The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [110]
I curse myself and contemplate cutting out my tongue. How’s the cancer? That’s the best I could come up with? Why didn’t I just blurt out that I know she’s pregnant and then make it a perfectly horrible social moment?
“Beecher, can I ask you a question?” Clementine adds as she jabs at the elevator call button. “Why’d you really come here?”
“What?”
“Here. Why here?” she says, pointing up. Three flights up to be precise. To her father. “You saw how crazy he is. Why come and see him?”
“I told you before—of all the people we’ve spoken to, he’s still the one who first cracked the invisible ink. Without him, we’d still be thumbing through the dictionary.”
“That’s not true. He didn’t crack anything. Your guy at the Archives… in Preservation…”
“The Diamond.”
“Exactly. The Diamond,” she says. “The Diamond’s the one who cracked it.”
“Only after Nico pointed out it was there. And yes, Nico’s loopy, but he’s also the only one who’s handed us something that’s panned out right.”
“So now Tot’s not right? C’mon, Beecher. You’ve got a dozen other people in the Archives who specialize in Revolutionary War stuff. You’ve got the Diamond and all his expertise about how the Founding Fathers used to secretly hide stuff. But instead of going to the trained professionals, you go to the paranoid schizo and the girl you first kissed in high school? Tell me what you’re really after. Your office could’ve gotten you in here. Why’d you bring me with you?”
As I follow her into the elevator and press the button for the third floor, I look at her, feeling absolutely confused. “Why wouldn’t I bring you? You were in that room when we found that dictionary. Your face is on that videotape just as much as mine is. And I’m telling you right now, Khazei knows who you are, Clementine. Do you really think all I care about is trying to protect myself? This is our problem. And if you think I haven’t thought that from moment one, you really don’t know me at all. Plus… can’t you tell I like you?”
As the elevator doors roll shut, Clementine takes a half-step back, still silent. Between her missing dad, her dead mom, and the evil grandmother, she’s spent a lifetime alone. She doesn’t know what to do with together.
But I think she likes it.
“By the way,” I add, standing next to her so we’re nearly shoulder to shoulder. “Some of us like country music.”
Clementine surprises me by blushing. As the elevator rises, she grips the railing behind her. “You were supposed to say that two minutes ago, genius—back when I said I liked elevator music.”
“I know. I was panicking. Just give me credit for eventually getting there, okay?” Within seconds, as the elevator slows to a stop, I reach down and gently pry her fingers from the railing, taking her hand in my own.
It’s a soaking, clammy mess. It’s caked in cold sweat.
And it fits perfectly in mine.
For an instant, we stand there, both leaning on the back railing, both entombed in that frozen moment after the elevator bobs to a stop, but before the doors…
With a shudder, the doors part company. A short black woman dressed in a yellow blouse is bouncing a thick ring of keys in her open palm and clearly waiting to take us the rest of the way. Clementine prepared me for this: To help the patients feel more at ease, the staff doesn’t wear uniforms. The silver nametag on her shirt says FPT, which is the mental hospital equivalent of an orderly. Behind the woman is another metal door, just like the ones downstairs.
“You’re the ones seeing Nico Hadrian?” she asks, giving a quick glance to our IDs.
“That’s us,” I say as the woman twists a key in the lock and pushes the door open, revealing dull fluorescent lights, a scuffed, unpolished hall, and the man who’s waiting for us, bouncing excitedly on his heels and standing just past the threshold with an awkward grin and a light in his chocolate brown eyes.
“I told everyone you’d be back,” Nico says in the kind of monotone voice that comes from solid medication. “They never believe me.”
73
That your pop or your granpop?”