by Chris Pavone
Charlie grinned, laughed maniacally, and threw his head back. But then he didn’t bring his head forward again. His face was turned to the dark sky, and the car was still moving, but Charlie was not. He’d passed out.
Dave hopped back a few steps to get distance between himself and the slow-moving vehicle, then ran around the side. He opened the door and walked alongside the car, and hit Charlie on the shoulder to try to wake him up, but it didn’t work. So Dave shoved him, slumped him against the gear shift; he shoved again and the guy fell over, halfway into the passenger seat, halfway to the floor, dead to the world.
When the driver’s seat was clear, Dave jumped in. Got behind the wheel, and buckled the seat belt; this was no time to not be wearing a seat belt. He was terrified that the cops were going to show up, and the girl would still be out there somewhere in the road, running away, and it would be an awful mess. He shifted into second gear.
He couldn’t see the girl but thought she must be up around this bend, maybe as much as a quarter-mile away; she’d really been sprinting. By this point she could’ve come to another intersection, turned onto another street, disappeared. He might be driving around looking for this girl forever.
Dave was furious at Charlie for putting him in this predicament. He considered stopping the car, turning around, driving away from this girl and this problem, going home. Letting Charlie handle this himself tomorrow, in whatever fashion that disaster would strike. His own goddamned fault.
But no, Dave couldn’t do that.
He began to take the curve, and then Charlie seized awake, and turned to face Dave, arms flailing out, pushing angrily at Dave’s arm on the gearshift. Dave glanced quickly between Charlie and the road, still going around the long curve, then turned back to fight off his drunken, irrational friend.
The car came around the curve in the light rain and the deep dark, and there was a sudden flash of movement from the side of the road, not quite on the shoulder, and then a dull thud and a terrified yelp and a sickening crack, and the screech of tires and the squeal of brakes.
Then Dave brought the old convertible to a shuddering stop.
He’d spent the better part of Thanksgiving weekend trudging heavily through the bracing late-fall cold, the trees bare and the sidewalks wet and slicked with fallen leaves. He shuffled through the park, amid the dogs prancing in the moist mess, and the smiling bundled-up couples strolling arm in arm, and the joggers in form-fitting bodysuits and synthetic-fiber gloves, and the decrepit old women under woolen blankets in wheelchairs being pushed by indifferent Afro-Caribbean nurses wearing baggy pink scrubs.
He stood across the street from his ex-wife’s apartment building, leaning against the rough stone wall of the park, in a light drizzle, a mist forming on his face, his ears raw and red, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his corduroy jeans. He pulled out his phone, and called.
“Hello?”
“Hi it’s me.”
“Oh, hi.”
“Listen, I’m downstairs. Can I see you?”
She paused, surprised. But then said, “Of course. Come on up.”
The elevator was slow and rumbling, an old New York elevator in a big old New York apartment building, the type of structure that doesn’t exist in Washington. He never waits in long slow elevator rides in DC.
She was framed in her doorway, wearing a loose wool sweater, barefoot. They hugged.
“How was your Thanksgiving?” he asked, walking into the foyer, scanning the pictures on the walls, faintly hoping he’d come across one of himself.
“Oh, you know.”
They walked into the sunken living room, and he saw that the Abstract Expressionist lithograph was still hanging prominently above the mantel, and he felt a small surge of pride. At least he’d gotten that right.
“Your dad was drunk?” he asked.
She chuckled. “Mom too. And Simon. And really everyone except the little kids, and me. They insisted we play football after supper, but it was raining, and muddy, so we all got filthy, and freezing. Then we came back inside and changed into sweats and pajamas while Mom did laundry, everyone sitting around like it was a slumber party, drinking hot cider.” She laughed. He still loved the sound of her laugh. “Now that I describe it, I guess it doesn’t sound so terrible.”
He knew that this was going to be their last amicable interaction, after years of amicable divorce. His ex-wife’s opinion of him was soon going to change, for the worse, forever. “No,” he said. “It doesn’t.”
