Wildwood Road (6 page)

This one was simmering.

Michael stepped away from the wall and regarded his handiwork, hammer dangling in his grip. All that remained was to frame the little pantry he had decided to add. Jillian was always wishing for more storage space in the kitchen and, if they were going to finish the basement, it only made sense to take advantage of the added room.

His stomach gave a sudden lurch and Michael burped softly, then scowled at the bitter taste in his mouth.

“Shit,” he whispered. His legs felt weak and he slid to the cold floor, the hammer taking a chink out of the concrete.

Come find me.

“What the hell?” he asked aloud.

As if in answer, the door at the top of the stairs opened. He could not see Jillian from where he sat, but he could feel her there.

“Michael?”

“Yeah?” He was careful to keep his tone flat and emotionless, just like hers. Like walking across a field of land mines, hoping to get to the peace that lay on the other side.

“I have to go to the cleaners and to the bookstore to pick up the book the club's reading next month. I thought I'd bring the costumes back. I've got them all together, but I can't find your hat.”

“Is it in the car?”

“I don't know,” came her frosty reply. “Is it?”

The muscles tensed across his back. It took great restraint, but he said nothing. The only thing he could do was hope that he could remember more of what had happened the night before, and wait for the lingering bitterness and awkwardness between them to blow over.

With a sigh, Michael climbed to his feet and trotted up the stairs. As soon as she saw that he was coming, Jillian retreated into the kitchen and busied herself unloading the dishwasher. He paused a moment to stare longingly at her back. If he just reached out now to touch her shoulder, to give her a moment of tenderness, he could probably put an end to the issue right there. But he couldn't, not yet. His own anger was still too fresh. It didn't matter if he was angry with Jillian or with himself. It needed time to fade. Soon enough, one of them would defuse the whole thing.

I'm sorry,
he thought, wishing he could communicate with Jillian mind to mind, so she could feel what he felt, and maybe make better sense of it than he could.

He went out through the kitchen door and into the garage. As soon as he found the hat he would go in and put his arms around Jillian at the sink. He would kiss the back of her neck. She would stiffen up at first, resisting him. Michael could almost see it playing out in his mind. But then he would whisper to her how sorry he was, how much he loved her. He would tell her the truth, that he had helped her to the car, but not carried her, and that would settle her nerves. And then, at last, he could share with her his fear that someone had drugged him, and the images that were plaguing him every time he closed his eyes, even for a moment.

The dream he'd had. The nightmare.

They never locked the car when it was in the garage. It just wasn't that kind of neighborhood. Wasn't that kind of town. Up here in the Merrimack Valley, there were probably people who still didn't lock their front doors. The Danskys weren't willing to go quite that far, but the garage seemed safe enough.

Michael tugged open the passenger door and the hat was there, on the floor of the front seat. He reached in to retrieve it and saw that it was misshapen.

For an instant he thought Jillian had stepped on it that morning, getting into the front seat.

Then that aluminum taste returned to his mouth and he sagged against the open car door. He squeezed his eyes shut and he could
see
her, there in the car. He could see her foot coming down on top of the hat. The little blond girl on the side of the road, silhouetted in the glare of his headlights, about to be run down. Then in his car. Lost. Alone.

No, not lost.

“Right there. Turn right there.”

“You recognize this street?”

Clutching that black felt hat in his hands, Michael began to remember.

CHAPTER FIVE

All day Michael had moved silently through the house, the air heavy with the tension between him and Jillian. Each time he felt the urge to reach out, to smooth things over, his body and mind felt sluggish, as if frozen by the chill. It was ridiculous. He could speak to Jillian about anything. She was his closest friend.

But not that day.

He had given her his costume, including the hat. Though it was obvious that they would have to pay for the damage, Jillian said nothing more about it.

His mind was filled with images of the night before, of shattered fragments of memory, of sights and sounds and even smells. Michael could not remember everything. The details were muddled, as though the previous evening had been a fresh deck of cards and someone had shuffled them, removing a random few. He had trouble putting them in order, and he could not tell what was missing. But he had enough to construct a basic mental sketch of those bizarre events.

The little girl in the road. That house. What the hell had possessed him to go inside in the first place? Yes, he'd been concerned for the girl. He remembered that much. But to go wandering around inside . . . it would have taken a lot more than a few Guinnesses to get him that inebriated.

Late on Sunday afternoon he was raking leaves as the last of the sunlight slipped away, the indigo sky bleeding into black. He wore a battered leather jacket and thin gloves, but when the wind blew the chill cut into him. It was too early in the autumn for the nights to be this cold. Or, at least, that was what he told himself. Obviously he was wrong. The proof was in the air, and the way his cheeks stung. His eyes watered. There were bags of leaves all over the lawn. The wind had forced him to collect them as he went, or he'd have been raking until the snow fell.

The second story was dark, but a warm golden glow radiated from the windows of the living room and the kitchen. Jillian had muttered something to him, noncommittally and without meeting his gaze, about making some sort of pasta dish tonight. His stomach rumbled as he paused, leaning on the rake, leaves rustling. Several blew away from the pile in front of him, drawing his attention.

