Chapter 32
Beatrix remembered just in time to keep her eyes shut so Draden’s men wouldn’t know she was awake.
She lay on the cot, trying without complete success to take slow, deep breaths.
Other than a soft rustling sound to her left, all was quiet.
What was happening? Peter wasn’t holding her hand—did the wizards separate them?
“Well,” said the very last voice she expected, reedier than normal, “that’s one heck of a story.”
Beatrix’s eyes flew open. Rosemarie—Rosemarie—was propped up on a bed next to her, looking at a newspaper, Peter standing over her. As a strangled sound escaped from Beatrix’s throat, their heads turned in unison.
“Thank God,” Peter said, rushing over to her.
“What—”
“Everything’s OK,” he said. “We’re at the hospital. The weapon’s destroyed, and—”
“Here,” Rosemarie said, holding out the newspaper. “Read this.”
The headline stripped across the Star declared, in all caps, “SHOCKING TURN IN BLACKWELL CASE.” The lead paragraph read, “Peter Blackwell was framed in the attack on his sister-in-law, kidnapped and forced to work with another abducted scientist on a weapon that close associates of the vice president tried to set off yesterday, endangering tens of thousands of people in Detroit, according to both scientists, the vice president’s son and surveillance film. ”
She read the rest, a woozy feeling of unreality setting in.
How was Rosemarie alive? How had all this happened?
Morse, Whitaker and Whitaker’s son had been arrested.
President Abbott’s spokesman gave a statement strongly implying that the president was not ruling out that Draden conspired to kill him and level a swath of Detroit.
Hickok even wrote that the film “purporting to show the Blackwells plotting to kill Lydia Harper” was clearly faked because both Blackwells had told the Star months earlier that they believed they were being surveilled in that part of their house.
She looked up at Peter, trying to put her fears into words.
“You’re not dreaming,” he said, sitting beside her and taking her hand. “I promise.”
“But Rosemarie,” she murmured, looking at the woman they’d thought was dead.
“Knitting,” he whispered in her ear. “She knit herself a soft landing.”
Beatrix stared at him, open mouthed. Rosemarie had never knit anything before. How on earth—
But then, how on earth had she herself teleported to Lydia when it seemed as if her sister’s life depended on it?
Beatrix scrambled off her cot and threw her arms around Rosemarie.
“Oof. Careful.” Rosemarie patted her on the back. “I’ve got bruises on my bruises.”
“And three broken bones,” Peter said. “Left hip, right knee, left shoulder.”
“Shattered them on the way down,” Rosemarie said matter-of-factly.
“Sorry—sorry.” Beatrix pulled back gingerly to keep from hurting her. “You’re … you’re alive.”
Rosemarie offered a half-smile, half-grimace. “More or less. My walking days, they tell me, are pretty much over. Oh, now,” she added, reaching up with her right arm, the one with no broken bones, and wiping away Beatrix’s tears, “none of that. I’m all right, really, I promise.”
“When Peter told me what Morse did …” Beatrix shook her head, throat clogged, unable to say more. Instead, she took Rosemarie’s hand and kissed it.
Now Rosemarie’s eyes were welling. “This is a fine how-do-you-do.” She sniffled and gave a wavering laugh. “Blubbering about being all right! I don’t know what’s come over me.”
“I love you,” Beatrix whispered. “I love you so much, mother of my heart.”
“I love you, too, my darling girl.” Rosemarie smiled at her through her tears, taking her hand back to dab at her face. “Well—I can’t lie around here in good conscience when there’s so much to do! Help me into the wheelchair, would you?”
Lydia’s room was two floors down. As they waited for an elevator, Beatrix murmured to Peter, “If they just wanted to take out the convention center, why did they insist on a five-mile blast radius?”
He leaned closer. “They were going to detonate it on the other side of the border. Morse slipped the stone onto the grounds of a Canadian weapons facility.”
She gaped at him.
His lips twisted bitterly. “They were planning to claim I gave it to the Canadians, who were intending to use it in the U.S. but screwed up a test and blew themselves up into the bargain. I take it Draden thought the resulting war would go better if the other side had lost most of its advanced weaponry.”
“He would have killed all those people in Detroit!”
“Yes.”
“Including top officials from every North and South American country!”
Peter raised his eyebrows. “Apparently, he saw that as a bonus. He seems to have had designs on both continents.”
“Good God.”
“Funny, isn’t it,” Rosemarie said as the elevator doors opened and Beatrix rolled her in, “how his people kept calling us the subversives.”
