Chapter 11
11
“Now, look at this...” Lawrence said with a raised brow as he let Celeste in. “And with a go bag. Where do you think you’re headed, little lady?”
Celeste hugged his neck as she stepped inside. “I’m here to check in on you and investigate the Doris mystery. Unless...you have answers you’re not telling us?”
The old man rubbed her back. “I told you. I only know as much as you kids.”
She hitched her backpack on her shoulder while tossing her go bag at the stairwell. “Magnus is stopping by, too.”
Lawrence’s eyes widened. “Well, maybe I should go ahead and put the tea on.”
“Hold off on that. I’ll pour myself some whiskey instead.”
“Back to the library, then.”
They went back to the library, where Celeste served herself while Lawrence sat himself in a comfy chair. “So how have you been holding up?”
Celeste took her first sip, let it burn a fiery path down her throat before shrugging. “I’m all right.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
She didn’t want to talk about Doris being dead, not when she was so full of life. “Tell me about how you met.”
He ran his hand over the tight springy curls of his hair and rolled his eyes to the ceiling.
“I met her in 1977. I was fresh from the South. Didn’t know what the hell I was doing up here. I was young, gay and running around like I was gonna live forever. If you can believe it, I met Doris at Studio 54.”
She grinned as she took another sip. “Nuh-uh.”
“Yes, ma’am. I had made some friends who lived five to an apartment in the East Village. Billy was a go-go dancer who had an invite and he let me tag along. They were hell-bent on me shedding this country shell. I was a little scared at first, but when we got there, I shed Menifee, Arkansas, all right...” He trailed off with a sad chuckle. “Boy, I was finally at home. I met her at the bar. She was surveying the scene all catlike and mysterious. It didn’t take long before I found myself talking to her. We talked about the South, the arts, the state of Black folks back then. She was my best friend. The light of my life. I was charmed by her.”
“She has a way of doing that,” Celeste said, resting her head against the back of her chair.
“Doing what?”
She shrugged. “Pulling you in like a flame pulls a moth. She’s really the light.”
Lawrence fixed his jaw and pursed his lips before replying carefully, “Doris found people when they needed her. She helped. But not without a price.”
Celeste peered at the old man with curiosity. “What do you mean?”
The doorbell interrupted them. “That must be our friend Magnus,” he said, pulling himself from his chair. “Save him some whiskey, won’t you?”
She placed her glass on a nearby table and frowned as Lawrence left the room. What did he mean by that? He made Doris sound like a spider trapping him in her web. Had he not benefited from her teachings like the rest of them? When Celeste had no one else in her corner, she had Dr. Grant. It didn’t sound like Lawrence to be this critical. And so soon after her death.
She heard masculine voices echoing from the entrance, filtering toward the library. Magnus’s laughter and Lawrence chiding him. Had she time, she would have talked to Lawrence about the Ball and Chain debacle from earlier in the day. To Celeste, they couldn’t have had better conditions: a busy store, a screaming child and a distracted saleswoman. And above all, they worked well together...for a moment, at least. They riffed with each other with an ease that Celeste hadn’t expected.
She’d had fun with Magnus until he went off in his own direction.
Celeste had almost pinned him down in the cab ride back to the store. He was very close to admitting that he might not know what he’s doing at every twist and turn. But he said he could be different. Against her better judgment, she’d have to trust him.
Speaking of the Nordic devil... He appeared around the corner, dressed in a pair of gray tweed slacks and a black polo shirt. His hair hadn’t moved from its stiff blond coif from that afternoon. “Hello again, Celeste.”
“Magnus,” she replied with a nod.
“I’m gonna leave you kids to the mystery,” Lawrence said, checking his watch. “I’ve got a show and dinner with a friend. I’ll be out fairly late.”
They both gasped in half-shock and half-teasing. “You’ve got a date?” Magnus asked.
“Who’s this friend?” Celeste pressed.
Lawrence gave them a dismissive wave. “Contrary to what you might think, I got a life outside of this big old house.”
Magnus leaned against the door frame with crossed arms. A grin stretched over his handsome face. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Celeste let out an unladylike snort.
“Y’all help yourself to the kitchen,” Lawrence said, patting Magnus on the back. “Spare rooms are already made up. Don’t wait up.”
“You’re not leaving money for pizza?” Celeste protested.
