Searching for Celia (12 page)

While I wait, I hear footsteps behind me, footsteps that pick up speed as they move closer. As I turn, the footsteps mount the steps and what there is of streetlight is suddenly blocked by two enormous figures, one on my left and one on my right. Before I can scream, or make any sound at all, a large hand is clamped across my mouth.
Dot
, I think.
Please open the door. Open it now.

Wednesday

8:32 p.m.

I’m too stunned to scream for help as the two burly men frog-march me down the concrete steps and bundle me into the backseat of an idling van, then whip the door closed with an angry rattle that splits the silence of night. I land on my left side, pinning my broken hand beneath me. A stabbing pain shoots up my arm and momentarily stops my heart as the van peels away down Rosslyn Hill.

“Who are you? What do you want?” Able to breathe again I sit forward and speak slowly, trying to disguise my rising terror. There are two men in the front, one in either seat. Both are broad shouldered and heavyset, with the passenger inches shorter than the driver and wearing a black fedora.

The driver glances at me in the rearview mirror. He has dark, deep-set eyes that suddenly, passing beneath the slivered light of a solitary street lamp, appear to be Polynesian. Oh no.

We are heading south, back toward the center of London. I search the horizon for a stoplight that might turn red in my favor, allowing me a chance to escape. Silently I reach for the door handle but just as my fingertips touch the cold metal, I hear the solid
click
as every door automatically locks.

“Please. Who are you? What do you want?”

No response.

We turn left onto a narrow, deserted side street off of Chalk Farm Road. The driver slows to a crawl behind a half-completed building site bookended by an empty parking lot and a row of industrial Dumpsters. Shadows gather and merge, creating overlapping layers of darkness with only thin fingers of light bleeding through from the street. Quietly unzipping my attaché case, I slip my hand inside and feel for my cell phone.

Suddenly the driver hits the brakes and pulls up short against a curb of crumpled pavement. The passenger, turning quickly in his seat, grabs the case from my lap and whisks it into the front seat, sending several items flying—lipstick, Kleenex, ballpoint pen.

“Don’t be frightened,” he says brusquely, in an accent I can’t identify. “We won’t hurt you. We just need your help.”

“My help?”

Neither man answers as the van lumbers slowly away from the curb, threading the length of the side street before returning to Chalk Farm Road. I try to stay calm and focused. I’ve already made a potentially fatal mistake, allowing them to abduct me from outside Celia’s flat and take me to a second location. And yet, if they wanted me dead, why not kill me at the building site and leave my body there?

I consider what Redleigh Smith would do under these circumstances. Kung fu, no doubt, with a few karate chops to the throat after momentarily mystifying her captors with an encyclopedic knowledge of conversational Samoan, complete with perfect noun declensions. Why did I write such rubbish? I suddenly wish Candee Cronin had never been born.

The men don’t seem concerned that I can see them, viewing their faces in profile when we pass beneath streetlights. They might be brothers, both dark haired and olive skinned, mid-to-late thirties, with the smaller one likely younger by three or four years. They must mean to kill me. Otherwise they would hide their identities.

“You said you needed my help,” I offer carefully, trying not to sound terrified. “What can I do?”

“You’ll see,” the driver says.

“Be quiet,” the other one warns. “It won’t be much longer.”

A bolt of fear slices through me. I try to pray but I can’t find the words. My mind races. Random images shuffle like a deck of cards across my consciousness, finally settling on the memory of my dead father, which rises to the surface and obliterates all other thought. My kind and loving father who was lost on opening day of the gun deer season, sixteen years ago. He was far from home when it happened, cocooned among the slender birch and fragrant pine of the Chequamegon National Forest, on the edge of the Bad River Indian Reservation. His beloved Gordon Setter, Axel, was at his side, and he had just finished setting up his tree stand when an errant rifle shot split the frigid afternoon and entered his abdomen.

In my mind I have viewed the scene a thousand times, each time trying to imagine a different ending. Pappa, shocked, first by the ruptured silence and then by the shattering pain, sinks to his knees in the snow. He sways side to side, struggling to stand, before collapsing onto his back and staring up at the sodden gray-white horizon. Axel, panicked, circles and cries, sniffing the air and the ground and the wound, so Pappa pulls him close and comforts him, stroking his black-and-tan head and whispering to him in nursery-rhyme Norwegian.

