Too Close

by Hilary Norman

  ‘Rebound?’ Holly was still cold, still suspicious.

  There was the sound of fresh activity in the hall behind them, footsteps tramping up the stairs, new voices, quickly hushed by the people outside. Another set of footsteps. The paramedics, maybe, Nick thought, prayed, taking care of Nina.

  ‘On the rebound from you, Holly.’ He had to fight to regain the thread – he was fighting for Zoë’s life now, he was ready to say anything. Anything. ‘I was so miserable without you when I left Manhattan – all alone in LA, missing you, but not wanting to admit to it to anyone, not even myself – thinking of you back in New York.’ He paused. ‘You were so brilliant, Holly. I thought you were better off without me. Like your mother was always saying. I always knew I was marrying second-best.’ He paused again. ‘The same way you probably felt when you married Jack.’

  Holly stared at him for a long moment. Zoë quietened again.

  Nick looked right back at her. He saw – thought he saw – something new in her eyes, something like hunger.

  ‘It was the same for you, wasn’t it?’ he asked, softly. Christ, he felt so sick. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep this up without vomiting.

  ‘Maybe,’ Holly said.

  He took a breath.

  ‘I love you, Holly. I know that now. I’m always going to love you.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘Swear it,’ she said.

  His bowels turned over.

  ‘I swear it.’

  The grey eyes were wide, unyielding. Devouring.

  ‘Swear it on the life of your child,’ she said, softly.

  God forgive me.

  ‘Our child, you mean,’ he said.

  Holly’s lips smiled.

  He felt his gut rising.

  ‘Our child,’ Holly repeated.

  Nick stepped closer to her. The other people in the room behind him stirred and then became very still.

  ‘Let me take her, Holly,’ he said, very gently.

  ‘Our baby,’ Holly said, and suddenly her eyes were wet.

  ‘I know she is,’ Nick said. ‘I know.’

  He held out his arms.

  Holly looked down at Zoë, then back up at Nick.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ she said.

  ‘I know you are, Holly.’ He kept his arms out.

  ‘You be careful with her,’ she said.

  ‘You know I will be,’ he said.

  He stopped breathing.

  Holly lifted Zoë up a little, and kissed her on her mouth.

  Nick felt his blood roaring in his head.

  And then Holly held Zoë out.

  He took her.

  He held his baby – his and Nina’s baby – close for one long moment, and then he turned slightly to his left.

  ‘Please,’ he said to Helen Wilson, softly. ‘Will you take her? I’m afraid I might drop her.’

  The inspector glanced at Lieutenant Begdorf, who nodded. Capelli and a uniform raised their guns while Wilson holstered her own and stepped forward to take Zoë.

  Nick felt the weight leave his arms.

  A little of the tension went out of the air.

  There was one more thing he had to do before he could stop.

  He knew he had no more than two seconds, tops.

  He turned back to Holly. Still sitting on the sill.

  He heard and felt them moving behind him, coming closer.

  Now he had about a half a second left.

  Holly looked him square in the eye.

  ‘That’s right,’ Nick said, and raised both his arms.

  And with every remaining ounce of his strength, he shoved her backwards into the rain.

  Chapter One Hundred-one

  I knew what I was doing.

  I told them that right away. Even while all hell was breaking loose.

  I remember the shock on Capelli’s face.

  And on Wilson’s.

  She’d been the hard case of the duo, but I knew, right there and then, that the shock and compassion in her tough, weathered eyes were for me now. Not for Holly.

  Capelli told me that they had gotten into 1317 through the side door that I had been obliging enough to break down for them. And that they had found Teresa’s body.

  Then Nina.

  I don’t think Capelli was supposed to be sharing this information with me, but he did it anyway. Nina, he said, had still been conscious and able to tell Wilson that Holly had killed Teresa and stabbed her. A day or so ago, Capelli admitted to me – crazy as it sounds – I might have had a tough time proving that I had not been the one who’d murdered the nanny.

  If Nina had died, the way Holly meant her to – wanted her to – I guess it is just possible that she might have got her way. I might have been charged with double homicide.

  As things stand now, it’s just one count of attempted murder.

  Holly isn’t dead.

  Chapter One Hundred-two

  They cuffed him, Mirandized him, took him downtown, booked him, took away his belt and the laces of his sneakers and put him in a holding cell. Capelli and Wilson, for so long Nick’s enemies and now his only friends in the system, talked whoever was in charge of such things into giving him his own cell.

  They figured he’d been through enough.

  They knew there was more to come.

  It was a blur. Fingerprinting and mug shots and ritual humiliations and lousy food and the general stink of the place. Even the naming of his attorney. Chris Field. Young Cold Eyes. What difference?

  None of it mattered.

  Except that Nina was at People’s Hospital – the same hospital that Holly had been taken to – and he wasn’t with her. Because of him, Nina was alone again when it really counted. Capelli had got word to him that she was in pretty bad shape, mostly because of blood loss and shock, but that Holly’s knife – my knife – had missed all her major vessels and organs, and so the doctors had told him that Nina was going to make it.

  He ought to be with her.

