“George didn’t kill her, did he?” O’Brien asked Malone as he turned to go. “They’re saying he did. But I don’t believe it. George Flanagan was a rascal, but he wasn’t a killer. He worshipped the ground Aneta walked on. And right he should. She was too good for him by half. I just don’t believe it.”
Malone only nodded and thanked the man again. He didn’t know George Flanagan, but he didn’t need to. The whole thing was a rotting, stinking shame.
O’Brien clamped his lips shut like he’d said too much, but he had one more question. “What will happen to little Dani?”
“I don’t know,” Malone said, but it was her birthday, and he was going to make sure she had her cat.
He brought it to Mrs. Thurston’s house and knocked on the door, dreading a slew of questions from the woman, but it was Dani who answered, almost like she’d seen him coming. She didn’t look like she’d slept, poor thing. Her eyes were ringed with purple and the shocked glaze had not abated. When the glaze left, the grief would set in.
Her hair had not been tended to, and it was a riotous mass of reddish-gold curls that bounced around her shoulders. He hadn’t noticed her hair the night before. She’d worn a stocking cap pulled low on her head, the curls barely peeping out here and there to frame her face.
“Your hair is almost the same color as Charlie’s fur,” he said by way of greeting. She’d taken one look at the cage and the little cat inside, and her face crumpled. He’d almost cried too.
“Is he mine now?” she asked, trying to control her tears.
“Yes. He’s yours.”
The cat, now ten pounds heavier and fifteen years older, spat at Malone again, bringing him back to present day.
“Don’t give me your attitude, Charles. We have history. And yes, I will call you Charles. You’ve outgrown Charlie.”
The cat didn’t budge, and Malone left it alone while he went into the bathroom to wash and shave, hoping it would leave while the coast was clear.
He dealt with his two suitcases, one that held his clothing and another filled with the odds and ends of disguise. He didn’t know yet what he would need, but he always traveled with some basics. When he opened the wardrobe, the scent of roses wafted around him, and he hung his suits and dress shirts on the rack and put his undershorts and pajamas in the fragrant drawers. He wondered who had inhabited the room before him. Clearly not a man. He tried to remember the details of young Dani’s family situation and could not. He would find out soon enough.
He exchanged one white shirt for another. He doubted dinner would require it, but he wore a tie with his suspenders just to be safe, though he left his suitcoat in his room. As he climbed the stairs, Charlie swished by him, tail high, as if he hadn’t just sulked beneath the bed for the last hour.
Malone followed the cat as well as the sound and smells of food and found three women—Dani, Zuzana, and one he’d not yet met—already seated in the small dining room off the kitchen. A place had been set for him at the end of the table, but Charlie beat him to it, hopping up onto the chair and eyeing Malone with disdain. Dani rose and scooped the indignant creature off the chair and took him into the kitchen where he heard her scolding him like a mother.
“Be nice, Charlie. You are not the guest.”
Zuzana introduced her sister, Lenka, a shorter, plumper version of herself, but where Zuzana was prickly and dour, Lenka was all smiles and soft glances. They were both a million years old, with bright blue eyes and thick white hair, and they both stared at him throughout the entire meal, which was hot and filling but not worth enduring their attention or his own aggravation.
The resemblance between the three women was unmistakable. Zuzana and Lenka had the same pearly skin as Dani, though theirs had pooled beneath their eyes and around their mouths with age. They were wrinkled and bent, but their skin was still unspotted. He suspected that once they had both been quite beautiful. Maybe as beautiful as Dani.
He sneaked a quick look at her across the table, and her different-colored eyes met his before dancing back to her plate. Her skin was as buttery and poreless as whipped cream. He thought briefly that it might simply be her youth, and then had to remind himself that she was the same age he’d been when they met. When they’d met, he’d already been to war and back again. He’d already outlived his children and left his wife.
Dani had been a child when they met. She was not a child now.
What a strange vortex the years suddenly seemed. The jump from ten to twenty-five was a lifetime. The leap from twenty-five to forty was but a long weekend. It was like being trapped in a Jules Verne novel.
He caught his reflection in the big mirror that sat over the long sideboard, the same way he’d seen himself in the washroom mirror when Dani was showing him to his room. He made himself look harder, simply to ease his disorientation.
He didn’t have a boyish face or a youthful glow, but he’d looked old when he was young, so aging wasn’t as marked in him as it was in some. He had deep-set, downturned eyes that were always shadowed, and skin like leather. He was currently the color of a brown paper bag, but even without the tempering of a year in the sun, he never burned.
We thought you were a changeling, with your dark eyes and all that dark hair. But then you smiled, and Dad saw himself. Thank goodness for that. They might have left you for the faeries or given you to Father McDonough to raise.
Molly had always said this with great affection, but young Michael had worried about it. What if he was a changeling? His pop’s skin was always pink, and his eyes were a vivid blue. How could Michael be the son of Martin and Kathleen Malone and look the way he did?
Have you ever seen a litter of pups where one is spotted and one is not? Where one is brown and one is gray? It’s no different than that.
Molly always had an answer for everything. But Michael had taken his looks as something of a sign. He was the outsider. The black sheep.