We know that, though mortally wounded, Pappa did not die right away. But, perhaps sensing the extent of his injury, he also did not call for help. Instead he settled himself on the ground where he had fallen, straightened his long narrow legs, and arranged his clothing. He removed his blaze orange cap, packed it with snow, and wedged it behind his head, where it melted and refroze, icing his ears to the ground.

Axel, loyal to the end, stretched out beside Pappa, breathing against his ribs to keep him warm. Side by side they must have lain there, considering the featureless sky for as long as it took for the life to seep out of him. Man and dog watched silently as snowflakes forming high in the atmosphere tumbled to earth, gaining weight and dimension during their descent, only solid when they finally came to rest on Pappa’s golden-blond eyelashes. With his final breath he pressed one hand to the red stain spreading steadily over his midsection and draped the other hand softly across his heart. I have often wondered whether his last thoughts were of us, my mother and me, that we’d be told by the park warden who found his body that he died looking satisfied, like a man at peace with the world.

No. I won’t give up. I won’t just lie down and die. If these men plan to kill me, they have to know what they’re taking. I sit forward, slipping my shoulders and torso into the narrow space between the two front seats, balancing my broken hand in my lap.

“My name is Dayle Salvesen.” My voice sounds strong and steady. “You may know that I’m American and that I’m a writer. But I’m more than that. I have family; I belong to people. I was someone’s mother for fifty-three minutes.” I pause. “My disappearance won’t go unnoticed.”

The men exchange sideways glances but neither says a word as central London looms into view. I continue. “I grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on a street full of tumbledown, shanty-shaped taverns with neon beer signs in the windows and strings of twinkling Christmas lights on display all year round. The city itself is compact and opens into Lake Michigan like the sprung joint of a giant elbow. Drive any distance in any direction away from the lake and you will find endless acres of cornfields, dotted with dairy farms that have red wooden barns and tall silver grain silos.

“When I was young, my father was my favorite person. He was fair-minded and generous, even though he was given to quiet moods during which no one could reach him. He had grown up on Norway’s Hardangerfjord and refused to admit how much he missed home. I was an only, but not lonely, child, a tomboy who refused to play with dolls, but I loved animals and had an enormous black-and-white rabbit named Duchess. I could see the Glory Road water tower in Ashwaubenon from my bedroom window, and it seemed so huge that I imagined it was visible to astronauts floating across the surface of the moon.”

We cross Waterloo Bridge and the van turns onto Belvedere Road and slows, screeching to a halt beneath Hungerford Bridge, just before the Royal Festival Hall. The doors unlock and I am startled into silence. The driver keeps the engine running while the passenger opens his door and jumps to the ground, then a moment later slides open the back door and motions for me to get out. Apparently I don’t move fast enough because he reaches in, grabs my good arm, and drags me from the backseat. I’m still trying to find my balance as he hands me my attaché case. “Our apologies,” he mumbles as he climbs back into the front seat, closes the door, and they speed away down Belvedere Road.

I am shaking so hard I can’t catch my breath. I must call the police. I am reaching into my attaché case and fumbling for my cell phone, barely able to see in the hollow brick cavern beneath the bridge, when a soft voice behind me calls out, “Wait.”

I turn quickly and stare straight into the shadowy face of Cecelia Frost.

Wednesday

8:53 p.m.

“Celia—you’re supposed to be dead,” I whisper, choking on the words.

“We’re not safe here—come, follow me.”

She turns to flee but I reach out and grab her arm, spinning her around. “Wait.” I step closer and stare into her half-hidden face. Without a doubt it is Celia, looking as she did in the photo that arrived this afternoon, drained and underweight with brittle, bleach-blond hair roughly cut and skimming her narrow shoulders. The only differences are a slightly blackened eye and an aging facial scar, curved and strangely elegant, an inverted pink smile bisecting her sunken left cheek. Dressed in faded jeans, scuffed boots, and a denim jacket over a dirty white T-shirt, she looks ruined: an anemic, jaundiced, malnourished mess. And yet she is also fantastically alive, with a nervous energy pulsing just beneath her skin, skin that is opaque and iridescent, as if beat to airy thinness, or hollowed by a flame of desperation.