  Instead, he’d let Holly get the better of him again. The way he always had. From the beginning to the end.

  Except that even now, she still wasn’t gone.

  And it still wasn’t over.

  DECEMBER

  Chapter One Hundred-three

  Holly doesn’t know too much about anything.

  She knows that Nick tried to kill her.

  She knows she’s in People’s Hospital, wired up to all kinds of monitors in Ward 11B. The arrest ward.

  And she knows that, from the waist down, she has no feeling.

  So far, there is only one advantage. Some of the other patients are cuffed or chained to their beds. At least no one seems to regard her as an escape risk.

  Still, she doesn’t think that being paralysed was ever part of the plan.

  She can’t be entirely sure about that, of course, because she can’t seem to remember exactly what the plan was. Oh, she knows about the fundamentals. Loving Nick. Wanting Nick to need her again.

  But the specifics seem all wrapped up in a haze.

  Quite a comfortable kind of a haze.

  There’s been no word from Jack, but her parents have been to visit her.

  They were very quiet.

  Both in shock.

  Richard’s eyes were red-rimmed, as if he had been crying. Eleanor didn’t look as if she had wept, yet Holly sensed that her mother’s pain was every bit as great as her father’s.

  That did surprise her somewhat.

  They haven’t spoken more than absolutely necessary about what has happened. They know that she has been charged with the murder of Teresa Vasquez, the attempted murder of Nina Miller, and the kidnapping of Zoë Miller. And that it was Nick Miller who pushed her out of a third-storey window of a house she has been living in, under an assumed name, since October.

  They didn’t know anything about the house. Or about Barbara Rowe. They didn’t even know that she was in San Francisco.

  It’s been a lot for them
to take in.

  She feels pity for them both.

  Holly doesn’t think that Eleanor will ever accept that her daughter is a killer. There’s only one person to blame for this whole tragedy in Eleanor’s mind, and that is Nick Miller.

  Finally, something she and her mother can agree on.

  Richard is a different story.

  Holly can understand his feelings. He is a lawyer, after all, and a fine one. And he has always loved her. Not in the tight, inexorable way that Eleanor has loved her. Eleanor Bourne’s love for her only surviving child has always been a hard, strangely cold, unrealistic thing. Richard’s love, much less blinkered than his wife’s, has been warm and giving and vulnerable, and now his wounds, his bleeding father’s soul, are more visible than Eleanor’s. Yet Eleanor, too, is bleeding now, Holly realizes. It’s just that when Eleanor’s soul is wounded, she conceals the blood, keeps it, together with her older scars, somewhere deep inside.

  She had her old dream again last night. More or less the same dream she always has – the one about Eric drowning. Only this time it was a little different.

  It started out differently.

  They’re stealing flowers from a garden – she and Eric – or rather, Holly is stealing the flowers and Eric is telling her to stop. And then a park superintendent – an old man with eyeglasses and a uniform – comes to yell at them, and Eric grabs the flowers from Holly’s hands and tells the old man that he’s to blame.

  Don’t blame my little sister.

  It wasn’t her fault.

  It was all my idea.

  I’m her big brother.

  And then he’s back in the pond, drowning again, and Holly’s scrambling out of the water onto the bank again, the way she always does.

  And then she turns around to look at him.

  And suddenly he isn’t Eric any more.

  He’s Nick.

  It’s Nick who’s coming up that one last time.

  Looking at her with his own warm brown eyes.

  So like Eric’s.

  Except that Eric’s eyes were always kind and sad and patient, and Nick’s eyes are angry and hurt.

  I won’t take the rap for you this time, Holly.

  No more big brother, no more friend, no more lover.

  You’re on your own.

  You’re the one who’s drowning now.

  And suddenly Holly is leaning over from the bank, and she’s stretching out both her hands, and she’s laying them over his dark, wet head, like a priest making a kind of benediction, and then she’s pushing him down.

  And he goes under again. First his face, then the top of his head, disappearing beneath the surface.

  And she hears the sounds again. The way she always does.

  The bubbles coming out of his mouth while he’s struggling to breathe. The sound the water makes when it closes over his head that final time.

  The first clump of earth hitting his coffin.

  Only this time she can’t hear her father weeping or her mother screaming. There is no one else.

  Only her.

  Nick, please come back now.

  Nick, please don’t leave me.

  Nick, I need you.

  And then the silence.

  And the darkness.

  Which is when she realizes. There is no one else, because she is the one lying in the coffin.

  And Nick is the one burying her.

  Chapter One Hundred-four

  Nick’s arraignment had been swiftly over. Chris Field’s attempt to win his release without bail had failed, as they had known it would, and bail had been set and met at one hundred thousand dollars bond.

  That was the house gone if he skipped town.

  Not that he was interested in going anywhere except to the hospital to see Nina and then home to see Zoë.

  Nina was out of intensive care and in a private room. She was still weak and in some pain, but improving fast. Her room was filled with flowers, reminding them both a little too vividly of the traumatic days following Zoë’s birth, but this time round Phoebe had sent a bunch of brightly coloured balloons, which made it very different.

