CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Picture Show

The room they prepared for me was done up in raspberry, white and navy. It was perfect, like a pin on Pinterest. I looked around pricing out the furniture, the blankets, and the artwork. Did they feel they had to do this because of the room Christian had made for me in Scotland? There was a telephone I quickly discovered was only connected to the reception desk. There was a TV and I could watch thousands of channels. No books. There was a desk for writing, but no supplies. Did they seriously think a TV would be enough to entertain me, when I was looking for ways to be a bad hostage?

Not long after, I was escorted to a conference room for dinner with my father and Dr. Hilliar. At the table, Charles took a seat beside me, even though I had asked for distance.

Dr. Hilliar took charge. “Bethany,” he said after he sat down. “I’ve been thinking that perhaps you don’t know much about the man who calls himself Christian Henderson. I think you need a lesson about him.”

“Are you sure you want to go through the trouble of telling me all this stuff? I have nothing to do with him anymore and I'm not interested in whatever he kept from me. He kept a lot more than secrets from me. I’m over this and I want to go home,” I said, making my promised effort to be polite.

Dr. Hilliar gazed about the room like he didn't know where to begin if I shut him down after his opening remarks. He had been counting on my interest. He smiled wryly as he continued, “Please humor me. You won't be bored at all. Christian Henderson is, without a doubt, the most interesting man alive. I have a slide show.”

“Over dinner?” I asked skeptically.

“Why not over dinner?”

I glanced at the table. It was the sort of food a person in university never got because they didn’t serve roast beef with horseradish and mashed potatoes anywhere I normally frequented. In the interest of being a bad hostage, I decided not to eat anything. I busied my hands by placing my napkin in my lap, as they dimmed the lights.

A picture of Christian popped up: hazel eyes, strong jaw, and wavy, tawny hair. I used to think he was gorgeous, but the appearance of the real him had killed the effect for me. That face was only a pinched mask he wore to hide his true face.

Then they showed me a picture of Damen Cross. “Do you know who this is?”

“Damen Cross. He’s a banker.”

“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? Would you believe it’s the same man as this?” He flipped back to Christian.

“I’ll believe anything you say to get this over quicker, or I won’t believe a thing if it’ll get you to stop… whichever.”

“Aren’t you interested in the man you’ve been living with?” my father inquired.

“‘Living with’ are strong words,” I said with palpable disgust. “They are also incorrect words. I hardly call vacationing a few times a year ‘living with’ him. Besides, he and I aren’t on speaking terms.”

Father piped up again. “But more importantly, do you think these two pictures look like the same man?”

I shrugged. “If you say they do.”

Dr. Hilliar and my father exchanged glances. From their expressions, my father thought it was time to put the projector away, but Dr. Hilliar wanted to press on. He flipped to the next picture.

It was of a man with extremely blond hair and dark eyes. He looked like a surfer with messy bleached hair below his collarbone. The picture had been taken at a beach resort. He looked a little like a raccoon because he had a slight tan line where his sunglasses had been sitting. I examined his bone structure carefully. I thought he did something to make his eyebrow ridge bigger. The slight lamb chop sideburns were also meant to throw a person off, but none of it threw me off anymore, not since I had seen his real face.

“This is Riley Fulks.”

“And he is Christian Henderson in disguise too?” I huffed.

My father looked deterred, but no amount of lip threw the doctor. He was probably better at judging my subtler nonverbal communication. I had heard all these names before, and I might not be able to hide my lack of surprise from someone who was trained to look for such things.

“He might be,” the doctor said noncommittally. “This is William Farris.”

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I glanced at the new picture on the screen. He had wrapped something around his torso to make himself look beefier. He also wore shoulder pads, but to me, his neck looked disproportionately thin. His hair was the most boring color of brown and his eyes the most boring color of blue. I could see how that getup could be useful to a man who wanted to disappear, as he looked like an extra in a movie.

“This is one of his less convincing disguises, don’t you think?”

I turned away. “You tell me.”

“Those are only a few of the aliases he uses now. What do you think of this?” The doctor flipped to the next picture. This one was yellow. He had curly grayish-brown hair and a mustache, but he looked more like the original man under the grubbiness. He still had that fantastic twinkle in his eye, like he knew all the fun things. He was at a BBQ in someone’s backyard. He was wearing flip flops and holding a red plastic cup. He looked really happy. I wasn't sure I'd ever seen his posture so relaxed.

