The Lady Vanishes (2 page)

DR. REGINA BURKE SAT DOWN
behind her desk with a sigh and glanced out the window to her right. It overlooked the small glass-enclosed tropical garden attached to the family wing of the hospital, where the children visited with their parents. The garden was kept at a balmy seventy-eight degrees, much different from the snow and freezing rain they’d been experiencing this winter. While it looked nice, she would rather be riding her bike along the river, taking in deep breaths of crisp air.

She couldn’t do that, either. She had paperwork to finish, and a date to go home and get ready for, but she found herself thinking about the magician instead. He’d been . . .
naughty
. The word drifted through her mind. He hadn’t said or done anything inappropriate, but she could have sworn that in the eyes behind that mask she saw more than a little kink. She’d bet he was a man who’d be all too willing to tie a woman up, cover her with whipped cream, or trace the lines of her body with ice cubes. His eyes said that he was a man who’d enjoy whatever she wanted as long as she was naked and he got to put his dick inside her.

She realized she was rubbing her bottom lip with her fingers and straightened abruptly. With a decisive headshake, she focused on her computer. He also spent his time playing magician. She was imagining things. For all she knew, he was a pimply-faced twenty-year-old right out of college, although he’d seemed older. Her therapist was right; she needed to get laid if she was turned on by a magician, of all things, complete with mask and top hat. She could have sworn she’d even seen stuffed rabbits, although the trick with the fire had been fairly cool. Dangerous, but cool.

Something pink caught her attention. She glanced down and saw the paper flower that she’d pretended to sniff earlier. Somehow he’d pinned it on her lapel, and she’d walked around wearing it all afternoon.

She touched the paper petals gently with her fingertips. How had he pinned it without her noticing?

He must have clever fingers,
she thought.

Unpinning the flower irritably, she started to throw it in the wastebasket underneath her desk, but stopped at the last minute. She hadn’t expected to be charmed, hadn’t let herself be charmed by anyone or anything in a long time. Her father had been charming, and just look what he’d done.

With a decisive flick of her wrist, she tossed the flower in a desk drawer and gathered her things to head home. It was already snowing, and she wanted to get on her way before it got too dark.

“Shaw the Magician,” she murmured to herself as she walked out of her office.

Jackie Keen, the head nurse, had told her about him when Regina questioned allowing the children to go off with a man claiming to be a magician. Jackie didn’t like being questioned; she didn’t seem to like much of anything. She certainly didn’t care for Regina and had refused to tell her any more about the man behind the mask. Regina didn’t feel wrong for asking. There were all kinds of crazies in the world.

Detouring to the locker room, Regina took a few minutes to change into her winter riding gear. She didn’t own a car and preferred the exercise of riding her bike to the hospital. It wasn’t far, but in the winter she usually froze her ass off before she was halfway home.

Today was no different. She walked quickly to the covered area just outside the employee entrance, where those people stupid enough to ride in this weather parked and locked their bikes. When the weather was too bad, she usually carpooled with a friend. She just didn’t see the point in buying a car when she lived so close to the hospital and spent all her time there, anyway.

Slinging her backpack over her shoulder, she began riding quickly in the direction of home, along the bike path that ran through the Emerald Necklace, a park that basically encircled the hospital. Her loft apartment—where she lived with her sister, Celeste, and a cat named El Greco since she’d started working at Boston Children’s—was built in the early 2000s and near the Charles River. Prior to that, she, Celeste, and El Greco had lived near the campus at Harvard so Regina could get to school. Celeste, six years her junior, had been her ward since Regina was sixteen, since their father had fled the country after he was indicted for embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars in an elaborate Ponzi scheme.

He’d disappeared shortly after his indictment and never been caught. Without him to focus everyone’s anger, her family had been left with nothing and vilified in the media. The damage her father had done to thousands of investors—mostly in the Boston area—had been covered extensively, and since her father wasn’t around to be cursed, the public had settled for her, her mother, and her sister. She’d gone from being a spoiled pain in the ass who’d played competitive field hockey, stayed out too late, dated inappropriate boys, and had a bad habit of raiding her father’s liquor cabinet to a hyper-responsible, perpetually serious young woman who had to care for her younger sister, her addict mother, and her ailing grandmother. She’d pushed everything wild about herself deep inside and locked it up. And she hadn’t let it out since.

