He couldn’t.
Do it now.
Taking a deep breath, Caroline slowly started playing a few, halting notes with her right hand. The notes were discordant, too slow, but the song was recognizable.
The opening bars of “Think of Me”—the haunting melody Christine sang to the Phantom—came out. The song was forever branded in her heart as a hymn to pain and loss.
Her hand faltered, and she kept her index finger down on F for a long moment, wondering if she could go on.
She had to. She had to not only out of courtesy to her boarder but for herself. And for her own sanity.
You must do this, Caroline ordered herself, her spine stiffening.
Her right hand picked out the notes of the opening again, faster, smoother, more melodic. The left hand came up, reluctantly, to provide the counterpoint to the lush melody. Muscle memory took over. The notes started flowing as her hands moved lightly over the keys, the song as familiar to her as her own name.
Think of me…
Mom and Dad and Toby had flown from Seattle to meet with her in New York for Thanksgiving. She’d taken the Amtrak down from Boston, where she was studying music and men, having a great time with both. Dad had booked a two-room suite at the Waldorf. The Lake family had four magical days together, taking in the sights by day and going to plays and musicals by night. Their last night in New York they’d all gone to see Phantom at the Majestic Theater. She’d been just old enough to sigh at the romanticism of the love triangle. The doomed, scarred lover banished forever to the shadows, the handsome young viscount and the beautiful young woman loved by both men.
Remember me…
Toby’d been just young enough to get jazzed at swirling capes, chandeliers crashing to the stage, candles rising from the water, a mysterious boat on a lake under the Opera. Toby’d been still hopping with excitement the next morning when they accompanied her to the station. She remembered boarding the train back to Boston, looking through the window at Mom and Dad blowing kisses and Toby excitedly waving good-bye. A happy family with their whole lives in front of them.
It was the last time she saw her parents.
It was the last time she saw Toby walk.
For years, he refused to listen to the CD of the musical. Caroline understood completely. It reminded him too much of what he’d lost, of the carefree boy he’d been, a boy with a whole lifetime ahead that had been cruelly snatched from him.
Then, suddenly, a couple of months ago, he started insisting that she play the music for him, over and over as he grew weaker and weaker.
Toby knew he was dying, Caroline thought suddenly, the hairs rising on the nape of her neck. That was why he asked her to play the music so often. Toby felt his death approaching and he wanted to hear the music that reminded him of the last time the family had been together, the last time he’d been a healthy boy.
She bent her head, her hands moving on their own, without her having to think of the notes.
The delicate, romantic music filled the room, filled her head, filled her heart. Her hands floated over the keyboard, the music coming from the deepest reaches of her being.
…please promise me…
She forgot where she was, she forgot about the large, dark-eyed man by her side watching her, as she was swept up in the haunting melody. A song of yearning and the promise of love when the hope is gone.
…that sometimes you will think of me…
Softly, softly the song ended on one last lingering note that echoed, then died away. Her hands slipped from the keys to lie in her lap.
Caroline bowed her head, a loose tendril of hair falling forward to lie on her shoulder.
A sudden current of ice-cold air swept through the room, ruffling the pages of the score, chilling her to the bone. Goose bumps rose on her skin. She looked up, startled, as the candles in their brass holders guttered, then died. The heavy curtains fluttered briefly, then stilled.
It was over almost before it began. The air was suddenly still once more. Wisps of smoke from the smoldering wicks rose straight up. Nothing moved.
Something had come—and gone—from the room.
To her dying day, Caroline believed that it was at that precise instant that her brother’s soul departed from this life, finally, finally breaking free from the broken cage of flesh he hated so.
He’d heard her play one last time and had left the world.
Caroline had just played Toby’s requiem.
Now he was finally, truly gone. And she was alone.
One large tear slipped down her cheek and fell on the keyboard, plopping so heavily that the key made a ghost of a sound.
Jack hadn’t moved, but something in the very stillness of the air to her side made her turn. He was standing next to her, one big hand on the top of the piano, watching her steadily. She had no idea what he could be thinking.
Probably what a crazy, crazy woman she was.
Suddenly, Caroline was so very weary of her grief and loneliness. Something had to happen to break her out of this icy shell of sorrow that encased her. She needed human warmth and connection. She needed to touch someone. She needed for someone to touch her. Other than an occasional handshake, she hadn’t touched another human being since Toby’s death.
She looked up into the dark eyes of a perfect stranger and spoke the truest words she knew out of a painfully tight throat.
“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” she whispered.
Five
Sierra Leone
The human eye sees what it expects to see. Deaver knew that. Like all soldiers he used that fact often. Half of military tactics is deception and evasion.
So when a five-ten, 180-pound blond man wearing dark sunglasses strode confidently through the UN camp, dressed in well-pressed fatigues with the UN badge on his shirtfront and wearing the distinctive bright blue helmet of the UN peacekeeping force, nobody gave him a second glance. He was just another of the five hundred UN soldiers in the encampment.
It was evening. Half the troops were on routine patrols—unarmed, the idiots.
Deaver still found it hard to believe that soldiers would allow themselves to go unarmed. Orders from on high. Military observers and peacekeepers had to show their neutrality at all costs. Axel had thought it stupid, too. Deaver had a sudden pang of sympathy for the guy.
He felt like an incredible asshole walking around unarmed in West Africa, a place where it was as if some giant hole had opened up and sucked in everyone who was human, leaving only deranged monsters. He’d only been unarmed for a couple of days, but it felt like forever.
Deaver could only imagine what a whole tour of duty here unarmed would feel like, where if you fell into the wrong hands, you could have your hands and feet chopped off by teenagers, be staked out in the broiling equatorial sun with your bowels slashed open for the insects to eat or be skinned alive, without any weapons whatsoever to defend yourself with.
Well, the hell with that, he was getting the fuck out. Right now. Just as Axel would have.
The evening air was suddenly filled with the familiar whump whump whump of a helicopter. Deaver walked fast in the direction of the sound. He wanted to break into a run, but he didn’t dare.
In the twilight, he could make out the familiar outline of a Huey, landing in an improvised helipad carved out of the surrounding forest. The pilot landed gently, smack in the center of the circle, and stayed in the cockpit, his hands on the controls. He clearly wanted to be out of there as soon as possible. He was landing at last light to increase his chances of survival. The route from Freetown took them over rebel-held territory. RPGs needed daylight to take planes and helicopters down.