Someone to Watch Over Me

by Judith McNaught

  “Not a thing. Enjoy your day off. Are you planning to stay in New Jersey at your sister’s tonight?”

  Hilda nodded. “My sister said she’s had very good luck at Harrah’s lately. I thought we might go there.”

  Leigh suppressed a grin because, as far as she’d been able to tell, Hilda had absolutely no human weaknesses—except one for the nickel slot machines in Atlantic City. “We won’t be back here until late tomorrow afternoon,” Leigh said as a thought occurred to her. “I’ll have to go straight to the theater, and Mr. Manning has a dinner meeting that will last until late in the evening. There’s really no need for you to be here tomorrow night. Why don’t you spend two days with your sister, and check out some of the slot machines at the other casinos?”

  The suggestion of two consecutive days off threw the housekeeper into a total state of inner conflict that reflected itself on Hilda’s plain face and made Leigh stifle another grin. In the War Against Dirt and Disorder, Hilda Brunner was a militant, tireless general who marched into daily battle armed with a vacuum cleaner and cleaning supplies, her foreboding expression warning of an impending assault on all foreign particles. To Hilda, taking two days off in a row was tantamount to a voluntary retreat, and that was virtually unthinkable. On the other hand, if she did as Leigh suggested, she would be able to spend two full days with her sister at the nickel slot machines. She cast a glance around the immaculate bedroom that was her personal battlefield, trying to assess in advance the extent of damage likely to occur if she were absent for two entire days. “I would like to think about it.”

  “Of course,” Leigh said, struggling to keep her face straight. “Hilda,” she called as the German woman bustled toward the door.

  Hilda turned in the act of belting her brown coat around her waist. “Yes, Mrs. Manning?”

  “You’re a treasure.”

  LEIGH HAD HOPED to leave the theater by four o’clock that afternoon, but the play’s director and the writer wanted to make some minor changes in two of her scenes after watching the matinee performance, and then they argued endlessly over which changes to make, trying out first one variation, then another. As a result, it was after six when she was finally on her way.

  Patchy fog mixed with light snow slowed her progress out of the city. Leigh tried to call Logan twice on his cellular phone to tell him she was going to be late, but either he’d left his phone somewhere out of hearing or the cabin was beyond range of his cellular service. She left voice mail messages for him instead.

  By the time she reached the mountains, the snow was falling hard and fast, and the wind had picked up dramatically. Leigh’s Mercedes sedan was heavy and handled well, but the driving was treacherous, the visibility so poor that she could only see fifteen feet in front of her car. At times it was impossible to see large road signs, let alone spot the little landmarks Logan had noted on his map. Roadside restaurants and gas stations that would normally have been open at ten P.M. were closed, their parking lots deserted. Twice, she doubled back, certain she’d missed a landmark or a road. With nowhere to stop or ask for directions, Leigh had little choice except to keep driving and searching.

  When she should have been within a few miles of the cabin, she turned into an unmarked driveway with a fence across it and switched on the car’s map light to study Logan’s directions again. She was almost positive she’d missed a turnoff two miles back, the one Logan had described as being “200 feet south of a sharp curve in the road, just beyond a little red barn.” With at least six inches of snow blanketing everything, what had seemed like a little barn to her could just as easily have been a large black shed, a short silo, or a pile of frozen cows, but Leigh decided she should go back and find out.

  She put the Mercedes into gear and made a cautious U-turn. As she rounded the sharp curve she was looking for, she slowed down even more, searching for a gravel drive, but the drop-off was much too steep, the terrain far too rugged, for anyone to have put a driveway there. She’d just taken her foot off the brake and started to accelerate when a pair of headlights on high beam leapt out of the darkness behind her, rounding the curve, closing the distance with terrifying speed. On the snow-covered roads, Leigh couldn’t speed up quickly and the other driver couldn’t seem to slow down. He swerved into the left lane to avoid plowing into her from the rear, lost control, and smashed into the Mercedes just behind Leigh’s door.

