Secrets of the Guardian (Waldgrave Book 3) (19 page)

Lena suddenly looked over at Tom, checking in on his son sleeping in his carrier, gazing down with those death-stricken eyes. She felt the urge to explain to him; to tell him he needed to take Brandon and leave her here, to go running back to South Carolina, the oysters, the irises, and the cats—and to never go near a train.

But it was too late now; their fates had become intertwined, and the acts that were destined to happen had to be played out. She knew now why Tom was dying. The echoes demanded it.

Tom looked over at her and caught her sad gaze. His smile fell slightly. “More bad news?”

“More of the worst.” Lena replied, trying not to choke up.

He pulled a chair up next to her and sat down. “What’s wrong? I mean, whatever it is, it’s okay. We can fix it. We can make it work.”

Lena shook her head in frustration and sadness and closed the email that had been sitting open on the screen. It was too late. There was no escape from the things that were going happen, because even when she fought, the echoes still found her.

“Well,” She began, overcoming the lump that had formed in her throat, “You remember when I said it would be a bad idea if I showed back up with a baby?”

Tom looked down at his knees and nodded a little. “Oh.”

“It’s not that I don’t want him. He’s a beautiful child, and I want him to have the best life he can, and I really want to be there to see it, but I’m afraid it’s just not possible.” Lena wiped a tear away. “This isn’t the world he deserves to live in. I just can’t do it. If you knew what they want to do to him…You have to take him back, Tom. I can’t let him be a part of this.”

Tom took a long time in answering. For a moment, she thought she had been thinking too loudly about the contents of the email, which she never intended to tell Tom about. “I’m sorry, Lena. I’m sorry I dragged you in to all of this. I just wanted him to have a family.”

Through the tears she was holding back, she almost laughed. “If anything, I should be apologizing to you.”

Tom smiled dolefully at her, then got up and turned the bedside lights on and the room lights off. He moved Brandon, still asleep in his carrier, over to the near side of his bed. He fidgeted with Brandon’s blankets for a few moments before laying down on the bed. “I just wanted him to have a family. I was an only child.”

Lena got up and laid down on her own bed. She kept her voice very low to avoid waking Brandon. “I was an only child too.” But then she paused. “Well, actually, I had a brother.”

“Had?” Tom whispered, staring into the ceiling.

“He…he, um…Well, I never really knew him. My mom and my dad separated a long time ago, and my mom took him and my dad took me. And, uh…” Her voice was trembling again. “Uh…my brother died before I got to meet him. Murdered.”

“I’m so sorry…How old were you?”

“Five.” Lena pushed out. “We were both five. We were twins.”

It was a long time before Tom spoke again. When he did, it didn’t help. “What’s your dad like?”

Lena flinched. It suddenly occurred to her that Tom must have thought he was sending his son off to a family—a 
real
 family, with parents and siblings and aunts and uncles. And Lena couldn’t offer up any of it. All of their conversations at the Iris Inn had been positive; Lena had purposefully avoided bringing her ugly past into the sanctity of the valley. “He’s dead too. He died when I was fifteen. Also murdered.” The quiver in her voice was growing. “Your mom’s my only living grandparent. My two on the other side were both murdered. My mom was murdered.”

Again, Tom didn’t speak for a long time. Lena was about to reach over and switch off her bedside lamp.

