Part 10 (1/2)

My phone rang when I was halfway back to the Vespa, which I'd chained to a streetlamp on Reservoir Road. Caller ID flashed TOMMY, along with a photo I loved of my half brother standing outside a clinic in a remote mountain village in Honduras where he'd worked on a medical mission during a gap year between college and medical school. His arm was draped around a sweet-faced young girl whose arms ended as two tapered stubs below her elbows. Both of them were grinning like a couple of fools without a care in the world.

Tommy and I were fifteen years apart-I was fourteen when my mother married Harry-but we were close and I adored him, just like I adored Harry. I knew the feeling was mutual, but there was also a special bond between us because Tommy realized, just as I knew Harry did, that deep down inside our mother wished I could be airbrushed out of the family photos and that I'd never been born.

Of course she would never admit it, but there were times when I'd caught her looking at me when she thought I didn't see, and I knew she blamed me for s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her life. Her dark-haired, olive-skinned daughter standing next to Tommy and my half sister, Lexie, both of them blue eyed and golden haired, as wholesome and all-American perfect as apple pie. I was the unhappy reminder of her affair with a Spanish soccer player during a study-abroad year in college, a misbegotten marriage, and a dozen hardscrabble years as a single mother after we left Antonio Medina, my father, and moved home from Madrid.

For years I wanted to believe that this broke my father's heart, that he loved me, even if my mother did not. When I was old enough, I tracked down every poster and photo of him playing for Real Madrid without telling my mother, poring over every detail of his life I could find. The first time I saw his picture, dark and n.o.ble looking and dangerously handsome, was like looking into a mirror, and I thought, I am Antonio Medina's daughter. For a while I kept a small backpack under my bed, ready to leave the instant he showed up to sweep me into his arms and take me with him back to Spain, a land of heat and light and fiery pa.s.sion in my young mind. Then one day right before we left New York to move to Virginia so my mother could marry Harrison Wyatt, she told me in a tight-lipped voice that a friend who kept in touch with Antonio said he'd been killed in a motorcycle accident near Seville. I unpacked the backpack and, just in time, Harry came into my life, and his unstinting love filled the empty s.p.a.ce in my heart.

Tommy and I talked regularly on the phone and tried to meet for dinner once every few weeks. But since Christmas he had been working part-time at the free clinic in Adams Morgan in addition to taking cla.s.ses as a first-year med student at Georgetown, and the dinners became sporadic.

”Hey you,” I said. ”What's going on? I've missed you.”

”I've missed you, too. Same old same old. Work, school, sleep. Unfortunately not much sleep. Any chance you're free for dinner?”

My brother's schedule is more tightly programmed than most military campaigns. If he was free all of a sudden either something fell through . . . or something important had come up.

”You mean tonight?”

I heard a stifled yawn. ”Yeah, tonight.”

”Sure. Is everything all right? You sound beat. Want me to make a reservation somewhere?”

”I thought we could eat at my place,” he said. ”It's five thirty now, so how about seven o'clock?”

I knew what was in Tommy's pantry: ramen noodles, boxes of mac 'n' cheese, a jar of peanut b.u.t.ter, and probably a big bag of Doritos. His refrigerator wasn't much better.

”Shall I cook?”

”I've got chili.”

”That you made?”

”Is that a dig about my cooking?” He managed to sound indignant, but before I could reply, he said, ”Relax. It's homemade. Not by me. And before you ask, she's just a friend.”

”You know I never pry. A friend who makes good chili?”

”Actually, she makes amazing chili. You don't pry, but you do what you're doing now, ask an innocent question and then another and another until eventually you find out who I'm seeing. Then Nick probably runs her through the Agency database to make sure she's not on some terrorist watch list or wanted in three states.” Another yawn. ”Hey, Soph, I'm still at the clinic, trying to get out of here. See you at seven, okay?”

Tommy hung up before I could say, ”Sure, fine.”

I know my brother. Something had happened and he didn't want to talk about it over the phone. Whatever it was, he was saving it to tell me over a bowl of amazing chili.

And that worried me.

I stopped by Safeway on my way home to pick up a six-pack to bring to dinner. Halfway home my phone rang, and it was Thea. I told her about finding the book and what Bram had said about it. The silence on her end went on so long I checked my phone for a dropped call.

”I would absolutely love to see those prints,” she said finally. ”Something that unique comes along once in a lifetime. If William Coles was considering publis.h.i.+ng a second edition of Adam in Eden that included those drawings, either he never got around to it before he died or perhaps everything was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Thousands of books were lost when London burned, so it wouldn't surprise me if either the original plates for those prints never survived or all copies of the second edition-if there was one-were destroyed.”