“And you?”
“My mother is just as crazy as ever, so, y’know …”
He trailed off. He wanted to just look at her, and hear her voice, for a minute or two. He didn’t want to tell her what he was here to tell her, another big fat lie. Didn’t want to do that to her, again.
But she didn’t say anything, waiting for him to continue, looking at him with the question: why are you here?
“Listen, I’m sick.”
She sucked in a deep breath and straightened her posture and stared straight ahead, gathering physical strength, to help her gather emotional strength. This is what she did when she heard something that worried her. “What do you mean, sick?”
“I have cancer.” His throat caught. “I …”
She closed the space between them, opening her arms. As soon as he felt her embrace, he started to cry, tears spilling down his cold chapped cheeks.
“I’m dying, Isabel.”
CHAPTER 52
Isabel turns over in bed, twisting herself up in an increasingly anarchic jumble of linens. She considers going downstairs, finding Jeffrey, also insomniac tonight. Folding herself into his lap, nuzzling into his neck. But perhaps he wants some privacy. Maybe she does too.
She can hear the wind rustling the trees and the surf tickling the shore, but these noises are not soothing. When her demons arrive in the middle of the night, nothing is soothing.
It was more than possible—it was inevitable—to blame herself, to blame her ambition. It had been one of those atypically emblematic days, everything colliding. She was running and auction for a hotly anticipated second novel, whose author needed a lot of hand-holding, and whose bidders kept increasing their offers every half-hour, from mid-five figures to high-sixes in the course of the day. This tense, lucrative nine-to-six was followed by a seven-o’clock black-tie that included an honor for—and an interminable speech by—a different author of hers. So this long frantic day, it featured a wardrobe change.
The nighttime portion was equally important work to the daytime; just because there was liquor and food and fancy dress didn’t mean it wasn’t work. Networking her way through the cocktail hour, the ballroom, the ladies’ lounge, the courtyard where the smokers congregated, having one tête-à-tête after another with the who’s-who of the business, glad-handing and cheek-kissing and date-making.
The nanny called a couple of times during Isabel’s sixteen-hour day, worrying that Tommy’s cold or flu or whatever was getting worse. But Isabel’s husband was away on a business trip, and Isabel didn’t want Lupe to be the one to go to the doctor with Tommy. The nanny’s English would be described—generously—as weak, and sometimes that mattered. So Isabel made a pediatrician’s appointment for first thing the next morning. She’d catch shit for missing the weekly staff meeting, but sometimes as a working parent that was unavoidable.
Anyone would’ve done the same thing. In the following months, people said this to her all the time—anyone would’ve done exactly the same thing. Except, of course, they didn’t.
Isabel returned home after midnight, exhausted. She thanked Lupe and sent her home in a taxi with an extra fifty, and let her cocktail dress fall to the floor, and collapsed into bed.
She was awakened at dawn by the screaming. Tommy was burning up, 106. She rushed downstairs with the boy in her arms, and ran around the block, panting and desperate, until she found a taxi.
“Don’t worry, Sweetie,” she said. “We’ll be at the doctor�
��s in a minute.” The hospital was a mile away.
The taxi peeled away from the curb, the eerie blue light washing over the dingy white garbage trucks, the minimum-wagers swabbing down the sidewalks in front of all-night delis, the street-cart vendors positioning their pastries in front of office buildings, the joggers with reflective stripes down their shorts, the normal business of a city’s day starting, coming to life.
“Are we there yet?” Tommy asked, as he had so many times recently. From the backseat of the shiny SUV that was cleaned every week by the guys in the garage, on the drive out to their weekend house. He had asked it on the way to visit her mother-in-law’s in Brooklyn, or her parents’ house in the Hudson Valley. While heading to Vermont, for a ski weekend; to Cape Cod, to visit friends; to the Bronx Zoo and the Brooklyn Aquarium, Yankee Stadium and Coney Island. It was something the little boy asked, all the time.
