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“They’re not going to make her move to some horrible, remote place, are they?”
“Nah. She’ll be allowed to live wherever she wants. She’ll just have to take a trip to Geneva every couple years for follow-up.”
“Why does Mrs. Vanders let her have dangerous information?” Jane says indignantly. “Why does Ivy need to know where the Panzavecchias are going?”
“She doesn’t know,” says Patrick, “and she still won’t know when she gets there. I don’t know either. Mr. and Mrs. Vanders do a good job of keeping things from us. Even from their son, Cook.”
“I bet they do,” Jane says, thinking of Aunt Magnolia.
“Hey. Knowing the truth in this business is really dangerous. People die.” The words are punching themselves out of his mouth.
“Like your parents,” Jane says.
“People die,” he says simply.
She studies him in the darkness.
“I don’t know Kiran very well,” Jane says. “But I can relate to how she’s feeling. It’s . . . confusing. Horribly. It’s like having everything ripped away from you and then thrown back at you all sharp and unrecognizable. But I can see you had a not-too-terrible reason for your lies. You didn’t do it out of selfishness, or maliciousness, or cowardice.”
“I still shouldn’t have lied,” says Patrick, choking over the words. “She trusted me, and she was always honest with me. She knows me better than anyone, and I lied to her. What was I thinking? If she never forgives me, I don’t blame her.”
Patrick turns his face from Jane, because he’s crying. It takes Jane a moment to realize she’s crying too. This is Aunt Magnolia’s apology, these words coming out of Patrick’s mouth. Aunt Magnolia can’t say them herself. She’s gone. But she made Jane promise to come to this house.
It was all she’d been able to do.
The rain seems to be clearing away. Clouds push across the sky, revealing stars and obscuring them again. Jane rests a hand on her own shoulder, where the bell of her jellyfish tattoo sits under her sleeve. It’s the visible proof that Aunt Magnolia is a part of her. “How long do you think we’ll be waiting?” she asks.
Patrick wipes at his face with the back of his hand and squints at the sky above the water. “Not too much longer,” he says. “You don’t have to wait, you know. There’s no reason for you to get pneumonia.”
“I’ll wait,” Jane says, not certain why she doesn’t want to leave him. “Will you tell me what happened to Charlotte?”
“Charlotte?”
“Kiran’s stepmother.”
“I know who she is,” Patrick says. “I don’t think anyone knows what happened to her.”
“So she wasn’t tied up in this spy stuff?”
“Oh,” he says. “I see why you’re asking. No. Charlotte was an interior designer. She had no connection to any of this. Mrs. Vanders even made some serious inquiries—discreetly—after she went away, but nothing came of it. Charlotte’s departure is a mystery.”
“Okay,” Jane says, then swallows. She pushes the words out. “What about my aunt?”
“Your aunt?”
“Ivy told me to ask you for some sort of information about her.”
Patrick pauses. “You mean the part where she died?”
Jane breathes in.
“Yeah,” she says. “The part where she died.” She breathes out.
“You’re right to ask,” says Patrick. “Just before the Antarctica trip, she came to a gala. At some point during the night, she left us without saying good-bye, which was unusual for Magnolia. We knew she was headed to Antarctica to take pictures of whales and penguins; it wasn’t a CIA trip. Then we saw the news about how she got lost in a storm on the peninsula. She was well-regarded as a photographer, so it got picked up, and we pay attention to the news. How did you learn about it? Did you get a call?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember who called you?”
“The connection was terrible,” Jane says. “His name was John Something but I couldn’t hear straight. Someone from the research station; he didn’t really know her. Then we got cut off, and I kept hoping the whole thing was some sort of mistake, until someone from the university came to talk to me. They mailed me her things from Ushuaia. They never found her body.”
“Right,” says Patrick. “Well, whenever an operative dies, we do some digging as a matter of course. When we dug deeper about Magnolia, our sources in Argentina told us she had the flu when her ship crossed the Drake Passage and she never left her cabin. Our other sources told us that she had the flu in Antarctica at the research station too, and never left her room. Next thing we know, she went out, got caught in the storm, and died.”
“But—why would she go out if she had the flu?”
“You’re missing my point,” says Patrick. “What I’m saying is that none of the people we’ve talked to ever actually laid eyes on her. No one can confirm seeing her on the ship or on the peninsula. She was always ‘in her room,’ but we haven’t been able to figure out who was initiating that story. And we can’t find any records of her flying from any American airport to any airport in South America, either. You see what I’m saying? We’re not convinced Magnolia ever went to Antarctica. The CIA has her categorized as a fallen operative, but we haven’t been able to confirm how or where she actually died.”
Jane’s body is an ocean, removed from feeling and from any consciousness of time. She knew, Jane thinks. She had a plan. She left her wool hat behind for me. She made me promise to come to this house. She left me a message.
Jane sits up straight and stares at Patrick in the dark.
What if . . .
“Oh, for the love of god,” Patrick says with sudden violence. He’s staring out to sea.
“What is it?”
“That woman is a piece of work,” he says, pointing to the sky above the water.
Jane turns to see what he’s looking at and is met with the vision of an oblong shape barely visible against the night sky. It’s like a whale in the sky, with a few flashing lights where she imagines its belly to be. “Is that . . . a blimp?”
“It’s a freaking zeppelin,” Patrick says.
“A zeppelin!”
“She owns a helicopter, this lady, and a seaplane, but she decides to pick up the children, the art, and my sister in her zeppelin. That means long ropes, and Ivy having to deal with the stress of not dropping Christopher or Grace or a Brancusi or a Rembrandt into the ocean. It’s unnecessary!” he says.
“It’s surreal,” Jane says.
“It’s romantic,” Patrick says scornfully, “coming to the rescue in a zeppelin. Poor Philip. He’s got to drop out of the zeppelin and there’s no way he’s not going into the drink.”
“I didn’t know anyone actually said ‘the drink,’” Jane says.
“It seemed like the right term to describe the water under a zeppelin,” Patrick says, still disgusted.
Jane snorts, and Patrick snickers despite himself.
It’s too dark to see what’s going on out there. After what feels like a long time, the zeppelin moves off into the clouds. Patrick pushes to his feet. “Stay here,” he says, then runs out to the beach with his flashlight and flashes it a few times toward the water in a rhythmic pattern.
Before too long, Jane sees The Ivy returning to shore, then hears the purr of its engine. When the boat gets close, someone climbs out, drops into the water, and begins to move toward shore. The boat zips away again, perhaps to be moored on some other part of the island.
Patrick returns to the brush with the new person, who turns out to be Philip Okada, soaked through and shivering.
“Hi,” Jane says.
“Hi,” says Philip, running a hand through wet hair, not seeming particularly surprised to see her. He’s wearing all black with his orange Chuck Taylors.
“Did Ivy and the kids make it into the zeppelin okay?” she asks.
