Disillusions

by Seth Margolis

Chapter 15

  Nick was working on a new piece the next morning. Though she recognized the melody—another Beethoven sonata, she guessed—the music, played with uncharacteristic awkwardness, sounded inappropriate, somehow. She’d become so used to hearing the Lebewohl every morning when she entered the house. It was as if the house had been redecorated.

  She found Tess in the music room, playing with a few stuffed animals as her father practiced.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Nick said as she entered the room. “I’m working on the Pathetique for the first time and I really need to concentrate.”

  She tried not to look as critical as she felt.

  “I need a distraction,” Nick said quickly. “If I didn’t have my music, I don’t know what I’d be doing.”

  She nodded and picked up Tess. “You look like you just ran a marathon.” Sweat covered his forehead and stained the collar of his polo shirt.

  “The Pathetique is almost physical in its demands; it takes me out of myself like a long run.”

  “I’ll bring Tess upstairs.”

  He turned back to the keyboard and pounced on a chord, following it with a string of staccato notes. As she left the room she heard someone enter through the French doors that opened onto to the patio.

  “Where’s Tess?” It was Russell Cunningham, and he sounded angry.

  The music stopped. “With Gwen.”

  “Do you think it’s wise, having that woman look after my…after Tess?”

  Gwen stopped a few feet down the hall.

  “She just lost her mother, she needs continuity.”

  “If she’d minded her own business, maybe Priscilla…”

  The old man’s voice was thin, almost whispery, his usual bluster completely gone.

  Nick resumed playing, the music unexpectedly light. Gwen could imagine the old man watching, seething. She heard Nick hit a wrong note, then slam the keyboard. The chord reverberated around the house like a startled pigeon.

  “Can’t you leave that damn piano be?”

  “How is Maxine doing?” Nick asked.

  “She’ll survive,” he said dismissively. “She’s not receiving visitors, except Reverend Leeper.”

  “Maybe if I brought Tess…”

  “I’ll call you when she’s ready.” The mention of Maxine had clearly annoyed Russell. Gwen sensed that only his loss mattered, his grief. What did the anguish of a boozy, Bible-thumping neurotic count next to his monumental dynastic tragedy?

  “Leeper will handle the funeral tomorrow,” Russell said. “Mount Hope Cemetery, ten o’clock.”

  So Nick would have no say in the arrangements. Eager to hear more, Gwen made a funny face at Tess to keep her happy and quiet.

  “Any progress in the investigation?” Nick asked.

  “Incompetents.” Russell’s voice came alive for the first time.

  “What about the fingerprint and fiber evidence?”

  “Nothing. The FBI’s moving out tomorrow, going to manage the case from Albany. I told them that was nonsense. They said that in a kidnapping, once the victim’s been recovered, there’s no need to keep a field office open.”

  “But there’s been a murder.”

  “It’s a vendetta,” the old man growled.

  “What?”

  “They can’t forgive me for not calling them in the first place, so now they’re only going through the motions of finding Priscilla’s killer. And my money.”

  “It’s more than going through the motions,” Nick said. “This is already a huge case. Have you seen the papers this morning? Even the New York Times put the story on the front page.”

  “Hypocrites. Phil Robinson called this morning. My foreman,” Russell added with obvious irritation that he had to identify the man for his son-in-law. “He wanted to know if he should shut the plant for the day. A sign of respect, he called it.”

  “Well…”

  “I told him he could shut the plant for a week, just so long as no one got paid.”

  “Oh, Christ, Russell, he was only—”

  “Hypocrite. You think any of them gives a rat’s ass about me”—his voice broke—“or my daughter?”

  No wonder he clung so ferociously to his offspring, Gwen thought. The rest of the world was the enemy.

  “No one loved her the way you did,” Nick said softly.

  A brief silence; then the old man cleared his throat.

  “About the will,” he said. “I went through it this morning.”

  “We don’t have to do this now, you know.”

