Jane (12 page)

I nodded.

“I have to check out the third floor. I want you to send everyone back to bed. Then take Maddy to her room; get her back to sleep. Stay in there with her. And don’t leave until I come to get you.”

He went. I switched off the bedroom light and ran to retrieve Maddy, detouring on my way only to pick up the match and conceal it in my palm. The staff readily accepted my explanation of the fire. I didn’t have to try very hard to sell the story, and they seemed eager to get back to sleep. I was relieved; I’d never been a convincing liar.

Maddy, though, was full of questions. “Is Daddy okay? What’s meditation? Is the house always going to smell? Can I go see him?” I answered her as noncommittally as I could and made her lie back down. In her little pink-and-blue tiled bathroom, I flushed the match out of sight and scrubbed the soot from my face and hands. On my knees beside Maddy’s bathtub, I washed the acrid smoke out of my hair with her bubble-gum-scented shampoo. My nightgown was ruined, streaked with black smoke, but there was nothing I could do about that now. By the time I’d neatened myself up,
she was snoring gently. I watched her from the white rocking chair beside her bed. A very long time passed.

Finally, there was a soft knock at Maddy’s door. I inhaled sharply. What if it wasn’t Mr. Rathburn? But then I heard his voice whispering urgently, “Jane? Jane?” I opened the door to find him looking pale and very unhappy. Then he beckoned me out into the hallway and shut the door behind me.

“Did you find out who set the fire?” I whispered.

He nodded. “It’s all taken care of. There’s nothing more to worry about.” I waited for him to say more, but he was silent.

“Who would want to burn your clothes?” I asked him. “They must have been trying to kill you.… They almost did.”

Instead of answering, he stood a minute with his arms folded, staring down at the rug. Then, he asked, in a whisper, “Did you see anything between your room and mine?”

“Just the match I told you about,” I told him. “I got rid of it.”

“Good. Did you hear anything?”

“A laugh. It seemed to come from the third floor. And then fingers brushing my door. The laugh sounded like Brenda.”
Come to think of it, what had she been doing on my wing of the house?
I pushed the question out of my mind for now.

“Brenda,” he repeated. “You guessed it. You’ve probably noticed that she’s peculiar. But I’ve dealt with her, so everything should be fine from now on.” He wiped some of the soot from his eyes. “Did the others believe our story? About the candle?”

“I think so,” I said. “They seemed to.”

“I’m glad it was you who came to help me. You won’t talk about this with anyone, will you?”

I promised that I wouldn’t. “But where will you sleep tonight?”

“I’m not so high and mighty that I can’t spend the night on the living room couch,” he told me. “What’s left of the night, that is.”

“Okay, then. Good night.” I turned to go.

“Wait.” He seemed surprised. “Are you really going to leave me so quickly?”

“I thought you wanted to get some sleep.”

“But not without saying good night. Not without thanking you.” He looked at me, urgency in his eyes. “Jane, you saved my life tonight.”

“It was nothing,” I told him.

“Nothing?” He brushed back his hair. “You can be a bit strange, you know that?”

I nodded. I did know.

“At least give me a hug, Jane.” He opened up his arms, and I stepped into them. “A hug between friends.” For a moment, I felt the warmth of his body and the strength of his arms clasped around me. When he released me I took a step back so I could see him better. “If anyone had to save my life, I’m glad it was you.” His eyes were softer, darker, than I’d seen them before.

“I’m glad I could help.”

“The minute I saw you, I knew you were different. That you’d do me good in some way. I knew…” — he paused — “I knew we’d be friends.”

My heart skipped a beat. Unsure of what I should do or say, I took another step back. “Well. Good night, Mr. Rathburn.”

“Even now, you won’t call me Nico?” A flicker of an emotion I
couldn’t identify crossed his face, but then he surprised me by laughing. “Go get some sleep, Jane.”

When I was back in bed, my thoughts kept racing. One moment I was swept aloft by a wave of happiness, the next grabbed by an undertow of foreboding. What new and strange events would the next day bring? I could barely shut my eyes for wondering.