Michael caught the scent of a wood-burning stove. A smile touched the edges of his mouth . . . the first one in hours. The Greenways, two doors down, had one of those stoves and used it all fall and winter. It was a wonderful smell, one that reminded him of autumns back home in Sudbury. Several people in the neighborhood had had such stoves. For just a moment, there in the gathering darkness, he closed his eyes and remembered.

And flinched.

That had been one of the smells in the girl's house. If it even
was
the girl's house. Several times during that day he had tried to open up to Jillian about it. But what would he say? How would he explain what he thought had really happened?

The one thing that was growing clearer in his mind was the progression of his drunkenness. His memory was murky now, but it seemed to him that he had felt only a little buzzed when he and Jilly had left the party. But that wasn't right, was it? Once he had gotten behind the wheel he had realized that he was drunker than he had thought. He might have had four bottles of Guinness instead of three. Maybe—and this was an enormous maybe—but maybe even five.

Still, though, that did not explain what happened afterward. It did not explain the blacked-out portions of his memory, or the way in which his judgment and perception had been impaired. The images of the house were practically hallucinatory. When he thought about it, he felt dread seize him. He was—

Terrified . . . you were terrified . . .

His eyes snapped open. Michael stood in his backyard, an eddy of chill wind spinning autumn leaves away from the pile he had made. It gusted, and he swayed, staring at the leaves as more and more slipped away. This was useless. He blinked away the encroaching darkness and then glanced upward. The night was deepening and the moon had emerged, frosted with a white corona, a kind of ghostly doppelgänger.

He
had
been terrified.

The small cuts and the bruise on his face were obvious, but he had done his best to hide the gash on his right forearm from Jillian. It bordered on needing stitches, and there was no way he was letting her talk him into going to the hospital. They would want to know how he had been injured. What would he say? Michael had only the vaguest memory of the fear that had sent him crashing through a window.

“Jesus,” he whispered, the word stolen away by the breeze. He shook his head, holding the rake as though it were some walking stick to keep him from falling.
Did I really do that?

The cuts told the story. As did the pain in his ribs when he inhaled deeply; probably some massive bruising there. His back ached and his right cheek was swollen.

Michael had done some incredibly stupid things in college under the influence of alcohol. He had shattered a car's headlights. One night he had done a back flip into a fountain in front of a hotel in Cambridge. He had thrown a beer mug at the head of one of his best friends, barely grazing the guy's skull, but left with the knowledge that he could have done serious damage. Freshman year he had said terrible things to a girl at a party, and remembered not a word later. Perhaps worst of all, he had walked a fourth-floor balcony railing as though it had been a circus high wire.

Those memories troubled him, but not nearly so much as the idea that he had somehow gotten so obliterated that he could have fallen back into that sort of behavior.

He glanced at the house again. The golden glow from within was irresistible.
What the hell are you still doing out here?
he thought.
You're freezing your ass off . . . and your wife is inside.

With that, the last of the chill that he had felt separating him from Jillian seemed to burn off, the ice melting. Whatever resentment he'd held on to was gone, and now, as ever in such situations, he felt like a complete ass for having nurtured those feelings at all.

“Screw it.” Michael let the rake fall to the lawn, abandoning it and the last pile of leaves he had gathered. He walked around to the front of the house and into the garage. Now that night had arrived the garage was quite dark, but he kept it neat and there was no chance of his tripping over anything. He could just make out the two crude wooden steps he had never gotten around to replacing.

The door from the garage into the kitchen was unlocked. He opened it and stepped inside, greeted by the almost overpowering smell of onions, peppers, and garlic frying. Jillian stood in front of the stove, her hair tied back as she stirred the contents of the pan to keep them from burning. Michael's eyes watered from the smell, and his stomach growled. She had the sleeves of her green cotton blouse pushed up to the elbows, and one lock of hair fell across her face. He smiled at the sight of her.

“Hey,” Jillian said without turning.

“The wind was too much. I'll have to finish it another day.”

“The snow will cover it all soon enough,” she replied, a tentative lightness in her voice. “Don't worry about it.”

Softly, Michael let out a long breath. He crossed the kitchen and moved up behind her. His hands seemed to act of their own accord, sliding around her waist. He kissed the back of her neck. Jillian stiffened a moment before releasing a tiny sigh. Michael held her tightly from behind, and Jillian turned her face just enough so that he could kiss her. Their lips brushed together and then the kiss became something deeper.

She set aside the wooden cooking spoon she had been using and turned toward him. For the first time that day, she really looked into his eyes, and then she slid her arms up to clasp her hands behind his head and drew him down to kiss her once more.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, laying her head against his chest. “I
was just . . .”

“Freaked, I know. I don't blame you.” Michael held her to him, relishing the feeling of Jillian in his arms. The kitchen was redolent with the smells of their home, their married life, and he felt like a fool for fighting with her. “I'm sorry, too. I don't know what happened. I swear I wasn't that drunk. I only had a few—”

“Oh, wait!” she said softly, eyes going wide as she spun to stir the vegetables that were frying in the pan.