  “She had few assets, other than some investments I made for her when she was a little girl. What she did have, she left in trust for Tess, until such time as she—”

  “We talked about this, Priscilla and me.”

  “You won’t be able to maintain this…this lifestyle without considerable assistance.”

  “Tess and I don’t need such a big place, anyway.”

  “This is Tess’s house,” he said very slowly, as if instructing a misbehaving child. “Or it will be one day.” His voice had regained its gravelly vigor. “I’m prepared to support you and Tess to any extent you please, so long as my granddaughter continues to live in this house. If you choose to live elsewhere, anywhere else, you won’t get a cent.”

  “Sounds like bribery.”

  “Call it what you want. But if you take Tess away from here, I’ll not only cut you off, I’ll do everything in my power to get her back.”

  “She’s my daughter.”

  Gwen could hear the old man’s breathing. “I’ll have you watched if you leave this place, every moment of your life. One slip and I’ll sue you in court for custody.”

  “Slip?”

  “Girlfriends, drugs, neglect of any kind.” Gwen heard footsteps coming from the music room and headed quickly for the foyer, stopping when she heard Russell resume talking. “But what are we discussing here? You can’t support her, at Penaquoit or anywhere. Just raise her in this house and you won’t have to.”

  “Haven’t you caught on yet?” Nick said. “After everything that’s happened?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You can’t control the world, Russell, not even your own family.”

  “That’s—”

  “—The truth. You think you can manipulate everyone around you with your money. But you can’t. If yesterday should have taught you anything, it’s that.”

  “I may not be able to control everything,” Russell said in a low, jittery voice. “But I can control you. Because I’ve got money, the one thing you’ve never had enough of. Other than talent.”

  “You son of a—”

  “Priscilla’s death ended what little freedom you had, because now I’m in charge of your life, no one else, and you’ll do what I tell you to do or you’ll discover just how…how insignificant you really are.”

  The footsteps resumed and Gwen hurried to the foyer, where she took the stairs two at a time.

  “I won’t lose Tess,” Russell shouted. “I will not lose her.”

  “You already have!” Nick called after him.

  A moment later the music continued, loud and clumsy and furiously fast. Gwen ran down the long second-floor hallway and into the nursery. She put Tess down and grabbed a small rubber ball, which she tossed to her. She needed a distraction from the hatred she’d just heard. The ball bounced gently off Tess’s chest and fell to the carpeted floor. Tess giggled, retrieved it, and threw it back.

  “Good throw!”

  Tess waved her arms. “Maw,” she said. More.

  And so it continued. Gwen searched for some sign of distress, some indication of the trauma the child had been through. And found nothing. No screaming fits, no loss of appetite. No calls for “mama.”

  This last was hardest to deal with. She’d never felt at all close to Priscilla, hardly knew her, in fact. But to be so easily forgotten by one’s own child…

  Of course, Tess didn’t understand that
her mother wasn’t coming back. And God knew Priscilla had been more of a specter than a living, breathing presence. Piano music continued to drift up from the first floor. Would no one mourn Priscilla Lawrence?

  And then she looked up and saw the old man, watching them.

  “I didn’t see you.”

  Russell Cunningham didn’t respond. The night had been cruel to him: his usually lustrous gray hair looked limp and dull, and his eyelids sagged. The yellow polo shirt and white, perfectly pressed pants seemed cruelly cheerful. But his cheeks were flushed, and his forehead glistened with sweat—from all that shouting, no doubt.

  She squirmed under his relentless gaze and cleared her throat to break the spell. But he kept staring, and she soon realized that he wasn’t seeing her at all.

  “Tess is a very resilient girl,” she said.

  His head jerked, as if startled.

  “Would you like to play with her?” Gwen stood up and gave him the ball. He looked as if he’d been handed a live grenade. “She can’t really catch it.”

  “No?”

  “Just throw it low enough so that it hits her tummy or legs.”

  He appeared doubtful as he tossed the ball. It landed a good three feet in front of Tess, who fell on top of it.