“Good night!” the old man said over his shoulder. “And behave yourselves.”
“Scout’s honor,” Magnus said, staring at her. His eyes twinkled with mirth from across the room. They sent a prick of awareness through her body that made her sit up straighter. Like she needed to be on guard. He pushed himself farther into the room and took Lawrence’s seat. He seemed to carry himself with the confidence he didn’t have earlier.
“You want anything to drink?” she asked politely.
He shook his head. “Better not,” he said. “Don’t let me stop you, though.”
“You’re not.”
“Are you ready to figure out this riddle?”
She scrunched her face as she got up and took her backpack to the desk. “I hate riddles. And Doris knew that. I don’t know why she couldn’t just tell us where to go and what to find.” She rifled through the box that Lawrence had presented to them and found the letter.
“Have you ever known her to say what was on her mind?” Magnus asked, crossing his legs. “She lived her entire life like a riddle. Why would things be different now?”
She was getting the sneaking suspicion that everyone knew something about Doris that she didn’t. First Lawrence, and his offhanded comment, and now Magnus was calling her secretive. What was wrong with a woman who liked to keep secrets? Not every little thought or feeling needed to be shouted from the rooftops. “Do you need to hear the clue again?”
“Lemme get my pen,” he said, reaching for his go bag. When he pulled out a legal pad and pen, she chuckled. “What?”
“You didn’t bring a laptop?”
Magnus flipped to a free page in his notepad. “Don’t need one.”
“Fair enough. ‘Peter promised her home but when he died, she couldn’t imagine a hearth without him. Not even the god of the seas could lure her back to the flowers and fountains. That kind of love is nestled deep, but it’s also quite fragile. If ever you were to take hold of it, be gentle lest you crack its surface. But go with a bold voice. Sing a joyous song that’s loud enough to drive the bear back to his iron cave.’” She sat down at the desk and looked up from the paper she had just read from. “Anything?”
Magnus gazed thoughtfully into the distance with the tip of his pen on his bottom lip. He looked very scholarly...and quite attractive. “Give me a minute.”
Celeste had to shake her head from the image of him in a classroom setting, leisurely pacing throughout the aisles and lecturing his students. For some reason, that did it for her, and she needed to shut that shit down to think about more important things.
“Well, it’s got to be Russia,” she said after about fifteen minutes of silence. The library was totally quiet save her typing and his scratchy note-taking. Even the suddenness of her voice startled her.
Magnus’s head snapped up. “Yeah...but probably not.” He flipped through his notes and read them aloud. “While it’s likely she’s talking about Peter the Great, his building a home for Catherine isn’t exactly news. I wonder if she’s referring to an egg when she says ‘nestled deep’ and ‘fragile’... Possibly a Fabergé egg? And of course, there’s the bear in the iron cave.”
“All of which sounds like Russia to me,” Celeste said, finishing her whiskey. She decided against pouring another. She was feeling loose as it was. If she was going to be alone with Magnus, she needed to keep her head on a swivel. The more time she spent with him, the more she began to doubt her own firm stance of never touching him again.
Pretending to be a man’s fiancée did things to a woman’s stomach. Even after she returned to her store, she couldn’t stop the butterflies from going wild. They were fluttering dangerously close to her nether regions despite her annoyance with him. He had kissed her a couple times that day, and it was difficult to shut those memories off when they shared a stuffy little library in a house where they were impossibly alone.
“Unless...” Magnus murmured, tapping his pen to his lip. “I stand corrected. I do need a computer.” He stood up and crossed the room in several long strides. “Can you pull up a map of the countries surrounding Russia?”
Before she could answer, he was standing over her with one hand beside her laptop and the other resting on the back of her chair. Boxing her in a warm, albeit hands-off embrace. He didn’t need to touch her for Celeste to feel her chest tighten and her thighs clench. As steady as she could, she brought up a world map and zoomed in on Eastern Europe.
“Mongolia, Finland, China, Latvia...”
“It’s a lot,” Celeste finished. “Fourteen nations, including the former Soviet Union countries.”
His heavy sigh blew warm breath against her ear and sent a shiver down her neck. “Right, never mind.” Magnus read the letter next to her once again, under his breath while she fought the urge to rest the back of her head against his chest. “‘Sing a joyous song that’s loud enough to drive the bear back to his iron cave.’ That part. That’s why I don’t think she’s sending us to Russia.”
