Keepsake

by Linda Barlow

  “Rina’s missing autobiography?” April tried to keep her voice even. Did he know the murderer? Is that what he was trying to tell her? Was there something on the diskette that implicated Rob?

  “Perhaps. There are a number of long files. All I’ve had time to examine is some of the correspondence. I found some letters that had passed between my wife and Robert Blackthorn. They are angry and confrontational, on his side, especially. And I also discovered a memo, written just before the trip to Anaheim, in which Sabrina makes a note to dismiss Blackthorn and his firm as soon as she returns to New York. ‘I just don’t feel safe with him,’ she writes.”

  April touched the silver necklace that was clasped around her throat.

  “Are you there?” Armand said, after a moment.

  “Yes.”

  “For your own safety, I think you should leave. Is he asleep?”

  “I think so.”

  “Cherie, I beg of you, get away from him. Now.”

  She tiptoed back into the bedroom. Rob was turned on his side away from her, and he was snoring. As quietly as possible, she grabbed her clothes from the floor where he had thrown them as he’d undressed her. Images of what they’d done together threatened to overwhelm her. She banished them. She’d think about that later. She’d think about all of it later. Right now she just had to get out of here so she could decide what to do.

  She carefully put the portable phone back on its holder. What she had knocked down when she’d reached for the phone turned out to be Rina’s keepsake—the photograph of both of them in the scratched tin frame. As she picked it up she saw that the glass in front of the picture had cracked in the fall. There was now a jagged line running down through the center of the photo, right between herself and her mother.

  For some reason this seemed like the last straw. April felt tears spring into her eyes. Everything was going wrong. Her mother was dead, her lover might be the murderer, and now the damn picture was ruined as well…

  Clutching it to her, she fled the room.

  She took the stairs. She checked to see that there was no one but a sleepy security guard in the lobby. She got out past him, quickly, looking up and down Sixty-second Street as she stepped outside. Nobody leapt back away from her into the shadows.

  It was just before six in the morning, and the city was slowly awakening. There wasn’t much traffic yet, but in a couple of hours, it would be gridlock.

  She walked quickly to the corner, holding the large pocketbook into which she had dumped a change of clothes and—she wasn’t sure why—Rina’s now-broken photograph. It was early, but this was New York. As soon as the light changed up at the next block, she saw a couple of taxis approaching. She flagged one down, he pulled up, and she climbed in.

  “Come here, to me,” Armand had said. “Together we will notify the police.” It was tempting. But the way she felt now, she didn’t trust anybody. If she couldn’t trust Blackthorn, whom she’d held in her arms and loved, then she certainly wasn’t going to trust Armand, Christian, or anybody else in the de Sevigny family.

  She would have to trust herself. “Take me to the Port Authority Bus Station,” she said to the cabbie.

  Morrow was across the street parked illegally in front of the Lincoln Center garage complex when he saw his prey come out of her building and catch a cab. So. It was happening. She was on the run.

  He pulled the car onto Columbus Avenue. Not too many cars. Following her would be easy if she did what she was supposed to do. But in his experience, you couldn’t count on that.

  Sure enough, she got out of the cab at the bus station. Shit. The only predictable thing about the Target was that she was quick, and always did the unexpected.

  Looked like she was leaving town.

  He ditched the car at the curb and followed her into the station. He caught sight of her immediately, her red hair was a dead giveaway. She was in line at one of the windows behind a fat woman who looked like a bag lady.

  He hung back. He didn’t think she’d recognize him even if she looked him full in the face. He was wearing a scruffy beard now and he’d had his hair cut punk-short and bleached it blond.

  When it was the Target’s turn at the window, she suddenly shook her head and changed her mind. Then she strode away, heading for an exit on the opposite side of the building.

  He followed, cursing. Now what?

  She looked behind her nervously as she exited the bus terminal, but Morrow was still behind the glass door and knew she couldn’t see him. He ambled out when she was about fifty yards ahead, and followed her as she walked south. He waited for her to flag down another cab, but she walked quickly and purposefully, as if she knew exactly where she was going. He hoped she wasn’t about to take refuge with a friend. He assessed the situation on the street. Dark, seedy section of town, but, as always, traffic in the street and pedestrians. He could take her now, but there’d be witnesses. He’d really prefer to get her alone.

  She walked fast towards Madison Square Garden. And Penn Station.

  Where did you go when you were frightened and unsure whom to trust?

  You ran toward the place where you felt the most secure. And for April, that would not be New York City, but Boston, MA.

  That must be it. At Penn Station, she could get an Amtrak train to Boston. More comfortable than the bus. He vaguely remembered that there was one that left sometime around now. He’d checked it out earlier during his research—where the Target might go if she decided to run.

  Sure enough, she looked behind her once again, then ducked into the Eighth Avenue entrance to Penn Station, near the departure point for the Amtrak trains.

  He’d guessed correctly. April Harrington was headed home.

  “Hey, Boss, what’s going on?”

  “Carla?” Blackthorn had a headache. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand while he tried to focus on the phone. “What the hell time is it?”

