A Place of Hiding

The study door opened and Simon returned. He carried both a towel and a blanket. Deborah took them from him, draping one round Cherokee’s shoulders and using the other on his dripping hair. This was shorter than it had been during the years that Deborah had lived with the man’s sister in Santa Barbara. But it was still wildly curly, so different to China’s, as was his face, which was sensuous with the sort of heavily lidded eyes and full-lipped mouth that women pay surgeons mightily to create on them. He’d inherited all of the desirability genes, China River had often said of her brother, while she’d ended up looking like a fourth-century ascetic.

“I called you first.” Cherokee clutched the blanket tightly. “At nine, this was. Chine gave me your address and number. I didn’t think I’d need them, but then the plane was delayed because of the weather. And when there was finally a break in the storm, it was too damn late to go to the embassy. So I called you, but no one was here.”

“The embassy?” Simon took Cherokee’s glass and replaced his spilled brandy with more. “What’s happened exactly?”

Cherokee took the brandy, nodding his thanks. His hands were steadier. He gulped at the drink but began to cough.

“You need to get out of those clothes,” Deborah said. “I expect a bath’ll do the trick. I’m going to run one for you and while you’re soaking, we’ll throw your things in the dryer. All right?”

“Hey, no. I can’t. It’s...hell, what time is it?”

“Don’t worry about the time. Simon, will you take him to the spare room and help him with his clothes? And no arguments, Cherokee. It isn’t any trouble.”

Deborah led the way upstairs. While her husband went in search of something dry for the man to wear when he was finished bathing, she turned the taps on in the tub. She laid out towels, and when Cherokee joined her—clothed in an old dressing gown of Simon’s with a pair of Simon’s pyjamas draped over his arm—she cleaned the cut on his head. He winced at the alcohol she dabbed on his skin. She held his head more firmly and said, “Grit your teeth.”

“You don’t provide bullets to bite?”

“Only when I’m doing surgery. This doesn’t count.” She tossed the cotton wool away and took up a plaster. “Cherokee, where’ve you come from tonight? Not Los Angeles, surely. Because you’ve no...Have you any luggage?”

“Guernsey,” he said. “I came over from Guernsey. I set off this morning. I thought I’d get everything taken care of and get back there by tonight, so I didn’t bring anything with me from the hotel. But I ended up spending most of the day at the airport, waiting for the weather to clear.”

Deborah homed in on a single word. “Everything?” She fitted a plaster over his cut.

“What?”

“Getting everything taken care of today. What’s everything?”

Cherokee’s gaze flicked away from her. It was just for a moment but long enough for Deborah to feel trepidation. He’d said his sister had given him their Cheyne Row address, and from this Deborah had first assumed she’d provided it to her brother before he left the States, as one of those gestures one person makes to another when an upcoming journey is mentioned in passing. Going to London as part of your holiday? Oh, do call on mygood friends there. Except when she really thought it out, Deborah had to admit how unlikely this scenario was in a situation in which she hadn’t had contact with Cherokee’s sister in the last five years. That made her think that if Cherokee himself wasn’t in trouble but if he’d come in a rush from Guernsey to London with their address in his possession and the express purpose of going to the American embassy...

She said, “Cherokee, has something happened to China? Is that why you’re here?”

He looked back at her. His face was bleak. “She’s been arrested,” he said.

“I didn’t ask him anything more.” Deborah had found her husband in the basement kitchen, where, prescient as always, Simon had already gone to put soup on the cooker. Bread was toasting as well, and the scarred kitchen table where Deborah’s father had prepared a hundred thousand meals over the years was set with one place. “I thought after his bath...It seemed better to let him recover a bit. That is, before he tells us...If he wants to tell us...” She frowned, running her thumbnail along the edge of the work top where a splinter in the wood felt like a pinprick in her conscience. She tried to tell herself that she had no reason to feel it, that friendships came and went in life and that’s just how it was. But she was the one who’d stopped replying to letters from the other side of the Atlantic. For China River had been a part of Deborah’s life that Deborah had wanted very much to forget.

Simon shot her a look from the cooker, where he was stirring tomato soup with a wooden spoon. He appeared to read worry into her reluctance to speak, because he said, “It could be something relatively simple.”

“How on earth can an arrest be simple?”

“Not earth-shattering, I mean. A traffic accident. A misunderstanding in Boots that looks like shoplifting. Something like that.”

“He can’t have meant to go to the American embassy over shoplifting, Simon. And she’s not a shoplifter anyway.”

“How well do you actually know her?”

“I know her well,” Deborah said. She felt the need to repeat it fiercely.

“I know China River perfectly well.”

“And her brother? Cherokee? What the dickens sort of name is that anyway?”

“The one he was given at birth, I expect.”