House of Secrets - v4 (36 page)

Jordan recovered quickly from the surprise. “How did you get past the gate?”

Lillian Turner demurred. “Well, it is a delight to see you, too.”

“How did you get in?”

“Twelve years and you can’t even be bothered to change the silly code. I’m surprised. You never know when the loopy old ex might come calling one night, do you?”

Jordan conceded. “I guess one doesn’t.”

“So, are you going to invite me into the home I once occupied, Paul? Or have we already arrived at an Alamo moment?”

There was a movement behind Jordan. Lillian looked past her ex-husband’s secretary to see Jenny Hoyt coming in from the dining room. Jenny stopped in her tracks when she saw who was standing in the open door.

“Good Lord.”

Lillian grabbed hold of her roller bag and bumped it through the entrance. From farther back in the house Whitney’s voice sounded. “Who is it, dear?”

Lillian answered first. “No one in particular, Whit! Just a bad old memory!” She turned her false smile to Jenny. “I must say, you look good enough to eat, dear.”

Swift footsteps were sounding on the marble floor, then Whitney Hoyt rounded the corner. “Oh, shit.”

Lillian tsk-tsked her ex-husband. “Whitney. Not in front of the help.”

J
enny summoned Whitney into the kitchen.

“How much do I have to say, Whitney?”

“Very little, Jen.”

“Well, I have to say
some
of it. That woman has got the balls of a bull! I know, I know, it’s her granddaughter, too. Of course. I’m not evil.”

“Nobody said—”

“Has she ever heard of a hotel?”

“Of course she has. But you remember how she is. Miss Lillian needs her audience. A woman like that would go berserk all alone in a hotel.”

“This is my house. I’m not anyone’s audience in my own home! Besides, she
is
nuts. Are we really going to let her just walk all over us like this? How about
I
get a hotel room? Maybe I’m the odd man out here. Michelle’s not my blood relative, after all. What if—”

“No. Jen. Please. Don’t you be dramatic now.”

“What!”
She lowered her voice. “We’ve got Sarah goddamned Bernhardt sitting in there, and you’re accusing me of being dramatic?”

“Oh God. This is exactly what she does: divide and conquer.”

“I know, Whitney. I’ve seen her in action before, remember?”

“It’d be a bum’s rush to hustle her out of here at this hour. She’s just flown halfway across the country. Her granddaughter has gone missing. You can’t blame her for wanting to be close.”

“Well, there’s close, and there’s close. But don’t you see how she operates? She comes waltzing in here with her suitcase and her oh-I’ve-been-in-an-airplane-all-day routine, and now if I make so much as a peep of protest,
I’m
the bad guy here. I’m the one who is rude. Look, let me talk to her in the morning. I really do think at this point we give her tonight. It will only start things off on a bad foot if we tangle right now. It’s late. Everyone’s wiped out.”

“Fine. Sure. Should we grant her the master bedroom? I don’t think that outsize persona of hers is going to fit in any of our lesser rooms.”

“We can shove her in the attic if you’d like,” Hoyt said gently. “This is still our household.”

Jenny raised her hands and let them drop. “Oh, hell. It doesn’t matter. She’s not my ex-wife, she’s yours. I’m not going to kick the woman out onto the street. I’ll just put on my armor. I can handle her. She got the first blow in, that’s all. Why would I expect her to be on her best behavior?”

Whitney leaned forward and kissed his wife on the forehead. “Lillian has no best behavior. Once you stop hoping for it to appear, it gets a little easier.”

T
he faded blue Fairlane bumped over the yellow connector ramp onto the ferry. Up ahead, a local teen wearing an orange reflecting vest motioned the driver to keep coming forward. The car advanced slowly, its headlights bathing the deckhand in its crossed cones of light. The teen made a slicing move across his neck, and the driver touched the brakes.

“That’s good!”

The driver remained behind the wheel, watching through his side and rearview mirrors as four other cars bumped over the ramp and packed in around him. A thin thumbnail of moon hung in the black sky, just visible at the top of the Fairlane’s windshield. Six or seven people emerged from the other cars and moved off toward the ferry’s railings.

A low baying call sounded from the ferry’s horn, and the vessel began drifting off-angle from the dock. With a hard growl, the boat’s engine sprang to life and a mass of churning water began chasing the vessel away from the dock. Robert Smallwood watched as the scattered lights of the silhouetted island receded. His heart was heavy for the families of the two men he had been forced to eliminate. But there had really been no choice. As the two men had arrived at the front door, the little girl had popped a small blood vessel in her left eye, trying to make her scream heard through the layers of duct tape. He felt bad for that, too. Such a mess all the way around. He’d been forced to act so swiftly. The banging on the door. Men with sidearms. Such a monumental pain in the ass.

As the small ferry powered forward, Smallwood’s eyes swept across the black water. He’d considered sinking the two men in the inlet. With all the house construction sites on the island these days, he could have fetched as many cinder blocks as he would have needed and used those to anchor them. He could have taken them out into the bay in a rowboat and quietly slipped them overboard. But in the end, he hadn’t taken the time. He had no way of knowing how quickly the men would be missed or how soon someone might come looking for them. Instead, he had dragged the dead weights into the house and let them remain there in the front hallway, one piled atop the other.

The ride to the mainland took less than ten minutes. In Greenport, the ferry sidled up close to the dock, reversed its engines, then cut them altogether. The deckhand and his counterparts on the dock exchanged heavy ropes and secured the vessel. After affixing the ramp in place, one of the deckhands stepped onto the ferry and came over to the Fairlane.

“Hey, anytime you want to sell that car, man, let me know, okay? It is
so
cool.”