  William was there, too; and Kate and Ethan Miller had flown into San Francisco to take care of Zoë and the house and anything else they needed.

  William was treating Nick with unprecedented warmth and courtesy, leaving him alone with Nina whenever they wanted.

  ‘Take all the time you need,’ he told Nick in the gentlest of tones.

  Strange man. So long as his son-in-law had been more or less innocent of all the accusations being thrown at him, he had treated him like America’s Most Wanted. Yet now that he had done his damnedest to actually kill a woman, William – not unlike Capelli and Wilson – seemed almost to be Nick’s buddy.

  ‘He’s proud of you,’ Nina explained to Nick. ‘He says that you did exactly what he would have done, given the chance.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just glad I’m finally going to jail,’ Nick said wryly.

  ‘Dad doesn’t think you will go to jail.’

  ‘I wish I shared his confidence.’

  They were silent for a while. Nina lay very still, watching Nick’s face, waiting for him to be ready to talk.

  ‘I went crazy, Nina,’ he said, finally. ‘I don’t mean that I didn’t know what I was doing – I knew exactly what I was doing.’

  ‘I know you did,’ Nina said softly.

  ‘But I didn’t stop to think.’

  ‘You never do.’ There was no real reproach in either Nina’s voice or expression. Just a degree of sadness.

  ‘I let you down again,’ Nick said. ‘You and Zoë.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘Of course I did.’ Nick looked at her pale face. ‘I was so afraid when I called Capelli that I was doing the wrong thing – that Holly might stick to her threat, and—’

  ‘You were right to call him,’ Nina told him.

  ‘The cops didn’t want me to go in after you,’ he went on, ‘and a part of me knew they might be right – that I might make things even worse – but all I knew was that I couldn’t leave you and Zoë alone with her for one minute longer.’

  ‘I knew you’d come.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I never doubted it for a single instant.’

  The door opened and a nurse came in to take Nina’s temperature and blood pressure and to check her IV line. She was young and pretty, and she regarded Nick with barely disguised fascination.

  ‘Think she knows I’m fresh out of jail?’ he said after she had left the room.

  ‘Probably.’

  They were silent again. Nina closed her eyes.

  ‘You okay?’ Nick asked her softly.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ She opened them.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us if I do go to jail?’

  ‘Nothing will happen to us,’ Nina answered.

  ‘Zoë won’t know me.’

  ‘Yes, she will.’ Nina shut her eyes again.

  ‘Holly’s paralysed,’ Nick said.

  ‘I know.’ Nina kept her eyes closed.

  ‘How does that make you feel?’ he asked. ‘About me?’

  She opened her eyes, tilted her head a little and looked at him.

  ‘How does it make you feel? About her?’

  Nick took another moment.

  ‘I wanted her to die,’ he answered, simply. ‘I wanted to kill her.’

  ‘Do you feel pity for her now?’ The question was loaded.

  Nick held more tightly to his wife’s hand.

  ‘She stuck a knife in your stomach, Nina.’ He knew he was gripping her a little too hard, but he couldn’t seem to let go. ‘She knifed a woman through the eye and put her in a freezer.’ He was having trouble breathing. ‘She kidnapped Zoë. She put our baby’s life in danger.’

  ‘Nick,’ Nina said, gently.

  ‘And then she kissed her’ – he was shaking again – ‘right on that innocent, tiny mouth. And I just couldn’t take any more.’


  ‘It’s all right, Nick.’ Nina lifted his hand, still clasped to her own, to her cheek and held it there. ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘No, it isn’t’

  His vehemence shocked her.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because Holly’s still alive,’ he said.

  Chapter One Hundred-five

  ‘He’s out on bail,’ Eleanor tells Holly. ‘It’s unbelievable.’

  ‘Not really,’ Richard says, calmly.

  Eleanor, outraged, would like to raise her voice – but just having to be in the same place as thieves and prostitutes and drug addicts and Lord knows what else is terrible enough, without having them all know her family’s private business.

  ‘How can you say that?’ she hisses at her husband. ‘After what he’s done to your own daughter?’

  ‘I’m only saying that I expected him to be released.’

  Eleanor’s eyes are gimlet-hard and full of hate. ‘He pushed our child out of a window, Richard. Or have you forgotten that tiny detail?’

  Holly has been regarding them, on either side of her hospital bed, fighting over her.

  ‘I was going to defend him,’ she says suddenly, quietly.

  Dumbfounded, her parents stare at her.

  ‘I was going to be his lawyer,’ she goes on.

  ‘What are you talking about, darling?’ Eleanor asks her.

  ‘It’s quite simple, really,’ Holly says. ‘If they had charged him with killing his wife and the nanny, I was going to take his case.’ She pauses. ‘That was my plan.’

  She started remembering that plan about thirty-six hours ago. Not everything about it, but enough.

  She watches their faces now for several seconds.

  ‘I’m not delirious,’ she assures them. ‘It might have worked out.’

  ‘Oh, dear God,’ Richard says softly, and covers his eyes.

  Eleanor, her face frozen, is beyond words.

  Holly began planning again at around four o’clock the previous morning.