Nothing, please God, nothing. Nothing but a little baby girl safely asleep in her crib, a phone not working, and a less-perfect-than-we-thought, too-heavily-sleeping nanny in her own bed.
But the struggle’s still getting harder.
‘Nick?’
I feel Nina’s hand clutching my own.
‘Nick, tell me what you’re thinking,’ she says.
‘I don’t know what I’m thinking,’ I lie, not looking at her.
‘You think it’s Holly, don’t you?’
Don’t even think it.
Nina reaches up, tilts my head to face her and looks into my eyes.
And I see that her own blood is turning to ice.
Chapter Eighty-seven
The house was silent and dark when they arrived soon after eleven-thirty.
Not right. Not normal.
They flicked switches, flooding the halls and staircase with light.
‘Teresa!’ Fear turned Nick’s voice hoarse.
Nothing.
Nina ran up the stairs, and Nick heard her banging doors and calling, her voice growing more afraid with every yell of Teresa’s and Zoë’s name. Nick took the living room – no one there, nothing out of place – then headed for the kitchen.
The note was stuck to the refrigerator door with a yellow smiley face magnet. He walked towards it very slowly and pulled it away.
‘Nick? Anything?’ Nina was on her way back down.
‘In the kitchen.’
She came in, saw him reading, her face distorted by alarm. ‘What is it? Is it from Teresa? Is Zoë sick?’
Nick opened his mouth, tried to say the words, but they seemed to stick in his throat.
‘It’s from her, isn’t it?’ Nina said.
He nodded and held the note out to her.
She took it from him and sat down on the pine chair closest to them.
Dearest Nick,
I have taken the baby. Come and meet me, and come alone. You can get a little rest and be in Napa at the Visitors Centre in the middle of town by seven AM.
Come alone, Nick. It’s been a long time since we really talked, and I have a lot to say to you.
I don’t want to harm her. It’s the very last thing I want. But if you call the police, or if Nina or anyone else comes with you, I swear you will never see your daughter again.
I mean that, Nick.
No cops. Not Norman Capelli or Helen Wilson – not even a Napa patrolman. I know cops – I can smell them. I’ve learned a lot since you and I first pinched copies of Cosmo from our local drugstore back in Bethesda.
I say it one more time, just so you believe it.
If you want to see our baby again, no police.
Love,
Holly.
PS Tell Nina I’ll be calling your house now and again towards dawn, and she’d better be there, waiting. Tell her I want her to experience what waiting for you feels like. God knows I’ve been doing it for long enough.
‘Our baby,’ Nina said, and her voice was full of anguish and hate. ‘She thinks Zoë is her baby. Hers and yours.’
‘She’s crazy,’ Nick said, beyond helpless.
‘She’s evil,’ Nina said.
The second piece of paper was in the playpen in the living room, tucked beneath the small pink toy rabbit that Zoë had lately favoured. Nina’s grim and barely holding-it-together face was already white, but, upon realizing what this was, it turned a sick, parchment colour.
‘New York,’ she said, faintly.
Nick took it from her, saw what looked like lines of poetry handwritten on one of the prelim pages from Firefly.
‘Your writing,’ he said, confused. ‘Isn’t it?’
‘It’s a quote from a Wordsworth poem,’ Nina told him. ‘A woman at a signing at Doubleday in New York City asked me to write it for her.’
Nick stared at it.
A simple child,
That lightly draws its breath,
And feels its life in every limb,
What should it know of death?
‘It’s horrible,’ he said.
‘It was Holly,’ Nina said. ‘Even then.’
Chapter Eighty-eight
If there were alcohol in our house, Nina would be on her way back down. As it is, she’s having to suffer this night stone-cold sober.
When William and Phoebe called, we told them everything was okay, that there had simply been a fault on our phone line, now fixed, that Teresa had been here all along (where the hell is poor Teresa? we hardly dare wonder) and that Zoë was tucked up safe and sound for the night.
No need for them to suffer too. Not yet.
Besides, neither of us is certain that William could be trusted not to call the cops or even to fly himself to Napa.
No risks. We agree on that.
We have not slept. Of course we have not slept. Nina, when she spoke at all, told me I should try to rest before my journey, and I pointed out that the drive to Napa before dawn in late November would take an hour at most, which meant I needed no more rest than she did. Apart from these and a few other brief, tight exchanges, we have spent most of this night drinking too much coffee and wandering around our house like a pair of disconnected ghosts, of little or no help to one another, isolated with our own thoughts and terrors.
‘I can’t wait much longer,’ I said, abruptly, a little after four.
‘But she said—’
‘She won’t expect me to wait,’ I said.
Nina gave me an awful look. ‘Won’t she?’
We were sitting in the living room, Zoë’s empty playpen in front of us. We were both cold, so I had made a fire. Earlier on, we seemed to take turns pacing, sometimes in this room, moving restlessly back and forth across the hearth and over the rugs, sometimes all around the house. Once, for a few minutes, while Nina was the one stalking around upstairs, I heard the sound of her weeping. Ugly, cracked, deep sobs. I sat forward on the edge of my chair, longing to go to her, to console her, but I knew there was no point. I would not have been a consolation to Nina. How could I be?
