“Did Miss Watson send you?” Emily gave in to the silence. Please let it not be that.
“Kinda sorta.” When Dilya descended into any form of slang, Emily knew she was dissembling.
“Not being helpful, Dilya.”
“Not wanting to get us all killed, Emily.”
12
When Dilya noticed that Emily had reined Chesapeake to a halt, she was forced to circle around and come back. She stopped when they were knee-to-knee. Emily faced the ice-crusted peaks, while Dilya and Wind Runner faced the vast flat of the Great Plains. Her attempts to not come up with any metaphor of the vast wasteland she was feeling inside didn’t make it one bit less obvious.
Her parents murdered. While she loved her adoptive parents, she’d lived with them for only a few years. She’d mostly grown up as that oddest of fixtures, the only person to live in the White House other the first couples and their kids. Because she served two separate two-term President’s families, she’d broken FDR’s record for the longest occupancy in the nation’s first home by three months—a fact she’d kept to herself after she figured it out.
She’d always been other. If not for her friends from the high school Chef’s Club—which had far more to do with studying geopolitics than cooking—she probably wouldn’t have any friends at all.
And she’d just lost Jimmy Martin, which left a hole in her chest bigger than anything except her parents’ deaths. She’d been twelve when they were murdered, which lay half a lifetime in the past. This pain was fresh, raw, and still bleeding. She and Jimmy hadn’t parted all that badly, but they’d done it very definitively. So definitively that Dilya wondered if she’d lose the friendship of the other Chef’s Club members while she was at it.
If Zackie missed Merle, she wasn’t showing it. Of course Zackie had always enjoyed new adventures. Also, she was ten years old to Merle’s one and he appeared to relish annoying the crap out of her elder statesman years. Even now she was sitting in her saddle bag trading polite nose sniffs with Emily’s Chesapeake before the horse turned her attention to the dry grasses sticking up through the snow. Sedate. Much more Zackie’s style.
But Dilya was missing Jimmy more than she’d thought possible. She didn’t think there was any going back. Jimmy was happy with his trains. Driving and servicing the equipment for the Cog Railway that carried a thousand tourists up Mount Washington each day satisfied him. He fit in so well that they’d offered him a precious over-winter contract. One night, he’d confessed his big dream in a bare whisper—that someday he might be the Cog Railway’s train boss.
Sure, a good step up for the kid of a single-mom DC cop. But where did that leave her?
Dilya had walked through the heart of wars and listened to whispers in the halls of power. Gods, she sounded like a purple-prose journalist in her own head. But knowing those experiences, she couldn’t sit still while the world careened down so many fractured paths.
“I left the mountain. I was less useful there than a turnip at a state banquet. And that was before the snow and ice closed the top of the mountain.”
“And you left Jimmy,” Emily’s voice was filled with kindness. “It’s okay to grieve.”
“I don’t…know how to.”
Emily reached out and brushed a gloved hand over Dilya’s hair until it landed on her shoulder. “You’ll know how when the time comes.”
Dilya shook her head, and Emily dropped her hand back to her pommel with a sigh. She hadn’t meant to push her away—missed Emily’s comforting touch the moment it was gone. Dilya had been too busy starving and running for her life to ever properly grieve her parents. Kee and Archie had shifted out of her life as they’d continued to serve, and Dilya had moved to the White House. Their mutual emotions didn’t fade, only their relevancy in each other’s lives. All without her noticing it happen. “I seem to always be too busy looking forward to remember to look back.”
“At least that hasn’t changed.”
“I…don’t know what to do with that comment either.” The way other people saw her was always surprising and had so little to do with how she saw herself. Yet most of their statements were true once she considered them.
She’d met too many real geniuses during her dozen years at the White House to think of herself as more than the low side of smart—yet she still jumped ahead of most people’s thoughts so effortlessly. Beautiful was just…weird. Driven! Jimmy had thrown that at her as if it was a bad thing. She’d seen pieces of the worst the world could hand out and knew she must fight to create something better.
Emily never judged her. Surprised her sometimes but never made her feel bad for who she was.
Neither did Miss Watson.
“I went looking for Miss Watson after I came off the mountain.”
“She didn’t end up here. She retired to a cottage in Choteau.”
Dilya wished she could see the small town from here, but thirty kilometers was too far even on a clear day like this. Other than the church and the big grain silos, it was a one- to two-story town, which left it below the horizon. “She’s not there. I went over every inch of her place. Again, no messages.”
Just last year she’d disappeared from her office in the White House basement as a killer was hunting her. Dilya had immediately left her life as a nanny and dog-sitter in the White House and set out on the quest to save Miss Watson. The quest had almost cost her own life, but it also brought her back together with the Chef’s Club. And Jimmy—her gut clenched at the freshening of the memory.
“What trouble is she in this time?” Emily didn’t sigh or groan. The tactician was ingrained so deeply in her bones that she went straight to the next step without question. That was something that Dilya wished she could do, but she had a strategic bent of mind—always worrying about the implications of the bigger picture. She automatically saw a hundred possibilities all snarled up in a jumble of a thousand possible whys. Emily wanted to know what to do next—and had become expert in doing it.
Swallowing hard, it still took Dilya a moment to continue. “There were signs of a hard struggle, including at least one corpse. Not her, based on the blood splatter patterns.”
Emily paled. It was one of the first times Dilya had witnessed such a thing from her. Nothing bothered Emily Beale. Dilya had witnessed her return from missions with a helicopter so riddled it should never have flown. With crew in the same condition, ones who’d only survived by the miracles of modern surgery. A few who hadn’t. Emily was always the practical stalwart.