  “This room is on the small side,” he said, glancing quickly around.

  Gwen also looked around—what else was she to do? The room was bigger than her living room and kitchen combined.

  “There’s a bedroom down the hall that’s half again as big,” Russell said. “It’s my son’s room. Was. Maybe we should move the nursery there.” He stepped farther into the room, almost warily, squinting at the bookshelves, dressers, and changing table. “Yes, I think the other room would be a lot more appropriate.”

  The ball hit him in the upper thigh.

  “What the…” He stepped back.

  “She wants you to throw it to her,” Gwen said.

  He frowned and bent over to retrieve it. “I know that,” he said irritably. He tossed the ball to Tess, who tried to catch it in both hands but succeeded only in clapping.

  The old man rubbed his leg. “She’s got quite an arm,” he said.

  As if to underscore this point, Tess picked up the ball and hurled it at him, falling forward in the process. The ball skimmed the top of her changing table, toppling the baby monitor. Gwen picked it up and saw that the small plastic antenna had broken.

  “I may be able to fix it,” she said. “Or we could get a new one.”

  We. She’d probably have to pick one up herself. She couldn’t imagine either Russell or Nick Lawrence getting involved in something as mundane as replacing a baby monitor. At least Priscilla had managed to keep the nursery well stocked.

  “What the hell is it?”

  “It’s a baby monitor. So you can hear Tess crying if you’re somewhere else in the house. The receiver is in the laundry room, unless it’s been moved.”

  “The laundry room?” He shook his head slowly, sadly, as if suddenly overwhelmed by the details of raising a child.

  “I’m not sure what it’s doing there,” she said. “In fact…”

  He looked sharply at her, expectantly, as if he knew what she’d been thinking. “In fact, what?”

  “In fact I’m sure I can fix it,” she said, but her thoughts followed a very different track. She’d been in the laundry room when she’d overheard Priscilla, Nick, and the old man discussing the arrangements after the kidnapper’s phone call. But there was no phone in the nursery, so either the three of them had hung up yesterday and immediately run to the nursery to discuss the arrangements, which was absurd, or…

  She placed the monitor back on the changing table.

  “Yesterday morning, when the kidnapper called, what room were you in?”

  “My daughter’s…the master bedroom. Why?”

  “No reason.” She picked up the ball and handed it to him. “Do you happen to remember seeing the baby monitor in the room when you talked about delivering the money?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have noticed a Mack truck in the room, under the circumstances.” He sighed, picked up his granddaughter, and carried her to the window. Tess immediately tried to squirm out of his arms. Gwen held a finger to her lips and shook her head: Don’t fight him, Tess. Let him have this moment, at least. Within seconds Tess had relaxed.

  “I tried to protect her,” he said softly.

  “I know, I saw—”

  “Not yesterday, always. I protected her from this place, this damn town. She never wanted to leave here, you know. I was the one who insisted she go to boarding school. For her sake—I couldn’t bear to see her leave. After college she wanted to come back. She loves this place…loved it. I got her an apartment in Manhattan, a job at that auction house. She wasn’t ready to take over Penaquoit, and you can’t learn squat in this town. I kept her away until she was ready.”

  Until she’d found a husband and conceived a child, Gwen thought. Only when she was safely married off was she allowed to claim the throne.

  “She loved you very much.”

  “She got her strength from this place.” He walked over to the window, still carrying Tess.

  “Why was your daughter carrying a thistle yesterday?” Russell turned to her. “Was it some sort of charm?”

  His face flushed crimson as his lips opened, but he turned back to the window without speaking and pointed outside.

  “See that big mountain, Tess? That’s Mount Sohegan.” He tried for a gentle, kid-friendly voice, but the resulting singsong sounded so insincere it verged on sinister.

  The baby rapped on the window.

  “That’s right, you do see it.” He glanced behind him. “She’s very bright, you know.” He turned back and moved his granddaughter’s hand up a few inches, then tapped it against the window. “That’s right, Mount Sohegan. Did you know that we own every bit of land between this very room and that big old mountain over there? You and me, Tess—every leaf, every blade of grass, every tree.”

