Protect Me, Love

by Alice Orr

  Delia knew that if he turned around and she saw his face, she’d be lost. She could never run away, with him watching her, and with all she felt about him no matter how conflicted it might be, beckoning her to stay. She let her panicky thoughts of flight pass. Maybe that was a decision to stay and face whatever came next. Maybe it was a failure to make any decision at all. Either way, when he turned toward her she was still pressed against the wall. She gazed up into his eyes and sought sanctuary there, but he looked as stricken as she felt.

  “We should get out of here,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do for her now, and I don’t want you involved.”

  He was already checking out ways to cover any tracks they might be leaving behind, wiping the doorknob and the edge of the door where he’d put his hand. She could tell he was being careful not to remove the smudge.

  “I don’t want to leave just yet,” she said.

  “The police could be on their way here right now.”

  Nick’s tone was urgent, and he sounded determined. Delia was determined, too.

  “I have to see what I can find,” she said. “Besides, it looks like we’re the first people to have been here since…it happened.”

  She turned away from the bathroom doorway and started toward the other rooms of the apartment. She didn’t like to think about what “it” had been.

  “By the way,” Nick said from close behind her, “I would say she died sometime last evening.”

  Delia was almost to the archway that led into the living room when she caught on to the significance of that.

  “I saw Penelope last night,” Delia said.

  “Yes, I know you did.”

  Delia spun around to face him. “I didn’t kill her if that’s what you’re implying.”

  Her voice was choked, and she was right on the edge of breaking down. She held her body tense, as if to keep herself from toppling over that edge.

  “I’ve never killed anybody in my life,” she said, still choking the words out that had to be said, for last night and for five years ago.

  “I know that.”

  “Do you?”

  He didn’t answer right away. Something in his eyes, or maybe something that wasn’t in his eyes, told her what he’d said was almost true. But not entirely. She turned and continued into the living room, moving much faster than before.

  “Delia, listen to me.”

  Nick was behind her with his hands on her shoulders. There was pleading in the way he’d asked her to listen. She couldn’t succumb to that, not yet anyway.

  “No,” she said sharply, and jerked herself out of his grasp. “I have to search.”

  “For what?”

  Delia was suddenly struck by how hysterically funny a question that was, so much so, she almost started laughing. What did she have to search for? The meaning of her life? The answers to death? The impossibility of her position made everything absurd somehow, and eerie, too, like the flickering reflection of the Christmas lights flashing off and on from the window. What could she expect to find here that would tear down the mountain of suspicions against her, the lingering doubts in Nick’s mind? Now she’d be considered a prime suspect in Penelope’s murder as well as poor Morty’s. Delia had the motive. She’d had the opportunity, too, since she was only blocks from this place last night. This was beginning to feel very déjà vu indeed.

  Delia set herself to searching, rummaging through drawers mostly, hoping she’d know what she was looking for when she found it. That turned out to be exactly the case when she got to the lap drawer of the desk near the window with the Christmas lights. Delia found a letter there from, of all people, her brother Samuel. Before she’d even read the contents, she knew this was about as important a clue to what had been happening to her and around her as there could possibly be.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “What’s that?” Nick asked, nodding toward the envelope and two pages of closely written stationery in her hand.

  Delia couldn’t answer just yet. She was still too stunned. She’d been astonished enough to find a communication from the older brother who’d virtually disappeared from their family years ago. Then she saw the return address on the envelope, and true shock set in. According to this letter, Samuel was living right here in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side near Riverside Park. Delia’s first thought, when she was once again able to think, was that Samuel might have been dumped up there in the kind of institution bailout that had sent so many poor, stricken souls back to the city streets whether they were mentally equipped to cope there or not. The Upper West Side had become a chief wandering zone for many such unfortunates. But why wouldn’t the Lester money have shielded Samuel from such a fate? She’d been out of touch with the family too long to know the answer to that.

  “Delia, is something wrong?”

  She looked up at Nick as if she might have forgotten he was present, though that was only partly true.

  “It’s a letter from my brother,” she said.

  “Samuel?”

  “Yes.” It sometimes slipped her mind that Nick’s history with her family meant he knew a lot about them, even the sad story of Samuel. “You would never have met him, but I’m sure you heard about him.”

  “I met him. I knew him pretty well, in fact.”

  Delia was gazing at the letter, though she hadn’t yet read beyond the first sentence. She was wondering if she could bring herself to read farther when Nick’s words jolted her attention back to him.

  “That can’t be true,” she said. “You couldn’t have met him. You must be thinking of somebody else.”

  “It is true. I used to take your father to see Samuel, once a week or so.”

  Delia remembered her father’s visits to Samuel all too well. She’d tried not to resent them when she was in her teens, but she couldn’t help it. She didn’t like to think of her beloved dad having such a close relationship with someone who made no pretense of wishing her nothing but harm. Samuel had made it very clear that he hated her. That was one of the reasons he’d been institutionalized when she was still an infant. He’d tried so many times to hurt her that he’d finally had to be put away. She understood how his addled mind saw her as the enemy taking over his territory. Unfortunately, understanding that had never kept her from feeling the hurt of having a brother who wished she’d never been born.

