Enjoy the snark. I particularly love this chapter.
EPOV
I knocked softly on the library door before entering. Carlisle was within, still on the phone and he held up a finger to indicate he’d be just another minute. I nodded and settled myself in one of the new armchairs Esme had just had delivered. She had done an excellent job remodeling the massive 20’s era house she and Carlisle had purchased in La Jolla, California. The library had originally been a bedroom, and seeing that there was no need for five bedrooms, Esme decided to make good use of the space. The arched floor-to-ceiling windows opened the room up to the bright blue waters of the Pacific, and quickly became my uncle’s favorite room in the house. A large mahogany table dominated the room and was covered with his medical journals, as well as various files and a laptop that was set up to wirelessly access any government database in existence.
The journals were necessary for him to stay on top of the latest in medicine. The files were a mish-mosh of patients and targets. The government network access was part of another scheme, altogether.
The Cullen family had been operating very quietly for the US government for quite some time now. My father, who had taken his mother’s maiden name when he came of age, worked diligently alongside Carlisle and their father to track down those who were considered a threat to national security. They were the best trackers on earth, able to find anyone, anywhere. My cousin Emmett and I had grown up with the great plan that we would join them on their quest one day, as top-secret government spies who saved our country on a regular basis and made the most of our legions of female followers. Of course, at the time we had no idea what we were getting into, and even now I wondered if it was worth it.
Emmett had been convinced it was, so I forced myself to trudge on.
I ran my hands through my hair, which was no better groomed than it had been when I woke up that morning, and leaned back in the chair. I sprawled my legs out and briefly deliberated propping my feet up on the coffee table in front of me when Carlisle’s conversation caught my attention.
“Yes, that’s fine. I need him out of the way as soon as possible. The situation is growing out of hand as it is.” He paused. “Right.” Another short pause, in which he took the opportunity to kick off his shoes and prop his stocking feet up on the table. I grinned and did likewise on the coffee table. He rolled his eyes at me and spoke again. “Money is not an object here. I can forward the advance today, and pay the rest upon completion. Yes. Very good. Send me the details of her travel arrangements and I will pick her up. All right, thank you.”
He punched the off button on the cordless phone and laid it face down on the table. “You know, if your aunt catches you with your feet on her brand new coffee table, you’re toast.”
I snorted. “I don’t think you have much room to talk, the way your wife is about her furniture.” I lowered my feet and stood, stretching out and moving toward the table. I stood at an angle from Carlisle and drummed my fingertips on the table while flipping absently through the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. “Alice said you wanted to see me?”
Carlisle lowered his feet and leaned forward, his forearms resting on the tabletop. “I did.”
“Would it have anything to do with that phone call you were just on?”
“It would.”
I flipped the magazine closed and tossed it back to the center of the table. “You gonna tell me about it, or sit here and play ping pong with me all day?” Actually, that was a great idea. After we got done discussing whatever it was he wanted to talk about, we could head up to the family room and go a couple rounds. It had been a while since we played, and I liked to make sure he remembered who was King Pong around here. My mind was drifting to strategy when he spoke again and fuck me, I was not prepared for the next words out of his mouth.
“Actually, yeah.” He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his stomach. “I just hired someone to kill you.”
*****
Ping pong strategy left me.
“Beg your pardon?” I couldn’t have heard him right.
“You heard me. I just put out a hit on you.” He grinned devilishly. “You’d better start running, little boy.”
I hooked my leg around an adjacent chair and pulled it toward me, dropping into it. “Explain to me why you put a hit out on me without consulting me first?” I was beginning to recover from the initial shock and the snark was making a comeback, slowly. “I mean, Christ. If you were getting tired of my company, all you have to do is say so. Esme’s not going to like the mess if it goes down here.”
He laughed. “I’m glad you’re taking this so well.” He pulled a large folder off the top of a stack and tossed it toward me unceremoniously. “As you well know, Esme would kill me if I killed you. So there will be no death or dismemberment here today. The contract is pretty much a front for something I’m going to really need your help on.” He gestured toward the folder in front of me and I opened it. The first page on top was an old newspaper clipping, dated December 15th, 1993. Its bold headline jumped out at me immediately.
Husband and Wife Murdered; Daughter Gone
Port Angeles, December 13th – It was a Friday the Thirteenth nightmare come true for one family in the small Port Angeles neighborhood of Cherry Hill. Phil and Renée Dwyer were found brutally murdered in their home early Saturday morning. The couple’s seven year old daughter, Isabella, has been reported missing. Officials have no leads at this time as to who could have perpetrated such a terrible crime, and there is no information at this moment leading to Isabella’s whereabouts…
The article went on about the Dywer family and their role in the community. Phil had been a teacher at the local high school, as well as the athletic director. Renée was a writer for a locally-based magazine, and Isabella, or Bella, as her friends called her, had been a bright young child with a gift for music. I glanced at the grainy black and white photo of the family and felt a vague sense of recognition when I looked at Renée Dywer.
