The Trophy Wife (34 page)

The light ahead seemed a bit brighter, perhaps because she was getting closer, but probably because her vision was acclimating
to the environment. She could see the open rafters where the ceiling ended, giving her plenty of space to drop down into the other room. Just that flicker of encouragement was enough to keep her struggling forward.

There was a sudden roar, starting far off and tumbling toward her like an approaching train. Water was running in the drainpipes. One of them was awake and Emily tried to listen through the cascade for the sound of footsteps. There was an instant when all was quiet again. Then the floorboards directly above her head groaned.

She lay perfectly still, holding her breath as if even the slightest movement of air would give her away. Footsteps shuffled above her. The refrigerator door creaked as it swung open and then seemed to explode as it was slammed shut. There were more footsteps; his, she thought. In her mind, she plotted his route back and forth across the kitchen, tensing when he seemed to be moving in the direction of the basement door. If he came down the stairs, there would be no escape for her. He could beat her to either end of the tunnel in which she was now trapped and be waiting in rage when she finally lowered herself out of the ceiling.

The refrigerator creaked open again and once more there was the loud slam when it was closed. Footsteps sounded directly over her head and then diminished as he climbed back up the stairs. Emily let herself breathe normally for a few seconds. She blinked the perspiration out of her eyes. Then she wiggled ahead, gaining an inch at a time toward the faint fight ahead. Her shoulders ached. The muscles in her legs were verging on spasm. She could feel fire where her skinned knees had been rubbed raw.

Slowly, painfully, she was approaching her goal and now she could begin to weigh the problems she would face when she reached the other room and the ceiling that was supporting her came to an end. She would enter the open space head first, with no room to turn herself around. That would mean dropping from the ceiling height to the floor with nothing to break her fall but her outstretched arms.

She thought of alternatives. Perhaps, when she reached the
end, she could lift out the last ceiling tile. Then, if she could manage to cross the open space with just the framing for support, she would leave herself room to lower her feet and get herself turned around. Or maybe the top of the wall that framed out the space she was escaping would give her a handhold. Then she would have something to hang from while she dragged her feet out from the narrow space over the ceiling. She couldn't be sure what she would find, but just thinking of the possibilities was a distraction from her agonizingly slow passage. Emily figured that she had been in the ceiling for about half an hour and was still only halfway to her destination.

Again and again she paused, stretching the pain out of her limbs and gasping down swallows of the still, dusty air. At one point, she exploded with a sneezing fit and then lay absolutely motionless while she listened to hear if her keepers had been aroused. At last, her outstretched fingers locked over the framing that held the last tile in place. She was able to drag her head out into the open.

She was peering down into a small room, bounded on one side by the studs of her framed-out prison and on two other sides by concrete walls that she took to be the foundation walls. The fourth side was a metal fire door.

Directly below her was a small heating unit. Hot water pipes rose from its boiler and disappeared through the flooring above. Directly across from her was the source of the sunlight she had seen during the day and now the hazy moonlight that had been her goal for the past hour. A small window, high on the wall, opened out to a window well. It looked to be about two foot wide, and maybe eighteen inches deep; plenty of room for her to wiggle through if it could be opened and if she could find something to stand on so that she could raise herself up to the sill.

She stretched out to the heating pipe and found it warm but not too hot to touch. Clutching it in both hands, she dragged her body across the last ceiling frame. She dropped one leg and then let the other slip off the edge. Her body cartwheeled, tearing her hands from the pipe and sending her
crashing down to the floor. He legs buckled and she sprawled out onto her back. She lay still for a moment, taking inventory of her pain. Then she smiled. A nasty fall, but not much worse than many of the dives she had taken on the tennis court. Nothing was broken and she had escaped from her cell.

Emily eased to her feet. She listened to make sure that the sound of her fall had gone unnoticed. Then she went to the door and gently grasped the knob. But it wouldn't turn. The door was locked from the other side.