  “Samuel and I even got to be friends,” Nick was saying. “As much as that was possible for him, anyway.”

  “You liked him?”

  Delia could feel some of that old resentment. Here was another man in her life professing affection for this person she’d grown up thinking of as a scary monster. If there was a single, consistent image in her nightmares from those years, that image was of Samuel.

  “Yes, I liked him. He needed friends from outside the rest home. Your father felt strongly about that. I was one of the few opportunities Samuel had for a friendship like that to happen.”

  “It wasn’t a rest home,” Delia said, sounding more at ease with the subject than she felt. “That’s a term the family used to cover up the truth. He was in a mental institution.”

  “Whatever.”

  Nick was watching her warily, as if he could hear what lay beneath her surface calm, as if he might think she was about to explode. She could see that attitude in his eyes, and it made her more agitated than ever and less able to keep that agitation under control.

  “Whatever?” she said. “Whatever Samuel needed, it was not rest. They locked him up in that place, supposedly for life, so he wouldn’t hurt anybody when he flew into one of his violent rages. Now—” she brandished the letter in front of Nick’s face “—now, he’s out.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “See for yourself.”

  Nick took the envelope out of her hand. She watched as he looked it over, including the return address.

  “From this, what you say appears to be true,” he said.

  “It’s true, all right. He’s out of
that institution and living in Manhattan. What do you think about that?”

  Nick shook his head slowly. He continued to examine the envelope until she took it out of his hand.

  “I asked what you think of my emotionally disturbed brother Samuel being right here in Manhattan.”

  “I don’t know exactly what to think. I would have said he was too sick to be released from the hospital, at least back when I knew him.”

  “Well, I’d say that his being here could explain a lot of things.”

  Nick studied her for a moment. “What things?”

  “Things like what’s been happening to me these past few days.”

  “You mean the fact that someone’s been stalking you and trying to run you down? You think Samuel could be the stalker?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I’ve seen the color of that man’s eyes, and I know he’s not Samuel. But my brother is mentally disturbed, isn’t he? He could have hired it done. Unlike me, he has his share of his inheritance, even if he has somebody managing it for him. He must have some access. With even a fraction of the Lester money at his disposal, he could afford to have anything done to anybody. Not to mention the fact that he’s always hated me. Did you know that?”

  “I heard about it,” Nick said in a guarded tone.

  Delia wondered if this was the way Nick used to talk to Samuel, as if he had to be handled with kid gloves because he might go off the deep end otherwise. That possibility didn’t please her at all.

  “I heard a lot of things from Samuel,” Nick was saying. “He didn’t necessarily mean any of them.”

  “Did he mean the threats of the terrible things he’d do to me if he ever had the chance?”

  “I don’t think so,” Nick said, but he didn’t sound altogether certain of that. He paused a moment. “I don’t know,” he amended more quietly. “He was a troubled guy, and he desperately didn’t want to be. He was angry with you for being normal.”

  “That certainly wraps him up in a neat little package. Meanwhile, I’m the one who’s being terrorized.”

  Nick looked at her for a moment without speaking. “That’s right,” he said finally. “You are.” He sounded sad. “You’re the one being terrorized, and Penelope Wren is the one who’s dead.”

  Penelope had slipped from Delia’s mind when Samuel’s letter turned up. She could hardly believe she’d stopped thinking about a woman who had once taken care of her and was now a corpse on the bathroom floor. What was this situation making Delia into? She didn’t know if she could face the answer to that, at least not right now.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, and headed for the door to the outside hallway.

  “Where are we going?” Nick asked.

  She waved the letter and envelope where he could see them. “We’re going to follow up on this.”

  DELIA INSISTED on taking a cab uptown to the West Side. It was a long ride to make in total silence. Nick’s practice in the past had been to keep himself at a distance from some of the more convoluted aspects of the Lester family saga. Samuel was an exception to that rule. He was maybe the most lonely person Nick had ever met in his life, shut away in that gilded cage of a high-priced lockup and doomed to spend his entire life there, or so it was supposedly planned. Edward Lester understood his son’s sorrowful solitude and was heartbroken for him. That had been painfully obvious in the many long, silent trips back from those visits to Samuel. Nick would drive while Mr. Lester stared out the window, lost in a sorrowful solitude of his own. Tears rose in his eyes more than once after his visits to his son. Nick had seen them there and respectfully glanced away.

