“No,” Sam replied. Then she looked at me. “That’s not odd for our father. He never says anything more than he has to, so I assumed the people with him were associates and not concerned with whatever brought him to my home.”
“Do you see him often? Or was this a bit of a surprise?” I asked.
“Oh, it wasn’t quite a surprise—I knew he was coming since he’d called and said so. I was almost not home, but he claimed he wanted to bring the kids some birthday presents, since he’d missed so many of those events. I should have told him to ship them. What was a surprise was his calling in the first place. I have done everything I can to stay off his radar. Our father isn’t a nice man and I don’t want my family mixed up in the things he does. I thought I had made that clear to him. This was the one time I had a moment of weakness over the possibility that Dad might have a paternal bone in his body—I’m an idiot to have imagined he’d be less of a son of a bitch after all this time. Now Soraia and the rest of us are paying for my bad judgment.”
She didn’t sound bitter; it was just a statement. Sam was the most collected, calm woman I’d ever met who wasn’t some sort of gruesome magic user. It was strange, especially when coupled with her painful gait.
“The leg made me think he’d lost his edge and might be feeling his mortality a bit,” she continued, “wanting to mend some fences now that he was disabled.”
Quinton rolled his eyes. “Playing it up, was he? Leave it to our father to pull the sympathy card for knee surgery.”
Samantha frowned and blinked at Quinton, confused. “I’m not sure what you mean. His left leg is missing from the knee down. He had a temporary prosthesis that didn’t fit very well, so his limp was quite pronounced. Worse than mine.”
Quinton was startled and stared at her, shaking his head. “No. . . . He was fine when I saw him last. The knee surgery was ten months ago and he was a model patient. He needed a cane to steady his stride on that side, but he was otherwise perfect. What happened to his leg?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. He didn’t offer much of an explanation—just said he’d had an injury in the field. He acted as if it were nothing and just went on with the rest of what he’d come to say.”
Quinton couldn’t seem to get a grip on the idea of his father’s missing leg. “You’re sure it was a prosthetic? He wasn’t just limping from some other problem with the knee?”
Sam rolled her eyes and gave him an exasperated look. “I did actually finish my medical degree, Jay. I know a cheap prosthetic when I see one.”
“I just don’t get it. . . . It was fine when I saw him last.”
“When was that?” I asked.
He bit his lip and frowned at the floor, thinking. “Must be four or five months ago, about the time he was in Turkey. I lost track of him there, but I was able to stay on top of his assistants and follow his trail.”
“Maybe it was a false trail,” I suggested. “He may have known you—or someone else—was watching him and created another series of events to follow while he did something that redamaged the leg.”
“It’s possible. . . . I just . . . What did he do?”
I shrugged and Samantha mirrored me. “You said he’d had surgery on his knee,” Sam started. “Dozens of things can happen to a knee if the patient isn’t careful with it early on. And our father is certainly the sort of man who plunges into things without too much worry about the potential damage.”
Quinton was disturbed. “I suppose. I’m still a bit thrown by it, though. I have a bad feeling. . . .”
I’d had a bad feeling about James Purlis for a long time and this was only increasing my alarm with the situation. “This particular line of inquiry isn’t helping us find Soraia,” I said. “While it may be relevant—your father rarely does anything that’s not part of a larger plan—we can’t get any closer to him with only this information. We need something else.” My words sparked an idea in my head. “Did he leave anything? You said he brought presents for the kids. There could be a clue there.”
Sam handed Martim to Quinton and got clumsily to her feet again. “I’ll get them. I thought it wasn’t appropriate to let the children open them without their father around, since we weren’t near either of their birthdays and it’s still three months to Christmas. Dad didn’t seem to like that, but I didn’t give him a choice about it. By that time I was starting to be very uncomfortable with his presence—and that of his friends. I asked him to leave a few minutes later and then I took Soraia to school. . . .” Her eyes reddened as she said it, getting misty with tears, but she sniffed, rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand, and turned to fetch the packages. “This will only take a minute. . . .”
The ghosts seemed to swirl around her as she left the room as if they all felt her passage and turned to look. It was an odd reaction, especially since she was oblivious to them and they didn’t actually turn toward her. She had some kind of weight in the Grey that was unusual.
I glanced at Quinton and found him watching me. “What do you think?”
“I think your sister is the calmest woman I’ve ever met. I’d be throwing a screaming fit if someone had kidnapped my daughter.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You would be thinking about how to hunt them down and kill them.”
“Like you are?” I asked, but I had to concede that point. “All right. I probably would.”
“Are you thinking that things didn’t go as she says?”
“No. I think they went exactly as she described them. I’m just surprised to see her so collected. It’s been three—or is it four days—and she apparently hasn’t heard any more about her missing daughter, but she’s sitting here, talking calmly to us about it.”
“That’s just how Sam is. She took care of our grandparents—Mom’s folks—when they were . . . declining. And she finished her medical degree at the same time. Sam is what the English would call ‘a brick.’ She’s totally unflappable.”
“And what happened to her legs?” I asked, uncomfortable but unwilling to let it slide.
“She was in a bus accident when we were kids. Crushed her legs, did a bunch of damage to her spine, but she survived and the damage was rehabilitated up to a point. It just didn’t come back quite as well as everyone hoped. Sam got to a stage of exasperation where she called a halt to the surgeries and experiments and said she’d just live with it. And she does, but that’s partially a credit to our grandparents for supporting her and looking after her when our mom and dad weren’t able to. That’s why she spent so much time taking care of them, later—it was like . . . coming full circle.”
“I still don’t understand what happened to your mother. She’s still alive, isn’t she?”
“She is, but—”
Quinton cut himself off when Sam came back into the room with an armload of wrapped boxes. “Good God, it is Christmas!” he said.
“Three for each of them—two Christmas and one birthday,” Sam said. “You can tell by the wrapping.”
“I think we’d better unwrap them and see what Dad left.”
“Agreed,” said Sam, putting the gifts down on the slab of unstained wood that served as a coffee table. “I’ll put them back together later if they prove to be genuine presents and not something . . . else.”
With three of us, it took less than two minutes to open all the packages. The gifts for Martim were generic baby things—a stuffed animal we decided was a platypus, a clattering box with doors that opened and closed to reveal various bells and rattles, and a package of baby-sized T-shirts—but Soraia’s gifts were a bit creepy. There was a very old china-headed doll whose face bore a watchful expression, a large smoky quartz crystal run through with black shards that hung from an ornate silver cap and chain, and a small flute-like instrument made of a smooth white material with an air hole on the top that looked like someone had taken a bite of it.
Quinton had unwrapped that one and he started to hand it to me. I leaned away from it as the jagged, black-and-white energy that writhed around it surged toward me. “No. I don’t want to touch that with my bare hands. Not until I can get Carlos to take a look at it.”