I am the cause of her child being taken away and endangered. She blames me. How can she not?
If Holly hurts Zoë, I will be to blame for that, too.
There is no avoiding that simple, stark truth.
The pacing stopped some time back, when we both slumped, suddenly, into armchairs. Becalmed on our bottomless sea of fear.
Our silence is oppressive.
It comes to me at four thirty-three that if I don’t make some kind of sound again soon, whether it’s to speak or to cry or even to scream, I may find myself, like Phoebe did, unable to talk at all.
I keep it up for another five minutes.
‘So we’re both quite agreed,’ I say, ‘about not calling the cops?’
My voice sounds too normal, too conversational. It ought to mirror the way I feel. Flayed. Bleeding.
‘We’re agreed,’ Nina says.
Her voice sounds dead.
Still, at least I have her sanction on this one thing.
The rest, for the time being, is on my own shoulders.
God help me.
Chapter Eighty-nine
He left just after five, planning to head out north on US 101 in the Land Cruiser, to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, turn east onto Highway 37, skirt around San Pablo Bay as far as Vallejo and then to continue onto Highway 29, the road that ran right through the Napa Valley as far as Calistoga. He remembered another time when he and Nina had made this journey (oh, Christ, poor Nina, having to stay home waiting while he, at least, was able to try and do something), remembered how, on that trip, he’d felt a compulsion to stop en route and make a swift pastel sketch of the gently undulating hills a little way out of San Francisco. Those hills had fascinated him, had not resembled any other hills he had ever seen, looking from a distance as if they were made of a kind of fur, or maybe moleskin.
This time, it was too dark to see either moleskin hills or the duller, flatter, marshy l
and on either side of muc of 37. It was raining, too, but even if it had been daytime and sunny, the tail-end of November, with all the grapes long since harvested and pressed, was not the greatest time to visit the valley.
The murky darkness of the early morning suited Nick’s mood.
Cold, flat fury.
Not the simmering rage of that long-ago time with Holly. The kind of rage that had pushed him until he’d had to explode, had to hit out at her.
This was very different. This was cold and calculating and all the more deadly for it.
Once he had Zoë back, safe and sound, he knew what he was going to do. Once he had Zoë back, Nick was going to make Holly pay. He was going to frighten her, and he was going to hurt her, and he was going to go just as far as he figured the law, under the circumstances, would be likely to let him get away with.
He wasn’t going to go to jail for Holly Bourne. Oh, no.
He was willing to go to jail for Zoë. He was willing to die for Zoë.
But not for Holly.
Oh, no.
Chapter Ninety
Nina was in the kitchen, trying to bake bread, when the phone rang for the first time after Nick had left for Napa.
She snatched up the receiver.
‘Yes?’
Silence.
‘Holly, is that you?’
The line went dead.
Nina put down the phone.
And went back to weighing ingredients.
Joanna Ford, Nina’s mother, had taught her daughters to bake at times of emotional crisis, before they’d left England, while William Ford had still been in the RAF. Before Joanna had become a fulltime drunk.
‘It doesn’t matter how it turns out,’ she would tell them. ‘What matters is the doing. Every part of it. The weighing and measuring, the mixing, the folding, the cleaning up.’
Nina remembered Joanna telling them there was no point cheating about things like cleaning up. The more tedious the chore, the more point there was in doing it when you felt really lousy or afraid.
Afraid.
Nina finished weighing the flour and began sieving it.
She finished sieving it, and then started again.
And again.
The phone rang.
Same as before. Holly listening for just a moment, then hanging up.
Nina put down the receiver, turned around, picked up the mixing bowl, and threw it, with every ounce of her strength, against the wall.
As the china shattered, Nina screamed.
And watched the cloud of flour rise and fly and fall.
Chapter Ninety-one
Napa was much the way Nick had expected the small town at the gateway to the valley to be at six AM on a cool, no longer rainy but still damp Saturday morning on the last day of November. Dark. Dead.
He left the Toyota in an almost empty parking lot, and checked the tourist signs for directions to the Visitors Centre. It was in a modern mall on a corner plot, its broad glass doors locked (what else had he expected at that time?) and a notice informing Nick that it was not scheduled to open until nine o’clock.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Just great.’
He knocked on the front door, and then, getting no response, pounded harder, but it was patently obvious that the whole place, reception and rear, was deserted.
‘Now what?’ he said.
He wandered around the silent shopping mall until he found a payphone, looked up the number of the centre in the Napa directory, called it, listened to a message informing him that they were closed, and then phoned Nina instead.
‘I’m here, but the Visitors Centre’s closed till nine.’
‘She’s been calling,’ Nina told him tersely. ‘About every half hour. She just calls, listens to me for a second or two, then cuts off. It’s driving me nuts.’
‘I’m going to try and check around town until seven,’ Nick said. ‘Just in case she’s hiding out in one of the local hotels or diners.’
