“And the cops?”
“Let me see what I can arrange.”
Chapter 29
Campulung Moldovenesc, Romania
Matt held Hannah’s hand as they walked up the rock pathway to the inn he and Jet had agreed to use as a base camp in the event of an emergency. Since evading the gypsies, they’d snatched sleep where they could, a few hours at a time, always on the move before they attracted unwanted attention. The day had gone by quickly, and dusk was falling when Matt rolled up the cobblestone drive to the hotel and parked just out of sight of the office.
The exterior of the inn had captured Jet’s fancy on a trip they’d taken eight months earlier, when the rolling hills around it had been dusted with snow, the air crisp with the snap of winter. It resembled a Tyrolean ski lodge with its high wooden-beamed ceilings and distinctive fa?ade, but was far enough off the beaten track to be a perfect place for them to lie low. Jet had been delighted that the owners seemed completely uninterested in any identification; their cash payment had been gladly accepted with whatever name they wished to sign in the register.
Seeing the amber glow from the oversized windows and the inviting wood-trimmed doorway, Matt felt a sense of palpable relief that their journey, at least for now, was over. He’d checked his email regularly during the day, but there had been no messages, and his agitation had grown as the hours had crawled by. He’d done his best to conceal his discomfiture from Hannah, but like her mother, she seemed to have a sixth sense that enabled her to read Matt like a dime novel, and her anxiety had steadily grown to match his.
“Remember this place?” Matt asked. Hannah had been with them when they’d driven across Romania, and it had been recent enough so that even in the short timeline of her existence, she might.
“Mama here?” Hannah chirped hopefully.
“Not yet. But soon, I hope.”
“Why no Mama?”
“I’m sure she’s doing her best. It’s a long trip. Look at how long we’ve been driving.” He paused, eager to change the subject. “Are you hungry?”
She looked at him with a doubtful expression, as though she knew what he was trying to do, and allowed a small nod.
Matt grunted. “Let’s get checked into a room, and then we’ll have a big dinner with anything you want. It’ll be like your birthday.”
“Not my birthday yet.”
He squeezed her little hand. “I know. But we can have a little party like it is. Why not? Cake, ice cream, the works.”
“Not. My. Birthday,” Hannah proclaimed again, as if to confirm that she wouldn’t be tricked so easily.
“Right. Well, maybe it’s mine. You ever think of that?”
Her eyebrows rose.
He smiled and waggled his. “Anything’s possible.”
The innkeeper could have stepped from a postcard. The woman’s wizened face was exactly as Matt remembered it, her hand-knit tan sweater and homemade floor-length blue skirt likely the same style and material her mother had worn and her grandmother before her. He was struck by the sensation of time having stood still in the Transylvanian mountains as generations lived, loved, fought, and died with nothing much changing as one century passed into the next.
He took note of the sign behind the woman that advised guests of the inn’s Internet password for the day and revised his impression, though only slightly. Technology might march inexorably forward, but the character of the people didn’t in this region of the world.
He paid for the room in the local currency, and when the innkeeper asked in halting English how many nights he wanted the room for, he replied three. His arrangement with Jet had been that whoever made it to the inn was to stay for only seventy-two hours, and if no word was received, should move on, assuming that the other was lost to them. At the time they’d discussed the morbid possibility, the chances of the unthinkable ever coming to pass had seemed remote, but now in his memory he could see, hear, and smell every moment of his time at the inn with Jet.
The old woman was oblivious to the drama playing out in Matt’s head, and he waited patiently as she made change and selected a key with a wooden cross attached to it and slid it across the counter to him. He pantomimed eating with his hands and raised his eyebrows, to inquire whether the inn was serving food that evening, and she nodded towards the small dining room off the reception area, where a younger version of the innkeeper stood with one hand on her hip, waiting for a stream of customers Matt suspected rarely came.