I could have told Thea I had photographed each of the prints and could send her an e-mail link to a photo gallery once I downloaded them, or mentioned the Fairbairn letter, but something stopped me. They say three can keep a secret if two are dead. Max a.s.sured me Thea could be trusted, but the matter of who owned the book still bothered me. The subject of Edward Jaine being Kevin's patron had never come up between Thea and me, so she probably wasn't aware that it could be a contentious issue.

”Bram's keeping the book in the vault at Asquith's until the new owner claims it,” I said. ”So at least we know it's safe.”

”Well, obviously the Franciscans own it now, don't they? Anyway, Kevin's parents are dead, though I believe he has a brother and a sister living in Jersey. Once the formalities of his estate are sorted out, perhaps we can discuss the possibility of them loaning it to the library to put on display.”

”That sounds like a good idea.”

After she hung up, I thought about Jack's remark last night about the dangers of the slippery slope. Once you start down, you really can't turn back.

Tommy lived in the Ontario, an elegant Beaux Arts apartment complex situated on a couple of acres on a hilltop in Lanier Heights in Adams Morgan. When the Ontario was built for wealthy Was.h.i.+ngtonians in the early 1900s, its selling point was the height of its location, guaranteeing pure air that was free from malaria. How times have changed. Now you hope the neighborhood's safe enough for you to walk from your car to your front door after dark without getting mugged.

Tommy's apartment was one of the larger ones on the fourth floor. When I knocked on the door, he yelled, ”It's open.”

He was in the galley kitchen, barefoot and in jeans and a gray Georgetown T-s.h.i.+rt, his straight blond hair still damp from a shower, standing at the stove stirring chili in a flame-colored pot with a book propped next to him.

”Is that a cookbook?” I asked, and pulled the six-pack out of a canvas bag.

”Principles of Biochemistry.” The kiss that was probably meant for my cheek landed on my ear. ”Is that beer cold?”

”Of course.” I gave him a quick hug around the waist. ”The chili smells terrific. What can I do?”

”Open us some beers, if you don't mind.” He pointed to the window and what looked like a small bra.s.s head of a wolf with its mouth open wide in a scream screwed to the frame. ”Use the gargoyle. It's a bottle opener.”

”It even has its own dedicated trash can, I see.” He grinned as I opened two beers and handed one to him. ”What else?”

”There's corn bread in the microwave,” he said. ”Can you put it on a plate?”

Before Tommy moved in, my mother had furnished the apartment-which Harry owned-in her idea of the perfect bachelor pad. To me it had looked like there ought to be DO NOT TOUCH or DON'T SIT ON THIS CHAIR signs on every surface until Tommy's weights and his unfolded laundry and his piles of books and papers slowly littered the rooms and the place finally seemed more like a home than a decorator showroom. Somehow I figured Mom hadn't seen the gargoyle beer bottle opener.

We ate in the dining room after I cleared the table of his papers and books.

”The chili's great,” I said. ”And when are you going to tell me what's going on?”

He pa.s.sed me the plate of corn bread and said, ”It's Chappy.”

At least he didn't beat around the bush. My chest tightened, and I set the plate down hard on the table. Chappy was the name I'd given Charles Lord, our grandfather, the first time I met him when I was two years old and he told me that Charles was happy to meet Sophie. I'd melded the words together and he became Chappy. One of the early postWorld War II photographers who worked for Magnum, the iconic photo agency, he had been hired by no less than the legendary Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Before my mother married Harry, she had sent me to Connecticut to spend summers with my grandfather since she couldn't afford day care when school was out. Those summers gave me some of my happiest and most carefree memories. Chappy had treated me as an a.s.sistant, not a child, letting me help him in his darkroom and experiment with developing my own film. When I was twelve, he gave me my first camera and taught me how to shoot. My grandfather was the reason I was a photographer today.

”Is he all right?” I asked my brother. ”How come n.o.body told me anything before now?”

”Relax, Soph. Chap's okay.” Tommy put down his spoon. He knew I was mad. By ”n.o.body,” he knew I meant our mother, who had put him up to pa.s.sing on this news. ”I mean, he's not in the hospital so it's nothing serious.”

”Then what is it?”

”A neighbor found him wandering around Topstone Park in the middle of the day dressed in his pajamas and carrying his old Leica.”

”Topstone Park used to be Edward Steichen's home. When Steichen was alive, he and Chappy were good friends. He knows that place like he knows his own backyard.”

”Well, Chap, uh, seemed to think he and Steichen were going shooting together, that they had some kind of date.”