Sooner or Later

Fear rushed hotly up her spine and she turned and fled through the parking garage. The elevator door was open, she jumped in and pressed the button for the ground floor.

She sagged with relief as it began to descend, her heart still pounding. She must get out of the car park, run the half block to Main, get help. She would be safe, out there….

The elevator stopped on two.

“Oh God, oh God. This can’t be happening.” She slammed her fist on the button again, but the elevator did not move.

Crouched against the scarred steel wall, all she could hear was the pounding of her own heart. She tried to remember the lessons she’d taken on how to protect herself in a mugging. “Don’t panic,” she told herself, taking a deep breath, “it’s the worst thing you can do.”

The elevator began to descend again. Breathing a shaky sigh of relief, she took an eager step forward as the doors slid open.

He was waiting for her.

Dell Books by Elizabeth Adler:

INDISCRETIONS
LÉONIE
PEACH
THE RICH SHALL INHERIT
THE PROPERTY OF A LADY
FORTUNE IS A WOMAN
LEGACY OF SECRETS
THE SECRET OF THE VILLA MIMOSA
NOW OR NEVER
SOONER OR LATER

Revenge is a kind of wild justice,
which the more man’s nature runs to,
the more ought law to weed it out.

Francis Bacon 1561-1626

T
HE CUSHIONY LEATHER SEATS IN THE BACK OF THE
white Bentley convertible were Eleanor Parrish Duveen’s favorite color. Red. They were also extremely hot. It was early afternoon, but as she was only five years old, she wasn’t much good at telling the time.

Ellie’s father was sitting next to her mother, who was driving. His arm was flung lazily across the back of her seat and he was singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” at top blast in a loud but pleasing bass baritone. He threw back his head, belting out the verses of the hymn to the sky and the trees and the astonished birds, while her mother laughed gaily at his antics. Occasionally, he turned and glanced at Ellie, throwing her a grin and a conspiratorial wink as he escalated the volume for her benefit, making her mother laugh even harder as she negotiated the dangerous bends leading down the mountain.

The hot California sun beat down on Ellie’s red curls. It was so hot she thought it would shrivel her brains.

She retrieved her straw hat from the floor and
crammed it on her head, pulling it over her eyes, trying to shut out the sun. A yawn took her by surprise and she slithered farther down in the hot red leather seat, wishing they wouldn’t insist on having the top down, however scorching the weather. The only time her father put it up was when it rained, and then they left California and “escaped” to Europe.

Today, they had lunched at the old staging post, hidden down in a valley of the Los Padres mountains. It was a place Ellie loved, where fake cowboys barbecued steaks and quail and corn, and sang songs and strummed guitars. Her father sang along, waving his beer glass aloft in time to the music. Then her mother got up and danced, swirling her long, gauzy skirts and clapping her hands over her head like a Spanish Gypsy girl.

Ellie was fascinated by her mother’s stomping little feet encased in expensive white lizard cowboy boots. She thought she was a wonderful dancer and her father was the greatest singer. Even though her mother laughed every time he started on “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which he always did after he’d been drinking.

Sometimes Ellie overheard other people’s comments about her parents. “Mad,” they said. But they were the ones who didn’t know them, and about their social connections, and how rich the Parrishes were. Those who did know, smiled and called them “eccentric.” They said they were true party-people, rich “hippies,” jet-setters. If there was a great party anywhere in the world, they would be there.

“Why not?” Romany Parrish Duveen would reply when asked why she felt the need to fly six or seven thousand miles across the world for one night’s entertainment. “Life is meant to be fun” was Rory Duveen’s motto, and one he lived by.

The lunch had been long and Ellie had eaten too
much. Her stomach stuck out from the quantity of food and her eyelids were heavy. She slithered down in the hot red leather seat with her chin sunk onto her chest. The sun beat on her eyelids sending brilliant flashes of purple and red as she half dozed. Somewhere in the background she could hear her mother laughing and she thought it was the most delightful sound in the world. When her mother laughed, everything was right with Ellie’s world.

“Ooops,” she heard her mother exclaim, when the big Bentley wobbled skittishly as it took the curve.

Ellie half opened her eyes. She peered over the edge of the car, over the edge of the road at the yellow dried grass and jagged rocks in the ravine below. Her mother straightened the wheel and the big convertible rolled smoothly on down the steep mountain road. Ellie sighed contentedly and closed her eyes again.

“Onward Christian so-o-o-o-ldiers, Marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus going on before …”

Her father’s strong voice and her mother’s laughter bounced from the mountain peaks, echoing round the valleys until Ellie thought it would wake even the sleeping rattlesnakes.

Then, “Ooops,” her mother said again as the Bentley did another little shimmy. She turned and looked questioningly at her husband. Their eyes met and it was as though they were drowning in each other’s gaze. He didn’t miss a beat,
“Onward Christian so-o-o-o-oldiers …”

He was still singing, loud and clear, when the big car suddenly flung itself into a violent spin.

