Minders (35 page)

“It happens to animals. They just freeze. You did that now. You’re spooked.”

“I’ve just had a long…”
What?
Sadie heard him wonder.
A long day? Month? Life?
“Week,” he settled on.

“Why don’t you take a shower?” Plum suggested. “You look like you broke six mirrors with your head. The towels in the bathroom are clean.”

“That’s a great idea,” Ford answered, his mind still prodding for foreign bodies. He went into the bathroom, locked the door, stripped off his clothes, and turned on the water. Then he looked in the mirror.

The bruises on his legs were shades of yellow with purple on them, but his ribs still looked painfully purple, blue, and green. Even with them, his body was magnificent. She’d never seen Ford completely naked before. At his house the bathroom mirror really only gave a shoulder-high view.

“Look at me,” he ordered, a low, primitive rumble that demanded obedience.

Her heart raced, and her mouth was dry. She felt vulnerable and naked and terrified of his contempt. His hate. She took a deep breath, poured as much love as she could into her gaze, and met his eyes.

The connection sparked, sending firecrackers of sensation through Sadie’s whole body. His reaction was as strong as hers, making his body rock backward and his hands grip the counter in front of him.

His knuckles were white, and he practically spit the words out. “I don’t want to hear you. I don’t want to feel you. I don’t want anything that reminds me you are there at all. I hate the thought of it. I hate you for doing it. I hate what you did to my friends. The less I have to think about it, the better. Got that?”

Sadie was trembling. She swallowed hard and tasted tears.

“You’re pathetic,” he sneered. “Watching someone else live their life instead of living your own.”

It would have been easier to shrug off his withering contempt if there hadn’t been some truth to it.

“Enjoy your perverted little show,” he sneered over his shoulder as he got into the shower.

Sadie spent the rest of the evening curled up in a corner of Ford’s mind, watching and registering his thoughts and experiences but doing her best not to interfere. As long as she kept her thoughts to herself, he didn’t seem able to hear them.

This was better, she told herself. It would force her to be objective, behave like a regular Guest. Minder. Whatever she was. The phrase was “I think, therefore I am,” not “I feel,” she reminded herself. Some distance between his voice and hers, between his thoughts and hers, was healthy.

It felt anything but right.

While he was in the shower, Plum had set the table at the counter with blue and yellow and aquamarine majolica china that a really good friend had sent her from Sicily. Dinner was butternut squash tortellini with pesto and a salad with blue cheese, hazelnuts, and orange and ruby beets. Sadie heard Ford wishing that Lulu could try food like this. See this place. Her eyes would be huge.

He called and texted Mason before dinner, then in the middle, then as they finished. Nothing.
He’s probably asleep
, Sadie heard him tell himself.
Or at a fund-raiser. Or dead.

Not dead
, his mind shouted.
I am not letting go again.

“Are you done texting your girlfriend?” Plum asked, coming around the island. She reached for his phone like she was going to read what he’d written, and he snatched it away.

“It’s not my girlfriend,” he snapped. “It’s—”

She stood in front of him, running her pointer finger down the side of his neck. “I don’t really care.” Her eyes met his. “Take your shirt off.”

I don’t really care
hung in the air in Ford’s mind. For a few seconds Sadie saw his pure desire warring with his loneliness, aware that satisfying one side of that thirst meant leaving the other parched.

But his greatest desire right then, Sadie could tell, was not to think. And for that, Plum was ideal. Even if Sadie didn’t like the hungry way Plum ran her eyes over him when he’d pulled his shirt off and breathed, “My god, Ford, you’re a treasure,” Ford did.

“I’m glad you approve.” Ford’s tone was smug, yet beneath the words Sadie felt the stickiness of humiliation.

You don’t have to do this
, she wanted to say.
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please, just leave.
But she knew that would just make it worse.

Plum exhaled, then took his hand and led him through the apartment to her bedroom. It had tall windows, but she pushed a button on the wall and dark blackout blinds slid down over them.