  “It’s six A.M. Where’s April?”

  “I don’t—”

  “Shit, are you all right? You’re not hurt or anything, are you?”

  “Just asleep.”

  “Well, while you’re lying there sleeping, the body you’re supposed to be guarding has apparently done another one of her disappearing tricks.”

  Blackthorn grabbed the phone and checked the apartment as she spoke. But he knew without checking that he’d fucked up again. He was alone.

  “Are you tracking her?” he barked into the phone.

  “Is she wearing the necklace?”

  “She was when we went to bed.”

  “Gee, what’d you do to her, Boss? Spooked her somehow? I’ve got her at Eighth and Thirty-first Street at the moment—that’s Penn Station. Looks to me like Ms. Harrington is on the run.”

  “Goddammit!” he barked into the phone.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The Poison Pen Bookshop was dark and silent when April let herself in at around noon. It was a Sunday, and the place was closed.

  She felt a sense of immediate relief. Surrounded by books that were shelved as high as the ceiling in the relatively small space, she felt safe and protected. Strange, dangerous, and fantastic things happened between the covers of these books. There were a thousand stories whirling around her. She and other fans of the genre could read them, identify with the characters, share the excitement and their fears and their glories. Always they were safe in the knowledge that good would prevail over evil and that justice would triumph in the end.

  She would have liked to stay. But the bookstore was too obvious a place to look for her.

  In the books, disappearing always seemed so easy. But in real life April had found her options sharply limited. She hadn’t been able to rent a car in New York, because there wasn’t any way to do it without giving her real name to the car company. She couldn’t fly anywhere for the same reason. Buses and trains didn’t require your name—not if you paid for your seat in cash. Fortunately there had been a bank machine in Penn Station.<
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  Here, though, she could get a car. Or, at least, borrow one.

  There was a phone booth down the street at a gas station. She glanced at her watch as she dialed. Maggie lived in Somerville, just a few blocks away. April could walk it easily.

  She hoped she was home.

  Maggie answered, sounding bright and chirpy. “Maggie, thank God,” April said.

  “April? What’s the matter? You sound awful. Are you in trouble again?”

  “Maggie, I need your help.”

  “Of course. What can I do?”

  Two hours later, April was on the road again, this time in the driver’s seat. She knew she didn’t have much time—she’d been too predictable—Blackthorn would find her. But all she needed were a couple of days to reflect, to think things through, and, most importantly, to decide whom, if anybody, she could trust.

  She was crossing the Cape Cod Canal on the Sagamore Bridge, headed for Brewster, Mass., where she and Rina had spent the summer in 1963.

  April had never been back to the Cape. This was a little odd for a woman who’d spent most of her adult life in Boston. Although the Cape was a natural vacation spot, she’d taken her vacations instead in Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont.

  Cape Cod drew her now, though. Here lay the beginning of the strange and twisted path that had led Rina away from her job as a waitress and put her on track for interacting with rich and famous men. It all went back to that summer when she’d met and loved the president.

  It seemed hard to believe, but Sea Breeze Housekeeping Villas were still there, right where she remembered them, just off a pitted dirt road leading down toward the sea from Route 6A in Brewster. They were old and badly in need of fresh paint. A faded, lopsided sign at the entrance to the driveway proclaimed a Vacancy, and from the looks of the place, quiet, with hardly any cars on a lovely June day, April suspected there were a lot of vacancies.

  An elderly man answered her knock on the end cottage, the one with a small sign that said Office and was missing one of the f’s. He looked her over and seemed incredulous when she declared that she’d like to rent one of the cottages for the night.

  “You ain’t one of them state inspectors, are you?” he said, looking her over through narrowed eyes. “I had the exterminators out here just over a week ago, just like I said I would.”

  Great, she thought, hoping they’d been after roaches rather than rats. “Just a tourist.”

  “We don’t get too many,” he declared. “Least, not this early in the summer. July, August, maybe, when all the other places are crammed full, then we take the overflow. There’s a real motel, just up the road.”

  “I like cottages,” she said. “Besides I stayed here once, many years ago, 1963. Were you the owner then, by any chance?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not the owner now. My son is, but he don’t lift a finger around here. Put me to work, figuring it was better than sticking me in a nursing home. Seems an odd place to want to reminisce. The cabins are musty and the furnishing’s old. Wouldn’t catch me staying in one of ‘em.”

  “Is number seven free?”

  He glanced at an old wooden key rack where several rows of rusty keys were hanging from faded ribbons. “Yup, it sure is,” he said, taking down the key.

  “I’ll pay cash,” she said, taking out her wallet.

  “Fine, sign the register,” he said, handing her a pen and pushing a moth-eaten volume toward her. She glanced in the front of it, wondering… but it only went back to 1978.

  She scrawled “Judith Exner,” smiled, and handed him back the pen.

  Morrow had nearly lost her in Cambridge.

  As he had expected, she had gone to the bookstore. He hadn’t been able to watch both exits at once, and she must have gone out the back, since only luck enabled him to catch sight of her hurrying into a gas station on the corner to make a phone call.

