They’d just have to take their chances.
“Come on,” Bostwick said. “Enough of this. Let’s get her.” Thomasine started down the hall with the stretcher.
“I can’t let you go in there,” the nurse shouted.
“Miss Jones, you no longer have a choice.”
“I’ll call security!” she shouted, her voice rising.
She did not hear Brad pad up behind her. During last night’s planning session, they had considered bringing guns—Bostwick had even briefly discussed needles loaded with a quick-acting sedative—and had finally decided against any weapons. It would have been too easy for someone to get hurt, to get killed. Frankly, they’d prayed that returning Abbie would be as easy as Heather’s taking her—without any resistance at all.
It wasn’t working out like that.
Brad put his hands over Miss Jones’s mouth, pulling her tightly toward him, locking her in a clumsy embrace. She felt surprisingly small.
“One word,” he whispered, “and I’ll kill you.”
Still joined, they crab-walked toward the medicine closet. Bostwick had predicted there would be one—hospitals were very security-conscious these days when it came to drugs, he’d said—and Brad had spotted it on the way toward Abbie’s room.
“Open it.”
“But I don’t have the—”
“Open it!”
She reached into her pocket and withdrew the key. Hand shaking, she fitted it into the lock and opened the door.
Brad snatched the key from her and shoved her inside. She toppled to the floor, too scared to cry. “One word,” Brad repeated before locking the door, “and I’ll slit your throat.” It was an unnecessary warning. Miss Jones would have stayed in that closet overnight if the police hadn’t found her there, shaking uncontrollably, a half hour later.
With Bostwick in command, they transferred Abbie quickly but gently from her bed to stretcher. She did not seem to know she was being moved. Back through the unit they went, into the hall. The elevator was waiting.
On the way out they passed the security guard.
“You all have a good day, you hear?” he said, considerably more cheerfully than on the way in.
“Thanks,” Bostwick said.
They pulled out onto Gold Street, no lights flashing, and were on the FDR Drive in minutes.
Just to be safe, the guard had memorized their license plate.
Brad knew that years later he would still remember Thomasine’s drive through midtown Manhattan and the incident that followed at a gas station on the Taconic Parkway, halfway home to Morgantown.
They had not expected to travel through midtown Manhattan. They had expected to get onto the FDR Drive near the Brooklyn Bridge, as they did. They had expected to head north along the East River, as they did. They had expected to continue north on the FDR Drive to the Harlem River Parkway.
As they could not because of an overturned tractor-trailer. Thomasine was behind the wheel. “Oh, shit,” she swore when she saw the traffic ahead thickening and slowing.
“What?” shouted Brad from the back of the ambulance. Thomasine was driving so that Bostwick could tend to Abbie and Brad could be there to comfort her in case she woke up So far she hadn’t.
“A slowdown. I can’t tell what’s causing it. Wait . . . I can see it . . . Jesus! It’s a truck. Turned over. Looks like it just happened . . . aren’t even any cops there yet.”
Brad left Abbie, crawled forward, and took the seat next to Thomasine. “Damn thing is blocking the whole road,” he said.
“Murphy’s Law,” Bostwick said softly as he adjusted the flow of Abbie’s IV and prepared to take her blood pressure.
“Here they come,” Thomasine said. In her rearview mirror she saw flashing blue lights.
“Who?”
“The cops.”
Cops, Brad thought with alarm. Last thing we need is cops. Even if there’s no kidnapping report out yet, there’s an accident up ahead. Someone may be hurt. And we’re in a bloody ambulance!
“Turn off here,” Brad said frantically.
“Here?”
“Yes. Thirty-fourth. We can cut across midtown.”
Thomasine slid off the road at the Thirty-fourth Street exit just as the cruiser whizzed past. They crossed Second Avenue, Third, Lexington Park, Madison, uneventfully. Brad was beginning to think the detour might not prove so costly after all when, a block from Herald Square, traffic stopped altogether.
