The Fountain of Youth

Chapter 26

Mrs. Patterson waited with Purdue, but they decided to go and look for Nina when it started to loom towards the evening darkening of the sky.

“Wonder where that darling child is? Usually she naps around 4 p.m. and I bring her dinner around 6 p.m. almost every day. This is the first time that she’s been this late,” Mrs. Patterson told Purdue. He didn’t like it one bit, but he didn’t want to jump to conclusions too soon.

“Maybe she’s finishing up some marking or making copies, or whatever it is lecturers do at smaller institutions,” he speculated. But in his gut he could feel that something was wrong. After Lieutenant Campbell shared with him that the Order was on Nina’s trail because of her blood work, he half expected her to be the target of some abductor sooner than later.

Purdue had tried umpteen times to reach her by cell and by e-mail without success. This he’d expected, what with their shaky relationship and her need for space. But when Sam had told him not even he had access to her, Purdue knew that the ailing historian was hell-bent on disappearing. But now he at least knew why she was being so distant, though it wasn’t much of a consolation.

“Should we go and look for her, perhaps?” Mrs. Patterson asked Purdue out of the blue. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t like this one bit. The poor woman is sick as a dog, smokes herself to death, and is a creature of habit. Who knows where she could be?”

“I concur, Mrs. Patterson,” he said firmly. “You seem to have a gut for trouble, as do I.”

She chuckled as she opened up her brolly. “My boy, if you only knew my aptitude for smelling trouble, you would make me your bodyguard. Come. We’ll start at the archive room where she works when she’s not teaching.”

With Purdue’s lanky body bent to share Mrs. Patterson’s umbrella, they traversed the beautiful garden through the threatening weather to see what was keeping Nina at this hour. When they arrived at the plummeting stairwell the trapdoor was open, as it always had been.

“She works down there?” Purdue asked.

“Yes, my dear,” Mrs. Patterson said.

“Odd,” he replied. “She’s terrified of small spaces.” He dipped his head under the ceiling as he came down the stairs. Somewhere in his Nazi-weakened trust Purdue was wondering if the nice old lady was leading him into a trap, only to have the trapdoor slammed behind him. But his paranoia was unfounded. She was right on his heel, calling for Dr. Gould into the pitch darkness.

“Wait, Mr. Purdue,” she whispered. “There is a light switch here.”

A click disappointed their expectations, but ignited their concerns. “Why are we looking for Nina in a dark room, Mrs. Patterson? It’s not like she would be sitting in the dark, would she?”

“No, that would be stupid of us. I just thought that she could be lying on the floor, passed out or something. That lady is very ill, you know,” the elderly woman told Purdue. “Nosebleeds and headaches, nausea and fainting spells plague her daily. It’s conceivable that she could be lying in the dark.”

“I see,” he said, fumbling for his tablet. Part of the device contained a sharp LED light.

“What’s going on here?” Christa asked from above them. “You will break your necks down there in the dark. The lightning blew the wiring on this grid.”

“We’re looking for Dr. Gould,” Purdue explained, patiently returning up the steps behind the Dean’s mother. He had no idea that he was leaving Nina behind in her slow acting coffin, unable to scream from behind centuries of thick stone.

“Nina went to see her specialist in Wolverhampton for tests,” Christa informed them with a splendidly played nonchalance. “She took the short break of the public holiday to get her treatment done. Apparently the poor thing has been really under the weather.”

“Oh, damn,” Purdue sighed. “Would you know the name of her doctor there, Dr. Smith?”

“No, I’m afraid she didn’t say, Mr. Purdue. But I’m sure she should be back by next week. In the meanwhile, would you like to stay for dinner?” Christa invited pleasantly.

“I would rather just get on to Wolverhampton, thank you Dr. Smith,” Purdue gave her a cordial nod and smiled.

“No, you won’t,” she insisted. “There is no way the Patterson’s will allow a guest to drive in this hellish storm. Absolutely not. And you can stay for the two days until she returns.”

“That is awfully kind,” Purdue replied. “I would hate to impose. And I am unannounced too.”

“Rubbish,” she said, and gave Purdue a wink. “After all, we’re already preparing a dinner for Mrs. Cotswald too, so you will not be imposing at all. We have more than enough.”

Mrs. Patterson watched her daughter-in-law pretend to be a human. It was chilling to see. But she was not about to embarrass her son by calling out his callous wife again. Not tonight.

In the main building’s cozy ballroom, the dinner table was decked out and the guests the residents gathered with wine and eclectic cuisine. Mrs. Patterson took her place next to Purdue, while Mrs. Cotswald sat across from them along the dining table. Their hosts sat at the heads of the table, and Mrs. Clara Rutherford was seated at Christa’s right.

Christa smiled as her husband chatted as he poured the drinks, keeping her eyes on the interesting field of play before her. One by one she surveyed them.

Look at them, all gathered at my table. Three widows, Christa thought. The billionaire genius who donates towards Daniel’s beloved academy, oblivious to the betrayal of his own medical staff who sent the woman he loves straight into the claws of the Black Sun organization to be used as an incubator.