“Well, I sure as hell don’t want to be in Moscow right now. Or St. Petersburg, for that matter. Remember the job we pulled in Kazan?”
Magnus chuckled. “In February...it was hell.”
“Poor Santi got his snowmobile stuck in a drift.”
“Lawrence didn’t say much but that was how you could tell he was pissed.”
Celeste laughed with him. “The quieter Lawrence gets, take a couple steps back.”
“Kazan was exhilarating, though...” Magnus murmured.
He was right. Despite the oppressive weather and a watchful regime, she felt so alive while stealing beside him. Occasionally, Doris gave them charitable jobs to complete. A Ukrainian collector led them to Kazan for what amounted to a rescue mission for his family’s long-lost Taras Shevchenko painting. The planning took a couple months, but it went off without too many hitches.
The first thing Celeste remembered was the cold, but then her thoughts quickly went to the part where Magnus heated her up. Outside, in the alleyway of a bar, he took her by the hips and pushed her against the wall. He kissed her deeply, high on celebration and adrenaline. She’d stared into his dark, dilated blue eyes long enough to lose herself. Of all the memories from that job, how on Earth did she get there?
“Joyous song...” she muttered. “What joyous song?”
“How do you sing Russia back to their side of the border?” Magnus asked.
Celeste shrugged. “I have no idea.”
“Just google singing and collapse of the Soviet Union?”
She turned in her seat to look at him. “What?”
Magnus was right in her face. Just an inch or so away. “Just try.”
Celeste quickly turned around to escape his mouth. “Fine.” She typed his keywords and they both glanced through the results.
“There.” He jabbed at her screen. “Click that.”
She clicked the article about Estonia’s thirty-year anniversary of the Singing Revolution. As she scanned the article, everything fell into place. Good Lord, he was right. The home that Peter built for Catherine was in Estonia’s capital, Tallinn. Those same people took to the outdoor amphitheater and literally sang the Russians out of the Baltic region. “Fuck,” she whispered.
Magnus straightened away and gave a single loud clap. “Fuck yeah!”
“That’s it, isn’t it?” she said excitedly. “We’re going to Tallinn?”
“I think so?” he said, planting his fists on his hips. “I mean, I can’t think of another place where the people sang the bear back in the cave. Peter built the palace, Kadriorg? It was for her. I’m pretty sure it was some kind of vacation home. If I remember correctly, she didn’t want to stay there after his death, and it went into disrepair.”
“No, it sounds about right,” Celeste said, standing from the desk. “I think we figured it out!”
Without thinking they embraced.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed him tight. With the excitement of their discovery very much in the front of her mind, she neglected to think about the implications of such a familiar hug. It didn’t occur to her until they lingered, interlocked, for a moment longer than they should have. Magnus released her first. She stumbled back a few steps, feeling embarrassed by the brief show of emotion.
“We did it,” Magnus breathed, running his hands through his hair, leaving it less coiffed. “Have you ever been to Tallinn?”
She shook her head, returning to her laptop. “No, I haven’t. I don’t know shit about Estonia,” she chuckled.
“I can’t wait to show you the Old Town,” he said, sitting on the edge of the desk. “It’s really nice...and old.”
She glanced at him as she sent an encrypted message to Santiago, Beatrice and Lawrence. We’re going to Estonia, get prepped . “Similar to Old Town in Stockholm?”
“Yes, but Tallinn is better,” he admitted. “My parents took me on the ferry between Estonia and Finland and I remember having a really nice time.”
His broad smile lit up the dim library in a way Celeste hadn’t seen in years. He looked genuinely happy when he spoke of his parents. When they’d had a more intimate relationship, Magnus rarely spoke of them, and she had never pushed him. “I look forward to it,” she said.
“Tallinn?”
Celeste grinned. “The hunt.”
This made him laugh. She felt surprisingly relieved to hear the sound he made when he let his guard down. It loosened something up in her chest, too. “Well, I’m going to find a room and get settled in for the night.” He paused to rub the back of his neck. “Do you know where you’re going to sleep?”
“I do,” she said. She sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him.
Magnus rolled his eyes as he took up his notepad and walked away. “All right, CeCe...”