Bundle of Joy (39 page)

"Hard work doesn't scare any of us, McKay," Bill Hughes, the psychologist, said, "but how in hell can I dial 911 when you keep over if the phone lines are down?"

In answer, Michael retrieved the axe and raised it overhead again, as the other men quickly stepped backward.

"Can't convince you to stop?" Frank DeMarco, the engineer, called out.

The axe whistled as it cut first through the air, then the oak tree, freeing the last piece to be cleared from the street.

"You finally convinced me," said Michael.

With one motion, he picked up the tree limb and tossed it onto the pile near the driveway to Sid's house.

"So now the problem is food," He turned to the rest of the men. "Any suggestions?"

"Marilyn refuses to open the freezer," Sid said."Says she's conserving energy."

Jim laughed. "We already polished off all the ice cream in there, Bernie. What else could be left?"

A few of the families were going to pool the contents of their refrigerators and have a barbecue, and the consensus was that an impromptu block party wasn't such a bad idea.

Michael rested the axe handle on his shoulder and started walking back with them in the general direction of his house. With David visiting his maternal grandparents, he hadn't bothered to shop for anything more substantial than a dozen eggs and some chocolate-covered doughnuts. In fact, if it hadn't been for the storm, he wouldn't have been on Long Island at all; he would have been in Upper Manhattan working on the gargoyle for the north side door of the cathedral.

This heavily mortgaged house on Harvest Drive was something he'd bought for David, and within his five-year-old son around it seemed echoingly empty.

"You're joining us, aren't you, Mike?" Sid asked.

The talk of franks and filet mignon was tempting, but not tempting enough to lure him into an evening of such concentrate conviviality.

"Not tonight." He stopped at the foot of his driveway and tossed the axe into the back of his four-wheel-drive. "I think I'm going to go out and do some exploring."

Bill shook his head. "You need counseling, friend. Anyone who ventures out farther than his own fireplace tonight is either a madman or –"

Sid Bernstein started to laugh. "Or a medievalist like our pal McKay."

It was an old joke, and one Michael was able to accept with good grace. For the three years he'd been there, he'd tried in vain to explain the difference between a medievalist and one who practiced a medieval trade.

To these men, rooted firmly in the next-to-last decade of the twentieth century, technology was king and speed the crown prince.

Why a man like Michael McKay would want to spend his life chipping away at two-ton blocks of stone with instruments his cave-dwelling ancestors would have found backward was beyond their comprehension.

"They barbecued in the Dark Ages," Jim Flannery was saying as he leaned against the fender of the Jeep. "In fact, if you happen upon a wild porterhouse out there, bring it back and we'll grill it."

Michael's baritone laugh rang out in the silence of his front yard. "You wouldn't know what to do with anything that wasn't wrapped in plastic and meant for the microwave. I can't wait to see what happens if the power company doesn't get us back up tonight.

"When the juice comes back on, you'll be the first one to turn to the Sports Channel, McKay. With the Yanks in the pennant race, you're not about to pretend they haven't invented the wheel yet."

Michael glanced up at the maze of cable-television wires that had been attached to his roof before Hurricane Henry came along. "Can I blame the existence of all that paraphernalia on David?"

Jim Flannery snorted. "Hell, no. You were wired and watching long before you got custody of your kid."

Michael reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out his car keys. "This place is worse than Knot's Landing," he said with a grin.

They all knew about his ex-wife's death and his ongoing custody battle with her parents; their quiet support had made the legal hassles more bearable.

"Abandoning ship?" asked Frank.

Michael climbed behind the wheel. "You got it."

"Coward." Jim ruffled the hair of his eldest daughter, who'd come out to tell everyone that the impromptu barbecue was ready. "Can't take ghost stories around the old campfire?"

"Not when the old campfire is on the deck of a four-hundred-thousand-dollar house, Flannery." The truck's engine roared to life. "Maybe I'll be back before you roast the marshmallows." He adjusted the headlights and backed slowly down the driveway.

"Guy's crazy." Jim's voice, tinged with curiosity and affection, floated down the street after him. "Doesn't know enough to come in out of a hurricane."

Maybe not, Michael thought as he steered around the split trunk of what had once been a beautiful weeping willow.

But there was one thing he did know: he'd rather be out there in the aftermath of a killer storm than back, safe and secure, in that empty house of his. He could protect himself against the elements but there was no protection against loneliness.

#

She had to admit it was one hell of a homecoming.

For six years Sandra Patterson had imagined how it would feel to return to New York in triumph, the city kid from the rough streets of Queens, with no advantages but a sharp brain and a lot of ambition, coming back with the keys to a new house on Long Island Sound in one hand, and the assistant-vice-president's job in the other.

Long Island had seemed like Shangri-La to kids from the city streets when she was growing up, and having a 516 area code had been the ultimate status symbol.

How great it would be to see the old crowd again, to know that at last she was their equal in every way. Oh, maybe she didn't have the husband and the children, but she'd managed to play the best hand possible with the cards she'd been dealt.

It had seemed as if the years of hard work and loneliness, the years of sacrificing things other women took for granted, were finally going to pay off.

Another gust of wind rocked the cliff house overlooking Eaton's Harbor. Sandra shivered, and for the hundredth time she imagined she heard footsteps along the driveway.

What a joke.

In the three weeks since she moved back, she'd discovered that the members of her old crowd had divorced and remarried, gone to jail, gone to seed, opened law offices and closed movie theaters. They'd gone into analysis and come out of the closet. Some of them had moved to Florida, others to Connecticut.