“Soon,” she said. In the back of the moldy-smelling taxi she pushed the fever-damp hair off her son’s hot forehead. On the slippery silver vinyl seat of the taxi, bumping along the potholed street, Tommy shut his eyes, and right then and there he slipped silently into a coma.
An hour later, Isabel’s baby was dead. A heart infection, said the young doctor, who had been up all night, up for who knows how long, working. He was tired and frustrated, and perhaps not as tactful as he could’ve been.
There was, the doctor added, almost nothing she could’ve done. Almost.
Isabel is agitated, and thirsty. She rises from bed, and walks to the bathroom, and reaches for the light switch, but then realizes there’s enough light from the moon. She doesn’t need the electricity, doesn’t want to wake herself any more than necessary. She should really be asleep.
She picks up the small glass from its ceramic holder attached to the beadboard wall, and notices a chip in the rim, a small shadow made by the moonlight streaming through the window, a dark little arc in the otherwise pristine glinting circle. She turns on the cold tap, lets the water run, flushing out the rust, the sediment, whatever metals and soils and bits of crud settle in the old pipes of a house like this. She drinks the full glass in one long pull, then refills.
Across the bedroom, the French doors that lead to the small balcony shudder in a gust of wind off the Sound. The room feels stuffy; the doors beckon. She should let in some fresh air; she should step outside, breathe in the salty breeze. She should settle her mind, so she can sleep, so she can survive. Humans need sleep more urgently than food. And she will no doubt face bigger challenges tomorrow. Perhaps before tomorrow.
Good God, she thinks, what have I gotten into the middle of? How will this end? Isabel knows that she’s being chased, trailed. She suspects she’ll be found, right here, in this house, soon. These are not people from whom someone like her can hide for very long. In fact, she’s surprised she’s managed to get this far. She wonders if she’s been allowed to get here, chased at half-speed to give the appearance of pursuit, to see where she leads, and what she does, and with whom.
Perhaps she’s being manipulated, not pursued. Perhaps her plan is not going to work after all. Perhaps she will need help. Perhaps she can get it from an unlikely source.
Even though she’s absolutely furious at what’s revealed in the manuscript, she has to admit that it took a huge degree of bravery to reveal those truths. Also to orchestrate the vast contrivances, the complex logistics, the resources, the foresight. It was an incredible effort. And the point of all that effort, she knows, is to atone. To seek forgiveness.
An old computer sits on a desk in the corner of the bedroom, a dinosaur of a thing that just a few years ago looked cutting-edge. She powers it up, fans whirring and lights blinking.
Isabel opens the web browser and logs on to her secondary e-mail account, one she hasn’t used in years. Her ATM account would be frozen by now, no longer her purview or property; plus it would be easy to monitor, to trace to this IP address. On the other hand, practically no one in the world knows about this older e-mail address. Certainly no one who made Isabel’s digital acquaintance in the past half-decade. No one who started trailing her recently.
She types rapidly, fingers flying over the keyboard, so much easier than on a handheld device. She re-reads her message once, then hits Send.
Isabel takes hold of the door’s lever, presses down, releases the catch. She pushes, but the door is stuck. All the doors in this house, she remembers, are always sticking. She shoves, and it budges marginally, but doesn’t open.
Isabel turns to go back to bed, but the tips of her fingers linger on the lever. She hates to be defeated by small things. She turns back to the door, determined to lean into it harder. She looks up and down the jamb, trying to identify the tight spot, the sticking spot, the spot where she should apply pressure.
She gives another firm shove, and the door pops open, the glass panes shuddering. She takes one step carefully over the saddle, brings one foot down the few inches to the painted planks of the shallow balcony, just a couple of feet wide. Not wide enough for any furniture, just enough to stand here and watch the sunset, watch the moonrise, watch the sea and the stars.
A gust of wind hits her in the face, a strong slap of salty air.
She looks out over the lawn, the bushes, the trees, everything glinting emerald-black in the moonlight. Another strong gust of wind, this one attacking the opening of the well-worn linen pajama top she found in the hall closet, pushing bare the hollow of her neck, the rise of her breast. Her hand instinctively shoots up to grasp the cloth, to close it, to shield herself.