  The memory of What followed was horrifyingly vivid—the explosion of air bags, the scream of tortured metal and shattering glass as the Mercedes plowed through the guardrail and began cartwheeling down the steep embankment. The car slammed against several tree trunks, then hurtled into boulders in a long series of deafening crashes that ended in one, sudden, explosive jolt as five thousand pounds of mangled steel came to a bone-jarring stop.

  Suspended from her seat belt, Leigh hung there, upside down, like a dazed bat in a cave, while light began exploding around her. Bright light. Colorful light. Yellow and orange and red. Fire!

  Stark terror sharpened her senses. She found the seat belt release, landed hard on the roof of the overturned car and, whimpering, tried to crawl through the hole that had once been the passenger window. Blood, sticky and wet, spread down her arms and legs and dripped into her eyes. Her coat was too bulky for the opening, and she was yanking it off when whatever had stopped the car’s descent suddenly gave way. Leigh heard herself screaming as the burning car pitched forward, rolled, and then seemed to fly out over thin air, before it began a downward plunge that ended in a deafening splash and a freezing deluge of icy water.

  Lying in her hospital bed with her eyes closed, Leigh relived that plunge into the water, and her heart began to race. Moments after hitting the water, the car had begun a fast nosedive for the bottom, and in a frenzy of terror, she started pounding on everything she could reach. She located a hole above her, a large one, and with her lungs bursting, she pushed through it and fought with her remaining strength to reach the surface. It seemed an eternity before a blast of frigid wind hit her face and she gulped in air.

  She tried to swim, but pain knifed through her chest with every breath, and her strokes were too feeble and uncoordinated to propel her forward more than a little bit. Leigh kept thrashing about in the freezing water, but her body was going numb, and neither her panic nor her determination could give her enough strength and coordination to swim. Her head was sliding under the surface when her flailing hand struck something hard and rough—the limb of a partially submerged fallen tree. She grabbed at it with all her might, trying to use it as a raft, until she realized that the “raft” was stationary. She pulled herself along it, hand over hand, as the water receded to her shoulders, then her waist, and finally her knees.

  Shivering and weeping with relief, she peered through the dense curtain of blowing snow, searching for the path the Mercedes would have carved through the trees after it plunged off the ridge. There was no path in sight. There was no ridge in sight either. There was only bone-numbing cold, and sharp branches that slapped and scratched her as she clawed her way up a steep embankment she couldn’t see, toward a road she wasn’t sure was there.

  Leigh had a vague recollection of finally reaching the top of the ridge and curling her body into a ball on something flat and wet, but everything after that was a total blur. Everything, except a strange, blinding light and a man—an angry man who cursed at her.

  LEIGH WAS ABRUPTLY JOLTED into the present by an insistent male voice originating from the side of her hospital bed. “Miss Kendall? Miss Kendall, I’m sorry to wake you, but we’ve been waiting to talk to you.”

  Leigh opened her eyes and gazed blankly at a man and woman who were holding thick winter jackets over their arms. The man was in his early forties, short and heavyset, with black hair and a swarthy complexion. The woman was considerably younger, slightly taller, and very pretty, with long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “I’m Detective Shrader with the New York City Police Department,” the ma
n said, “and this is Detective Littleton. We have some questions we need to ask you.”

  Leigh assumed they wanted to ask about her accident, but she felt too weak to describe it twice, once for them and again for Logan. “Could you wait until my husband gets back?”

  “Gets back from where?” Detective Shrader asked.

  “From wherever he is right now.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No, but the nurse went to get him.”

  Detectives Shrader and Littleton exchanged a glance. “Your nurse was instructed to come straight to us as soon as you were conscious,” Shrader explained; then he said bluntly, “Miss Kendall, when did you last see your husband?”

  An uneasy premonition filled Leigh with dread. “Yesterday, in the morning, before he left for the mountains. I planned to join him there right after my Sunday matinee performance, but I didn’t get there,” she added needlessly.

  “Yesterday was Monday. This is Tuesday night,” Shrader said carefully. “You’ve been here since six A.M. yesterday.”