“My dad died of a heart attack when I was twelve.” He took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly. “He had the look. We woke up one morning and we both saw it. He didn’t, of course. Just popped into the kitchen like always, and I was sitting there at the table doing the homework I was supposed to do the night before, and my mom was there cooking eggs and coffee…she was wearing this thing, like one of those old aprons from the fifties. It was red—I think it’s the only time I’ve seen her wear something red. But he just came into the kitchen with the newspaper under his arm, kissed my mom on the cheek, and sat down next to me like always. He had the newspaper up in front of his face when my mom brought over the eggs, and when he took it down to eat I heard him say, ‘What?’ My mom was sitting there with her jaw dropped, staring at him, and I looked over, and I knew, and I looked back over at my mom, and she said, ‘Nothing.’ She gave me a look, like…we didn’t say anything. It’s deceiving when you see it coming and you want so bad to fix it, but the truth is that it’s already broken and you can’t. You just can’t. And we ate breakfast, just like that. Christ. He was gone that afternoon—I got the chance to tell him I loved him before I went off to school that day. Heart attack while he was changing out a blown fuse in someone’s car…he was a mechanic. I’ve always wondered if she would have told him…you know, eventually, if he would have lasted longer. I’ve always wondered if he knew, you know, in those last moments, if he was thinking about her looking at him like that…he if ever knew that she knew in those seconds. Christ. He’s been in the teapot ever since.”

She heard Tom shuffle on his bed. When she glanced over, she saw that he was looking at her. Normally she wouldn’t have said anything—grieving was personal. There wasn’t anything for anyone else to say about it.

But Tom seemed to be expecting it.

“I’m sorry, Tom. At least you had the chance.” She whispered, but her mind had grabbed onto those final turbulent memories of her father, and it wasn’t about to let go any time soon.

“So…you’re alone then? Like me?” He asked.

Lena turned over on her side. Her stomach was starting to ache. “I have an uncle that I live with. My dad’s brother—if he’s still alive, I mean.”

“What’s he like?” Tom asked. He tried to smile, but it vanished almost instantly.

“He’s…” Lena thought back to Howard. Always so busy, always in meetings. Always trying to fix things that were irreparably damaged; things that just couldn’t be fixed, but he somehow had a way of making them work. “Lonely. We only have each other, and some of the time we don’t. I think he wanted a family a long time ago, but it just never happened. He just got too busy to have a family. But he’s nice. Really nice. It really screwed up his life when my dad died and I had to come live with him, but he never said anything about it. He just made it work…”

Lena trailed off. She turned her head and looked over the edge of her bed at Brandon, sleeping quietly, his little cheeks working like he was dreaming of a bottle. Was that how it was supposed to happen? Was she supposed to be Brandon’s Howard?

She glanced up. In the slightly yellowed light cast by the lamps, Tom had met her gaze, the eerie look in his eyes magnified in the surrounding dark. “You don’t have to tell him about all of this. I don’t want him to have to grow up with this tragedy. I want him to have a family, and happiness. But someday will you tell him about us? Me, and Janet, and my mom? When he’s old enough to understand?”

“Of course I will.” Lena whispered back.

They slept with the lights on that night. The next day they drove to Raleigh, where Lena tried to get tickets to take them to Greenland, only to discover that Tom didn’t have a passport. He offered to stay behind, letting Lena fly away with Brandon, but they had no way to get a copy of his birth certificate to apply for a child’s passport without going back to South Carolina. They were stuck with no way to leave the country, and the Silenti probably knew it.

From that day on they started driving West, zigzagging back and forth through the mountains and staying at any small hotel they came across. Lena was spending copious amounts of time trying to figure out how she could adequately fake a birth certificate for Brandon that listed her as his mother; there was no way they were going to let him go with her without explanation otherwise. Even then, she had no intention of traveling under her own name if people were looking for her, and that meant forging her own identifications as well. She wasn’t even sure what she needed to forge for what purpose; Griffin would have known. Aaron had known. Lena wished she would have paid more attention to illegal activities she had previously considered beneath her.

She had Tom max out his credit card and cash out his personal checking account—a substantial amount of money, given the limit on his card was designed for the small business he had been running with his mother. He assured her it wouldn’t be a problem, because Olesia had amassed a small fortune years earlier to send him to college; he had never used it, instead staying home to help run the Iris Inn because he couldn’t bear to be away from other Silenti contact for so long. Lena still felt bad, however, and promised Tom that she would pay his mother back.