And the one she thought of late at night when her defenses were down had married and vanished to Virginia, obviously forgetting his old dream to live on the Island one day.

He'd managed to forget her. Why should it surprise her that he'd forgotten his other dreams as well?

Not one thing had stayed the same — herself included.

She glanced at the huge stack of computer printouts on the makeshift desk in her family room. Thank God, assistant vice-presidents in charge of mortgage planning had precious little time to be lonely.

Sandra was used to hard work, but the degree of tension at this level was higher than she'd expected. It was as if US-National Bank were bound and determined to get its money's worth out of her, even if it got it in blood.

The latest bill for her mother's medical care caught her eye, and she shoved it farther under the pile of computer sheets. Anything she knew about self-reliance she'd learned from Elinor Patterson, the woman who had stopped dreaming so that her daughter could start.

Maybe she wasn't getting the ego boost out of her professional triumph that she'd anticipated, maybe there were nights when she wondered why it had seemed so damned important to come back home, but there was a deep satisfaction in knowing that the help her mother needed could be had – and that she could pay the price.

In a way, she was thankful for the demands US-National made on her time; it gave her less opportunity to think about the disease that was slowly but surely killing her mother.

So when Sandra heard the crunching sound beneath her window for the third time in ten minutes, she chalked it up to overwork and to the way the hurricane had jangled her nerves. She hated storms – she had hated them since childhood – and surviving Henry's brutal battering had obviously taken more out of her than she'd realized.

Then she heard it.

"She's in there." A man's voice, right beneath the side window. "I can hear her."

Sandra's pen clattered to the floor, and she gave up pretending that the footsteps she'd heard crunching along her gravel driveway were a trick of the wind blowing off the Sound.

"There are no lights on in there." A woman's voice this time. Equal-opportunity employment had apparently reached all sectors of the work force, felons included.

"Idiot," said another woman. "We just had a hurricane. There are no lights anywhere."

A few hours ago, after the worst of Henry had passed, she'd thought spending a candlelit evening alone in her new house with only a stack of ledger sheets for company would be a rustic adventure, one of those experiences that would make for great cocktail conversation at US-National Bank networking sessions.

Somehow she hadn't bothered to factor in nightfall, or just how dark it could get out there in the heart of suburbia. Her neighbors were all tucked snugly away in their houses, probably telling ghost stories around their crackling fires, while she hid behind a pile of computer printouts and waited for a crazed axe-murderer and his accomplices to break into her house.

The footsteps crunched their way around to the other side of the house. She blew out the candles surrounding her desk with a burst of lung power that would have done her old aerobics instructor in Sioux Falls proud, and tried to ignore the blob of white wax that plopped onto the top ledger sheet.

Only a lunatic would worry about obliterating the 1985 foreign-interest figures while the Wild Bunch lurked outside her window, and while Sandra was a self-confessed workaholic, her obsession still managed to stay within the recognized legal bounds of sanity.

A tree limb brushed against the den window and her heart made a three-point landing in the pit of her stomach. So much for being rational: it was time to panic.

She stumbled across an unopened crate in the darkness and cursed out loud. Wouldn't Newsday love a story about a hometown girl who returned to Long Island in triumph, after surviving six years at US-National's billing center in South Dakota, only to die in her own hallway after tripping over a box of vintage Motown LPs?

If she could just find her flashlight and that baseball bat she used to keep in the back seat of her car, maybe she'd be able to –

"Open up, Patterson! We know you're in there." A woman's high-pitched voice echoed through the quiet house.

Sandra froze at the sound of her name, her back pressed against the wall to the left of the front door. Only the criminally insane would be out and about after the worst hurricane to hit Long Island in forty-five years. Only the criminally insane, or –

She flung open the front door and was nearly trampled as Ed Gregory, Carol Richter, and Ilene McGrath – three of her co-workers – swept into her house with the same subtlety shown by the storm.

"We aim to serve," Ed said, his arms laden with blankets and batteries and a bottle of Cinzano. "Your friendly corporate rescue squad comes prepared for any and all eventualities."

Carol turned her flashlight on the den and whistled. "Can you believe this?" She zeroed in on the scores of worksheets scattered about the desk. "She must have known we were coming. I mean, working by candlelight . . . ?"

"Good going, Sandra," Ilene chimed in. "Great way to impress the boss." Ilene cast a glance at Ed Gregory, who was in charge of the entire East Coast operation, and was also Sandra's mentor.

Her promotion from the outback of Sioux Falls to second-in-command at corporate headquarters had engendered more than a little jealousy among her co-workers, and Sandra had been doing her best to ignore the slings and arrows fired in her direction. She'd worked damned hard to get where she was; no explanations should be necessary. People like her former fiancé, a Sioux Falls financial litigator, and Ilene McGrath, however, made that stance difficult.

"Patterson's on the fast track," Ed said. "She's too busy to watch the clock. Something beyond your comprehension, McGrath."

This was dangerous territory. Sandra didn't need electricity to see the jealousy in Ilene's eyes.

"You realize you people nearly sent me into cardiac arrest, don't you?" she asked, accepting the extra flashlight from Carol. "I was convinced you were a bunch of wild-eyed motorcycle maniacs hell-bent on pillaging my new house."

"Some thanks we get for risking our lives to free you from darkness," Ed said.

"The weather's still that bad out there?" Sandra asked.

"To hell with the weather," he said. "It's the people I'm worried about. Hijackers are lurking behind every felled maple tree, waiting to rob people idiotic enough to ride around with flashlights and batteries in plain sight."