Cupping the back of Plum’s neck, Ford pulled her mouth to his and brushed her lips softly. Plum’s mouth opened beneath his and she caught his lower lip between her teeth and nibbled it, setting off an explosion of sparks in his body.

Stop! That’s not fair!
a voice whispered from a far corner of Sadie’s mind.

She hushed it, to keep him from hearing, and because it was a voice she was embarrassed about. The voice of a little girl in a flannel nightgown with tiny blue flowers and lace smocking being left alone in a house on Christmas Eve, scared out of her mind but instead of admitting that, saying, “It’s not fair. How come you get to go out and have fun and I have to be here alone?”

Her mother holding a big pearl earring in one hand and a big square-cut diamond in the other, trying to decide which went better with her mustard-yellow gown. “Because Alma has the night off. It’s Christmas Eve, Sadie. Don’t be spoiled.”

“Not the housekeeper. You. Why can’t you stay?”

Her mother gave her a pitying look. “Now you’re being silly. You know we have supper with the senator and her husband.”

“Other people’s parents stay home on Christmas Eve.”

“Other people’s parents don’t get invited to the parties we do, darling,” her mother explained.

“Why can’t I come too?”

“Because it’s for grown-ups. Now stop acting like a child or Santa won’t deliver your presents.”

“You can’t accuse me of being a child and then talk to me about Santa as though he exists. Either I’m a child and can believe in Santa, or I’m an adult and can go to the party.”

Her father said, “God, kid, you’re giving me a headache.” He looked over at her mother. “No wonder we have to go out.”

No wonder.

“One day it will be your turn to have fun,” her mother said on their way out the door, her cheek soft, just the faintest hint of perfume.

“When?” Sadie had asked, and the front door had closed on the sound of their laughter.

When will it be my turn?
Sadie wanted to know now, suddenly afraid that she may have missed it.

You signed up for this
, she told herself.
You agreed to the terms. You knew you could never have him.

I didn’t know what it was going to be like!
she wanted to yell.
What he was going to be like. How could I have guessed—

“Oh,
yes,
” Plum moaned.

—that I would fall in love with him?

Or that he would hate me so completely.

Sadie closed her eyes and wept.

A little while later Plum stroked his head and whispered, “Sleepy time for my big boy” into his ear as though he were a baby or a dog, which seemed demeaning to Sadie.

Ford didn’t mind anything now. He relaxed and repeated “Sleepy time,” like a macaw. “Can you set an alarm for an hour?”

“Sure,” Plum said, unnecessarily giving him a kiss on the lips.

Ford’s arms came around her. He held her to him and kissed her back, deeply and passionately. Sadie ached with envy and desire.

“Sleep,” Plum whispered in a soothing voice.

He turned onto his side and she lay in the curve of his body, her head pillowed on his shoulder, and Sadie had to bite her lip from crying out. Ford kissed her hair and said drowsily, “Why are you being so nice to me?”

“Because it amuses me,” Plum told him.

Ford chuckled as he dozed off, but Sadie didn’t think Plum was joking.

CHAPTER 28

T
hey slept until the
cock-a-doodle-do!
of an alarm woke him. He groped for it, knocking things off the night table, turned it off, and opened his eyes.

He was only partially alert, and Sadie sensed deep disorientation, not just because it was pitch black in an unfamiliar room but because he’d expected something entirely different.
Bunk beds?
she thought she registered.
Brown plaid comforters?
The old room he shared with James
, she realized. But the air was wrong, and aside from the familiar alarm, the sounds were wrong too—

The next instant he was completely awake, aware that he was in Plum’s apartment, his mind vibrating with the thought
It’s too quiet.

There, in the dark, it hit them both simultaneously.
It was too quiet
. Not here, now, but in the message James left for Ford right before he was killed.

There were no trains, no buses, no horns on the message. Cali hadn’t been able to hear a word of the message Ford left for her from the same place at nearly the same time, but Ford could hear every word of James’s message perfectly. Because there was no background noise at all.

Which meant James didn’t leave the message from the playground at Happy Alley, Ford thought. And that he wasn’t killed there.

Then where?
Sadie asked before remembering she should stay quiet. Why had he ended up at the playground? On the merry-go-round?