The snow wasn’t responsible, although it was no longer just a tease, but a pelting, driving storm that had the potential for real accumulation. It was the shoppers. A thousand shoppers. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand, coursing through the streets and sidewalks and in and out of stores like an army of insects on a suicide march. These were not your garden-variety shoppers, Thomasine realized with instant frustration. They were the most desperate breed of all—last-minute Christmas shoppers engaged in the final countdown. This was do-or-die. And if they were spilling into the streets, trapping cars, creating a traffic jam that was monstrous even by New York City standards, well, that was just too bad.
“We’re screwed.” Thomasine cursed.
“These things sometimes have a way of breaking up quickly,” Brad said hopefully.
“Are you kidding? Look ahead. Gridlock, as far as you can see.” Ten minutes passed, and they had moved four car lengths. Fifteen minutes, and they’d gone a quarter of a block.
Twenty-five minutes, and they were only to Herald Square. The gridlock showed no sign of loosening. If anything, fed by the shoppers’ frenzy, it had intensified.
Ahead to their right was MACY’S. THE WORLD’S LARGEST STORE, the giant sign proclaimed.
It’s almost Christmas, Brad thought once again. No matter how often he was reminded of it today, that fact struck him as impossibly cruel.
Every year of her life he’d come to Macy’s with Abbie. Every single Christmas, starting with her first, when she was a six-month-old bundled in a cocoon of blankets and wedged comfortably into her collapsible stroller. Even when he and Heather had been civil—when, conceivably, she might have wanted to join them—Macy’s had always been the quintessential father-daughter treat, deliberately off limits to all but Abbie and Dad. This was to become a tradition in the grand tradition of the circus, trips to the ball park, the Staten Island Ferry. And it had. Brad remembered each and every one of their holiday visits with incredible sharpness of detail, as if they’d been written in bold type in the Absolute Best Times chapter of his life’s book.
He looked at Abbie, strapped into a stretcher, and he wiped a tear from his eye. “How’s she doing, Doc?” he asked.
“The same,” Bostwick answered.
But Thomasine was not the same.
Not the calm, take-charge person she’d been in the hospital, or driving up the FDR Drive, or even trapped in gridlock half a block back. Thomasine was getting very, very uptight. Her knuckles were white from gripping the wheel, and she was actually sweating, even though she had the window cracked. Normally the coolest of human beings, she liked to joke about how she’d been known to blow a valve on occasion. Her reaction to Charlie’s and Brad’s altercation had been one of those occasions. Even caught up in the madness of that moment, Brad had been able to feel her fury, shimmering from her in waves, like heat rising from a summer sidewalk.
Going on half an hour they’d been stranded, Thomasine thought. Damn! Thousands of people had been passing within sight of the ambulance—that’s right, the old-fashioned one with the out-of-state plates—and all it would take was one of them to be an off-duty cop (or an on-duty one, for Christ’s sake) and their gig would be up. Surely by now the hospital had reported Abbie’s disappearance. Surely by now reports of it were crackling out of dashboards of a hundred cruisers from Staten Island to Queens.
Besides, the weather was deteriorating. By the time they got to Massachusetts, there could easily be a foot of snow, and then they would be at the mercy of DPW crews. God for
bid. Abbie seemed stable, but Bostwick had been very emphatic on one point: There was absolutely no way of predicting how long she would remain like that. Moving her once already had apparently shocked her system. Bostwick read that in her vital signs, her pulse and blood pressure, both lower than when he’d seen her last at Berkshire Medical. A second move, no matter how careful, was risky. Not to mention what lay ahead of Abbie once they got to Thunder Rise.
It was in the middle of these ruminations that it hit Thomasine.
Siren.
Flashing lights.
The ambulance had both.
This whole thing is such a gamble anyway, she decided.
I’m going for it.
Thomasine reached for the dash and flicked two switches. He couldn’t see the lights, but the siren startled Brad. “What are you doing?” he yelled.
“Getting us out of here,” she answered, and he could hear it plainly, the derangement in her voice.
“You’re crazy! You’ll draw attention to us!”
“That’s the idea,” she answered wickedly. “That’s why we’ll be on our way in no time.”