In the morning, I drove Maddy to a playdate across town, but even though I more or less had the day off, I returned straight home to Thornfield Park, unsure what to do next. I hoped to see Mr. Rathburn, but I didn’t know what I should say to him or how I should act, especially after what had happened the night before. And I worried that Lucia and the others would ask me questions about my part in the postfire tumult. What would I say to them? I’d never had such a big secret to keep before. I decided that I would answer their questions — and Maddy’s — simply, in as few words as possible. With Maddy, this tactic worked well. She seemed satisfied with the explanation I had given her, and more than anything else she was excited because she’d been up in the middle of the night.

As it turned out, I didn’t run into Mr. Rathburn that morning. He had gotten up unusually early and had already gone out
somewhere. Something unsettling happened with the others, though. I got back to the house, punched in the security code, hung the car key on its hook, and slipped into the kitchen for coffee and toast. There I bumped into Lucia, who looked a bit frazzled, her reading glasses pushed back absently on her head. “I hear you had some excitement here last night,” she said.

“Yes. There was a fire.”

She poured herself a mug of coffee, stirred in a packet of Sweet’n Low, and headed back to her office, saying over her shoulder, “I know. Who do you think has to order a whole new wardrobe for Nico and call in the carpet cleaners?”

Did I detect blame in her voice? But what sense would that have made?

As for Amber and Linda, neither said hello to me when I passed by the laundry room, where they were folding towels. They had been chatting, as usual, but when they saw me, they stopped talking. It was almost as though they suspected me of something. Most startling of all was the moment, midmorning, when I returned to the kitchen with my coffee cup and happened to see, as I walked by the laundry room, Brenda loading clothes into the washer.

Our eyes met. I had thought Mr. Rathburn fired her early that morning, but there she was: her eyes a bit puffy, her plain, broad face shiny as if it had been vigorously scrubbed, her dull hair pulled tightly back. She looked the way she always did, not the least bit guilty. “Good morning, Miss Jane,” she said in her usual matter-of-fact way, and poured blue laundry detergent into a measuring cup.

This was almost more than I could take. “Good morning, Brenda,” I said. “Last night was something else, wasn’t it?”

“Last night?” Her tone was casual. “You mean the fire in Nico’s dressing room?”

“Of course. I didn’t see you downstairs. Didn’t the smoke alarm wake you?” I looked her straight in the eye.

“I’m a very heavy sleeper.” She didn’t glance away. “Slept right through all the commotion.” She wiped her hands on the towel slung over her arm.

But I wasn’t about to be brushed off that easily. “I thought I heard a laugh last night just before I smelled smoke. Was that you?”

“A laugh?” She didn’t look or sound surprised at the question. “Why would you think it was me?”

“It sounded like you.”

“Maybe the little girl was watching television past her bedtime,” she said.

“She was sound asleep. It was two in the morning.”

Brenda shrugged. “You never know with children.”

I decided to take another tack. “What caused the fire?” I asked. “Does anybody know?”

She reached for the fabric softener. “I heard Nico was meditating in his dressing room before bedtime. He must have forgotten about the candle and left it burning. He says he’s taken up meditation lately, to relax.”

It seemed very strange to hear her parroting the official story to me, but then it was no stranger than seeing her still here in the house, pouring fabric softener into the washing machine and shutting its door with a firm hand.

I said nothing. It dawned on me that if she knew I suspected her of starting the fire, she might try to hurt me next.

“When you heard someone laughing, didn’t you open your door to see who it was?” Her question surprised me. Was she trying to catch me off guard?

“No,” I said. “I checked my door to make sure it was locked.”

“You mean you don’t always lock it at night before you go to sleep?” She asked the question casually, but she seemed to watch me closely.

“From now on I will.”

“That’s a very good idea.” Her voice was flat and emotionless. “Even with guards and an alarm system, I always say you can’t be too careful.” At that, she turned and walked away.

On my walk that morning, I revisited the pine grove where Mr. Rathburn and I had walked together two days before. What a long time ago it seemed. I couldn’t sketch or paint; I was too preoccupied trying to understand last night’s bizarre events and Brenda’s continued presence at Thornfield Park. Mr. Rathburn could have had her arrested, or at the very least he could have sent her packing. Instead, he’d done neither. But why? Did she have something on him? Some kind of knowledge she could use to blackmail him? Was he worried she might tell his secrets to the press? If so, what sort of secrets did he have left to tell?

