Here’s the opening chapter of Open Water, the tenth Ingrid Skyberg thriller.
Ingrid scanned the arrivals hall as she ran to make sure her mother wasn’t already there. She pictured Svetlana—a human lynx, small, lithe, and powerful—barging her way off the plane and slaloming through the labyrinth of corridors to ensure she arrived first, just in time to plaster a vulnerable look on her face and place a hunch across her shoulders. What kind of daughter leaves her elderly mother alone in a foreign country? Ingrid’s jaw tightened in anticipation of her mother’s rebuke. She could feel the tension building in her muscles, the dread curling in her stomach. Svetlana would relish the chance to bring up her lateness at any opportunity during her stay. Ingrid pressed her lips together to suppress the scream her lungs were brewing.
The arrivals board announced the flight from Minneapolis had landed over twenty minutes beforehand. Ingrid spun round to check Svetlana wasn’t scowling in a corner, then ran over to the exit, convinced her mother’s nicotine addiction would have led her outside. But Svetlana wasn’t among the smokers. When Ingrid was absolutely sure her mother hadn’t yet cleared customs, her shoulders dropped and she sauntered back to the barrier to wait for the maternal deluge. Her job, she told herself, was not to drown.
It’s only a week. I can handle this.
A library of self-help books had taught her she couldn’t change her mother’s behavior, only her own reactions to Svetlana’s loaded passive-aggressive comments and next-level fault-finding. If Ingrid could be kind, then perhaps her mother would respond with a little kindness of her own.
Perhaps.
Ingrid had been stunned when Svetlana announced she was traveling to London. In the six years since her posting to the FBI’s UK office, her mother had never shown any interest in visiting her only child. “I will be there next week. You have a room for me, yes?” Svetlana’s accent betrayed little evidence that she had lived in the US for almost fifty years.
The reason for Svetlana’s visit had left Ingrid equally speechless. She had been invited to take part in a BBC radio program about Soviet defections. The invite wasn’t a surprise—Svetlana had made headlines in 1976 when she renounced the USSR after competing at the Montreal Olympics—but her acceptance of the invitation was shocking because Svetlana never, ever talked about her past. Ingrid knew more about her mother’s life from Wikipedia than she did from Svetlana’s own lips. Yet her mother was now prepared to discuss her defection on national radio.
Ingrid monitored the automatic doors that spasmodically ejected travelers into the arrivals hall. She lasered in on the luggage tags to see if any of them had been on her mother’s flight. A red-faced child wearing a Mini Apple sweatshirt was the first of the Minneapolis travelers to make it through. By the look of the toddler’s tear-stained face and her parents’ exhausted demeanor, it had not been an easy flight. Ingrid hoped the kid hadn’t been sitting near Svetlana who hadn’t even shown forbearance with her own child.
Ingrid’s eye was drawn to a smart-looking woman in a barely crumpled light gray dress and matching jacket. The Midwest tag on her Gucci case suggested she had also been on her mother’s flight. The sunglasses perched on her head were tucked in between wisps of tidy blonde hair. How did she look so fresh? When Ingrid got off a transatlantic flight, she looked like a hobo. Ingrid’s gaze followed her as she walked through the concourse, toward the welcoming committees with their balloons and expectant smiles.
Was the woman famous? One of those talking heads from the local news who popped up when there was a prize pumpkin in Grand Rapids or a murder in Duluth? Ingrid recognized her from somewhere. Had they been at school together? They made eye contact, and Ingrid flinched. A slight widening of the pupils. A tiny flare of the nostrils. She had recognized Ingrid too. The woman looked away and started walking more quickly, passing Ingrid as if she were late for a train.
Ingrid tried to recall the woman’s name from the dark recesses of her memory. Her vision blurred as more passengers exited the automatic doors in various degrees of dishevelment. She looked down, willing her synapses to locate the information.
A twinge in her shoulder. A shiver over her skin. Bear Creek.
Ingrid’s mouth was instantly dry at the memories of bullets strafing the sweet night air. Burning rubber. Blue and red flashing lights through the magnolia branches. Without realizing, Ingrid followed.
Becky. The name landed in her head like a punch. Becky Swann. Ingrid picked up speed, searching for Becky’s blonde hair in the sea of bobbing heads or her Gucci luggage between a moving forest of legs. She scanned the concourse and broke into a jog.
The last time she’d seen Becky, she’d been wearing a torn cotton blouse and hand-me-down jeans. She’d had a deep tan from their lazy days at the Bear Creek compound and been the kind of girl who knew how to braid hair and turn men to Jell-O with the promise of sexual favors. Somehow, she was now a Gucci girl. Perhaps Ingrid was mistaken. Yet the distinctive kink in her nose and the angle of her jaw meant Ingrid had started to run.
A traveler with Gucci luggage does not ride the subway. Her only route out of Heathrow would be a black cab, so Ingrid raced outside, where the June warmth had yet to materialize, and followed the signs for the taxi lane, weaving in between people asking for directions or corralling sleepy children. She spied a long line of London black taxis, their orange lights indicating their eagerness for a fare, and sprinted toward them.
Ingrid approached the line of waiting business travelers in dark suits with cell phones illuminated in their hands. She scanned their faces and dipped her gaze for a Gucci logo, but Becky was not among them. Ingrid ran a hand through her short, blonde hair and let out a frustrated sigh. Her heart pounded, and she had to blink to refocus her vision. It probably wasn’t her anyway. She turned for the terminal building just as a black cab looped round the drop-off zone with an immaculately dressed farm girl in the back seat. Ingrid inhaled deeply: It was her. Subconsciously, Ingrid rubbed her shoulder, reaching for the spot beneath her scapula where a .38 Remington had entered her thorax before grazing her lung. She didn’t even realize she was doing it until she heard a familiar voice.
“What, you can’t even stand up straight now?”
Svetlana Skyberg stood at the exit to the arrivals area, one hand gripping an enormous battered suitcase, the other clasping a handbag tight against her side. Birdlike, her mom weighed less than 100 pounds and still bleached her hair the same shade of nicotine yellow. The eyeshadow—blue, always blue—and vermillion lipstick were unchanged since forever. Pickled by vodka, Svetlana hadn’t aged since Ingrid had last seen her. She hardly looked any different from the wedding photos on the mantlepiece in the farmstead where Svetlana had lived, alone, through almost three decades of widowhood. Bitterness is better than Botox, Ingrid thought, as she forced a smile onto her lips.
“Svetlana!” Ingrid reached out a hand to take her mother’s suitcase. Their hands touched, and Ingrid knew that other mothers and daughters would embrace. Other daughters would have said ‘Mom.’ But there was ice in Svetlana’s blue eyes, and Ingrid knew that now was not the moment to fake intimacy. “The car’s this way.”
After a few steps, Svetlana made her first parry. “Did you forget I was coming?”
“Of course not.” Ingrid forced herself to look at her mother as she dragged the heavy suitcase.
“So, what? You went wee-wee?”
Geez! “I’m not eight years old!”
Svetlana emitted a sound somewhere between a grunt and bark. “So, where were you?”
Ingrid stopped walking and looked at her mother. “You remember Bear Creek?”
Svetlana’s features rearranged themselves to display something like maternal concern. “Of course I remember where my Malyshka got shot.”
An eavesdropping passerby stared at them and clattered straight into a pillar.
“Well, the woman who shot me was on your flight.”