Shard of Glass | Page 3

of letting them catch us didn't occur to me until much later. She never really told me what had happened that day she wore the yellow dress, but I knew my father and his family were chasing us because of something she had done. Somehow, it didn't matter. I loved my father, but he had been like a smiling shadow my whole life--not a real person, just a grainy four-color facsimile. A man who sent me fancy clothes and jewelry on my birthday under fake names, visited me and my mother at strange times of night and then vanished for months on end. No, I loved my father, but my mother owned my soul. How could it have been otherwise?
Three weeks after we arrived in Luxembourg, my mother and I huddled together for warmth in a reeking alley behind an expensive French restaurant. The window on the side of the building was a bit too high for either of us, but I could see through a gap in the curtains when she hoisted me up. Inside, a man who looked sort of like my father, only with less hair and a bigger belly, was slowly sipping a glass of fifty-franc wine as he watched the front door with lidded eyes.
"Is he still there?" she whispered.
"On his third glass of wine," I said, softly as I could. "The waiter keeps coming back, but he won't order any food. I think he's waiting for someone."
"Us, probably. Just like that damned family to spend a small fortune feeding us before they throw us in jail."
"Who is he?" I asked.
I could practically hear my mother's frown. "Your uncle," she said, finally. "Henry. He's part of the family business."
"What's the family business?"
"Money. Politics. Mostly money." She sounded bitter, but I didn't quite understand why. Despite the confusion of the last few weeks, the glow of adventure somehow still hadn't worn off for me. I guess that I couldn't imagine my father actually hurting us. The danger was something only my mother understood--she knew what she had taken, and how much they would risk to take it back.
She had spied him around the corner when we were walking back from the market. We had cowered behind the gigantic loaves in a baker's window as he walked past and into a restaurant. Luckily, Mom had insisted we take our bags with us wherever we went--if they had traced us all the way to Luxembourg City, then surely they would have found our tiny second-floor apartment by now. They would expect us to flee the city, and were probably watching every possible method of transportation for just that eventuality. So, we hid in the safest place we could think of--behind the restaurant where my uncle waited for us, sipping his expensive wine.
"Leah," my mom whispered, "my shoulders are getting tired. I'm going to put you down, okay?"
The door in the front of the restaurant opened. "No, wait!" I said. Two men who didn't look anything like my father brushed straight past the maitre d' and sat down in front of my uncle. The two newcomers spoke quietly for a few moments, but whatever they said made my uncle livid.??He slammed his glass on the table, and some wine sloshed over the rim. He stood up, tossed a few francs on the red-stained table cloth, and stalked out of the restaurant.
"Dammit!" he cursed as he stepped out onto the sidewalk. "I always told Charles that pet bitch of his would get him in trouble. You're sure there was no sign of them? Or the glass? Did you check the rooms?"
They had stopped in front of the alleyway, the three of them making long shadows in the flickering streetlights. My mother and I pressed ourselves against the wall.
"I turned the rooms upside down," one of the other men said. "Had to pay the landlady for two nights just so she wouldn't call the cops. I mean, somebody'd obviously been there, but they didn't leave anything behind. Not even a toothbrush."
"Did you show the landlady their pictures?" my uncle asked.
The second man nodded. "She wasn't sure about the woman, but she said it looked like the same girl."
My hands slid to my jacket pocket. The coat my mom had bought for me in Luxembourg was made for someone much bigger, and its pockets were deep enough for even the fat book to fit inside comfortably. I don't know why I took it out--I hadn't dared look through the glass since that near-disaster on the highway. But curiosity gripped me. Why did my uncle care so much about this glass? What would it show me if I used it to look at him?
"They can't have left yet," my uncle was saying as I pulled out the glass, hands shaking with every heartbeat.