“We have to go,” she says roughly, “now.” She jerks my good hand and the jolt electrifies my heart. Still dressed in my raincoat, skirt, blouse, blazer, and pumps, I struggle to keep pace as she darts along the damp thoroughfare of Belvedere Road, past a deserted parking lot on one side and faceless gray office buildings on the other. She turns onto a concrete path that cuts through the flat green expanse of the Jubilee Gardens, not even stopping for breath until we reach the approach to the massive London Eye, the huge Ferris wheel erected along the banks of the Thames to celebrate the birth of the new millennium. The Eye, which looks like an enormous bicycle wheel with long narrow spokes and glass-encased passenger capsules attached to its outside circumference, towers over central London’s cityscape, dwarfing even Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.

“Over here,” Celia pants, nodding toward the ticket office inside the County Hall. “We’re just in time for the night’s last flight.”

I follow her across the street and inside, struggling to catch my breath as I stand behind her in the ticket line. “Celia—the bridge, the body…”

“Shush!” She turns and scowls at me, pressing a finger to her lip.

“Sorry,” I mumble, content now, given the brighter indoor lighting, to gaze at the back of Celia’s neck, watching the muscles tighten and release as she purchases two tickets for the ride. I don’t dare blink for fear she’ll disappear. It occurs to me that I might be dead; perhaps the men in the van really did kill me and now it is only my soul that is coursing the damp concrete rise and fall of London’s South Bank, trailing the elusive ghost of Cecelia Frost, whose death has a mere seventeen hours on my own. I don’t care. I don’t care at all. I am just so glad to see her.

The tickets purchased, Celia turns and beckons me to follow her back to the entrance of the Eye, up a wooden ramp, through a security checkpoint, and to the embarkation point on the very edge of the Thames where we stand, hunched against the cold, waiting for the next empty passenger capsule to reach us. The wheel moves continuously at a steady pace, but the movement is so slow that there is time enough to empty and refill each compartment without stopping the wheel. Normally the London Eye is overrun with tourists and a long line of people waits to board, but tonight the ride is nearly empty, no doubt due to the cold, the fog, and the lateness of the hour.

When our capsule arrives we step inside the glass-walled, oval-shaped, futuristic-looking pod, and an attendant closes the door behind us. The capsule, which is stationary save for the revolution of the wheel itself, is large enough to hold at least twenty people, but Celia and I have this capsule all to ourselves.

We rise slowly above the thick oily ripple of the Thames, watching it churn darkly beneath our feet. The glass capsule’s normally panoramic view of late-night London’s illuminated landscape is blurred by drizzle and softened by fog, leaving only the largest and brightest sights visible, poking through the gloom.

Suddenly the lights go down inside our pod, leaving nothing but a low blue glow. Celia takes a seat on the slatted wooden bench in the center of the capsule, where the muted light gently envelops her, erasing years from her appearance. She takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, as if releasing a huge weight. A slight nervous smile plays about her pale lips and her face becomes youthful again, almost impish, although the smile never reaches her eyes.

“Sorry for all the cloak-and-dagger,” she says softly. “We can speak freely here. We have about thirty minutes until we once again touch ground.” She pulls a crumpled pack of cigarettes from the breast pocket of her denim jacket and taps one into the palm of her hand. Of course smoking is not allowed inside the capsule, but Celia doesn’t care.

“Celia, everybody thinks you’re dead.” Even in the semidarkness my eyes keep searching her face, looking for details, anxious for proof that she is real.

She clamps the cigarette between her teeth and grimaces. “I know. I wanted it to look that way.”

“But the dead body…?”

Her eyes widen. “Dead body?”

“At Waterloo Bridge.”

She shakes her head, pausing midshake to search for her lighter. “There was no dead body. I dumped my car near the bridge at four this morning so everyone would think I’d offed myself.”

“But there was a report on the radio that police found the body of a young woman there this afternoon. We assumed it was you.”