War history arose the sound of a ringing cordless phone.
Ben stared at the ringing pile but didn’t make a move.
“Aren’t you going to get it?” Hunt asked.
“The phone hasn’t been exactly kind to me of late.” Ben narrowed his eyes and finally dug it out. “Yes?…Oh, Amada, what’s up?…What do you mean he wasn’t there when you went to pick him up? I thought you said he was going to his friend Vincent’s house to study?” Ben nodded as he listened. “Sorry, sorry. Okay his friend, Verjesh. So where is he? Does Verjesh know?”
He crooked his elbow to read his Breitling sports watch, one of the few vestiges of his former high-flying lifestyle. To his surprise, the time was already seven-thirty. “No, he doesn’t? Well, he couldn’t have gotten far.” He ran his hand through his hair. “What’s that? He’s got his bike? And Verjesh said his backpack looked full?” He paused. “You don’t think…All right, all right. I’ll handle it. You just go on home.”
Ben rang off. “Sorry, Hunt, but we’ll have to continue this discussion later. I’ve got to head off on a search party. What a day. First your mother. Now my son!”
CHAPTER TWO
“YOU KNOW, DEAR, IT’S only natural to be nervous,” Lena Zemanova said to her granddaughter standing nearby. She had to raise her voice to be heard above the torrential rain that lashed at her stalwart frame. It was a dark, February evening, making the downpour cold and menacing, a real Horatio Hornblower moment in land-locked Grantham, New Jersey.
Katarina Zemanova wrestled with locking her grandmother’s ten-year-old Corolla while simultaneously trying to open her own umbrella. Like clockwork, the over-the-shoulder strap of her Coach briefcase chose the exact same moment to slip down, thereby crushing her left wrist. She might never play the violin again, Katarina ruefully acknowledged, not that she ever did, mind you. Whatever. She pressed the small button on the remote again—and again—but when the car refused to lock, she gave up and bent forward to do it manually. That meant her umbrella tilted back, which, as fate would have it, allowed a sudden burst of wind to pop it inside out. Oh, yeah.
Katarina closed her eyes and bit back a sigh. To think that she had once been an accomplished multitasker. The only thing more awkward that could possibly happen would be if her headband slipped down over her eyes.
Her headband slipped down over her eyes.
Life was not meant for the faint of heart.
Katarina pushed it back on her already soaked head, and blinked in despair, the raindrops beading on her lashes. Once upon a time, she had had her two hundred dollar coiffure professionally washed and blown dry before work each morning. Once upon a time was a mere four months ago. How quickly times change. Merely thinking “whatever” was a little more difficult the second time around.
“Really, Babička, I’m not a delicate flower,” Katarina said to her grandmother.
As a young bride, Lena had left what was then Czechoslovakia to come to live in New Jersey. Despite a passage of fifty years, certain Old World connections, especially Slovak phrases and vocabulary, lived on, including the Slovak word for grandmother, Babička.
“Of course you’re not a delicate flower. None of the Zemanova women are delicate flowers,” Lena said. “Still, if you’d wear a proper hat instead of carrying one of those overpriced gizmos, you wouldn’t be soaked to the bone.” She tsked at Katarina’s Burberry umbrella. Unlike her granddaughter she wore a sensible, eye-popping yellow rain slicker along with a pair of high Wellington boots. With a few tweaks here or there, she could have modeled for the figure on the Morton’s salt container.
The wind blew Katarina’s hair, and a wet lock slapped her cheek. “I don’t like hats. They give me hat hair. Though I’m beginning to rethink that prejudice.” She held the umbrella into the wind and worked the catch a few more times to pop it right side out. “Good,” she said, and holding the umbrella overhead, offered an outstretched hand to guide her grandmother over the uneven pavement of the parking lot. Unfortunately, the high school lot was closed due to neverending construction, and they were forced to make the trek from a temporary lot down the block.
Her grandmother promptly ignored Katarina’s gesture, and together they bent forward into the stiff wind and made their way toward the sidewalk. In the darkness of the evening, Katarina had to concentrate on the tricky footing due to all the construction around the school. With her weakened leg she felt especially vulnerable. She tightly gripped the collar of her coat around her neck. The driving rain bit into her pants, causing the still tender muscles of her right leg to spasm. She pretended it wasn’t happening. Denial was a powerful weapon, one she’d been living with these last months. Her briefcase flopped against her hip with each limping stride.
“Okay, so I am nervous,” she said. “It’s not like I’m in any position to back out now anyway. The proverbial die has been cast, and, a die, I might add—” Katarina felt herself wearying of the metaphor before she’d finished using it, but seeing no where else to go “—that in no small part is due to a certain small person walking next to me.”
Lena didn’t bother to turn her head as she trudged forward. “Excuse me. I don’t know where you get the idea that I had anything to do with your teaching this class at the Adult School. I’ve been much too busy making sure I got into the Tai Chi class to meddle in your affairs. It happens to be very popular among people of a certain, more mature, age. That’s the problem with you young people today. You always think the world revolves around you. Haven’t you ever heard of Copernicus?”
“That’s Galileo, Babička, and, no, I hardly think the world revolves around me.” In fact, these past few months Katarina had felt more as if the world, at least the world as she knew it, had passed her by. “And besides, at thirty-three years old, I hardly qualify as young anymore.”
“In my book, anyone under the age of sixty is young. And for your information, I am not small!”
Katarina smiled. Her grandmother barely scraped the bar at five feet. Not that Katarina was any giant at five-four, but she could still claim to be the tallest woman in her family. Her mother, for all her outsize personality, stood a mere five foot two.
“All right, I take back the comment about you being small, but stop pretending you didn’t interfere, or, if you prefer, influence.” Katarina lifted her umbrella to talk face-to-face. “I know you, Babička. You wouldn’t have been able to stop yourself from calling Iris Phox and suggesting I teach a course on inves—”
Thwa-ack! A wall of water drenched Katarina. It got her face, splashed her coat. Soaked her shoes. Her designer umbrella? Gone with the wind. Having flown out of her hand, it tumbled down the street, ricocheting from one curb to the other, eventually chasing a speeding motorcycle like a Border collie dashing after a Frisbee.
Katarina wiped her wet bangs out of her eyes and fumbled for her headband, only to find it had disappeared somewhere in the torrent, too. “I don’t believe it! F—” She quickly remembered that her grandmother was standing next to her. “Sorry, Babička.” She looked sideways. Her grandmother wasn’t there. She looked down. She wasn’t there, either. Frantically, she looked behind her. “Oh, my god, Babička! Where did you go?”
Despite the glow of the streetlamps, the moonless night and pouring rain made it difficult to pick out more than diffuse shapes in the distance. She scanned the sidewalk up ahead, and at last spotted her grandmother standing next to a tree.
Katarina