  Gwen stepped out into the hall, unsure whether to cry or scream. The old man’s grief was painted across his face, and yet, just then at the window, he’d been almost smug, as if he’d mentally moved on from his daughter to his granddaughter, skipping over Priscilla like a piece on a checkerboard. Now it was Tess’s turn to play heir apparent, and Gwen didn’t know who to feel sorry for most: Priscilla, Russell Cunningham, or Tess herself, just one year old and already saddled with the full weight of the old man’s expectations.

  The piano music from downstairs had turned fierce, the notes fired like bullets. Gwen glanced back in the nursery. Russell Cunningham still held Tess up to the window, surveying their property. He knew what the thistle meant, but he wasn’t saying. Why?

  Something else troubled her. What was the monitor doing in the master bedroom yesterday morning? Why had it been switched to the on position? Who had brought it back to the nursery? And who, for that matter, had taken the receiver to the laundry room?

  Had someone wanted her to overhear the ransom plans?

  Barry Amiel walked around the cavernous warehouse near Kennedy Airport, nervously aware of his footsteps reverberating off the corrugated steel walls. The day was bright and warm, but the empty warehouse was cold and dank, cloaked in darkness except for random shafts of grainy light from a handful of dirty windows. He should have had a drink before leaving his room. Should have brought a bottle with him.

  He’d arrived a few minutes early for the nine o’clock appointment, punctuality one of the few habits he’d brought with him when he’d left his old life in Manhattan. Left it? He hadn’t left shit. He’d been thrown out, ejected, abandoned. He’d never had a chance to explain, not even a moment’s chance.

  He checked his watch. The big hand jerked onto the nine just as the metal door banged open and a figure in silhouette stepped into the doorway.

  “You said I could see my son,” he called across the warehouse. The vast space swallowed his
voice. The figure stepped forward. Barry squinted through the darkness; was this the same person who’d met him back in Manhattan, offered him the first lucky break he’d gotten in ages: a hundred grand in hundred-dollar bills, his son?

  “I never saw my kid; for all I know he’s not even in that jerkwater town you sent me to. And you never said anything about killing anybody. I read in the newspaper about some woman getting shot at that ravine. And what the hell was Gwen doing there? You never told me she’d be there.”

  Holy Christ, he’d almost lost it when she’d stood up from behind that rock. Wanting Jimmy was one thing, confronting Gwen something else. But he’d played his part, nothing too demanding. He’d been involved in some rough stuff as a kid, and in his twenties, before Gwen. All he had to do was grab the bag, fire his old gun a few times into the air, then run back to the car.

  The figure took another step forward, still just a black mass in some kind of long coat, the sun shimmering behind it like a vapor. A shiver ran through him, right to his gut.

  “You got the money?” he asked. “Forget my son, I’ll find Jimmy on my own, now I know where his mother is. You got the hundred thousand we talked about?”

  He thought he saw a nod; then the right arm began to rise, real slow. Well, all those hundred-dollar bills had to be heavy.

  “I’ll find Jimmy on my own, now that I got some money.”

  A glint from next to the figure, then an explosion that he felt in his ears first, like diving underwater, then…

  Then something blasted the back of his head. No, not something—he’d hit the floor, hard. He tried to sit up, couldn’t. Another explosion, this one from directly above him. He saw the face then, staring down at him, the same face, and he tried to ask why.

  But he knew the answer, in a flash as quick and bright and painful in its own way as the gunshots that he knew were killing him, if they hadn’t already.

  He tried to move his lips anyway, not to ask this time, but to explain. They were so dry, all of a sudden, glued together, they felt.

  “Jimmy,” he said, or thought he said. He heard nothing except a distant whooshing sound, a long, tired sigh. It wasn’t the money, Jimmy, honest. I only wanted to say, I only wanted the chance to tell you I was sorry.