Almost a week after the incident in Raleigh, they passed through Ashville. They sat in the car outside of the airport, while Lena stared at the entrance, dejectedly watching people come and go with their bags. She had to find a way to get Brandon out of the country. It was very difficult to get a child passport quietly, and they were probably counting on that fact—she couldn’t leave the country with a baby without someone finding out. They knew she was here, and that was where they were going to be looking, which made it even more important for her to find a way to get them out.

“Couldn’t you hide him or something?” Tom asked.

Lena glanced over, then set her eyes on the door again. “Where? In my purse? With flight restrictions the way they are now, I’ll be surprised if I can get him on the plane without having security frisk him first. Anyways, this is a regional airport. We need international.”

She sat back in her seat. They might be counting on the fact that Brandon didn’t have a birth certificate, and hence couldn’t even apply for a passport—someone had inevitably checked into whether or not she had checked into a hospital to deliver a baby under her own name. But Brandon wasn’t her baby; his last name was Spinkle. That fact might allow her to sneak him under the radar.

She needed a birth certificate to apply for Brandon’s passport. It was possible they could write to have one sent to them, but then Lena was going to have to fake her own passport to show her name as Janet Spinkle, the name on the birth certificate. This led to its own set of problems, as someone was sure to notice that Janet Spinkle had a death certificate issued in her name at some point during the approval of her passport, the issuing of the international tickets, or one of the security checks as she boarded the plane. And she was losing precious time before someone finally tracked her down.

She had to make a decision.

Lena sighed. “Okay. Okay…let’s find some off the road place to stay at for a few days. I’ve got to get stuff to fake passports for both of us. Then we’re crossing the border into Mexico, because I don’t think they check all that well. I’ll do whatever I have to in order to get us citizenship papers there so we have valid papers. Incomes are pretty low there—if nothing else works we’ll grease a few palms.” She sat back to think again. “Then I’ll get a vacation visa so we can get off the continent, and then we’re gone until things settle down back home.”

As a matter of fact, she had no idea when or if things were going to settle back to normal in the Silenti world; they had proven many times over that they could hold a grudge. It could take years. It could take a lifetime or longer, but she wasn’t about to share this information with Tom.

They drove a few hours out of the city and settled in a hotel off the one main road in Maggie Valley. It was a mid-size hotel with indoor hall access to the rooms, two floors, indoor pool, a continental breakfast, and rooms with windows that overlooked the parking lot. She spent several hours on the internet that afternoon trying to figure out how to get the right quality paper and supplies to fake a U.S. passport. She had settled Brandon on the bed next to her. He was such a serious child; he only stared at her as she poured over page after page of how difficult it was to use a fake passport to try and travel internationally. Her chances were better at faking the documents to apply for a passport, but the application process was going to cost her time that she didn’t have. As dusk began to fall, and the light in Maggie Valley stretched and faltered, Tom broke the stony silence that had enveloped them.

“You wanna go out to dinner?” He asked, switching off the television.

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Tom…” But she was already shutting the open windows on her computer. She checked into her email one last time; she wished she could have written to Hesper. Serena and Hesper knew about babies and taking care of them, and soon she was going to need all the advice she could get. Subconsciously, she was already planning to swing through Australia to see her one more time before she made her great escape around the world with Brandon.

Anyway, it was probably good that she hadn’t heard anything about any of the Masons; hopefully they were just keeping to themselves and out of the crosshairs. Maren would be going on two now, talking, learning to walk, and making trouble. Daisy and Rose were probably enjoying her immensely. They probably liked playing dress-up with her, taking her to the beach, making her laugh…

Tom cleared his throat. “Dinner?”

“Sure.” Lena said, closing her laptop and getting up from the bed. She picked up Brandon, bundled him, buckled him into his carrier, and then they walked out to the car. Even though it was only early evening, it was already dark outside. The streetlights cast a blue sheen across the snow-packed lot and road, making every flurried tree, bush, and roof glitter like Hollywood fakes. It was late January now, and the country was suffering an unusually chill winter, making Lena long even more to escape to a warmer climate.