The door slams shut behind her, blown by the same gust that opened her collar, and Isabel spins at the noise, startled. But it’s just the door, slamming in the wind and then bouncing open, a few inches ajar.
She turns back to the sky, to the view. But something inside catches her eye, and she swivels her head to see that the bedroom door is opening slowly. Maybe it’s the wind that’s causing some type of vacuum that sucks doors open. Maybe not.
She sidesteps toward the edge of the balcony, toward invisibility, and watches. The door opens wider, but still she can’t see anything on the other side, where it’s only the darkness of a windowless hall, no lights, no nightlights, no moonlight. Just blackness.
The door opens wider, and wider, until it’s fully open. But still nothing.
And then she watches a cloth-clad knee come into the moonlight, then a foot. Not Jeffrey’s bare foot, but a leather-shod foot. Then another knee and a torso, then shoulders and a head, then a face, and none of it is Jeffrey, but someone she’s never seen before, a stranger entering her bedroom in the middle of the night. An intruder. Holding a gun.
She slithers to the side, completely out of view from within, her body flat against the rough weathered shingles.
Isabel glances down. It must be twenty feet to the lawn, a long way. But it’s grass down there. It’s soft. It may not hurt. She could be fine.
Then again, she could break both her legs, get shot, and die, all in the next couple of seconds. This could be the end of her life, right now.
Another gust of wind, and Isabel’s hand again instinctively shoots up to her neckline, just as the door slams again and bounces open, and she realizes that this noise has been noticed by the intruder, that she has practically no time before this man with the gun finds her—
She jumps.
The fall lasts longer than expected, and Isabel has time to think about the impact, to bend her knees, to prepare to squat and roll, the grass wet and cool, dew on her bare knees, dampening the thin linen that covers her back, moistening her cheek as she completes her somersault and comes to a panting, panicked sitting position.
Isabel leaps to her feet, and sprints toward the line of hydrangeas that separate the horizontal plane of the lush lawn from the vertical face of the bluff above the boulder-strewn, pebble-lined beach. She can just make out the break between two shrubs, the cedar gate and its wrought-iron latch, clearer as she gets nearer, a quick flick to rel
ease the catch, pulling the door open, wobbly on loose hinges, and then she’s taking the rickety stairs two at a time, holding the banister to spin herself around landings, driving a deep splinter into her sole, the searing pain of a small wooden stake driven into her flesh.
She almost cries out, but stifles it.
She continues to bound down the stairs, limping now on her injured foot, an uneven unsteady rhythm, slipping as she spins around another landing, crashing down onto the rough-hewn surface of the weathered wood, weeds invading through the gaps between the planks. Her knee is bleeding.
Isabel looks up to the top of the bluff and sees a figure emerging from the gate, looking down, locating her. She rises again, battered by her own mistakes, and continues gingerly to the bottom of the stairs, to the beach covered with stones of every conceivable size, painful on the bottoms of her bare feet, jumping over driftwood logs, circumnavigating car-size boulders, splashing ankle-deep in the shocking chill of the early-summer water.
She glances back behind her, sees the man leap down the last few steps to the beach.
She rushes past an upended rowboat, then sees a different set of stairs fifty yards ahead, which could carry her back up the bluff, to a neighbor’s house and a 911 call, to a driveway, a road, safety, freedom—
Then she hears the crack of a gun, and wonders whether she’s been shot.
CHAPTER 53
When Jeff hears the gunshot his whole body seizes, an electric jolt. “What was that?” And a few seconds later, three more gunshots.
The man gives him a what-are-you-kidding look. It was only a few minutes ago that the guy came bursting down the stairs, gesturing into the yard, yelling at his companion, “Go after her!” And then he descended the last few stairs, and turned his attention to Jeff. Waved his pistol in Jeff’s general direction. “You stay absolutely put.” Which is exactly what Jeff has done.
“Those were gunshots?”
