Keys to the Castle (34 page)

Sara's fingers covered her lips, catching the whisper of breath that was almost like a cry. “Oh, Ash.”

But he jerked his head away, refusing her emotion, refusing to meet her eyes. “I hated Daniel,” he said tightly. “I blamed him for what he'd made me do—what I thought he made me do—and I wanted to punish him. I didn't tell him I had been there. I let him think he was responsible for the girl's death. I made him give up the only thing he had of value—a portion of Rondelais—to pay for it. I thought if I could make him suffer, my own suffering would ease, but of course it didn't. And the worst thing was, I never had a chance to tell him the truth. No.” And now he did look at her, with a bleakness in his eyes so deep it seemed to go all the way to his soul. “The worst thing was, I let you hate him, too.”

He drew a breath, released it slowly. “So there you have it. Now you know me. Now you know what I'm capable of. And now, every time I look at you, I'll see it in your eyes.”

“Ash.” It was hard to draw a breath, hard to form a thought. Her chest was aching, her throat on fire. “I don't know what to say.”

“That's all right.” A faint softening of his features almost formed a smile, but not quite. And none of it reached his eyes. “I think we both knew all along that it all was only make-believe.”

He looked at his watch. “Please pack your things and get dressed. I'll wake Alyssa.”

She said hoarsely, “We have to talk about this.”

He shook his head briefly. “There's nothing more to say. There are some ghosts that simply can't be laid to rest. Besides, I have a plane to catch.” And he looked back at her with a cold, humorless smile as he turned to leave the room. “You didn't really think you could change me at this late date, did you, my dear?”

Ash purchased their tickets and saw them to check-in. The busy St. Pancras Station allowed no time for conversation and he attempted none. Alyssa, who loved trains and was excited about seeing her cat again, bounced up and down with a ceaseless stream of chatter between them. At the gate, he transferred Sara's carry-on from his shoulder to hers, and said, “This is where I leave you. Your train is in twenty minutes.”

There was a stricken look in her eyes when he said that. He wondered if it had been there all along, and he simply hadn't noticed. He said, with care, “I think we may come to see that there's a difference between being in love, and loving. I'm not sure I'm capable of the latter. But I've enjoyed being in love with you. And I hope one day you'll forgive me. But I don't expect it.”

Alyssa raised both arms to him. “I love you,
petit-papa
!” He knelt down and hugged her hard, and kissed her hair, and told her to be a good girl on the train.

Sara said, when he stood, “It's not going to be this simple, Ash. I'm not going to let you make it this simple.”

But he couldn't look at her anymore. “I'll call,” he said, and he walked quickly away. He didn't even tell her good-bye. Later, he would remember that.

He hadn't even told her good-bye.

He had the car wait while he stopped by his office to pick up his mail and the paperwork he needed for the trip. He spoke tersely to Mrs. Harrison and told her he didn't know when he would be back. He made it to the airport with half an hour to spare. He sat in the departure lounge and opened his briefcase to take out his laptop and then he noticed the return label on one of the envelopes he had scooped up on his way out of the office. He opened it, and read the contents.

“Damn it,” he said softly. His fingers tightened on the paper in his hand, wrinkling it. He looked at the clock on the opposite wall. “Damn it,” he repeated, with more ferocity. He snapped his briefcase closed, stuffed the letter inside his coat, and left the airport.

In the taxi, he tried to reach Sara on her mobile but, to his frustration, got an out-of-service message. She was always forgetting to charge the battery, despite his admonitions and reminders. But then he glanced at his watch and realized she would be on the train by now, perhaps even in the Chunnel and out of range. He tried her again when he got out of the taxi, but got the same message.

There seemed to be slightly more activity than usual in his building when he arrived. Televisions were playing on every floor, with groups of people clustered around them here and there, which usually signaled some kind of bloody financial crisis or another somewhere around the world in which he was not remotely interested at the moment. He strode into his suite without looking left or right and said, “Mrs. Harrison, see you if can arrange a video conference with the Dejonges tomorrow morning instead. Meanwhile, get my team into the conference room for a briefing. And make it within the next fifteen minutes.” He glanced at his watch. “I have to catch the next train to France.”

She was already dialing the telephone. “Very good, sir, but you'll have to make it a plane instead.”

He scowled at her. “What?”

She nodded meaningfully at the flat-screen that was muted on the opposite wall. It showed a reporter interviewing a firefighter against a background of chaos, but he did not give it more than a glance. “There's been a dreadful accident in the Chunnel,” she said. “I'm sure no more trains are running today. They've been trying to reach the victims for over an hour but there seems to be . . .”

He did not hear anything else she said. He stared fixedly at the images on the television screen. The high glass arches of St. Pancras Station, the chaos inside, a reporter pushing a microphone into some woman's face. She was weeping hysterically.

He felt the blood leave his face. His fingertips went cold. He said hoarsely, “Which train?” And when she did not answer immediately he shouted, “Which train, goddamn it!”

She hung up the phone. She lifted the remote control and pushed the Mute button. In a moment a grave voice intoned, “Again, if you're just joining us, Eurostar 1902, the 11:32 nonstop from London to Paris, has met with disaster in the Channel Tunnel . . .”

He stared at the screen. The images, the words, buzzed by him. From very far away he heard Mrs. Harrison say, “Sir?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her rise.

He turned to look at her. He said woodenly, “Sara and Alyssa were on that train.”

