The Assassini by Thomas Gifford

Mother. Never saw any of the clay, and that confused me. Val in her quiet, little-girl way went to work with her jars of modeling compound and produced quite a remarkable rendering. Mother came into the playroom, stopped, did a double take, and asked what those things were. Val piped up, clear and sweet, “Feet of clay!” Mother found that extravagantly amusing and had Father come take a look. Later on she brought a friend from the Church to see them, but Val said she’d scrunched them all up to make something else. I knew it wasn’t true. She’d hidden the feet of clay inside her big bass drum with the clown painted on the side panel. She had pried one of the panels up and used the space inside as her most secret place. It was years before she discovered that I knew about it. I never found a great place like that, but then, I never had any great secrets. Val was the curious one, the one who had stuff to squirrel away.
    I was remembering Val as a little girl, learning to skate on the pond with a kind of natural ease while I floundered around like a fool, cold and wet and bruised and generally irritable. Winter sports always struck me as unhappy pursuits, punishment for unnamed offenses, but Val thought I was a goof.
    And I suppose I was.
    * * *
    I was thinking about Val when Miss Esterbrook, my secretary, came in and cleared her throat behind me. I turned back from the fog and memory.
    “Your sister’s calling, Mr. Driskill.”
    She left and I sat at the desk for a moment before picking up the phone. I do not trust coincidences. “Hello, Val? Where are you? What’s going on?”
    My sister sounded funny and I told her so. She laughed and called me a goof but her heart wasn’t in it. There was something wrong but she said only that she wanted me to get out to Princeton, to meet her at the house that evening. She had something she wanted to talk over with me. I told her I’d thought she was in Paris or someplace.
    “I’ve been all over. It’s a long story. I just got home this afternoon. Flew in with Curtis. Will you come tonight, Ben? It’s important.”
    “Are you sick?”
    “I’m a little scared. Not sick. Ben, let this wait until tonight, okay?”
    “Sure, sure. Is Dad there?”
    “No. He’s got a board meeting in Manhattan—”
    “Good.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Just the usual. I like plenty of advance warning if he’s waiting in the shadows to bushwhack me.”
    “Eight-thirty, Ben. And, Ben? I love you, even if you are a big goof.”
    “Earlier today Vinnie Halloran told me I was the Antichrist.”
    “Vinnie always erred on the side of overstatement.”
    “I love you, too, sis. Even if you are a nun.”
    I heard her sigh and then she hung up. I sat for a while trying to remember if I’d ever known her to be afraid before, with the fear seeping into her voice. I decided I never had.
    I left the office a little early for me since my customary day had a tendency to wind down between eight and nine. I wanted time for a shower and a change of clothes before I ransomed my Mercedes for the drive to Princeton.
    The cab dropped me at Seventy-third and Madison. The light had faded behind the fog and the streetlamps were on, glowing their moist penumbrae. I walked toward the park, still trying to figure out what was going on with my sister. The streets were slick and shiny. The World Series had ended just over a week before and suddenly it was cold as winter and the mist was turning to biting little pellets.
    Sister Val … I knew she’d gone to Rome to get started on a new book, had then sent me a postcard from Paris. I hadn’t expected to see her in Princeton until Christmas. She stuck fiercely to her research and writing schedule, yet here she was, taking a break. What had scared her enough to bring her home?
    Well, it looked like I’d be finding out that night. You could never be sure what kind of hell my sister Val was raising. All I knew was that she’d been researching the