She bent low and looked for the locking mechanism in the minute crack between the door and the frame. Then she dropped down to her raw knees to look under the door. But there was nothing to see. There was no trace of light from the other side. The lock seemed heavy. She wouldn't be able to wiggle the door open.

She felt herself beginning to tremble and had to struggle to get hold of her nerves. Then she waved her arms through the darkness until she made contact with a pull cord that was hanging from an overhead bulb. The light would certainly shine through the window and, even with the well, would be visible from outside. But her jailers were probably still asleep. And even if one of them were awake, the odds were that their bedroom would be on a different side of the house. Emily had to know exactly where she was and what she had to work with. She pulled the string and light flooded the room.

It was a furnace room, accessed from outside by the locked door that probably led to the garage. There was the small, squatting furnace and a tall, thin water heater, surrounded by a maze of cross-connected copper pipes. An oil line came out of the concrete floor and bent into the face of the burner. A round, sheet metal flue disappeared through the wall a few feet over the door. Other than that, the room was empty. There was nothing she could use to pry at the door jam. No tools that she might use to knock the bolts out of the door hinges. Worse, there was nothing that she could climb on. No workbench, nor cartons, and certainly not a ladder. When she went to the window, she could just manage to curl her fingertips
over the sill. With such a weak handhold, Emily couldn't even lift her toes from the floor.

She spent the next fifteen minutes in a frantic search for things that she might put to use. She tugged on the pipes to see if a section could be pulled free. She tried to lift the small firebox door from the boiler. She even tried to tip the hot water heater so that she could free one of the bricks on which it rested. But everything was secure.

Emily stood in the middle of the barren room, battered, barefoot and clad only in the ripped nightgown. She had been clawing her way forward for more than half an hour and yet she was less than twenty feet from the spot where her broken bed stood. She had escaped her prison cell only to lock herself in an another cell. She had freed herself from her tormentor, but all she had really done was given him a new reason for his terrifying anger. She felt herself choking on her own frustration.

One of the handcuffs dropped down from under the sleeve of her gown. Emily stared dumbly at the eighteen-inch length of chain with the closed manacle hanging from its end. She tugged at the other sleeve, freeing the second chain. Her eyes scanned the heavy metal extensions of her arm and she grasped the chains just below the cuffs that fastened them to her wrists. A weary smile crossed her lips and then she pulled the string to douse the light that was shining out into the window well. She wasn't beaten yet.

Andrew Hogan caught up with Helen Restivo at an all-night diner, where she was having the standard field breakfast of a doughnut and a cup of coffee.

“Just the coffee,” he told the waitress as he slid into the booth.

“Smart call,” Helen told him as she pushed her partly eaten doughnut away. “They get worse with the years.”

She filled him in on the street activity. The State Troopers were doing the most efficient thing by talking with all the street toughs and lowlifes who worked the neighborhood. It made sense that any newcomers would be thoroughly cased
as potential burglary victims or as targets for pension check and social security rip-offs. Someone must have noticed them.

Her hirelings were doing the gumshoe work, showing photographs to taxi drivers, gas station attendants, and convenience store managers. The police photo lab had printed up shots of the two that had been arbitrarily retouched. Rita appeared with hair of varying lengths and shades while Mike was in both clean-shaven and bearded versions. It was the clean-shaven Mike, without the moustache, that the owner of the stolen car had recognized. Two people had identified shorthaired versions of Rita.

“We're going door to door selling magazine subscriptions,” Helen reported. “I feel as if we're standing right on top of them. It's amazing that we haven't had a hit by now.”

“What about the troopers?” Andrew asked as a cup was set in front of him.

“Nothing at all,” she answered. “Apparently our couple are experienced enough not to make waves in a community. As far as the local scum knows, they don't even exist.”

He glanced at his watch. “Almost six,” he mumbled absently. Then he turned to Helen. “So what do you think?”

“I don't want to be grim.”

Andrew nodded. “That's what I think, too. She has to be dead by now. And to tell you the truth, I feel more than a little guilty.”

