Chapter 22
She’d shocked him, she could see that. But as she laid out her evidence, she realized how thin it sounded.
The signature in the cabbie’s autograph book reminded her of Ella’s, lines long and spiky—but Ella and her brother could well have had the same teacher in elementary school, which was how she and Peter ended up with such similar handwriting.
Draden had behaved quite differently today than he had in their earlier chance meeting—but men did that when they were sober instead of sloshed.
He was sick before and well today—but people routinely recovered from illnesses.
He’d blurted out “my regards,” exactly what Ella had joked that men in Washington reflexively said (usually while having none for the person they were saying it to)—but then, Draden was a man in Washington.
She didn’t offer up the counter-arguments as they came to mind. Instead, she trailed off, her second guesses overcoming her, as Peter slumped onto their bed with a groan.
“Just to be clear,” he said, “you’re suggesting she—what, killed her brother and took his place?”
She hesitated. Then she lay beside him, shaking her head. “What I’m saying doesn’t prove it, I know that. And it sounds crazy to boot.”
“Well, she walked in here looking so much like you that she fooled me. I don’t think we can afford to dismiss the idea outright. Let’s think this through: Could she trick her father? Could she sound like her brother, first off? I realize he doesn’t have a deep voice, but …” He shrugged.
“I—I think she could. She’s good at imitating voices. And she can play a wizard quite convincingly.”
“How would you know—oh.”
She looked away. “I’m sorry about Plan B,” she whispered. “Desperately sorry.”
He put an arm around her. “If we’re on the topic of things we’re desperately sorry about …”
With a sigh, she said, “Here’s the thing: There’s surely a great deal of difference between what she already did, fooling strangers for brief periods and you for—how long, ten minutes?—vs. an ongoing con on her own father.”
He gave a thoughtful frown. “She didn’t have to trick me for very long, that’s true—she drugged me as soon as I sat down at the kitchen table with her.
And before it took hold, the hangover I had surely helped her.
But Frederick Draden doesn’t seem to have spent much time with his father in recent years.
If Miss Draden doesn’t quite nail the voice or the eye color or other small details, would he really notice? ”
Beatrix shivered as she considered the implications. “There’s just one reason I can think of to explain why she would willingly move back in with her father.”
“Vice presidents are very well guarded, even in their own homes. I don’t think she could easily attack him.”
“No, not that.” She swallowed, throat raw. “She wants another crack at the weapon.”
A few seconds of suffocating silence followed.
“Peter—could she succeed?”
“No,” he said, a shade too quickly. “I mean—OK, I saw the vice president at the test site, so he might go back and she might be able to persuade him to take her along. But I can’t see how she could smuggle the weapon out of the complex.”
She raised her eyebrows. He’d managed it. He’d left a seemingly identical copy, true, but surely the security there was less than perfect?
“I knew the system,” he said, clearly seeing where her thoughts tended. “She doesn’t. Also, I got them to tighten things up afterward.”
“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself.”
He laughed—a clipped sound. “I would never in a million years have thought she could do what she’s already done, that’s why.”
They lay there for a somber moment.
“Peter,” she said, feeling the thud-thud of blood rushing too fast through her veins, “I just remembered something. Ella and I saw her brother in Baltimore in January. He was ordering a dangerous abortifacient. And she said …”
He turned his head, staring at her. “Yes?”
“I took it as perfectly normal hyperbole at the time, you understand, but—” She bit her lip. “She said she wanted to kill him.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “We need to figure out if it’s her. As quickly as possible.”
Looking through old newspapers in the college’s archive the next morning didn’t give them definitive proof that Marbella Draden—he refused to think of her as Ella Knight—was now playing the role of her brother. But it hardly dispelled their worries.
The Washington Herald’s gossip columnist had written about Frederick Draden with some regularity.
The librarian brought them dozens of clippings about his appearances at soirées and less-than-reputable locations.
The last such reference (Freddie Draden Leaves Bar in Uproar) was just a day after their run-in with him in Baltimore.
The next time he appeared in the column was the item about him moving into the vice-presidential house—the one with the headline that now seemed chilling: Veep’s Son ‘a New Man.’ The columnist had written just one item on him since, relaying that Draden wasn’t going out with his buddies anymore—or even returning their calls.
“What do we do?” Beatrix said.
All they could think of was to get another close-up look at Draden and see if appearance or demeanor could offer categorical evidence about whether they were dealing with the son or the daughter.
It was a task they would have found far easier when Draden was staggering from club to club in Baltimore every night.
Their only option now seemed to be showing up at events where the vice president was scheduled to appear and hoping Frederick tagged along.
That was easier said than done. They waited outside a conference where the vice president was speaking Wednesday night—there were no tickets left to get inside—but they didn’t pick the right doors to babysit in order to see him arrive or leave.
They managed to get a seat in the audience when he addressed Congress the following afternoon about grave threats to national security from foreign powers, but he had no offspring in tow.
They even showed up at the Friday evening premiere of an opera he was said to be attending but, it became clear, was not.
“Let’s call it a night,” Peter murmured to Beatrix during intermission.
They’d been up since 5:30 to get their brewing in, and she was leaning on him, eyes closed—though perhaps she simply wanted to block out the stares from other patrons, some quite hostile.
“He’s not going to arrive halfway through—”
“Omnimancer Blackwell?” A woman in an ornate dress that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a royal wedding sailed over to them.
“Oh, it is you! How charming! And Mrs. Blackwell, too—enchanté, I’m sure!
It’s been so long since you attended one of my gatherings, Omnimancer, that I’m certain you don’t even remember me! ”
She said this in a way that suggested she was certain he did remember her, that no one who met her would ever do anything as absurd as not remember her, and it was this that brought her back to mind.
