“Going where?”
“About half the population belongs to the royal family, and most of them have other homes in other places. France. The U.S. Switzerland. Britain.”
“If the envoys decide to make Arabian women ugly, or Iranian ones, it won’t matter where they are,” she said.
“Shall I quote you?” He laughed.
“Of course not.”
“So far as we know, the media aren’t looking for you except by puttingAttention: Jane Doe a ds in the personals. You haven’t agreed to be on 20/20 have you? Or Date/me?”
“Is there such an ad?” she asked.
“There certainly is, are! People from the FBI have had several little chats with the news people,” he said cheerily. “Here’s your door. Let me pull right up beside it.”
He asked if he could see the job his agency had done on the apartment, and she invited him up. Sasquatch greeted him with a very threatening growl, but when Chad hunkered down, offered his hand and talked with Sasquatch as he scratched him behind the ears, the dog decided he was all right, gave him a good sniffing, and went back to sleep. The two of them had coffee and spent a pleasant quarter of an hour just chatting before he went home. It occurred to Benita that this was the first time in … what?, eighteen, nineteen years?, that she had sat in a room alone with an intelligent man in pleasant conversation. Not counting men she worked for.
The phone by the bed made her think of Angelica, and after dithering about it for a few minutes, trying to remember if Angel was in the new apartment yet, and what she’d said about moving her phone, she dialed the same number and crossed her fingers.
Angelica’s phone number hadn’t changed, though her voice had. She answered with a crisp, “Yes.”
“It’s me, honey.”
“Oh, Mom. I thought it was Dad again.”
“Has he been bothering you?”
“Seems like every five minutes this evening. He got bailed out by that person who wants him to help find you. So now he’s facing a trial and he’s all up in the air. I think the guy who bailed him out may be connected to the guy that was hanging around here. According to Dad, his guy was bigger, taller, with gray hair. He gave Dad a card with the name Prentice Arthur, and there was an even bigger guy with him called Dink.”
Score two for Chad. Both of them members of the cabal.
Benita asked, “So, are you moved in to your new place?”
“As of today. I brought the last stuff up this afternoon, and they just connected the phone an hour ago. The manager was really nice to let me skip on the lease of the other apartment.”
“I didn’t think it could work, your living with him.”
“It didn’t, Mom. I think he’s moved in with the girlfriend. He’s got a phone now. You can call him directly.”
Benita’s lips were pressed so tightly that it took her a moment to respond. “I won’t, Angel. Since I know he’s trying to make money out of doing something that may hurt me, he’s . . . well, he’s broken the tie. I’ve been thinking about mother bears a lot.”
“Bears?”
“Like on the nature shows. Mother bear is very fierce, protecting the cubs. She risks her own life for them. She does everything she can to let them grow up safe, but a time comes when she turns on them and drives them away. She’s done everything she can, and from then on, they’re on their own.
“The only way I can handle this is to be like a mother bear. Let the cub be himself without anything from me, no complaint, no anger, no love, certainly no interference, and that means no nothing. See what he becomes. See what he can be, totally on his own. At best, he’ll turn out great. At worst, he won’t be able to blame me for anything past today.”
There, she’d said it, realizing as she said it that it was totally true. She was not going to overlook it. He had made his own choices, now he could stand by them.