The onions had started to burn. Michael could tell from the smell, but as he peered over her shoulder he saw that they had not yet blackened.

“Looks like you've rescued dinner.”

Jillian shut off the burner and turned to look at him. “I've been more annoyed with myself than I was with you. I just keep wondering what people would think if they saw us on the side of the road. Or even if they saw you helping me into the car.”

“You worry too much about what people think.”

“That's—” she started, angrily, and then took a breath and shook her head. Jillian laid a hand on his chest. “Maybe you're right. Anyway, look, I was thinking about what you were saying. About how much you had to drink. It doesn't make any sense. Do you think somebody could have—”

“Put something in my drink?” Michael finished for her, his brow furrowing. “Yeah. I'm definitely thinking that. Nothing else fits.”

“God. Who would do something like that?”

He shrugged and turned from her, going to the refrigerator and retrieving a root beer. “I don't know. It could have been totally random. Probably was. Just some asshole playing a prank.”

As he spoke, Jillian had gone to the sink and picked up a strainer full of bow-tie pasta. She had a pot of tomato sauce simmering on the stove with chunks of sausage in it. Dinner was looking promising.

“Some prank,” she said, dumping the pasta into the sauce pot. “We could have been killed.”

Michael watched her as she added the onions, peppers, and garlic into the pot as well, and then began to stir.

“Jilly.”

She raised an eyebrow and turned to look at him.

“It's still fuzzy . . . but I remember some of what happened last night.”

T
HE LAW OFFICES OF
D
AWES,
Gray & Winter were located in the heart of Boston, at One International Place. It was a rounded tower whose upper floors provided one of the best views in the city. There was always chaos on Monday mornings, as the firm’s engines got up and running again. Business did not cease for the weekend, but those who were fortunate enough to be able to abandon it on Friday afternoons had to play catch-up come Monday.

Jillian relished the Monday morning rush. Paralegals who had been working on closings in the corporate department over the weekend were always burnt out by then, and she did whatever she could to arrange for them to leave early on Monday. Sometimes that was impossible. Documents had to be changed and refiled, new signatures had to be obtained. That could be difficult. By far the least entertaining part of Monday—of the entire job, in fact—was refereeing conflicts between attorneys and paralegals.

She had just walked through the marble lobby with its splashing fountains, a place with the size and elegance of a cathedral, and was getting on the elevator when Brad Klein caught up with her. He called her name and trotted up just as the doors were sliding closed, thrusting out one hand to stop them. He was a junior associate, a fortyish man who might have been decent looking if he'd had the common sense to shave his head down to stubble instead of trying to pretend he wasn't going bald. The way he combed his hair was not yet the rat's nest such things could become, but it was on the way.

“Good morning, Brad. How was your weekend?”

The doors slid closed and they managed to jockey for position next to each other, despite the other half dozen people on the elevator.

“It could have been better.”

Jillian glanced at him. It was obvious from his tone that he was talking about work. He'd been working on a buyout—Downtown Corporation was acquiring Lyons Publishing—and they had been supposed to close on Friday. When Jillian had left the office, they had still been working on it, but she'd assigned Barb Hagen and Vanessa Castille to the closing, and she trusted both of them.

Obviously, Brad wasn't happy with her judgment.

“What happened?”

The attorney moved his briefcase from one hand to the other. His gaze shifted toward her, and then he went back to watching the numbers light up above the door. Neither one of them said another word as the elevator made its stops and the other passengers made their exodus at various floors. Only when they were alone, three floors away from their own destination on thirty-nine, did he address her again.

“Lyons and Sons Publishing Partners, Incorporated. That's the legal name of the company,” Brad said.

A sick feeling churned in Jillian's stomach. She glanced at him. “They got it wrong?”

“We had to start from scratch. Every document just said Lyons Publishing. Vanessa has been with the firm two years. This is not the kind of mistake an experienced paralegal should make.”

Shit!
Jillian thought. But she nodded gravely and did not speak that particular sentiment out loud. “I'll talk to her first thing.”

The elevator stopped on thirty-nine and the doors slid open. They stepped off together and Brad turned to look at her. He was an intelligent man, and had always been pleasant enough to deal with. Today none of his kindness was in his eyes.

“This is the second time in as many months that something like this has happened with her. At the beginning of September we had the Havilcek thing? That had the wrong address. When it's our mistake, Jillian, we don't charge the client. Vanessa has cost the firm a lot of money in the last couple of months. And she cost me a Saturday watching my son play football. I'm not happy about that. She's got two strikes.”

They stood in the foyer, just outside the frosted glass doors of the firm's reception area. For the moment they were alone, and Jillian was glad. She did not want to have this conversation where anyone might hear.

“Do we understand each other?”

Jillian nodded. “Three strikes and she's out.”

“We can't afford her if she doesn't clean up her act.”