‘Even if she is, I’ll bet she’s made sure you won’t find her.’
‘No harm in looking. Better than standing outside the damned centre, waiting. Anything’s better than waiting.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Nina said.
It was hopeless in the short time he had. Nick managed just three inns and one bed and breakfast, but if any of the enviably early-Saturday-calm innkeepers had seen a dark-haired, grey-eyed, pregnant woman in her late twenties with a little baby girl with red-gold hair, they weren’t about to share that information with a desperate-looking stranger.
He was back at the Visitors Centre at ten before seven, because that was where Holly had directed him to be, and because he had no better alternative.
The morning was growing lighter and the weather improving, but other than that, there was no obvious change. The glass doors were still locked and there were no more signs of life than there had been an hour earlier. No Holly. No Zoë. Panic soared like a high-speed elevator. God, what a fool he was for believing the bitch.
And then he saw the envelope. On the ground about four feet away, one sharp white triangular corner protruding from the base of a trashcan. He had no way of knowing if it had been there at six o’clock. He only knew, with absolute conviction, that it was there for him.
Hands shaking, he bent and picked it up.
His name was on the envelope. Typewritten.
He tore it open.
Another note, much shorter, and also typed.
Be outside the Pieter Winery on the
Silverado Trail at seven-thirty. Come
alone. Then wait and see.
He called Nina again on his way back to the parking lot, told her where he was heading, knew from her voice that she was holding up badly but knew, too, that short of bringing home their daughter, there was still nothing he could do for her.
They had driven the Silverado Trail – the elevated road above Highway 29 – together the previous spring, and though they had moved quite swiftly away from the Napa district to the Sonoma Valley, Nick remembered that the Trail had offered a string of wineries and fine views across the valley. If the Pieter Winery gave him back Zoë safe and sound this morning, Nick vowed that he would return next spring with Nina and buy every last damned bottle they wanted to sell him, but right now he didn’t care about either wines or vistas. All he cared about on this increasingly bright, pleasant, late fall morning was finding his beautiful baby girl, and then – and only then – dealing with Holly Bourne once and for all.
He found the Pieter Winery without much difficulty, not far from the Yountville Cross Road. It was on the right hand side of the Trail, and appeared to be a small, private establishment, with an arched rough stone gateway and a neat, shrub-lined tarmac track leading up to a creamy house with a red tiled roof, surrounded by vineyards.
Nick pulled off the road just outside the gateway and got out of the car. He thought, for a moment, about heading up to the house and asking if anyone had seen Holly or Zoë, but the note had not instructed him to do that. The note had told him to wait and see, whatever the hell that meant.
He took a few moments, looking around. A Ford Explorer drove past but didn’t slow down; then a small Volkswagen; then a Cherokee; then, after a longer pause, a Bonneville. He stopped checking cars. There was nothing else to see, unless you’d come for the scenery, nothing except trees and hills and early winter vines and a great view of the valley down below. Not as great, though, as the view from the two brightly-coloured hot air balloons just floating into his eye-line. Nina had wanted to take a ride in a balloon last spring, but they’d only had two days, and all the early-morning flights had been sold out, so Nick had promised her a rain check.
In another lifetime, maybe.
He turned around and looked back up towards the winery. A man had emerged from the house and was walking around the side. He was talking to someone. A woman. Nick narrowed his eyes, trying to see what she looked like. She was wearing coveralls and she was tall. Too tall. He looked a
way, back at the road. A car was coming closer, heading towards Napa, and it was slowing down.
Nick’s heart rate increased. It was a blue Volvo, and there was a dark-haired woman at the wheel.
He stepped out a little way into the road.
The woman slowed right down, looked straight at him and drove on.
Not Holly.
Nick was sweating and his pulse racing. He wanted to pick up a stone and throw it at the goddamned car. What the hell had she been looking at?
Probably at the idiot man standing in the road, looking at her.
He shook his head to try and clear it, crossed the Trail, climbed over a low stone wall dividing the road from the slight wooded incline on the other side, and looked up. Where there had been two balloons just a short while ago, there were now four, three of them seeming, from this perspective, quite close together, the other gliding through the now almost perfectly blue sky in splendid isolation.
Nick stared at the balloons.
And understood.
Wait and see.
Holly was up there in one of those balloons. With Zoë. A small baby with a cold – his and Nina’s small baby – Christ-only-knew how high in the sky with a crazy woman.
He heard a sound, something between a moan and a bellow, and realized that it was coming from him. He was standing there on the edge of the Silverado Trail and he wanted to stretch out his arms and snatch his daughter back – he wanted to fucking fly – and he couldn’t do either of those things – he couldn’t even tell which of the balloons she was in.
Jesus.
Jesus!
He turned around, vaulted over the wall, raced back across the road, and ran under the stone gateway and up the tarmac track to the cream-coloured house. Close up, through one of the open first-floor windows, he could smell bacon cooking, could hear Mozart playing and voices gently chatting.
Too Close Page 34