“Ooops,” her mother yelled, laughing as she tried to straighten out. She was still laughing when the big car hurtled over the edge, bouncing from the rocks, deep into the canyon. Because wasn’t life all a joke? And maybe death, too?

T
HE
H
UDSON
S
ANITARIUM WAS BUILT INTO A STRETCH OF
rocky land overlooking the river, as far upstate New York as you could get using a paved road. It consisted of a central redbrick administration building with smaller satellite wings where the patients were housed. Dark green ivy climbed the walls and circled the barred windows, where, in springtime, starlings and sparrows made their nests, finding a snug haven from the howling winds and ravenous predators.

Those patients who were still able to tell the difference and understood what their surroundings were like, did not feel quite as happy as the sparrows. Besides the barred windows, there were locked doors, security alarms and armed guards. The nurses were burly men who could wrestle a patient to the ground if necessary, and even in the women’s wing, the female nurses were chosen for their stature and strength, as well as their ability to distribute medication and keep control. The Hudson was a private maximum security facility for violent and
deranged patients. It was a place where families, fearing for their own safety, had committed them.

The man in room twenty-seven was considered lucky by the other patients. His room was on a corner and had two windows. Admittedly, both were barred and set high in the wall, but they let in more light and a glimpse of the trees tossing in the everlasting wind. In this small, isolated half-world where most patients wore cheap, well-worn clothes, he was also remarkably well dressed. He wore smart button-down shirts and chinos in summer and cords and neat sweaters in winter.

He had a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cigarettes, and even had special foods, pizza and chicken and ribs, sent in from the nearby township of Rollins. It was also rumored that he paid a guard to keep him supplied with secret bottles of vodka, and to dispose of the empties. He was, those patients said, who still had enough wits left to them to know the difference, a rich man.

Patrick Buckland Duveen did not agree with their assessment of him and his luck. It was not lucky to be incarcerated in the Hudson Sanitarium. It would have been called a lunatic asylum not so many years ago, and for its violent clientele, a room there was as much a prison cell as any high security jail. His “privileges” were not due to his personal wealth, nor to the charity of his family. They were to appease the conscience of the woman who’d had him committed to this place, locked in like the
crazy animal
she had called him, insulting him in her stern, unafraid voice.

The fact that she was not afraid of him was one of the reasons he had felt compelled to kill her. Too bad he’d not succeeded.

“You should go to jail,” she had stormed at him, while her guards held him down, his face pressed into the
rich, soft carpet at her feet. “But I will not allow you to disgrace our name.”

She had told the police she would not press charges against him, but that he was a proven danger to the public and she intended to have him committed.

The eminent doctors who were her friends had come hurrying at her command. They agreed he was dangerous, a born killer. “A madman, you could see it in his eyes.” And those three doctors calmly signed the documents that had put him away in this place, forever.

In Buck Duveen’s book, decent clothing, the occasional pizza and bottle of vodka—chosen not because he preferred it but because of its lack of detectable odor on his breath—plus a room with two barred windows and an armed guard on every floor, did not make up for a lifetime of missed pleasures. He missed the restaurants, the bars, the booze and the women. And he missed
power.
He had spent twenty years without it and he craved it as a child wants candy.

One cloudy, blustery morning in early April, he was marched from his room, through the green windowless tunnels they called transit passages, with an armed guard on either side, his hands cuffed safely behind his back because he had been known to try to fight his way out, to the office of the chief administrator.

Hal Morrow was sitting behind a large teak desk piled with papers. He could smell Duveen’s strong breathmint before he even looked at him. He took him in, quietly, for a few minutes, noticing how fit he looked. He was a tall, well-set-up fellow of—he checked his papers—Duveen was forty-two now. He had a fine head of copper-red hair, dark eyes, narrowed against the unaccustomed light, and a lean-jawed, handsome face with the pale skin of an incarcerated man. He also had the wiry physique and strong hands of a peasant.

Morrow glanced at the file again. Those same hands had been used to attempt to strangle the woman who had put him in here, as well as, it was suspected, two other women, both prostitutes. No evidence had ever been found to link him definitively with those last two cases and he had never been prosecuted for them. Nor for attempting to murder the first woman, but that was her choice. In Morrow’s view, she’d given Duveen a break because he undoubtedly would have done time in a maximum security jail.

Buck Duveen was a psychopath: attractive, charming, unemotional, ruthless. And clever. New guards at the Hudson facility always said you couldn’t meet a nicer guy: pleasant, soft-spoken, intelligent. He’d taught himself Latin and Greek, read Juvenal and Plato in the original. He quietly tended his garden, an immaculate plot in the large parklike grounds, where he grew only flowers. Beautiful, pampered flowers, with never a bug to be seen because he annihilated them the very minute they appeared. His roses were a picture, heavy blossoms locked in the neatest little prisons of clipped box hedges. He grew flowers for every season, except the long, hard winter when the earth lay under a blanket of snow for months on end.