When they reached Lydia’s room, a policeman—possibly the same one she and Ella tried to creep past several days earlier—waved them in. Beatrix’s heart lurched: Lydia’s face was pale, her eyes closed. Her whole body spoke of exhaustion if not pain.
But then Joan exclaimed, “Beatrix,” and Lydia’s eyes flew open. She broke into a beatific smile.
“Bee! You’re awake!” She got out of bed, slowly, and leaned in for a hug that kept her injured torso clear of contact. “I was so afraid this whole time. I thought ...”
“Me too,” Beatrix said, choking up. “How … how are you?”
“So much better now that you’re safe.”
Beatrix kissed Lydia’s cheek, still unable to quite believe it. All of them were safe. All of them.
“You realize that now every one of us has been hospitalized within the past six months?” Lydia gave a small shake of the head. “I was lying here yesterday, wondering how we’d pay the latest bills—”
“Oh, no,” said Beatrix, who’d been too consumed by other worries in the past week for that one to occur to her.
“No, no, it’s OK.” Lydia sat down on her bed, grinning. “Wizard Hillier told us this morning that the U.S. government agreed to cover it.” She paused, cocking her head, eyes widening. “Bee—what are you wearing?”
Beatrix laughed. Several doctors and nurses she’d passed on the way here had worn exactly that scandalized expression as they took in her shirt and pants.
“Rescue attire,” Peter said. He put an arm around her waist and grinned at her. “It suits you.”
“It’s certainly far more comfortable than what I usually wear.”
“We should get you more outfits like this.”
Lydia looked horrified. “What?”
“Don’t tease her,” Beatrix whispered, elbowing him.
“I’m dead serious,” he murmured back.
Partly to change the subject but mostly because she owed them a debt of gratitude, Beatrix turned to Joan, Dot and Marilyn. “Thank you,” she said, hugging them in turn. “If you hadn’t been here—thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Happy to do it,” Marilyn said.
Dot squeezed her hand. “Even happier that you’re back.”
“When you disappeared from the holding cell—well, we thought the worst,” Joan said quietly.
“Senator Gray spent all last week pressing the police to investigate. That’s how we found Rosemarie, you know.
One of the detectives told him yesterday that an emergency-room patient in West Virginia was claiming to have information about the case, and Gray got her transferred here so fast you wouldn’t believe it. ”
“West Virginia?”
“That’s where she was found. She lay at the bottom of a mountain for more than a day before anyone discovered her. It was a while before she was well enough to explain her situation, and even then, no one took her seriously at first.”
Beatrix shuddered. She glanced over her shoulder at Rosemarie and was reassured to see her poking Peter in the arm, looking thoroughly like herself.
“Where is Senator Gray?” Beatrix asked, turning back to Joan.
“We convinced him to go home when you both got here last night. He needed the rest.”
Beatrix nodded. She held all sorts of conflicting feelings about the man, but he’d certainly come through when they needed him most. She owed him a debt of gratitude, too.
“You must desperately need rest as well,” she said to the women. “Why don’t you take Gray’s example? It’s safe to go home now.”
Dot and Marilyn looked at Joan. Joan bit her lip.
“What?” Beatrix’s heart sank. “What is it?”
“Come to the restroom with us,” Joan murmured.
She followed them into the hall, struck by memories of all her previous times going to bathrooms with these women. Of Plan B. What had Joan said to her a week ago as Lydia was in surgery? “We’ve kept on practicing”?
She was the last one through the door. She closed it and leaned against it as Dot checked the stalls, all empty.
“Well?” she asked, stomach tying itself into knots.
“We were afraid you weren’t coming back, you see,” Marilyn said.
“We had to do something,” Dot said.
They fell silent. Beatrix, in terrible suspense, said, “What? What did you do?”
Joan leaned in. “We put out a call to come to Washington.”
Beatrix sucked in a breath as she put two and two together. “You mean you called your recruits, and they called their recruits, and …?”
“Yes, and so on. Just as you originally planned.”
It was hardly the most salient response, but all Beatrix could think to whisper back was, “The Vow didn’t stop you?”
Joan shook her head. And really—how could Beatrix expect a Vow to be predictable, after all her experience to the contrary?
It didn’t stop Ella from setting off the weapon.
Whatever ersatz brain the Vows operated with must have considered Plan B more protective of Lydia than no Plan B, even though the Vow she made to Peter judged it dangerous for him.
Joan leaned in even closer. “Also, the recruiting kept going.”
“How—” Her voice cracked. She cleared her throat and tried again. “How many women are coming here?”
“Well, not everyone wanted to show up when push came to shove, which I suppose is to be expected, and—”
“Joan! How many?”
“Almost a hundred thousand.”