Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan(42)

“After he was knighted? Yes, you’ve told me that,” Holly says, trying to keep the impatience out of her voice.

Jane shakes her head. “No, before. The first time. I was a little girl, very young. He’d come to the house, and my mother said we were to have a special visitor, and I looked at this tiny man in a brown plaid jacket that was too big and thought, ‘There’s nothing special about him.’ He smelled of liniment and tobacco smoke, and I couldn’t understand why my beautiful mother would have anything to do with him, or why she introduced him as one of her dearest friends.”

She’s silent a moment, lost in her memories. “We were here, in the library. Mother’s face was strained. She was waiting for the tea things to be brought. I had the distinct impression she was watching me, which was unusual, because she almost never paid attention to anything I did, so long as I was clean and polite and quiet. But she turned away to speak to the maid, and as soon as she did, he beckoned me over.

“?‘Hello,’ he said, leaning forward. He was sitting and I was standing, and we were almost exactly the same height. He took a peppermint stick out of his pocket and offered it to me. We both checked that Wendy wasn’t watching before I took it.

“?‘Seen that Peter fellow about?’ he whispered.

“?‘Mother won’t talk about it. Father says he’s just a story.’

“?‘Don’t let him hear you say that. I have it on excellent authority he’s a real live boy,’ he said with a nod toward Mother. ‘I made her famous, you know. I can do the same for you, if you tell me any tales.’ A distant look came over his face. ‘I always wanted to meet him. He seemed like such a nice chap.’?”

The scarf has fallen to the floor. Jane makes no move to pick it up. “It was the first I’d heard that, that Peter was real,” she says, and her voice is still far away. “Mother had never told me before—she’d always treated it as a story.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, she came back to the conversation and that was the end of our little tête-à-tête,” Jane says. She picks up the scarf. “Mother must have overheard, because she was quite cool to both of us, but I badgered and badgered her from that day forward until she broke down and admitted what he said was true. We owe him quite the debt, Mr. Barrie. If it weren’t for him, if it were up to my mother, we might never have learned the truth of Peter at all.”

“Indeed,” Holly murmurs. There are no answers in Jane’s story, only more questions after all.



* * *





Holly set her phone to silent while she was working. At the end of Jane’s tale, she glances down and sees a string of texts across the screen. One is from Christopher Cooke with his banking information, and the rest are from an increasingly worried-sounding Barry. They break the spell Jane’s had her under.

She holds up the phone. “I’m sorry, would you mind? I have a work call I have to make.”

“At this hour?” Jane glances at her watch. “Surely those Americans don’t expect you to work twenty-four hours a day?” She sees Holly’s face and relents. “Oh, all right. I’ll cajole the boy into helping me set the table, and then we can have a cocktail. Don’t be long.”

As soon as the door closes, Holly wires the money to Cooke’s account. The amount makes her wince, but she’s out of options. Besides, she’d pay anything to bring Eden home. She also texts him a list of places to start looking, including Soho, nursing homes, and hospitals. Then she calls Barry. He answers on the first ring.

“Are you all right?” he asks immediately.

“Yes. I’m sorry to have worried you. After the meeting, I was . . . working on ideas for a new product and I lost track of time.” The lie stings. Work has always been Holly’s refuge, but now there’s no room for anything else but Eden and Jack.

“I got a bad feeling when I didn’t hear from you. I thought you’d been kidnapped or something,” Barry says. He sounds serious. “I have to tell you, I called my contacts back and pushed them, hard. Not sure this guy is such a good idea after all.”

“Too late,” Holly says, trying for cheerful. “I’ve already sent the money.” She taps her fingers against the laptop’s case. She supposes it’s still possible to stop the transfer. “Please, tell me I won’t regret this.”

“He has serious anger issues. He got bumped off the force after a series of conflicts, the last one of which culminated in him grabbing a dealer by the neck. Almost crushed his windpipe. But guess what . . .”

“He used his hook,” she says.

“Yeah. You saw it?”

“Hard to miss.”

“He seems to think it’s hilarious. But it’s a strange coincidence. The guys on the force? They refer to him as Captain Hook. Any chance he could be a Darling fame stalker after all?”

There’s an uncomfortable silence. Barry knows she doesn’t like to talk about the novel or her family’s link to it. Even as her panic rises, she knows there’s little she can tell him—or nothing he’d believe—so she tries for a light tone.

“The press would have a field day, wouldn’t they?” she says. “?‘Captain Hook Searches for Darling Girl’s Lost Lover.’ But no, I don’t think he’s a stalker. Even the craziest ones wouldn’t go to that length.”