Thomasine prepared to move out. Incredibly, nothing happened. The siren was not meek; Bostwick knew that from experience. Thomasine had expected Thirty-fourth to open like the Red Sea parting for Moses—the traffic dividing, the cars and cabs slinking to opposite sides of the street—but the most they got was the car directly in front of them to begin tooting its horn. Pedestrians stared briefly, then let their thoughts return to their last-minute shopping. The street-corner preacher who’d been yelling “Jesus saves souls!” through a bullhorn stopped momentarily, then resumed his crusade. “I don’t believe it,” Thomasine shouted.
“Would you knock it off?” Brad said, panicked.
Thomasine looked at the sidewalk, calculating distances. It was certainly wide enough. The Macy’s marquee looked high enough. There was only the question of the people.
“Hold on,” she said, cutting the wheel and giving the ambulance gas. It jumped the curb with a lurch that toppled Bostwick. A blue-haired lady screamed. A second lady screamed and dropped her Macy’s bags. They crunched under the ambulance’s tire. A chestnut vendor fled from his cart. Thomasine inched forward. More people screamed, scrambling to get away. The message rippled with amazing speed through the crowd, more effective than any siren or lights. Thomasine could almost hear it buzzing through their brains: Crazy person on the loose! In an ambulance! On the sidewalk! Run for your lives!
And run they did.
“You’re going to kill someone!” Brad shouted. “You’re going to hit a hydrant! You’re going to lose control!”
But she didn’t. In under a minute they found themselves with an empty sidewalk. Thomasine put the pedal down and roared past the store, into the open street beyond.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE
Wednesday, December 24
Afternoon
Charlie cleared as many deadfalls as he could in the time they’d allotted. At two-thirty he silenced his chainsaw, even though he was still several hundred yards from the entrance to the mine. Maybe it was wishful thinking, but the rest of the old access road didn’t seem as overgrown as the half mile or so he’d hacked his way through. With luck, they’d be able to get the snowmobile right up to the entrance.
It was luck they’d surely need now because the ambulance was probably no more than two hours from Morgantown and Charlie did not have the spear. It was time to get it.
He had turned his back on Thunder Rise, was trudging down through the storm and wind and the growing drifts toward his Cherokee, when he felt it—a light touch, as if someone had gently laid a hand on his shoulder. Charlie pivoted, knowing even as he turned that there would be nothing behind him, just as there had been nothing there that autumn day with Jimmy. He understood immediately: Hobbamock, making his presence known. On fast forward, a succession of images passed through his mind: a wolf, a bear, a vulture, a snake. Denizens of the pniese. Hobbamock’s warriors, a band of soul deliverers. Perhaps passing by even now, on their way to deliver another.
You know, don’t you, you bastard? Charlie thought, not with fear, but with a vicious hatred he could barely control. You know what we’re up to, and you’d stop us if you could, wouldn’t you?
But you can’t, can you?
You can only touch the children. Only children, you fucking coward.
He turned again, and this time he ran.
Abetted by the weather, evening already was eating into the afternoon as Charlie proceeded through downtown Lenox and on up West Street toward Eagletop, Ted Wigglesworth’s summer mansion. Charlie had his window down for a smoke, and he heard the strains of Christmas carols—Bing Crosby and Andy Williams, crooning about exactly the kind of holiday shaping up this year for the Berkshires, a white one—from an outside speaker one of the shop owners had mounted over his door. Main Street was choked with people, but it was a good-natured crowd, a partly tipsy crowd, a mixture of shoppers and folks let out early from work and red-cheeked kids rediscovering that after they had waited all year for Santa, the last few hours were by far the longest.
Charlie drove past Tanglewood, its summer song muted until a more inviting season. The road twisting, climbing higher, past meadows into pine-smothered hills, passing estates in the million-and two-million-dollar range. The road narrowing, disappearing in woods, reemerging by what in good weather should be a breathtaking vista of town. The entrance to Eagletop was across the street from that vista, between elaborate stone pillars. Charlie stopped before he reached them, scanning up and down the road to be sure he was alone. He was. He turned into the drive, which wound between two meticulously landscaped rows of towering blue spruce. The drive had been plowed, but since the last pass the storm had deposited another four inches of virgin snow. This was the only entrance to Eagletop; behind the estate were woods frequented only by squirrels and deer. No one had passed in or out for hours.