Ford was too distracted to notice her voice among the different sounds in his mind, too busy rooting around the destruction of the day before, trying to make sense of the confusion. He remembered the events of the previous night and saw he was alone in bed but shouldn’t be. He glanced at the clock and saw it was seven. Hadn’t they gone to bed at ten? How was that—

Ford scrambled to his feet, pulling aside one of the blinds and getting a face full of daylight. It was seven in the morning.
Crap
. Lulu was going to be terrified, his mother—he couldn’t even imagine. He crossed to the wall and pushed buttons until the blinds went up, thinking,
Crap crap crap
.

The bedroom door opened with a click, and Plum peeked in, wearing nothing but a transparent robe and a smile. “What are you doing up, puppy?” she asked, grabbing the end of the black boxer briefs he was about to put on. “Go back to bed. I just ordered breakfast, it should be here in ten.” She sighed. “God, your body is great.”

Ford, naked, towered over her, shaking with rage. “What the hell is wrong with you? I told you to set the alarm for an hour.”

She looked at him innocently. “But you didn’t say
which
hour, so I picked one. I hate having breakfast alone.”

He stared at her. “Do you ever think about anyone but yourself?”

Plum let go of his briefs and took a step back. “You’re joking, right?

“How would I be joking?” He stepped into his underwear. “I asked you to do one simple thing—”

“I don’t understand what’s so important.” Plum retreated around the bed and bent to pick up the book and bear wind-up toy he’d knocked off the nightstand.

Ford yanked his pants from under the bed. “I was such an idiot. I knew you’d toyed with James. Why should I think you’d take anything seriously, even a simple request to set an alarm?”

“You don’t know anything about my feelings for your brother,” Plum said, her voice tight with emotion.

Ford was too busy looking for his socks—
by the wall
, Sadie whispered—to notice the intensity in Plum’s tone, but Sadie heard it.

“I think you should go,” Plum said. She was clutching the toy, almost desperately, and with her mass of hair she looked small, like a young girl.

“We’re in complete agreement there.” He turned around, looking for his shirt.

Kitchen
, Sadie whispered, wanting to get him out of there.

He stormed into the kitchen and threw on his shirt, not bothering to button it.

Plum followed him and got busy straightening things, opening and closing drawers. “If it was so important, you could have set your own alarm. All phones have them.”

“Everything is so simple for you,” Ford said and headed to the front door. “How nice that must—”

He stopped. His mind settled. A beautiful, crisp image in glittering dots of brown, gray, and orange flashed together, his room with James, bunk beds, plaid comforters, early morning, his own voice saying, “Man, there’s a reason we don’t have real roosters—”

“Cock-a-doodle-do” had been the alarm on James’s phone, Sadie realized.
It could have just been a coincidence
, she heard him think, but the next moment he’d whipped out his own phone and started dialing. The song “Frosty the Snowman” started to play from the bedroom.

It was James’s alarm that woke him. James’s phone was here.

“That’s my brother’s phone,” Ford said, holding his up, now getting James’s voice mail message, “James. Message. Bye.” Sadie felt a stab of grief and caught a flash image of Ford dialing James’s phone over and over after his brother’s death just to hear the voice. Sadie hated the raw pain inside of him, hated being powerless to ease any part of its sting.

Plum’s chest was heaving. “I’m calling security.”

Information and connections began flooding Ford’s mind, making Sadie dizzy. Image after image layered one on top of another like a huge glittering machine.

“It was here,” Ford said, tugging together the silence from the message and the presence of the phone. “He must have been killed here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Plum told him, and Ford’s vision didn’t dim. It wasn’t a lie, but she did look nervous. “Besides, I told you, I was in Paris.”

“He called me from that phone right before he was killed.” Ford’s eyes bored into hers.

“So?”

“That means either James was killed here or someone brought you his phone after he was dead. You must know something.”

Her hand came out from behind her, and it had a kitchen knife in it. Apparently she hadn’t just been opening and closing drawers. “I know I want you to leave. Now. Or I’m going to call security.”