  Obviously she was afraid of being tracked. But she didn’t seem to realize that she’d been carrying a tail ever since she’d left her apartment in New York.

  She left the gas station on the opposite side from where she entered it, but instead of doubling back to the bookstore, as he’d expected, she disappeared somewhere behind it. He gave her a couple minutes, in case she was simply being cautious about returning to the bookstore, then set off in pursuit. When he got around to the back of the gas station, she was nowhere to be seen.

  It was part instinct, part luck that sent him back to the car he’d rented. There were only two possibilities for streets, and he could cover them much faster by car than on foot.

  It took him several blocks to acquire her again, just in time before she entered a three-decker house over the line in Somerville.

  Of course. Her friend Maggie. The woman who had accompanied her to the ABA convention. He’d forgotten she lived so close by.

  He’d cruised by the house and found a rare parking slot a block away. He waited nearly an hour, hoping she hadn’t once again slipped out a back way.

  Turned out to be a very good thing he’d rented the car. When she left, she drove away in a green Toyota, and she wasn’t wasting any time in getting out of the area.

  Keeping well behind, he followed her.

  All the way to the Cape.

  The cottage looked much smaller than she remembered it. She’d noticed that before about things from childhood—to a child everything seems larger than life.

  Even allowing for the changes that thirty years of wear and tear and little care had wrought, the place was pretty sad. There was a narrow living room area—no TV, she noted—as you stepped inside, with a sink, an ancient two-burner stove, and a half-size refrigerator toward the rear. The bedroom was separated from the main part of the cottage by a ragged curtain. Within it was a sagging double bed that April could have sworn was the same one that had been there thirty years before. It had a knotty pine headboard at one end that she remembered. Had the mattress ever been changed? She sat down on it and sighed. Probably not!

  There was dust everywhere, and dirt ingrained in the cracks between the floorboards. This, at least, was different. When she and Rina had spent those summer weeks here, the place had been spotless.

  And the new curtains had fluttered over what were now small, grimy windowpanes…

  Why am I here?

  She sat down in a battered chair in the living room, suddenly depressed. And tired. She’d been on the run since early in the morning, and she’d had very little sleep last night. She didn’t know exactly what she was running from, and it seemed totally futile to have come to this place. Her memories were not going to help her understand her mother. Everything that had happened to change Rina had happened after those weeks they’d spent here, in this tiny cottage.

  She picked up the photograph with its now-cracked frame. She stared at it, seeing the cottage in the background, the number seven painted in a big white numeral by the front door. The number was still there, but the paint had faded. Everything had faded, even her memories.

  She’d have to replace the glass. Maybe have the thing reframed while she was at it. Get a decent frame. This one was loose, from the fall this morning, probably. It had always bothered her that a photograph that her mother had left her as her only personal memento had come in a cheap tin frame.

  She stared at the loose frame and thought, for some reason, about the day she’d gone rollerblading in Central Park. Going past the museum, seeing a crate full of picture frames being unloaded, being in the museum with Kate, listening to a lecture on framing. The importance of the frame to a work of art cannot be overestimated…

  Ohmigod.

  She turned the photograph over and began to pry the heavy cardboard back off the picture. It ought to slide down through the metal rims of the frame, but it was very stiff. The cracked glass protested, and cracked a little more as she pulled the thing apart, impatient now…

  The cardboard backing came away. Out came the glass and the photograph, and tucked between the picture and the
backing was a 3 ½-inch computer diskette.

  Inscribed on the label were the words, “Rina de Sevigny: Autobiography.”

  “I don’t believe it,” she whispered.

  She’d had the missing diskette all along.

  And now here she was in the middle of nowhere, far from Kate, without a computer. She had the missing document in her hands, but without the laptop, it was useless to her.

  Oh, Kate, Kate. Where are you when I need you?

  She thought briefly of getting back in the car and driving back to Boston. She could use Maggie’s computer, or even take the shuttle back to New York.

  But she was here, and she was tired. Tomorrow morning, she decided. Her curiosity, powerful though it was, could wait one more night.

  It was earlier than her usual bedtime, but she might as well sleep. Get up early. The sooner she fell alseep, the sooner morning would come and this mystery would be, at last, resolved.

  She pulled out her nightgown and got ready for bed.

  The place was perfect.

  Small. Isolated. Hardly any people around, except one old guy in the office. So much for the Target’s brain-power. Picking this dump had been a stupid move.

  She was alone, and soon he’d fix it so she had nowhere to run.

  She was history.

  He’d wait until full dark. When she was deeply asleep he’d slip in there and take her.

  She had hurt him—hurt his eyes. Humiliated him as well. Made him abort his job, and damaged his reputation. For that she was going to pay. She was going to die slow. No need to bother about the client’s stupid instructions. No need to do anything… except enjoy.

  So many times over the past few days he’d imagined what he was going to do to that slim female body. He’d played it out in every detail. No need to worry this time about making it look like an accident. It would be artful, elegant. Yeah, and slow.

  He’d brought the necessary items, including rope, duct tape, and several appropriate tools of the trade.