The bike path on which she rode had been cleared of snow, but heaping piles of it surrounded either side. Snow covered the limbs of the trees and clumped on rocks in the river as she rode over small bridges, lit by the dim glow of the setting sun. She’d covered her mouth with a scarf, but the thick wool barely warmed the icy air before it went into her lungs. She rode on, relieved when her muscles began to warm, and she stopped feeling numb from head to toe.

When she finally pulled up in front of her house it was full dark, and she was breathing quickly. Without pause, she hauled her bike onto her shoulder and started up the stairs to her loft. She was about to set the bike down and get her keys when Celeste opened the door, El Greco—the gray beast cat—twining himself around her legs.

“Reggie, guess what?”

Regina set her bike down and pushed it through the open door, forcing her sister and the cat to move out of the way. “You’ve decided to move out?”

“No.”

“Finish college?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t care.”

“I met this gorgeous man today. He’s staying at the hotel.”

Celeste had attended college for four years, hadn’t graduated, and now worked as the assistant manager at the Hotel Commonwealth, a five-star luxury hotel near Fenway. In Regina’s opinion, it was a waste of the money she’d spent to send her sister to school, but Celeste truly believed that she’d be able to find a wealthy husband and never have to work again. Regina had long since quit trying to convince her darling sister that a wealthy husband was not the answer to life’s difficulties.

“Is he married?” Regina asked, not really sure why she bothered. She was still breathing hard as she opened the door to the postage-stamp balcony that overlooked the river and rolled the wheels of her bike into the stand she kept there.

Celeste shrugged. “Probably. He’s from Russia or the Ukraine or something like that. Handsome. Very dark and brooding.”

Regina thought about the magician. Dark and brooding he was not, but handsome, yes. “Sounds like too much drama.”

Shaking her head, Celeste followed Regina as she stripped off her scarf and unzipped her jacket. El Greco began meowing loudly, demanding his dinner. “You know, you should go out with me tonight. I can borrow Katie’s car, we’ll get dressed up, and go out on the town.”

“You’re out of money again, aren’t you?” Regina asked as she walked through the living room, which was mostly just a gray Ethan Allen sofa that had belonged to their grandmother, a Persian rug that had been her aunt’s, and a deep red leather chair that one of Celeste’s boyfriends had given them when Regina had complained about sharing the couch with two people who wouldn’t stop making out.

The apartment was essentially one big room with some half walls to divide the space. The ceiling was sixteen feet high with open ductwork and lights that came down from long extensions. The kitchen was separated from the living room by a small bar with cherry-red stools, and tall cabinets separated the kitchen from the two bedrooms and the bathroom on the other side. There were actual walls separating the bedrooms and the bath, but the walls didn’t go all the way to the ceiling. Sometimes her sister could get . . . vocal . . . when she had overnight guests, which was why Regina slept with earplugs.

She noticed as she came into the kitchen that her sister hadn’t done the dishes as she’d promised she would that morning, and sighed. Picking up El Greco’s bowl, she filled it with kitty crunchies and set it down for him. He began eating like he hadn’t been fed in ten years, though looking at him you’d know he hadn’t missed a meal in a long time.

Regina scratched his ears and stood, walking out of the kitchen and toward her bedroom. Celeste followed.

“I can’t go out with you tonight, Celeste.”

“It’s Friday. Why not?”

“I have a date, actually.”

Celeste stopped. Regina ignored her and opened the door to her bedroom, which was also on the river side, but had no balcony. Celeste’s room was bigger, but it was on the back side of the apartment. They shared the bathroom, a connecting door inside each bedroom.