He remembered pushing his way out of the office and someone grabbing his arm and Mrs. Harrison saying something to him about a crisis center hotline and trying to push a piece of paper into his hand with a telephone number on it but he shook her off and he knew what it was to be blind with terror because he didn't see anything, not the people he shoved out of his way, not the button on the elevator, not the stairwell he plunged down, until he was in the street and traffic was screeching around him and horns were blaring and he grabbed the door handle of a taxicab before it even stopped. And he was saying, fiercely, under his breath as he flung himself inside, “No.
You can't have them
.”

“Beg pardon, guv?”

“St. Pancras.
Now
.”

He punched the number again for her mobile, and this time he got nothing, not even the out-of-service message, just a high-pitched warbling that sounded like sirens rushing to a disaster, that sounded like the end of the world.

He threw a handful of bills at the driver, he did not know how much. He was running now, running through the big doors, down the vast concourse with its throngs of people, pushing his way to the front of a ticket window, blurting something, demanding something, and before he could hear the answer he saw a man in uniform and he grabbed his arm and he started running again and at some point a woman with a Red Cross emblem on her shirt took his hand gently and said, “Did you have family on board, sir?”

And he answered hoarsely, “Yes.”

She took him to a room packed with folding chairs and people who were eerily quiet, except for the occasional broken sob, the sounds of shock, the sounds of horror. Someone led him to a chair and gave him a clipboard with a form to fill out but he couldn't make his hand work. He heard whispers:
Two hundred forty-six dead
.
No survivors. No, two hundred forty-six on board. Twelve survivors. No, twelve dead. So far. No, the first car had been untouched. No, the first car had exploded on impact
. There was a board at the front of the room with papers pinned to it. People kept gathering around it, stiff-muscled, holding one another. He said to the man next to him, “What's that?” And he said, “The passenger list. The names with the check marks next to them are the bodies they've recovered.”

Ash stood up and he walked to the front and stood there, unable to make himself approach the board. He saw pain and terror and sympathy on the faces of the others, strangers to him, but just like him. They stepped back to let him near the board but he stood still, staring at those small typed lines from a distance, some with check marks, some without. How life could change in an instant. How only a breath ago he was worried about diamonds in South Africa and calling for his team. How only a heartbeat ago he stood in the dark and watched Sara and Alyssa sleep and ached with loving them. How he hadn't even told Sara good-bye. Someone touched his arm. He stepped forward.

Gabon, Gentry, Giddons . . .

And he couldn't do it. He couldn't read further. He couldn't stand here in this sea of pain reading a list of names and waiting to see the one with the check mark beside it, this was not what was supposed to happen, this was not what he had planned, and there was nothing he could do about it, not this time.

He remembered a spring day, the chapel ruins, a picnic spread on the stones. Sara's eyes. Always, Sara's eyes.
What are you afraid of, Ash?

This.
This moment. This future that even then had been rushing toward him, that he could have avoided had he only taken more care, had he been more vigilant. This moment. This was what he had been running from all his life.

He turned and fled the room, suddenly drenched in sweat, suddenly desperate for air, and he felt other pained, sympathetic eyes following him, but not for too long, because they were all the same, they and him, his agony was theirs and there was nothing any of them could do to stop it. On the concourse again he grasped a pillar simply to stop his forward motion and he turned, leaning his head back against it, and closed his eyes, shaking inside, breathing into his cupped hand because he was afraid if he didn't, he would shout out loud, he would scream like a madman,
You can't have them
.

Yet he was the one who had failed to keep them. He was the one who had let them go.

Almost as if an answer to prayer, his mobile rang. He fumbled it out of his pocket, breath stopping, trying to focus, thinking for a moment the letters on the screen spelled
Sara
, thinking they did but they didn't; they spelled
I'tnl Caller
and how absurd it was that life should go on, that somewhere in the world someone in an office was picking up a telephone and dialing his number, not just absurd but fantastic, really, completely obscene. He took the phone and he threw it as hard as he could across the floor where it collided with a kiosk and broke into several dozen pieces. That was when he heard a voice.

“Ash?”

He stood very still, not daring to turn.

“
Petit-papa!
There you are!”

They were there, just across the way, surrounded by a moving throng of people. Alyssa with her ribboned ponytails and her little backpack in the shape of a floppy rabbit, clutching Sara's hand and bouncing up and down, waving to him, and Sara, in the yellow dress she had worn that morning, looking frail and worried. He moved toward them, not taking his eyes off them, terrified that if he did, they would disappear, knowing that if he reached for them, he might grasp only air, bumping shoulders with strangers, trodding on toes, and then he stood before her, with her big gray eyes looking so strained and anxious, and she said, “We missed our train. I tried to get another, but there was an accident in the Chunnel and—”

A sound exploded from his throat, one he didn't recognize, and he caught her to him and she didn't melt away at all. She held him back, hard, as hard as he was holding her, and when his knees started to give way she sank to the floor with him and he blindly reached out an arm to gather Alyssa into his embrace. Sara said breathlessly against his ear, “I was so mad at you for sending us away, for thinking I wouldn't forgive you, for not giving me a chance . . . And then I was mad at myself, for letting you send us away, for not fighting for you. I tried to call you, I wanted to tell you I'd stay here if you wanted, and Alyssa could go to school in London, and we'd work it out together what to do with the château, God it's so simple, Ash, if we could just work it out together . . . but I couldn't get a signal on my phone so I left the gate and then I realized the battery was dead, but they wouldn't let me back through security, and by the time I made it back the train was already gone . . .”