“Kimberly?”
“My sister. My younger sister.Onlysister, now.”
“Oh.” His brow knitted. “I’m sorry.”
Alice gave a quick nod. She never knew the correct response when someone apologized for the deaths in her family.
“You didn’t think it was strange that he didn’t go to the funeral?”
“I did wonder. I mean, what kind of husband wouldn’t show for…? But then,” she added quickly, remembering that therealex-husband was standing in front of her, “grief affects people differently. And if there was guilt there too…”
“What did he take from your house? And how did he know where she lived?”
“Uh, I guess I must have introduced myself at the hospital. And like you say, I’m in the phone book. I don’t think he tookanything. Nothing obvious, anyway. I told him about the rings but he didn’t seem interested. I suggested he talk to my lawyer if he wanted to claim her assets, not that I have any idea how much money she had, beyond the fact that she never missed a rent payment, and had good healthcare, and seemed to get by okay without a job. But he just asked for some time in her room alone, and when I came back to check up on him, he was gone. He never went to the lawyer.”
“What about a computer, documents? Was anything like that missing? He must have known she had something of value. And if he did, maybe the Feds did too—maybe that’s what they’re looking for.”
“She didn’t have a computer, or even a phone. A real technophobe. And she was so paranoid that she wouldn’t have left things like important documents lying around. I remember thinking that when I got home from the hospital, after she died—it was remarkable how little there was of her. It was like she had no past at all, which is starting to make sense now. An entire life, and I packed it up in half an hour. Of course, I should have asked her for contacts while she was still alive—friends, family—but I guess I’d been holding out hope. I didn’t expect to be the one left to arrange her funeral. You think you’ll have time for all that, you don’t want her thinking you’ve given up hope and…”
Alice’s voice cracked, and Carter gently squeezed her shoulder.
“She went downhill so quickly,” Alice continued. “Just before that final slide, she seemed to rally. Her mind came back. We’d even made plans to get away to a beach house for a week and finish the first draft. In the end I went alone and filled in the gaps.”
“So that part where Nika—I mean, your heroine—secretly meets Randolph-slash-Robert in Moscow and begs for passage to the U.S. Did that actually happen?”
“That was Nika’s idea, if that’s what you mean. She was very specific in her notes for that scene. Galina appeals to his better nature, and it doesn’t work. Of course, later on I cast him as the mole, but that wasn’t her intention, as far as I know.”
“He only has one nature, nothing better, nothing worse. The guy’s a professional, a rule-follower, though, like you say in the book, you always got the sense there was something he wasn’t sharing. Not unusual in those circles. But she obviously got someone to change their mind and smooth the way. She must have had leverage. Was it blackmail, bribery? Or something legit? And did the COS help her or get in her way?”
“I’m afraid I can’t shed any more light on it. That meeting with Randolph was one of the last scene drafts she left me with, while she was still lucid. Well, apart from the murder—but not to the point of identifying the killer. And then there was the…” Alice’s face and neck warmed.
“The…?”
“The, um, the se— the lo— theintimacyscene in the D.C. hotel, once they’d gotten to the States.”
“Ah,” he said, with a knowing grin. “I take it that was mostly her work.”
“So it wasreal?”
“There were some, uh, additions I definitely would have remembered, if they’d happened.”
“I did add one or two embellishments, but yes, that scene was one of hers.” Could Alice’s face get any hotter? “We didn’t always write in order, and she skipped ahead to draft that scene. She told me she wanted to write it while her mind was still fresh. I guess she meant while hermemorywas still fresh.”
“Gotta say, it was pretty weird to read about your own…”
“I can imagine. It explains how protective she was about that scene. I did suggest a couple of other improvements, but she was adamant it should stand as is.”
“Improvements?” he said, with faux offense.
Alice gave a little squeak. “I did think it went on way too long. Though Kimberly didn’t agree, so I decided not to trim it.”
“Rightly so.”
“I can’t believe all that stuff really happened.”
He scoffed.
“I don’t meanthatstuff. I mean the whole story—everything—up to the point where she faded away and I took over the narrative. The details, the way she would go into almost a trance as she related it… I thought she was just insanely talented at being able to visualize a story—a fictional story. I once asked her how she knew so much about all this spy stuff, and she said she had a vivid imagination. And she was always getting CIA memoirs and things out of the library. She said she’d been a tour guide in Moscow, and that was when she’d gotten the idea, because her job took her right to the gates of the Kremlin nearly every day—and inside it, too. But … wow. How much trouble am I in, exactly—with the authorities?”
