Chapter 38
CHAPTER 38
LUKE AND NICK made the drive back to the house without further incident. The place was still lit up like a nightclub by emergency service vehicles, blue and red lights flashing everywhere, so Nick parked at the far end of the driveway.
“You okay, buddy?” Nick asked when Luke didn’t move.
“Yeah. Just thinking.”
Which was always dangerous. Luke got out of the car and shuffled towards the house, thankful that Tia had gone to bed. He wanted to tell her they’d caught the kidnapper, but at the same time, he didn’t know how to explain that Simon Howard appeared to be a relative. They’d gone through their whole lives believing it was just the two of them and their mother. The news he had a half-brother was still sinking in, not to mention the shock of Howard being a criminal. How would Tia take it?
Perhaps Ash could help him break the news? Luke was still cross at her for lying, but that anger had been tempered when she came through on the kidnapping problem. Without her, he’d most likely be lying in a shallow grave, and even if he’d survived, he wouldn’t have known where to go for help. He’d always be grateful to her for getting her friends involved, doubly so for the way she’d selflessly exchanged herself for the police officer at gunpoint.
Her hysterical reaction afterwards still baffled him, though.
And where was Ash, anyway? She and Dan weren’t among those gathered outside. Come to think of it, their car wasn’t even in the driveway. Nick had stopped to talk to the police who’d stayed to ensure Tia’s safety while the whole mess unravelled, and Luke wandered in that direction.
“Has anyone seen Ash? I’m surprised she’s not back by now.”
Especially with the way she’d smoked the tyres when she left ahead of them. Could she have crashed?
Nick excused himself from the group and led Luke out of earshot. “The thing is, she’s not coming back.”
“What do you mean? Tonight? She’s not coming back tonight? Have you got her number? I could meet her somewhere tomorrow.”
“Sorry, buddy.” Nick shook his head. “She’s not coming back at all. She’s on her way home.”
“To America?”
“Yeah. She thought it would be better that way, what with not being your favourite person right now.”
Luke tore a hand through his hair as Nick’s words sank in. “I need to talk to her. Surely if she left at the same time as us, she’ll still be on her way to the airport? I’ll go after her. Is she flying out of Heathrow?”
Nick looked at his watch. “No, out of Northolt, and she’s already taken off.”
Since when did commercial airlines fly out of Northolt? It had been over a year since Luke last chartered a jet from there, so maybe things had changed?
Movement by the front door caught his eye, and an awful evening became even worse. Why wasn’t Tia in bed? Her eyes settled on him, and she veered in his direction.
Now he’d have to break the news about Simon, Ash, and everything else himself. Tia would be devastated Ash had left. They’d grown so close in the time she’d been with them, and of course, she didn’t yet know about Ash’s deception.
He walked over to her, slowly, as if by dragging his feet he could somehow put off that talk forever. Tia looked so young and vulnerable at that moment, lit up by the security lights on the outside of the house, her face pale and her frame gaunt. The ordeal of the past few days showed in the way she carried herself.
Luke put his arm around her, but she shook it off. Seemed that having a big brother who cared was still totally uncool. Instead, he put his hand on her back and gently steered her inside. People milled around all over the place downstairs, talking into phones and writing notes, and he didn’t want to have this conversation with an audience.
A policewoman started towards them and he waved her off, bypassing the rest of the crowd. They could wait. He led Tia back up to her room where she sat at the top of the bed, hugging a pillow to her chest. Luke perched on the edge, facing her. For a few minutes, they just stared at each other. Luke didn’t know what to say, and it seemed Tia was in the same boat.
Finally, Luke broke the silence. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened? Can you talk about it?”
He wasn’t sure whether Tia would tell him all the details, or even if he wanted her to, but the masochist in him couldn’t stand being kept in the dark.
“I want to tell you, but I’m not sure I remember everything right. It’s hazy.”
He reached over and squeezed her hand. “It doesn’t matter if you forget things.” It might be better that way. “Just tell me what you can.”
“I was walking home from Arabella’s. I remember seeing a van up ahead, and I was going to cross the road to avoid it. But then you got out the driver’s door. What were you doing in a van?”
“It wasn’t me. The man who took you, we look alike.”
Tia shuddered. “Creepy.”
“What did he do?”
“I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in a bathroom. I was on my own, but my wrist was chained to the radiator. The taps didn’t work, and I had to drink funny tasting water out of a bottle. I think he put something in it. I didn’t want to drink it, but there was nothing else.”
Tia paused, and a tear rolled down her cheek. Luke reached out and wiped it away with his sleeve as thoughts of murder ran through his mind.
“I needed to use the toilet, but it didn’t flush.” She screwed up her face at the memory. “The smell was disgusting. I thought I’d been abandoned. One night, I dreamed you came through the door, but then you left. You didn’t leave, did you?”
Tia dissolved in tears, and Luke struggled to keep his own eyes dry.
“It wasn’t me. I swear, it wasn’t me.”
Should he hug her? Or leave her to calm down? This was why he needed Ash—she’d know what to do. In the end, he opted for the middle ground and stayed on the bed while Tia continued.