Since discovering the spear was here, Charlie had learned several facts about Eagletop. He’d learned them from the caretaker, Pat Foley, a reliable, amiable, but not terribly bright or ambitious bachelor Charlie knew from high school. Foley’s Achilles’ heel was booze, and once Charlie had determined where Foley did his major drinking, and when—Mondays and Tuesdays, his days off, at a pub in Lee—it had simply been a matter of showing up with a wad of cash and a professed desire to toast old times.
Sitting in that pub two Tuesdays ago, matching Foley’s scotch (“the old man, that son of a bitch, gave me my taste for it”) with Cokes, Charlie had learned that Wigglesworth did, in fact, have an unusual spear—one of a kind, or so Wigglesworth liked to brag to his multimillionaire friends. He’d learned that the spear was kept in a glass case in a cavernous, oak-paneled room that Wigglesworth called the library but that was really the mansion’s main art gallery. He’d learned that the library was off the front sitting room, which was off the dining room, which in turn was off the kitchen. He’d learned that Foley’s “chambers”—a three-room suite—were on the second floor. He’d learned that Eagletop had an elaborate alarm system, said system being activated usually only at night. He’d learned that Foley’s boss no longer used the estate as a summer residence. Now, as Wigglesworth hobbled into old age, a victim of arthritis and a bum heart, he was there most of the year. Christmas, however, he still spent in New York. He’d left for the city Sunday, taking with him his two bodyguards, servant, cook, and chauffeur, leaving Foley in charge, and alone, until his return shortly after New Year’s Day.
Charlie parked halfway up the drive, on a curve where he was not visible from the street or the mansion. He inhaled deeply, savoring the smell of spruce, his favorite outdoor scent. It was beautiful up here. Peaceful and quiet, except for the wind, which bore down from the hilltop in angry blasts that stung his face. Putting his head down, staying among the trees, Charlie continued up the hill on foot. Cushioned by the snow, his boots were noiseless as he approached.
Eag
letop—granite, megatherian, inhospitable—loomed out of the storm.
Foley’s beat-up ‘74 Duster was the only car parked in the drive. Charlie had expected that. The drifts sloped up and over it in great, sweeping angles. Foley, the poor slob, was going to have one hell of a time shoveling it out when this blew over.
He’s alone, Charlie reckoned with a certainty that did not surprise him. He’s alone, and ten to one he’s been drinking all afternoon because it’s Christmas Eve. A lovely, fine, wintry Christmas Eve and the cat’s away . . . Time for this pathetic little mouse to play.
Charlie circled the house, peering in through cathedral-height windows as he dodged from hedge to stone wall to gaudy cement bird feeder. He did not see Foley anywhere. Concentrating again—feeling in his fingers and toes the same low-current voltage he felt when plugged in at the tables—he had a fleeting impression of Foley in a small room. On the second floor. His chambers, as he called them.
Charlie removed his work gloves, pocketed them, then pulled a pair of surgical gloves over his fingers. He did not want to leave fingerprints. He felt for his burglar tools, but the kitchen door, which faced the woods lapping the estate out back, was unlocked. Charlie held his breath and nudged it open. Foley had said the alarm was activated only at night, but as for holidays, well, that depended on . . .
The door swung inward without a creak of protest. No buzzers or bells. On tiptoe Charlie stepped into the kitchen and closed the door behind him. The insistent wind faded to an unfriendly murmur. He let his breath out, inhaled, exhaled again, and strained to hear any sign that Foley was about.
Charlie froze.
People were talking. Two people.
Probably upstairs—their voices were barely audible, and it was impossible to determine what they were saying. Occasionally one or the other voice would rise in volume. It appeared to be a man and a woman, but it did not sound as if Foley were the man—unless his voice had inexplicably deepened over the last two weeks. His intuition had been wrong. Foley was not alone. He had company, at least two other people, and possibly more.
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