“This picture was taken in 1968.”

I squinted my eyes. “If you want to feed me horse manure, you could at least tell me it’s chocolate. It’s his dad or his uncle. So what?”

“It’s not his dad or his uncle. It’s him,” my father said quietly. “This was what he looked like before he started messing with his face so that he could disappear into the crowd. The way the world worked back then was less exact. Someone could fudge their identity much easier. What do you think, Bethany? Do you still think he’s handsome?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“He was going by the name Clint Johnson.”

“Riveting,” I said drolly.

“What about this?” the doctor asked as he moved onto the next slide in the photo tour.

This one was a black and white shot of him looking over his shoulder. He was wearing a military uniform and he had a cigarette sticking out of his mouth. There was no disguise unless a uniform was a disguise. They flipped to an enlarged version of his face. It was grainy and monochrome, but it was him.

“This was taken in 1915. He was Harold Martens back then.”

I didn’t answer the question they didn’t ask. Why did he look the same in the two pictures when over forty years had passed? And why did he look the same in 1915 as now? Christian had told me he was alive when he shouldn’t be. He did not tell me he was over a hundred years old.

But he was.

I believed them instantly. It explained everything. It explained his classic tastes, his chivalrous attitude, and perhaps how he felt when he told me that he had expected to watch me die. How many people had died in his arms?

I had to mask my interest, hide my curiosity, even though he was the only person I’d ever been curious about.

I pitched my voice to a bored drone. “And all this has something to do with me because?” I waited for them to fill in the blank.

“Bethany, after all this time with him, we wonder if you know the answer to a few of his darker secrets.”

I glared at them. Suddenly, I understood something Rogan had told me. He said that they wouldn't come after him if I was with him. They were trying to get him to confide in me, because I would be an easier nut to crack than him. It wasn't that I was precious to them. It was that I was unwittingly their mole. They had come to get me because I was out of contact with Christian, so they thought I couldn’t learn more about him. It was time to harvest what they'd planted. I scoffed at my father. “I don't know any of his secrets if he has them. I’ve tried to explain it to you. He neglected me. All the years I was with him, he neglected me.”

“But you still have some lingering affection for him?” the doctor questioned.

“Right. I like him more than I like any of you. That isn’t saying much.”

My father rolled his wheelchair sideways so he could face the doctor. “I’m sick of this cloak and dagger. Christian already knows what we want. She might as well know too if she’s going to cooperate.”

Dr. Hilliar inclined his head. “If that’s what you want to do, but we might not be able to go back.”

“We already can’t go back,” my old father said bitterly. He turned to me and raised his voice, “Bethany, show us your heart surgery scars.”

That was a strange turn for our discussion to take, but since I knew no reason to hide the truth, I left it open. “I can't. They're gone. Over the years, they faded.”

Doctor Hilliar leaned in toward my father and tried to whisper unsuccessfully. “All our questions should be answered in the next few days. We don’t need to convince her of anything more right now.”

It was then that dad noticed my dinner plate. Everyone else at the table had cleaned their plates, while I had eaten nothing. “Why haven't you eaten?”

I looked at the food. “I have vowed to eat nothing until I am released.”

Dad looked at Dr. Hilliar for his opinion. The doctor shook his head. “Bethany, we can't send you home in that state. We have to keep you here for treatment. Any hospital would do the same.”

“No. They wouldn't. They would send me home to my own bed since I require no further treatment until the stitches come out,” I answered bravely. “And though I am grateful to Dr. Hilliar for stitching me up, surely I don’t need a doctor of his expertise to remove my stitches.”

“Bethany, we don't want to risk infection,” the doctor said, again using my full name in that infuriating way. “You must eat so your body can heal.”

I glared at them. “I don’t need to heal. I need to leave.”

“She knows,” my father rasped. He started speaking into his smartwatch and within a second I was completely surrounded by their army drones in military uniforms.

They were ordered to escort me back to my room. I walked, albeit slowly, because of my injury. Charles followed behind them, carrying my dinner plate.

Outside the room, I flipped it over so the mashed potatoes and meat splattered across the carpet. I was so feeble they hadn't expected me to do something like that. “I'm not eating that!” I spat angrily.

Before I could register his reaction, I was thrown headfirst into the room. The door was slammed shut with finality behind me. A few of my stitches ripped open and I bled through my gauze and into the white nightgown.