  Fear made Leigh forget about her injured body. “Where is my husband?” she demanded, levering herself up on her elbows and gasping at the stabbing pain in her ribs. “Why isn’t he here? What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

  “Probably nothing,” Detective Littleton said quickly. “In fact, he’s probably worried sick, wondering where you are. The problem is, we haven’t been able to contact him to tell him what happened to you.”

  “How long have you been trying?”

  “Since early yesterday morning, when the New York State Highway Patrol requested our assistance,” Shrader replied. “One of our police officers was dispatched immediately to your apartment on the Upper East Side, but no one was home.”

  He paused for a moment, as if to make certain she was following his explanation; then he continued, “The officer spoke with your doorman and learned that you have a housekeeper named Hilda Brunner, so he asked the doorman to notify him as soon as she arrived.”

  Leigh felt as if the room were starting to rock back and forth. “Has anyone spoken to Hilda yet?”

  “Yes.” From the pocket of his flannel shirt, Shrader removed a notepad and consulted his notes. “Your doorman saw Miss Brunner enter your building at two-twenty that afternoon. He notified Officer Perkins, who then returned to your building at two-forty P.M. and spoke with Miss Brunner. Unfortunately, Miss Brunner didn’t know exactly where you and your husband had planned to spend Sunday evening. Officer Perkins then asked Miss Brunner to check the messages on your answering machine, which she did. Seventeen messages had accumulated on your answering machine between Sunday at one-fourteen P.M. and Monday at two-forty-five P.M., but none of them were from your husband.”

  He closed his notebook. “Until now, I’m afraid we haven’t been able to do much more than that. However,” he added quickly, “the mayor and Captain Holland both want you to know that the NYPD is going to assist you in every way we can. That’s why we’re here.”

  Leigh eased back against the pillows, her mind falling over itself as she tried to grasp what seemed to be a terrifyingly bizarre situation. “You don’t know my husband. If he thought I was missing, he wouldn’t stop at calling our apartment. He’d call the state police, the governor, and every police department within a hundred fifty miles. He’d go out searching for me himself. Something has happened to him, something terrible enough to—”

  “You’re making too many assumptions,” Detective Littleton interrupted firmly. “He might not have been able to use a telephone or go out looking for you. The blizzard knocked out telephone and electrical service in a one-hundred-mile radius, and in many areas, it still hasn’t been restored. Almost a foot and a half of snow fell, and none of it is melting. Snowdrifts are eight feet high in places, and the plows have only been able to clear the main roads. The side roads and private roads up here are mostly impassable.”

  “The cabin doesn’t have any electricity or phone service, but Logan would have had his cell phone with him,” Leigh told her, growing more frantic with each moment. “He always has it with him, but he didn’t try to call me, or warn me to stay home, even though he must have known I was driving into a bad storm. That isn’t like him. He would have tried to call me!”

  “He probably couldn’t use his cell phone,” Detective Littleton argued with a reassuring smile. “Mine doesn’t work very well up here. You said the cabin doesn’t have electricity, so even if your husband’s cell phone was working, it’s possible he decided to leave it on a charger in his vehicle, rather than take it inside. The blizzard came on very suddenly. If your husband was taking a nap, or doing something else, when it started snowing, it might have been too late to get to his car and his phone when he finally realized there was a problem. The snowdrifts are unbelievable.”

  “You could be right,” Leigh said, clinging fiercely to the fairly plausible theory that Logan was safe but unable to use his phone or dig his Jeep out of the snow.

  Shrader removed a pen from his pocket and opened his notebook again. “If you’ll tell us where this cabin is, we’ll go out there and look around.”

  Leigh gazed at both detectives in renewed alarm. “I don’t know where it is. Logan drew a map so I could find it. It doesn’t have an address.”

  “Okay, where is the map?”

  “In my car.”

  “Where is your car?”

  “At the bottom of a lake or a quarry, near wherever I was found. Wait—I can draw you another map,” she added quickly, reaching for Detective Shrader’s notebook.