“The room didn’t have any windows, so I didn’t know if it was day or night. My thoughts were all jumbled. Maybe that’s what they mean when they say someone’s lost their mind?”
“You hadn’t lost your mind. That situation would make anybody think odd thoughts.”
“Nothing made sense. But then I remembered Ash reading me a poem once. She made me a copy. It started ‘If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs…’ And that was funny, because it wasn’t those all around me who’d lost their heads; it was me. I’d lost my head. But I kept repeating the poem over and over, to have something in my head that wasn’t fog. But I couldn’t remember one part, and that annoyed me more than anything.”
“What part couldn’t you remember?” Luke asked. He’d look it up.
“‘If you can make a heap of all your winnings; and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss; and lose, and start again at your beginnings…’ I just can’t remember the line that comes next.”
“‘And never breathe a word about your loss,’” Dan completed softly from the doorway.
“You know it, too?”
“It’s ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling. Ash has a copy of the poem hanging on her office wall back in Virginia. I’ve read those lines many times when I’ve been sitting in there.”
“She said it was special to her, that when she was my age and struggling with how she should live her life, someone read it to her like she did to me.”
“She told me that tale too.”
Dan might have smiled on the surface, but her eyes told a different story as they fixed on the far wall. Haunted. She looked haunted.
“It helped so much,” Tia said. “I’d have gone mad in that room otherwise.”
“She’ll be very glad to hear it offered some comfort.”
“She saved me again. That’s three times now. Once when I fell off my horse, once with the poem, and then when she got me out of that room. It was her, wasn’t it? Or did I imagine her like I imagined Luke?”
“It was her,” Dan confirmed. “She put all the pieces together and realised who’d taken you.”
Really? Luke knew Ash had been there at the end, but he hadn’t realised she’d been so hands-on in the search. What exactly had her role in all this been?
“I thought I was dreaming when she opened the bathroom door,” Tia said. “She wrinkled her nose and said, ‘He’s been making you eat Pop-Tarts? What kind of sick animal would do that?’ I’d been stuck in that filthy room for days, and she still managed to make me laugh. Then she got the chain off my wrist and carried me out of the house.”
Luke wasn’t sure laughter was appropriate. Ash sure found humour in strange places. Although when Tia asked her next question, he almost let out a nervous giggle himself.
“Where is Ash, anyway?”
So, this was how a deer in headlights felt. Ready to get flattened and unable to do anything about it.
“She needed to leave, honey,” Dan said.
“Leave? Why would she leave? She lives here. Where else would she go?”
“Ash wasn’t totally truthful with us about who she was and why she came here,” Luke said. “It was for the best that she went back to her real home.”
Wherever that was. Luke realised he didn’t have a clue. Virginia was a big place.
“But this is her real home now. She was happy. We were all happy. You have to make her come back!”
Now what? Luke didn’t know what to do, other than somehow get Ash to return. And that was impossible, because according to Nick, she was over the Atlantic right now.
“Ash had a few problems in her life, sweetie.” Dan stepped in once again. “Just before she came to England some awful things happened, and she needed to get away for a while. But the time’s come when she needs to face up to those things rather than keep running from them, and that’s what she’s gone to do.”
“Will she ever come back?” Tia asked, tears flooding down her cheeks.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t. She told me to tell you that she’d miss you, though.” Dan looked at Luke. “Both of you.”
Luke couldn’t meet her gaze, and at that moment, he understood just what he’d lost. He’d never truly known Ash—the quiet woman with what in hindsight was an underlying sadness about her despite her efforts to put on a mask for the world.Yes, she’d lied, but she’d never set out to hurt him, and she’d come through for them both when it really mattered.
“Are you going to see her?” Tia asked Dan.
“Yes, in a day or two. I can give her a message if you like?”
“What am I supposed to say to her?” Tia rolled over and faced the wall. “I can’t believe she left.”
Dan’s phone trilled, and she looked at the screen. “I have to take this. I’ll be downstairs if you need me.”
Luke slid to the floor and leaned back against the bed. In less than a week, his life had fallen apart. His sister wasn’t the only one broken inside.Hurt battled with confusion, a rivalry that left him drained. As well as being cut up about Ash, his view of the world had changed.
He’d once been convinced that violence never fixed anything, that right and wrong were black and white. But when Tia had been rescued, Luke suspected the methods used slipped into shades of grey. Once, he’d have had a problem with that, but now? His only regret was that Ash had inflicted the damage on Howard instead of Luke doing it himself.
He thought of his own online exploits. He’d never minded skirting the boundaries of legality with hacking by telling himself the only people he hurt were up to no good. Was what Ash did to Simon Howard any different? He couldn’t deny the satisfaction he’d felt when he saw the man holding his nuts.
No, Luke wanted to throw the man under a train for what he’d done to his family. What would have happened if Howard hadn’t come on the scene? Would Ash have stayed? He’d never know.
“I miss her,” Tia sobbed from behind him.
Luke reached up and squeezed her hand. “I miss her too.”
The question was what, if anything, could he do about it?