Purdue looked a bit tense, not the usual flamboyant extrovert his reputation dictated. Christa figured he was just feeling out among all the strangers. Probably worried about his stubborn little bitch, she sneered. Then her eyes fell on some of the others. Oh, sweet, tenacious Mrs. Cotswald, the idiot who can’t tell when she’s unwanted. Probably the reason she got the shit beat out of her by Raymond all those years before she married the corpse in the archive room.

“Happy, deary?” Mrs. Patterson asked loudly, her remark drawing all eyes towards the smiling Christa. She hadn’t realized that her self-perceived superiority was showing on her face.

“Oh, um, yes, thank you, Anna,” Christa said amicably, successfully fooling all the others that she was smiling with affection. As soon as they’d all returned to their conversations she continued taking stock. And let us not forget the matriarch, Anna Patterson, bred by SS and turned traitor. Adoptive daughter of Prof. Ebner’s good graces, having been raised by one of the Order’s finest scientists and now? You’ve chosen to turn your back on us and you’re now only alive because I need your son to manage your estate when I kill you.’

Christa’s black heart throbbed eagerly as her victorious disdain escalated. In fact, had she not been so desperate to tap Nina Gould’s precious blood over three days or more, she could have wiped the slate clean of the smaller vermin she was beholding. Purdue’s nosy prying to find Nina and Mrs. Cotswald’s annoying recurrence blighting Christa’s harvesting of Gould’s powerful sanguine elixir made them both intolerable obstacles she had to bear with. Daniel seemed ignorant of his wife’s doings. To him, her meetings and clandestine projects were much like a book club, a hobby to keep her busy when she wasn’t working — something to help her forge alliances with other women. He was almost correct in that assumption, barring the murderous tendencies when she did not get her way.

Now and then she would exchange looks with Clara, both hoping to maintain the charade until the others retreated to their respective corners and they could check on the progress of Nina’s exsanguination. Christa wondered what Daniel would do if he knew that Clara was in fact her child. How would he react if he knew that St. Vincent’s administration manager was, in reality, the product of Christa’s involvement with one SS-Oberstrumbannführer Martin Hertz for the Lebensborn project?

He knew about her fetish for the antique font in the garden. She’d had an obsession with the moss-covered stone ornament that used to tap the underground river that had now run dry, but Daniel would never believe such nonsense as that of it being a Fountain of Youth. All he knew was that the water spring was one of the reasons he hadn’t sold the property before, because his wife loved it so much. Nowadays she didn’t even look at it, and yet she still fought to keep the fortress. Why, he did not know.

“Mrs. Cotswald, you told me you’ve been looking for your daughters all your life. May I ask how you lost them?” Dean Patterson asked.

She gracefully wiped her mouth and she took a hefty helping of wine before she replied. “Many years ago, I was a young dancer in Latvia. I belonged to a Ballet Company that toured throughout Europe during…” she stopped. She could hardly share her true age with the people around the table, and mentioning that her tale was set during World War II would have been absurd.

“During?” Purdue asked, eager to hear her story.

“Um, during dark times in Poland, where I come from,” she recovered. “As I said, I was a dancer, but a terrible injury sustained on stage one night caused me my career.”

“That’s terrible,” Mrs. Patterson frowned.

Mrs. Cotswald shrugged and sighed sadly, “I was young and I got involved with a…military man…with whom I had two children.” She told her tale as nonchalantly as she could, trying not to make too much of an impression. “But, of course, he left and I could not care for my girls. Having been dismissed from the ballet company, I’d had to rely on the charity of art lovers and friends to get by. Eventually, I had to give up my baby girls for adoption or see them starve. The adoptive parents kept in touch with me about my children, as long as I never visited them.”

“You weren’t allowed to let your children know you?” Daniel gasped. “That’s barbaric.”

“Perfect word, my boy,” she replied with a crack in her voice, “Perfect word.” Holding out her glass to Daniel for more wine, she cleared her throat and tried not to weep. He obliged gladly and sat down to hear the rest.

“As long as I remained a ghost, they would send me pictures and tell me where the girls were schooled, and so on. But somewhere around 1966 I lost touch. At the time my then husband sent me to a boarding house in Steinhöring. From there I was admitted to a secret mental asylum in Graz, Austria. From then on I couldn’t find my daughters again, until I followed the adoption trail to Hampshire,” she smiled such hope that Daniel wished he could embrace her. “But the trail ran cold again when Prof. Ebner died.”

Clara and Christa looked at one another knowingly. Purdue was touched by Mrs. Cotswald’s story, but he could feel that she had omitted the core truth. He planned to extract the actual, although unbelievable, truth from her before the night was over. If she was familiar with these people at St. Vincent’s, she would be able to provide him with a little more insight on which of them, if not all of them, could have abducted Nina.

One thing was plain to Purdue. He did not buy the Wolverhampton excuse for a minute and something told him that, if he left here, he would never see Nina alive again.