  Sorrowful or not, however, there was never any question that Samuel belonged exactly where he was. Without question, he was dangerous, but contrary to his ravings and Delia’s fears, he had never in his life hurt anyone other than himself. Whatever the source might be of Samuel’s psychotic rage, he was the sole victim. That was the primary reason he needed constant custodial care. That was the reason Edward Lester could never bring his son home, no matter how much he longed to do so. Even medication only halted Samuel’s self-destruction temporarily. Still, he’d never struck out at those around him, even those whose job it was to restrain and imprison him. That was why Nick found it hard to believe Samuel was responsible for terrorizing Delia. That was why the possibility of Samuel as her stalker had never entered Nick’s mind. Besides, Nick had understood that Samuel had been locked up with no chance of release.

  But that wasn’t what troubled Nick most and kept him staring out his own side of the cab through this long ride made longer by streets narrowed to single lanes bordered in banks of snow. He wasn’t even most concerned with what might be waiting for them at the address on the envelope Delia had waved in his face, then had torn away. He was most unsettled of all by Delia herself and the deep sadness he’d seen in her eyes when she spoke of Samuel, deep sadness mixed with what he guessed to be carefully controlled rage. If he was right about that, what could her repressed anger make her capable of if it suddenly slipped its bonds? Could she, after all, have been the one who killed Mortimer Lancer? Could she have the cold heart of a murderer? He knew she could be stubborn, but he had never known her to be hard-hearted. In fact, it was the very softness of her heart, so obvious to him beneath the guard of her defenses, that had drawn him to her in the first place and continued to draw him—until now. Could he have been wrong about her all along? The possibility plagued him, block after block, all the way to Ninety-first Street.

  Riverside Park was a blanket of white, and Nick found himself reminded of Denver yet again. The buildings here were mostly what they call prewar and often divided into much larger apartments than was otherwise the case in Manhattan. Nick had been in some of those apartments in the course of his work. They were pretty nice. Maybe Samuel was living well. Still, Nick couldn’t imagine Samuel on his own. Maybe he was being taken care of by a family in a private home situation, or there could be a group hostel up here somewhere. There was also always the possibility of Samuel having undergone a miraculous cure, but somehow Nick didn’t think that was the case.

  He wished he’d been able to read the letter Delia found. She’d stuffed it into her pocket before he could do much more than peruse the envelope to see if the handwriting looked familiar. He’d seen some pages in Samuel’s journal once, and the envelope could possibly be in the same hand. Nick couldn’t be sure, and he didn’t want to ask Delia to let him examine it again. He could feel her sadness, deeper even than before, filling the cab. He respected that sadness and her silence and left her to herself.

  Samuel’s address turned out to be a building with a doorman. He asked their destination, and Delia gave the apartment number from Samuel’s letter. When the doorman asked who he should say was calling, she answered, “Penelope Wren,” without so much as a flutter of her long lashes. Once again Nick was struck by how expertly she lied. It bothered him to see her do that even in a good cause like this one. Honesty was something he put a high value on. Meanwhile he held his breath to see what would happen when the doorman called up to Samuel’s apartment with the news that Penelope Wren was supposedly downstairs.

  The doorman turned back from the phone on the wall and smiled. “Go right up,” he said.

  “Thank you.” Delia smiled back at him. No one would ever have guessed that she’d just identified her self as a woman who lay murdered on a bathroom floor a few miles away.

  Nick had stopped to make an anonymous call to the police before hailing the cab to bring them uptown. The detectives would have arrived at Penelope Wren’s apartment by now. Nick mentally reviewed the places he’d wiped to remove his fingerprints and Delia’s. He thought he got them all, but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. He was worrying over that small chance of error as the elevator moved upward. Delia stood in front of him, maintaining her silence. She didn’t have to speak to tell him how tense she was. He could see it in the rigid set of her shoulders. She was as anxious as he was about what
they would find on the eleventh floor.

  What they did find was another unlocked door with a yellow note stuck to it. “Penelope—Come on in,” the note said in a scrawl that could have been Samuel’s.

  Delia had her hand on the doorknob when Nick reached out and took her arm.

  “Let me go first,” he said. He already had his gun out.

  “I guess that’s necessary?” she asked, looking at the weapon.

  “Yes, it is.”

  She gazed up at him for a moment, then took her hand off the knob and stepped aside with a resigned sigh. She had to know that even if there was only Samuel on the other side of this door, and even if Nick was right about her brother posing no real danger to anybody, erring on the side of caution was always best. Still, Nick could understand why she might not want her first meeting with her brother in many, many years to begin at gunpoint. Nick had his weapon at the ready all the same as he turned the doorknob slowly, then eased the door open inch by inch, just as he had at Penelope’s place.

  What greeted them inside could hardly have been more disarming. The splashing shower was clearly audible from down the hall into the interior of the apartment, and above that, the sound of singing. A tuneless ditty it was, unrecognizable and quite loud, the kind of thing a nonsinger belts out in the shower for the fun of it when nobody is around to hear. Nick looked back over his shoulder at Delia, and she returned his glance. Some release of tension was obvious from her expression. Nick, on the other hand, wasn’t ready to relax just yet.