Helen seemed surprised. Andrew Hogan wasn't the kind of policeman who let himself get emotionally involved with anyone. In his world, both the victims and the criminals were simply data. With all the suffering he dealt with, indifference was the only way to survive.

He noticed her interest. “I've been thinking that if I had left Walter Childs alone, he might well have saved her. He had two chances to pay the ransom. Either one might have brought her. I screwed up both of them.”

“We can't always succeed, but we have to always try,” she quoted from one of the inspirational speeches he used to give to the troops.

“Mindless idealism,” he answered.

“Besides, if we're going to start blaming ourselves, then I have to come in for a share,” Helen told him. “It was my team that missed whoever was waiting in the airport at Grand Cayman. And it was my people who lost the guy in the shopping mall. I'd say that I was more to blame than you.”

“Okay,” Andrew agreed.

“Backstabbing son of a bitch,” Helen accused. They both laughed. The waitress poured seconds on the coffee and picked up the remnants of Helen's doughnut.

“It's not that I screwed up,” Hogan went on. “It's that maybe I didn't care enough about the consequences.”

“ ‘You can't let yourself care.' You must have said that a thousand times.”

“So maybe I was wrong a thousand times.”

Helen's expression was puzzled. “What's with you?”

He shook his head. “Nothing important. But I want you to pull your people off Walter Childs.”

“What? You know what he might try to do.”

“Maybe he will. It's his wife.”

“Probably he will, and it's the bank's money. You have to be kidding.”

His expression showed that he wasn't. “Right away. Get in touch with whoever you have watching the Childs house and tell him to take the rest of the day off.”

She pushed her cup away and took the cell phone out of her purse. “Andrew, why are you doing this?”

He turned his hands up in a gesture of ignorance. “Walter said that I never made a mistake with a woman I loved and had to live my life regretting it. I guess I'm beginning to understand that something like that would be awful.”

Helen shook her head slowly. “Why would you listen to the philosophy of Walter Childs? He's a heartless bastard. Even if he gets his wife back, he's going to dump her for this year's model. For all we know, he's going to pay the hundred million to himself.”

“Indulge me,” he said, pointing to her telephone. “Make the call.”

She was angry as she dialed. “Maybe you're letting him
send the bank's money to that tennis stud. He'll never get his wife back.”

Andrew gestured again toward the phone.

“Or to Mitchell whatever-his-name-is. He gets a hundred million he doesn't need. And you get canned in disgrace.” Helen heard the voice of the man she was calling. She put her hand over the phone. “Please, Andrew. Don't do this. You're putting your own neck in a noose to ease Walter Childs's conscience. For God's sake, he doesn't deserve it. He's been screwing young ladies who can't afford to say no.”

Hogan pointed impatiently toward the phone. “I'm not worried about his conscience. I'm thinking about my own.”

Helen shook her head in despair and gave the order. She had to repeat it before her man really believed what she was asking.

He paid the bill and then walked her to her car. She was going back to ringing doorbells. He was headed to the State Trooper barracks, hoping that the professional police had turned up something. He held her door open and then bent through the window.

“Helen, you knew what I meant, didn't you?”

She didn't answer.

“When I said I had never made a mistake with a woman and lived to regret it? Because it's not true. I did make a mistake with you.”

Helen made a point of looking directly into his eyes. “The answer is still no, Andrew. There's no way I'm ever going to get tied up with someone who feels responsible for me.”

The automatic window closed in his face and the car pulled away.

 

Walter was in a daze, numbed by the horrors of the past week. It was not that he had forgotten the miscalculations and blunders that he had made in his dealings with Emily's jailer, nor that he could block out the thought of the pain he had probably caused her. It was simply a case of overload. There were too many tragedies for him to deal with rationally. So many of the structures that supported his version of reality had been
undermined that he felt like the pathetic victim in a bad dream. He had lost control of his fate. All he could do was hope that he survived until the sunlight woke him in the morning. And then he would go on from there.