  Weakness and tension made Leigh’s hand shake as she drew first one map and then another. “I think that second one is right,” she said. “Logan wrote notes on the map he drew for me,” she added as she turned to a fresh page and tried to write the same notes for the detectives.

  “What sort of notes?”

  “Landmarks to help me know I was getting close to the turnoffs.”

  When she was finished, Leigh handed the notebook to Shrader, but she spoke to Littleton. “I might have gotten the distances a little wrong. I mean, I’m not sure whether my husband’s map said to go eight-tenths of a mile past an old filling station and then turn right, or whether it was six-tenths of a mile. You see, it was snowing,” Leigh said as tears choked her voice, “and I couldn’t—couldn’t find some of the landmarks.”

  “We’ll find them, Miss Kendall,” Shrader said automatically as he closed his notebook and shrugged into his jacket. “In the meantime, the mayor, the police commissioner, and our captain, all send you their regards.”

  Leigh turned her face away to hide the tears beginning to stream from her eyes. “Detective Shrader, I would appreciate it very much if you would call me Mrs. Manning. Kendall is my stage name.”

  NEITHER SHRADER nor Littleton spoke until they were in the elevator and the doors had closed. “I’ll bet Manning went out looking for her in that blizzard,” Shrader said. “If he did, he’s already a Popsicle.”

  Privately, Samantha Littleton thought there were several, less dire possible explanations for Logan Manning’s absence, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. Shrader had been in a foul mood for two days, ever since Holland pulled him off the homicide cases he was working, and sent Sam and him to Mountainside. She couldn’t blame Shrader for feeling angry and insulted at being turned into what he regarded as “a celebrity baby-sitter.” Shrader was a dedicated, tenacious, overworked homicide detective with an outstanding record for clearing his cases. She, on the other hand, was new to Homicide and, in fact, had only transferred to the Eighteenth Precinct two weeks before, when she’d been temporarily assigned to Shrader until his regular partner returned from sick leave. Sam understood and even shared Shrader’s frustrated urgency about the cases piling up at the Eighteenth, but she prided herself on her ability to deal with frustrations without inflicting them on others. Masculine displays of irritability and outrage, like the ones Shrader had been indulging in for two days, stru
ck her as being amusing, adolescent, or mildly annoying—and, occasionally, all three.

  She’d chosen a career in a field dominated by macho men, many of whom still resented the encroachment of women into what had been their domain. But unlike some other women in law enforcement, Sam felt no compulsion to make her male colleagues accept her, and absolutely no desire to prove she could compete with them on their own level. She already knew she could.

  She’d grown up with six rowdy older brothers, and she’d realized as a ten-year-old that when one of them shoved her, it was futile to try to shove him back harder. It was far easier, and far more satisfying, to simply step aside. And then stick out her foot.

  As an adult, she’d converted that tactic to a mental one, and it was even easier to execute because most men were so disarmed by her pretty face and soft voice that they foolishly mistook her for a sweet, ornamental pushover. The fact that men underestimated her, particularly at first, didn’t faze Sam in the least. It amused her and it gave her an edge.

  Despite all that, she genuinely liked and respected most men. But she also understood them, and because she did, she was serenely unperturbed by their foibles and antics. There was little they could say to shock or anger her. She’d survived life with six older brothers. She’d already heard and seen it all.

  “God dammit!” Shrader swore suddenly, slapping his hand on the elevator wall for emphasis.

  Sam continued fastening her jacket. She did not ask him what was wrong. He was a man who’d just cursed and then hit an inanimate object. It followed that he would now feel compelled to explain the unexplainable. Which, of course, he did.

  “We’ll have to go back upstairs. I forgot to ask her for a description of her husband’s vehicle.”

  “It’s a white Jeep Cherokee, brand-new, registered to Manning Development,” Sam told him, digging her gloves out of her pockets. “I called DMV a little while ago, just in case Mrs. Manning couldn’t talk much when she finally came around.”