“This was sixteen years ago, Carlisle. I doubt we’d be able to track the girl down – she’s probably dead, you know that. Her mother looks oddly familiar, though. Do we know the family?”
Carlisle sighed. He stood up, walking over to the wall opposite the bank of windows. He pulled a small silver photo frame down from the bookshelf there and brought it over to me. The photo in the frame was of the same family pictured in the newspaper article, this time standing together on a rocky beach. I looked up, confused.
He sat back down. “Renée Dwyer was born Renée Platt. She was Esme’s sister.”
Whoa, back the damn truck up, Holmes.
“What do you mean, her sister? Esme doesn’t have a sister.” At least not one I’d heard about.
Carlisle leaned forward again on the tabletop. His fingers were laced together in front of his face and he was using his thumbs to rub either side of the bridge of his nose.
“Esme and Renée’s parents were Lois and Clark Platt. They worked for the same government branch that the Cullens have always worked for. Clark and my own father were much more hands-on in the field than your father and I have ever been. The Alpha for our unit had just assigned them to an Italian-based organization known as the Volturi.” He paused as recognition dawned on me. The Volturi were fucking horrible, no two ways about it. “Good, you recall them. At any rate, they had successfully tracked down the Volturi’s most dangerous assassin, a man who had been carefully picking off our ambassadors in Europe at an alarming rate. His name was Charles Swan, and he was quickly becoming a major threat to the safety of our people overseas.” He leaned forward further and pulled a couple pages out of the way, exposing an FBI info sheet on the aforementioned Mr. Swan. “The Alpha had no one readily available to send to Italy, and so Clark and Lois volunteered. Esme and Renée had come to stay with us while they were gone, and I was so excited. I had finally decided to ask Esme to wait for me, until she got out of high school.” He smiled. “I had planned this big, romantic outing, and it ended up in disaster. But it worked.”
Shaking his head and smiling at the memory, he continued. “I digress. So, the Platts traveled to Italy, to the Emilia-Romagna region, where they found Charles easily. He had been drinking heavily, Clark later told us, which made the entire incident go down much more smoothly. I don’t know all the specifics, but the basics of it were that Charles ended up dead, and Lois and Clark returned to the States.”
I had been flipping pages errantly now, listening to him tell me the story as I associated various paper clippings and photos in the file with the names he used. I turned another page. It was two obituaries.
“Charles had a son, whom he had been carefully training to replace him when he retired from the day-to-day operations. Charlie was a smart boy, by all accounts, although he was nowhere near his father’s caliber.” I read down the page. Lois and Clark Platt had been killed in their San Francisco home, survived only by their teenaged twin daughters and ‘many close friends’.
“When the Platts were killed, measures were taken to place the girls in protective custody. Esme ended up with us, since she and I had come to an understanding of sorts. My parents never officially adopted her, although I know in their hearts they considered her, and Renée, their daughters. Renée was placed with another family, whom had no agency involvement and lived near Seattle.”
I flipped back to the page detailing the Dwyer family’s destruction. “So I take it Charlie successfully caught up to Renée?”
“Yes. No one told us where Renée had been sent, as the agency thought it was safest that the girls be separated and cut all contact with each other. It was so difficult for Esme, and I can only assume Renée found it just as hard. We were trying to track her down – it had been over ten years at that point since their parents had been murdered and since there had been no trace of Charlie since, we assumed that it would be alright. I only wish we had started sooner.”
“So, let me get this straight. Esme had a sister, who is now dead. Her daughter went missing, presumably dead, and the man who did it has been off the radar for well over a decade now.” I raked my hands through my hair, tugging it in frustration. I could not see where he was going with this, and I hated not being able to figure that shit out for myself. “Tell me what this has to do with my pending death, because I’m not seeing the connection here.”
Carlisle looked at me in annoyance. “I never said that we presumed Isabella was dead, Edward. And Charlie is no longer ‘off the radar’.” He stood and walked to the windows, gazing out at the water. “That phone call you just overheard?” I nodded. “That was Charlie. And the agent he’s sending to kill you for me?”
He turned, giving me The Look and I braced myself. It was the one he reserves for when whatever he’s about to say is going to change the course of history, or some shit like that. That Look.
“It’s Bella.”
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