Conjured

Malcolm charged through the front door. He had three agents flanking him. He held his badge in one hand—he flashed it at the employees—and a gun in the other. The other three agents wore bulletproof vests and had their guns raised.

Victoria, Topher, and Aidan all raised their hands in surrender.

“Garlic knot?” Topher offered Malcolm.

Chapter Fourteen

Eve had spent a lot of time in Malcolm’s car, studying his expressions. She was more familiar with his face than any other in her spotty memory. She was an expert on the way his cheek muscle twitched before he laughed or the way his eyebrows lowered when he was upset or the way his lips moved ever so slightly when he was deep in thought. But she still didn’t know if he intended to kill her.

As he drove out of the restaurant parking lot, Eve studied him anew. He had a scar in the shape of a crescent moon on his chin that seemed to darken when he was angry—and it was dark now. His jaw was tense, and that tension rippled to his neck, thickening it, and down his arms to his clenched hands on the steering wheel. He glared at the road as if it had insulted him.

“After the case is over, what happens to me?” Eve asked.

“You live your life,” Malcolm said. “But you live it without fear.”

Such a nebulous concept. Her life. “What’s my life like?” She tried to picture her home, but all that came to mind was the little room with the quilt on the bed, the painted dresser, and the birds-and-branches wallpaper.

“You know I can’t talk about your past.”

“Can you talk about yours?”

She noted the way his eyes widened to smooth the creases by the corners of his eyes—he was startled. His face was easy to read. She wanted to believe that his was a face that would never lie to her, but she knew he’d already lied to her at least once. “Mine?”

“Yes.”

He braked at a traffic light and watched a pack of joggers cross the street. Chests heaving, they glistened with sweat. One of them drooped more than the others, arms sagging by his side as if they pulled at his arm sockets. Still, Malcolm scanned the joggers, his eyes flickering as if calculating the distance between them and the car, in case they proved dangerous. It occurred to Eve that his job was full of lies—both telling lies and watching for lies in order to protect his witnesses. “I … um … what do you want to know?”

“Everything! I want to know about you—who you are, what made you who you are. I want to know what it’s like to have memories inside you that make sense!” She realized she was shouting, and she clamped her mouth shut. She didn’t think she’d ever shouted at him before—at least not that she remembered.

Malcolm was studying her with the same attention that he’d given the joggers. He then faced the road and eased off the brake. The car rolled through the intersection. “All right. If it will help, ask me questions.”

She wanted to release an avalanche of questions—all the things she wanted to know about herself but aimed at him. She settled on one. “Do you have parents?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it like to have parents?”

He drove slowly, as if the car were also thinking while he deliberated. “Your parents define the world for you at first. Right, wrong, normal, not normal. You know, you should have this discussion with Lou. He’s far better suited for the philosophical stuff. Joint major in psychology and biology. Smarter than he seems.”

“Tell me about them. Your parents.”

“My parents were fine. Mom stayed home; Dad worked. He was a cop. And he was my hero. He was the one I looked up to and emulated. He was always trying to protect everybody. While Mom … she was the one who protected me.”

“What did she protect you from?” Eve tried to picture a mother protecting her like a mama bird. She tried to remember what it must have felt like to have her say good night or greet her in the morning or ask about her day or comfort her … or whatever mothers did.

“Anything and everything. She was fierce. Also, she sang all the time. Had a terrible voice. Could not hold a tune. I inherited that from her. Birds take flight when I sing. Small children cower in fear. Once, I joined in singing with the congregation during a wedding ceremony and the woman in the pew in front of me turned around and said in a prim voice, ‘You know, singing is not required.’”

Eve searched her memory for music … A cello, always at night. A fiddle and a flute and bells. She’d heard a soprano sing once in a voice that rose so high it became silent … The memories floated in the murk of her mind without time, place, or context. She couldn’t tell if they were real memories or not.

“She’d sing on holidays. On birthdays. In the kitchen. In the shower. My father liked to tease her about it, but she kept on singing.”

“Are they dead?” Eve asked.

“Yes.”

“Are mine?”

He hesitated. “I can’t tell you that. You have to remember your past on your own.”

“Why?” Eve asked.

“Because it has to be from you.”

“Why?” Eve asked again.