Violet Kendrick, wife of a senator on the Armed Services Committee.
She’d thrown one of the last semi-official dinners he’d attended in Washington, more than two years ago now. Martinelli had dragged him along.
He swallowed and faked a smile. “Mrs. Kendrick—how very good to see you again.”
“It’s positively providential that we should run into each other,” she said. “I would so love to have you both at a little ’do I’m throwing tomorrow night.”
If he hadn’t wanted to go when he was on good terms with the Pentagram, he especially didn’t want to go now. “I’m afraid we’re already engaged—”
“No, no, none of that,” she exclaimed, playfully rapping his knuckles with her folded-up fan.
“I defy you to find a better way to spend your evening! My gatherings are the talk of the town! Why, I even prevailed upon dear Freddie Draden to come”—Beatrix stiffened against him—“and you know what a coup that is these days! Put off whomsoever it is you were going to see tomorrow—do say you’ll be there. ”
He did, hardly believing their luck.
But two hours into her party the next evening, “luck” was not the word that came to mind. They were surrounded by wizards and Pentagram officials—who alternated between glaring at him and making passive-aggressive small talk—but “dear Freddie Draden” had not shown up.
“Why did she invite us?” Beatrix whispered. “Did she not realize we’d be persona non grata here?”
“Probably wanted her party to make the gossip columns. I’ll be right back.”
As he left in search of a bathroom, he heard a woman exclaim, “Mrs. Blackwell, what an … intriguing dress! So very antediluvian,” and he kicked himself for bringing Beatrix without recommending she buy something new to arm herself against this sort of insult.
How he hated these horrible D.C. parties.
He found the library and a sunroom but not what he was looking for, so he rounded the corner to the main hallway—
The collision was so sudden it took him a few seconds to realize the man who’d literally bowled him over was their target.
“I’m sorry, I was in such a rush I didn’t—” Freddie-or-Marbella stopped short. “Well. Omnimancer.”
“Yes,” he said from the floor, rubbing his neck. A burst of inspiration made him say, “Help me up, would you?”
Draden hesitated, then took Peter’s outstretched hand and pulled him to his feet.
Draden’s hand was at least as large as his—there was no illusion making it appear bigger than it was.
They looked at each other for a moment, eye to eye, Draden’s height roughly the same as his own.
He abruptly glanced down at Draden’s feet, remembering that the petite Miss Draden, some six inches shorter than he was, had floated to cover up the height difference when she masqueraded as Beatrix.
Draden’s boots, though, looked firmly planted on the floor.
Which of course they would have to be in order to give someone a hand up.
“What happened,” Peter said, “that you decided to completely change your life?”
Draden swallowed. Then his lips stretched into a sharp smile that did not reach his eyes. “You think you have the right to ask me that?”
“Six weeks ago you cursed me out in the middle of a public street, and now—now it’s as if you’re a different person. Someone else entirely.”
It was a test. Draden passed. Looking bored rather than alarmed, the vice president’s son (for it was the son, Peter was now sure of that) shrugged and said, “Got sick of my old life. Same as you, or so I hear.” He gave a short bark of a laugh. “We have a lot in common, Omnimancer.”
Peter only just managed to hold in a shouted no we do not. He crossed his arms. “You know what I’m trying to accomplish in my second-chance life. What about you?”
Draden’s expression morphed from mocking to something else—more serious, even grim. “Omnimancer—”
“Pardon me.” The interruption came from behind Draden, giving him a visible start and making Peter’s stomach flip. He hadn’t heard anyone walking toward them or seen movement to signal that they were no longer alone. “Your father is waiting outside.”
It was Morse.
“I’d better give my regrets to dearest Mrs. Kendrick,” Draden said, the mocking edge back. He swept off—Morse like a shadow behind him—without another word.
“I wish I’d been there,” Beatrix said once they were back home in their bedroom. “You’re certain it’s not Ella?”
“Illusion takes you only so far, and it’s not far enough if you’re a small woman trying to appear to be an average-sized man.
” Peter sat next to her at the foot of the bed.
“Four months ago, she couldn’t create the impression of being as tall as you are.
She had to float several inches off the ground to make it less obvious.
Even if she came up with some magical equivalent of stilts in the intervening time, she wouldn’t be able to give me a hand up without unbalancing herself.
And Draden’s hand—there was no mistaking its size. ”
He paused, shaking his head. “Look, I’m not saying there’s not a shred of a chance. But if you’re asking me whether I’m ninety-nine percent certain? Yes.”
She nodded, unable to argue with this logic. It made sense—unlike her desire to find Draden again, yell out “Ella!” and see how he reacted. No, that made no sense at all.
“Did Morse recognize you?” she asked, shivering at the memory of what Ella had said of him.
The vice president’s personal wizard, an alumnus of the same dirty-tricks squad that employed Garrett, and potentially the reason that all Draden’s competitors for VP ended up out of contention—one of them dead in a car crash.
I don’t know that he had anything to do with it, Ella had said. I just … wondered.
Peter shucked off his coat and began unbuttoning his shirt.
“The man goes through life wearing a perpetual poker face, so who knows. But I presume he recognized me. And here’s the thing …
” He frowned. “He came out of nowhere. I suppose he might have a sound-dampening spell on his feet, but I didn’t see him moving toward us, even out of the corner of my eye.
For all I know, he followed Draden under an invisibility spell. ”
“Perhaps Morse doesn’t trust ‘dear Freddie.’”
He snorted. “Smart man.”
She leaned against him, pondering. Twice now she’d told him she thought someone was Ella—first the invisible enigma who saved his life, and now this. She would have to be more circumspect before offering up any other theories about what her former friend was up to.
“I wish we knew what Miss Draden is actually doing,” he said, as if reading her mind.
“Yes,” she murmured. What, indeed.