Robert Smallwood said nothing. The other deckhand removed the chain gate from the front of the ferry, and the Fairlane made its way slowly onto the ramp and back to terra firma. Within seconds it had dissolved into the night.

I
rena Bulakov watched as a fat juicy June bug crossed along just beneath the lip of the countertop, out of sight of the black man who was manning the front desk. The man was pointing out directions on a map to a young German couple who spoke no English whatsoever. His voice seemed to be growing louder in direct relation to the couple’s decreasing volume.

“You want to take the
B train
down to
Columbus Circle!
You got that?
Downtown!”

The June bug covered the length of the counter and then came up onto the counter itself, though it remained behind the silver desk bell, still hidden from the black man’s sight. The German couple folded their map politely and left through the front door. As Irena stepped forward, the black man disappeared into a small office. A lanky blond boy wearing a gigantic backpack came through the front door, stepped brusquely past Irena, and brought his hand down over and over on the silver bell.

The June bug scooted swiftly down the wall in a panic.

The man emerged from the office and immediately began yelling at the boy. The boy yelled right back. Irena couldn’t follow their sentences enough to know what their problems were.

She looked down at the tabloid newspaper she had picked up after leaving the copy shop. If she had stared once at the photograph of Senator Andrew Foster and his wife and daughter posing in front of the Statue of Liberty, she had stared at it a hundred times. It was
him
. This same man from Dimitri’s little movie. It was this United States senator from New York. Here in the newspaper. He was a horrible man. She knew this. She had seen him with the woman who was now dead. The woman who was not his wife.

And now somebody had kidnapped his child.

Irena had wanted children, but her body had forbidden it. Three times her body had let her down. She had never shared this with Dimitri, but she had wanted twins. A little boy and a little girl. Irena had thought about it so often over the years that she could bring the fantasy children’s images to her mind whenever she chose. In Irena’s mind, they were nearly seven already, both in school.
He
was very, very good with his numbers, possibly a future engineer. One day he might build impressive buildings and bridges.
She
showed creative talent. She could draw, and she was also a beautiful little ballerina. Both of them were popular with their fellow students and with their teachers. The teachers called them “shining examples.” The imagined term itself could bring actual tears to Irena’s eyes. Shining examples.

Irena’s imaginary children were the same age as the girl in the newspaper, the senator’s daughter. In a world where anything can happen, they might have been friends.

The black man and the lanky blond boy concluded their argument, and Irena stepped forward. The sign on the wall told her how much was needed to rent a room. Irena placed the exact amount on the counter and asked for a room.

Five minutes later she was testing the mattress with her hands. The springs made a little bit of noise, but this didn’t matter. It was a bed. She was not going to be sleeping on the ground. This was her current definition of heaven.

There was a shower down at the end of the hall. Even though she had no clean clothes to change into, Irena took a shower. She also had no towel, and since the man at the front desk had said to her that none were provided, she used the bed’s thin bedcover. There was a slender chip of soap on the floor of the shower, and Irena ran it over her body until it disappeared altogether. The water pressure was not very strong. But the water was hot. As hot as she could stand. And this was good. The hotter the better. She closed her eyes and pretended that the searing water was dissolving her skin all the way down to her bones. This was also good. The old skin was the old Irena. It was all that remained, and now it, too, could be made to vanish. At the end of the shower, she could step out and begin to let the new Irena blossom. Maybe this one would have better luck. Maybe this one could have real children. Maybe this one could marry a man who devoured her with love, could be less nervous, could be more happy.

Back in her small room, Irena dabbed herself dry with the bedcover, then got naked into the bed. She had the tabloid newspaper with her. She also had the blue stick from Dimitri’s computer in her hand. She scrunched up against the thin pillow and set the newspaper and the blue stick on her lap. She was ready.

T
he last thing Christine wanted to do was cry in front of her mother, but once she had gotten it out of the way she felt somewhat better.

The two women were seated together in the squeaking wooden love seat out in Jenny’s garden. Far above them, the three-quarter moon was playing hide-and-seek with an endless stream of curling clouds; the way its dim light wobbled off and on reminded Christine of an errant bulb loose in its socket.

The two were each wrapped in thin shawls against the brisk bite of the late evening. Each also cradled a wineglass in her lap. As the others had headed off to bed, Lillian had snared a bottle of Sancerre from her ex-husband’s wine cellar and cajoled her daughter into staying up with her for a nightcap. The decision to move it outdoors had been Christine’s. To whatever degree the semidarkness might ameliorate Lillian’s hawklike scrutiny, all the better.

“The hair is cute, by the way,” Lillian said to Christine after a few minutes of uncustomary silence.

Christine wiped away the last of her tears. “Thank you.” She poked at her hair. “It feels like a thousand years ago.”

Lillian’s wineglass floated near her chin. “Listen, darling. I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to say it. Andrew seemed awfully dead tonight.”

The words that rose to Christine’s tongue were precisely the ones she knew better than to use in response to her mother. She forced herself to take a beat. But even then, she couldn’t keep from at least nibbling at the bait. “That’s a hell of a thing to say. You know, you might want to remember that Andy’s under a lot of pressure right now.”

Lillian dismissed the remark. “Oh, the pressure. Yes, I remember that one. You seem to forget I was married to one of those men myself for over thirty years. I always thought it must be nice to have a big important wall like that to hide behind.”

“Andy is not hiding behind any wall. His daughter has just been kidnapped.”

Lillian was unimpressed. The shifting moonlight slid across her face as she sipped her wine. Even in the dimness, the terrible beauty of her eyes prevailed. She trained them on her daughter.