Regina’s room was orderly—she was hardly ever in it—with a queen-size bed covered in an ancient quilt that had been her grandmother’s, and shelf after shelf of books, most of them medical textbooks, but there were a few romance novels scattered around. She usually left them on the bookshelves at the hospital when she was finished for the nurses and parents to read. There were pictures of her and Celeste in frames on the shelves, of Celeste and their grandmother, but not one photograph of their father. They’d all been boxed away and put into storage. She set her bike helmet, backpack, and jacket on a small armchair covered with owls and then went to her closet, throwing the doors open.

“With who?” Celeste sat on Regina’s bed, clearly recovered from her surprise. Regina didn’t date all that often. During college, she’d been too busy working to pay for school and rent and food for her and Celeste, and then she’d been working and busting her ass in medical school while paying for Celeste to go to college, and then she’d been a first-year physician and working more hours than she’d known existed in a week. Things had been calmer since she’d accepted the position at Boston Children’s, but it had been a long road.

“A professor.”

“Ugh.” Celeste wrinkled her nose. “Dull and poor. You are insane.”

Regina ignored her, though she felt a slight twinge of agreement. Corbin Gould was a professor of history at Harvard and an intelligent man, but she was not that attracted to him. She’d met him the previous Saturday when she’d ridden her bike over to Harvard to talk to a former teacher and had stopped for a coffee at the Starbucks on campus. He’d been there, standing in line for a scone and tea.

He’d asked her to join him at a table, a short, stocky man with a slightly receding hairline and crooked teeth. His smile was nice, though, and he’d been direct and confident. She’d refused, politely, but had agreed to go on a date the following Friday. Now she was almost dreading it.

“Quit judging my taste, judger, and help me pick out something to wear.” He was supposed to arrive at her apartment at six thirty, so she had only a little over an hour to get ready.

“For the professor?” Her sister snorted. “Just put on anything halfway decent, and he’ll probably be slobbering all over you.”

“Celeste, you better be polite. If you embarrass me, I will watch musicals at full volume the next time you’re having sex.”

“Kinky,” Celeste retorted, unfazed, but she scooted off the bed and stood next to Regina to analyze the contents of the closet.

Regina hadn’t spent a lot of time or money on her wardrobe. She had two designer dresses that had belonged to her mother and hadn’t been auctioned off, but they were far too formal. Everything else was mostly work or casual wear.

“We’d be better off looking in my closet.” Celeste frowned, glancing down at Regina. Regina was three inches shorter, curvier, and dark-haired whereas her sister was blond. Sometimes Regina wondered if her mother had found someone on the side the year before Celeste was born.

“I have a cashmere wool dress that’s a little short on me. I’ll get it. And my knee-high boots, though those are probably wasted on the professor.”

Regina thought about protesting, but didn’t have the heart for it. Her sister’s endless flirtations and chasing after men for money resulted in an astonishing number of presents. Celeste had the wardrobe of a socialite, if not the bank account.

Regina went to turn on the shower, and after a few minutes of waiting for the water to warm up, Celeste appeared with a gorgeous forest-green cashmere dress with long sleeves and fawn-colored knee-high boots. The outfit screamed high-class and expensive, not exactly the look she was going for, but it also looked comfortable and warm, two things Regina required of her clothing.

“Thanks, Celeste.” She touched a sleeve of the soft fabric. “It’s beautiful.”

“I know,” Celeste agreed smugly. “I’ll put this stuff on your bed.” She turned to leave.

“Okay,” Regina replied. “Oh, and Celeste?”

Her sister stuck her head back in the bathroom, which was just beginning to fill up with steam. “Yeah?”

“It’s still your turn to do the dishes.”

Celeste shook her head. “I’m letting you borrow my clothes. Get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Regina considered that. It didn’t really seem fair, since she paid the rent and most of the bills, but the dress was beautiful. Regina thought she might just keep it.

“Fine, but if you make a mess while I’m gone, you have to clean it up.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Celeste waved a hand. “I’m probably going out tonight, anyway. Don’t wait up for me.”

Regina sniffed. “Maybe you’ll have to wait up for me.”

“Not likely.”