The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

1

HARVEY BALTIMORE’S HOUSE WAS DYING. ONCE STATELY, the Tudor had become an embarrassment to its Brookline neighbors. Glossy black paint flaked off the shutters, the pocked shingled roof covered the house like a disease, and the other half of the duplex, which had long been a source of good, steady income for Harvey, had been vacant and closed off for almost six months. The dwelling, like its owner, seemed to be declining at an accelerating pace.

The doorbell was broken. I let myself in with my key. For someone as private as Harvey, giving me the key to his house had been a monumental concession, but it only made sense. He wasn’t exactly mobile anymore.

“It’s me,” I called out while I wiped my shoes on the welcome mat in his foyer. No response, as usual, but I knew what I would find. If it was a good day, he would be clean-shaven, reading his newspaper by the light of the sun slanting through open blinds. If it was a bad day, he’d be sitting at his computer in the dark, unshaven, playing Minesweeper. Either way, he’d be in his wheelchair, his body ravaged by the multiple sclerosis that had been stealing function from him in excruciating increments. I hoped for a good day. There hadn’t been enough of those lately.

“Harvey, your shutters are flaking. We need to get them-” I rounded the corner, walked into the office, and stopped.

Harvey was there, all right, and it must have been a good day-a very good day-because there he sat in his wheelchair, engaged in a passionate kiss with the woman on his lap. At least, until I’d barreled in, at which point they tore themselves away from each other to stare at me.

Too late to back out unnoticed. I was too embarrassed to go in any further. “I’m sorry…I’ll just…I didn’t…” have any idea what to say.

“Oh, my.” Harvey went every shade of red and some from the orange spectrum. Despite his confinement to the chair, he managed to do a lot of fluttering about, mostly with his hands. He encouraged the woman off her perch. She slipped off easily, stepping gingerly so as not to get entangled in the workings of the wheelchair. Of the three of us, she was the only one who didn’t look as if she wanted to curl up into a ball and roll out of there.

I took a step back. “I can just leave you two and, um…come back later.”

“No,” Harvey stammered. “Please stay. It is I who should apologize.”

“Why should we apologize?” The woman seemed more annoyed than embarrassed, as if I had just tracked mud into her clean house. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

She was petite and fragile-looking, a good thing to be if your habit is to sit on the legs of wheelchair-bound men. She was also vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t imagine where I might have seen her before. She wore her chestnut hair cut in a short, shaggy bob. Her tight cotton slacks stopped just above her ankles, and her high-top basketball shoes were tied with thick white laces. She could have passed for a twelve-year-old boy except for her eyes. I took a closer look at those eyes, and I knew who she was.

“You’re Rachel.”

“Do I know you?”

Since Harvey couldn’t seem to find his voice, I did the honors. “I’m Alexandra Shanahan, Harvey’s business partner.”

She smiled down at Harvey. “You told her about me?”

I pointed to the picture on Harvey’s desk, the only personal photograph on display in the entire house and one of the few things she hadn’t taken when she’d walked out on him six years before, two years before I’d met him. I had caught Harvey making out with his ex-wife. No wonder he couldn’t find his voice, and no wonder I hadn’t recognized her right away. She didn’t look anything like her photo, especially with the flowing locks cut short.

“Would you like a cup?” Rachel must have noticed me staring at the full china tea service set up on the coffee table. Harvey hadn’t been able to make his own tea since he’d dumped a full pot of hot Darjeeling in his lap. That meant she’d made it, which meant she’d been there for a while.

“Harvey said you would be coming, so I made enough for three.”

“No, thanks. I’m good.” I set the cup I’d brought from Tealuxe on the desk. Harvey’s favorite blend had gone cold anyway.

Harvey cleared his throat and waded in. “Rachel has a job for us. I asked her to wait until you arrived to detail it.”

“Both of us?”

“But of course. Why would you-” He blinked at me and reached up to scratch his head, bumping his glasses in the process. “Oh, my, no. That was just…it has been a long time since we have seen each other, and…”

“I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. I’m just surprised. I didn’t know you two were…together.”

“Together?” Rachel laughed. “This is the first time we’ve seen each other in how long?” She reached over and straightened Harvey’s collar. Then she just went ahead and hoisted one petite haunch up on the armrest of his chair. “Four years?”

“Yes,” he said. “Almost.”

“We were talking and reminiscing about how much I used to enjoy giving him his back rubs, and one thing led to another-”

And that was all I needed to know. “What kind of a job?”