Or could he have some kind of attachment to Brenda? If she were young and attractive that might have made some sense. still, some men like older women. I supposed it was possible that they had been involved once, though it was hard to imagine that drab, flat-footed Brenda had ever been even remotely pretty.

I’m not pretty,
I reminded myself.
Still, Mr. Rathburn seems to
like having me around.
I remembered the look in his eyes last night, the warmth of his voice, his enthusiastic hug, and noticed that my heart was racing.
Calm down,
I admonished myself.
Stop imagining things that can’t possibly be true
. I turned back toward the house.

That afternoon, I couldn’t concentrate enough to read or draw, and I couldn’t stand the thought of hiding in my bedroom. Instead, I haunted the main wing, reading the inscriptions under the gold and platinum records in the hallway, picking up magazines and putting them back down again, poking my head into the refrigerator even though I was far too agitated to eat. As the day wore on, I grew increasingly eager to see Mr. Rathburn, if only to gauge his attitude toward me. Would he look at me the way he had last night? I was sitting in the breakfast room, staring out the window at the pond, when Lucia walked in.

“You look different,” she said to me. “Flushed. Are you feeling okay? Are you still shaken up about last night?” She took the chair beside me and set down a cup of yogurt and a spoon.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just overtired.”

“Huh” — she stirred her yogurt — “aren’t we all? At least I can have lunch away from my desk today, since Nico’s out of town.”

“He is?”

“Didn’t you know? He went back to New York to tape some more TV appearances. He’ll be on
Letterman
this week.”

“On the spur of the moment?”

“No, of course not. The Letterman thing has been booked for a while. Sorry I didn’t mention it; it’s just been floating out in the air. I thought you knew.”

“How long will he be gone?”

“He didn’t say. He’s got some other business to take care of in the city, he said. And be on your guard. Whenever he does get back here, it’ll be sheer chaos. He’s not coming back alone. The rehearsal show has been scheduled for three weeks from today. The whole band’s going to descend on us, some of them with their lady friends. I have to start getting the guesthouse in order.”

“They’ll all be staying here?” I was having trouble taking in so much news at once.

“Nico likes it that way. Before the tour, he likes to do what he calls ‘a little intense male bonding.’ Seems crazy to me. They’ll be in each other’s pockets the whole tour, but by now I guess he knows what he’s doing.” She sighed. “And even if he doesn’t, we’re in the sidecar.”

I hardly knew how I felt about any of this.

“Oh, and when they do get here, you might want to sharpen up your image a little,” Lucia continued. “Wear your best clothes. That photographer’s coming with them. You know, Bianca Ingram? She’s doing a spread on Nico for
GQ,
and she wants to capture the beast in his natural habitat. Those were her words.”

I thought back to the photo shoot. Had it really been only three days ago? And I tried to remember Bianca Ingram. All I could recall was her elegance, her glossy dark hair, her diaphanous scarf, and her laughter floating into the breakfast room with Mr. Rathburn’s.

“I don’t have much in the way of nice clothes,” I said. “Besides, I’m sure she won’t want to take pictures of me.”

Lucia rolled her eyes. “She’ll be shooting all of us. I doubt you or I will wind up in any of the shots chosen for the article, but you
never know. At the very least, Maddy should look her best. She’ll wind up in the spread for sure.”

“Bianca Ingram… That name is familiar.”

“Of course it is. She’s photographed just about everyone on the A-list — politicians, musicians, movie stars, you name it — and some of their glitz must have rubbed off on her. Every other week her face is in
People
or
InStyle
. The media like to follow her around and speculate about her love life. She supposedly has a habit of sleeping with her subjects, so it could get interesting around here.”

Why did this news distress me? I said nothing, and Lucia disappeared for a moment, then returned with a bottle of mineral water and two glasses. “Want some?”

The water tasted good; I hadn’t realized how thirsty I was. “Had she photographed Nico before the other day?”

“No, and she’s been after the chance for quite a while now. She was thrilled when he called her to do the tour program. She told Mitch she’s had a crush on Nico since she was a teenager.”