Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(112)
“Dr. St. Croix—” Pax began.
Before he or Pogo could say another word, Solange St. Croix saw the ink on Pax’s right bicep, said, “I don’t believe it,” and with one finger pushed up the T-shirt sleeve that half concealed his only tattoo. It was the official SEAL emblem: an eagle in an overwatch position on a trident that was also the cross of an anchor, with a flintlock pistol in the foreground, rendered in shades of gold with black detailing. “Are you a fraud, young man?” she asked.
“Excuse me, ma’am?”
“No, you’re not,” she decided. “You’re the real damn thing, an honest-to-God Navy SEAL. I’ve only met one before, and everything I wrote about him is locked away where no one can see it, where it’ll remain until I’m old enough to want everyone to see it.”
Letting the T-shirt sleeve slide half over the tattoo once more, the professor looked at Pogo and smiled, and Pogo blushed, which Pax had never seen him do before.
To Pax, with girlish enthusiasm, she said, “I could use a jolt of the exotic. Tell me you’re here in an official capacity, on a mission of grave importance, you’re military intelligence conducting an investigation on which the fate of the nation depends.”
“Not the fate of the nation, ma’am. But it is a matter of life and death,” Pax said.
He didn’t confirm or deny that he was with one branch or another of military intelligence, allowing her to infer that, with academic perspicacity, she had known the truth of him at first sight. Judging by her manner and the delighted surprise in her eyes, Pax thought that this Sunday had been of a grayer cast than she had hoped, as perhaps had been some number of days before it, and that she would insist upon the risk of believing he was what she imagined, welcoming them into her house. More than anything at this moment, perhaps she needed color in her life, while Pax and Pogo offered all the hues of a box of forty-eight crayons.
“Ma’am, I’m Chief Petty Officer Paxton Thorpe, and this is Averell Beaumont Stanhope the Third.”
“Of the Boston Stanhopes?” the professor asked.
“No, ma’am,” Pogo replied, lest there be no Boston Stanhopes and her question a trap. “Of the Virginia Stanhopes.” Which was a lie, but a reasonably smooth one.
Pax said, “If you can spare us fifteen minutes, we’d be most grateful, but we can meet with you tomorrow, in your office at the university, if you prefer.”
He still half expected her to ask for proof that he was with one intelligence service or another, whereupon he would be able to produce only his military ID, which would not identify him as what he was now pretending to be. But she stepped back from the door and welcomed them inside and led them through dramatic but sterile rooms of starkly modern décor, her ao dai both loose and yet clinging to her as she seemed almost to float through the shadowy spaces with the grace of a brightly painted koi in half-lit waters. She was barefoot, and her feet were small for a woman of about five foot eight, like the well-formed feet of a child destined for ballet.
“I have to stir the soup,” she said, and brought them into a spacious kitchen with a maple floor finished in a gray wash, matching cabinets, black-granite countertops, and stainless-steel appliances. The soup-in-the-making stood on the cooktop, blue flames caressing the bottom of the large pot. “Potato leek,” she said. Pax smelled potatoes and leeks and tarragon and an abundance of butter. Padded stools were lined up along one side of the large center island, and St. Croix suggested they sit there.
On the island stood a bottle of eighteen-year-old Macallan Scotch, a container of half-and-half kept cool in a bowl of ice, and a Baccarat-crystal on-the-rocks glass containing those three ingredients. Whether Dr. St. Croix began drinking by 3:10 on the average Sunday or whether this indulgence was an exception, she evidently felt no need whatsoever to justify herself. After she finished stirring the soup and set the lid askew on the pot, she produced two more Baccarat glasses. With the certitude of someone who had always done what she wanted and encountered no objections, the professor neither asked if they would join her in a cocktail nor inquired if they would like something different. Standing across the island from them, as she spoke of her love of cooking and built the drinks, Pax realized that declining the Scotch would be taken as a gross insult and that in spite of her girlish delight in their visit and her hospitality, she could turn on them in an instant.
Pogo watched her through squinted eyes, as if he suspected that she might be concocting poison, but he appeared to have reached the same conclusion as Pax.
As St. Croix pushed their drinks across the black granite to them, she said, “So…you called it a matter of life and death.”
Concerned about dropping Bibi’s name without preparation, Pax injected the equivalent of Scotch and cream into the absurd military-intelligence fantasy. “Life and death, yes, and although it sounds melodramatic, it’s also a matter of national security.”
“A little melodrama is good now and then,” the professor said. “If life were nothing but Raymond Carver stories, we’d all go mad.”
Pax knew who Raymond Carver was, but he thought it more in character if he looked puzzled for a moment before continuing. “Anyway, we’re here to ask you about a person of interest to us—”
“A suspect,” she interrupted, seeming to take this as seriously as some people took the con men who phoned and, posing as IRS agents, induced them to wire money to foreign bank accounts.