was used to his accent by now, and had no trouble understanding him.

The girl tucked a stray strand behind her ear and tried to figure out how to answer. But the reality of what she had to tell him appeared to her now in all its ugliness, and she didn’t know where to start. To put off the hard part, she checked the glass on his bed tray and found it was bone dry. She stepped to the small refrigerator in the corner to fill it from the pitcher she had suggested keeping there.

“Thank you—how did you know I wanted that?” the man asked gratefully, taking it with his left hand. His right was shrunken and lay useless by his side. One side of his body was paralyzed. His gray hair, as usual, was bushy and unruly.

She smiled as she gave him the water. “Those medications for your tumor make you thirsty. It says so on the labels.”

He tilted his head to the left. “You’re such a caregiver. How do you remember these things?”

She warmed at the compliment. “Perhaps it’s in the genes. Remember, my mother’s a nurse.”

“That’s right—I keep forgetting that.”

“Plus, whenever I come to read to you, you always ask for something to drink, even though I’m the one doing the reading. Hasn’t this nurse been making sure you’re hydrated?”

Half the man’s face grimaced in an expression the girl found comical. “She says I’d be better off getting water intravenously, but I can’t stand IVs.” He paused. “This isn’t your usual day to come by, is it?”

The girl shook her head, and swallowed. “Actually, I am in a bit of trouble. I thought I’d, well, find someone to talk to...” She started to pick up the books and magazines that had dropped from the bed to the floor.

The concern that had been in the man’s eyes returned, and his voice became lower. “My wife told me you had been arrested.”

“What do you mean?” She turned back to him, her mind reeling.