“I need someone to go to my house in Quincy and pick up a few things. Some family photos, mostly, and some jewelry. Some things my mother gave me.” She glanced at Harvey with a shy smile. “Some things Harvey gave me.”

“Quincy? I thought you lived around here.”

“We moved a few months ago.”

“Why can’t you get that stuff yourself?”

“Because I’m afraid my husband”-she glanced down at Harvey-“my soon-to-be-ex-husband will kill me.”

“Did he threaten you?”

She wrapped her arms around her as if a sudden draft had blown through. “The last time he beat me, he nearly killed me.”

I looked for visible bruises or scars. That she didn’t have any didn’t mean she was lying, but we had done work before for women who had been beaten down by men they loved. The battering didn’t always leave physical evidence, but it never failed to leave some part of them shattered, some part they couldn’t hide. Rachel looked whole to me.

“What did the police say?”

“You know how that is.” She laughed nervously. “I have no real recourse until he kills me.”

“Do you have a restraining order?”

“Yes. But he has two legs and a car, and when he’s drinking, there’s nothing that’ll stop him.”

“Why come to us?”

“Because Harvey’s a private investigator.” She stood up, stepped behind Harvey, and settled one hand on each of his shoulders. “I didn’t know about his current condition. I wish someone had told me things had gotten this bad.” She glared at me as though I were personally responsible for his MS.

Harvey seemed torn between basking in her attention and wanting to dive under his wheelchair. Public displays of affection were not his thing.

“Rachel,” I said, “do you mind giving us a minute?”

She looked down at Harvey. He found her hand, pulled it down to his lips, and kissed it. They locked eyes and held that pose until he nodded. I sensed the slightest bit of triumph behind her smile as she passed without looking at me. I had known the woman all of ten minutes, and I couldn’t stand her. Of course, I had despised the idea of her and what she had done to Harvey almost since I had known him.

To Harvey, Rachel was an angel, the only woman except his mother who had ever loved him. That she had dumped him for a younger, prettier boy when he’d been diagnosed mattered not, because love makes you stupid. But when I looked at her picture, I had always seen something in her eyes that made me think she wasn’t the angel he thought her to be.

“Please, forgive me.” Harvey was clearly embarrassed, and yet he couldn’t stop smiling. “That was-”

“Look, Harvey, you’re an adult, and your business is your business.” I went over, sat on the couch, and looked across the tea service at him. “But isn’t she still married?”

“Separated.”

“How long?”

“Eight months.”

The question was, what did she want? Harvey didn’t have any money. Neither one of us did. “Do you believe-” Scratch that. He obviously believed her. “Has her husband been stalking her?”

“I did not ask.”

“Did you know that her husband was abusing her?”

“No.”

“Has she called you even once over the past four years?”

“No.” He fiddled with the loose leather cushion on the arm of the wheelchair. I’d been meaning to tighten it and kept forgetting. “Nor have I called her.”

“Is she planning on sticking around after we collect her stuff for her? I mean, I hate to be so skeptical, but doesn’t this all seem to be coming out of the blue and moving really, really fast?”

He started to huff and puff. “You would expect what? That I would say no? That I would throw her out of my house and leave her to her own devices?”

Her own devices seemed to be in fine working order to me. “If I’m not mistaken, she tried to take this house from you in the divorce proceedings.”

“Are you telling me that you will not take this assignment?”

“Is she paying us?” He stared at me as if I’d just poked him in the eye. How had I become the bad guy? “She left you, Harvey. She hurt you. Now she wants you to help her out of a jam with the guy she left you for. I’m only…I’m just asking that you be sure before you get involved with her again.”

“She came to me because she trusts me.” His voice was quiet but firm. “I could no more turn her away than I could turn you away in a time of need.”

There it was. In one deft stroke, he had revealed the essence of his relationship with each of us, stated his priorities, and ended the discussion. Rachel could ask him to walk over hot coals in his bare feet, and he would ask me to hold his shoes. I would do it because I would do anything for him. I sat back and started getting used to the idea of working for Rachel.

“I’ll do it for you, Harvey. Not for her.”

He took off his glasses, found a cloth in his saddlebag, and cleaned them with a determination that wasn’t required. He put the glasses back on and looked at me with a steady gaze as he folded the cloth. “Thank you.”

I went over to the door and called Rachel back in. Harvey beamed at her. “We will be more than happy to help you with your problem.”

She smiled for him, and I got a bad feeling.