Carolyn Jourdan - Nurse Phoebe 02 - The School for Mysteries (12 page)

Chapter  25

Their speed was making them a spectacle, particularly since Nick and Phoebe were racing in the opposite direction of the hordes of tourists being shepherded through the house. But by the time anyone noticed them, they were gone.

They ran down a narrow service staircase that descended only one flight and then gave onto an expansive reception area. Nick did a 360, made a decision, and dragged Phoebe into a sprint toward a massive central staircase. It was a curving masterpiece, made of limestone. But, just as they would’ve started down, they glanced into the open stairwell and saw two men running up. The men were clearly not tourists. The four of them saw each other at the same time.

The grand staircase was lined with leaded glass windows that would open. They gave access to a highly decorative but mostly useless exterior spiral staircase of carved stone. Nick unlatched a window and climbed through it.
Not again
, Phoebe thought, but she followed him without argument. They tripped down the extremely narrow curved exterior staircase, then crouched behind the waist-high stone wall as their pursuers ran past them, headed upward, without realizing that Nick and Phoebe were hiding just on the other side of the wall.

They were only able to make it down one flight before the exterior stairs came to a dead end against a cold stone wall. Of course it did, it was ornamental. Nick peeked through the lowest window they could reach, then opened it, crawled through, and helped Phoebe clamber inside. He steadied her enough to break her fall as she dropped onto the wide limestone treads of the vast central staircase.

Several tourists goggled at them, surprised to see anyone climbing in via a window. But Nick didn’t hesitate. The instant Phoebe was on her feet, he resumed a fast pace down the stairs, moving awkwardly against the tide of visitors.

They fled toward the back of the house, and made it into what, from its narrowness and lack of ornamentation, seemed to be another servant’s hallway. It was then that they realized they’d made a serious mistake. There were men running toward them from both directions. Phoebe cast about for options and saw they were standing beside a servants’ balcony with a high view into the majestic Banqueting Hall. Unfortunately the drop from there to the floor was at least forty feet.

There was no choice. Nick shoved her to one side and stepped over the rail onto yet another decorative ledge of carved stone. This time there was no cable for a handhold, and the length of travel was much farther, but this ledge was considerably wider than the other one had been. Nick reached back for Phoebe, smiled, and said, “Buck up, my girl. Compared to the last one, this one’s a cinch.”

Phoebe made a quick prayer and crossed herself, although she wasn’t even a Catholic, and began the long traverse, creeping along a four-inch wide path toward the opposite side of the huge room. If they could make it, it would be easy to hop down onto the open gallery that housed the keyboard for a pipe organ that filled the opposite end of the room.

From there, a heavily carved wooden spiral stairway was in plain sight. It ran from the organ loft to the floor. Once they made it down that, they’d be on the ground level and would have a lot of options.

Their movement along a ledge that was more than thirty feet above the heads of the crowd of tourists viewing the room understandably attracted a great deal of attention. Even though photography was forbidden inside the house, camera flashes were going off right and left.

There were a lot of sounds of surprise and also some shouting coming from below, but Phoebe tried to ignore it. She kept her face toward the wall and gripped whatever meager handholds she could find.

Nick talked to her in a steady and encouraging way as they travelled along the ledge. She marveled at his new superhero persona. She had to admit that it hadn’t been fair to judge him by how he reacted immediately after being tossed out of a helicopter. He’d been in shock and pain, and then heavily drugged, and dragged through a kaleidoscope of bizarre environments, none of which presented a reasonable opportunity to assess his character. But this guy, … this guy was
feisty
. He was making this almost
fun
.

She felt like she was in a remake of
To Catch a Thief
. If only this was a movie, there’d be stuntmen to do this scene.

Just as they reached the organ loft, their plan to use the stairs from there to the ground was trashed by a man who leaped off the same viewing balcony Phoebe and Nick had climbed out of. Except he flung himself hard in the opposite direction. He didn’t go toward the wall and the ledge, he went for the massive sloping hood of the triple-wide fireplace that filled most of that end of the Banqueting Hall and did an acrobatic slide down the face of it like an Olympic luge run.

He skidded down on his rear end, feet first and then was spit out onto the near end of the long, magnificent dining table. He landed on his back, but jumped to his feet and sprinted down the center of the antique table. Clearly he’d be waiting for them at the foot of the stairs by the time they got there.

Another of their pursuers began the precarious ledge walk along the same route they’d taken, so they couldn’t go back the way they came.

There was nothing they could do but dash across the organ loft, step up onto the ledge, and head back down the long axis of the room, but this time on the opposite side. Nick couldn’t see any way out from there, but there was nowhere else to run.

At this point it was becoming apparent to the rapidly growing audience in the enormous room that several large dangerous-looking men were chasing an obviously terrified middle-aged couple who seemed to be running for their lives.

Human nature being what it is, the spectators couldn’t resist taking sides, and without any overt consultation with each other, they sided with the underdogs.

The man running down the long dining table was already experiencing the verbal wrath of the docents, but now he was about to learn a lesson he’d never forget. There are few things on earth more formidable than an angry woman with broom.

A little silver-haired tour guide reached behind a heavy brocaded curtain and came out with a scraggly old wooden-handled broom She swung it, aiming for the man’s ankles, with the force and accuracy of a professional baseball player.

The fool with the temerity to damage her beloved dining table went down, hard. When Phoebe saw the havoc that small elderly woman was able to wreak with her humble weapon, against a mercenary, she suddenly grasped the staying power of the iconic image of a woman flying on a broom.

Phoebe wondered why the men didn’t just shoot her and Nick. She had no way to know that her pursuers were under revised orders to take the targets alive and with as little controversy as possible. What the men had assumed would be a simple task was getting harder by the minute, especially now that they had hundreds of tourists to contend with as well.

The chateau visitors jostled, shoved, and elbowed them at every opportunity. And by this time, the room was so crowded that people who weren’t intentionally trying to disrupt the chase were helping by simply standing in the way. Phoebe silently thanked each of them.

Chapter  26

Phoebe and Nick had made it less than halfway along the ledge when Nick noticed that there were latches on the lowest panels of the tall windows that filled the top half of the wall on either side of the Banqueting Hall. He was able to observe them at them at point blank range as he shuffled along the ledge. He realized that, unlike the windows on the other side, these could be opened.

He refocused his eyes and peered through the glass. He realized he was seeing an expanse of roof just outside that was at eye level. Phoebe noticed that Nick had stopped and was looking at something. She stood on tiptoe so she could follow his gaze. It was the roof of the Winter Garden. It was the lowest elevation rooftop in the entire chateau. At its center it had a bulging glass crown that allowed sunlight to shine onto a greenhouse in the atrium of the house called the Palm Court.

Whoever it was who built this pile, Nick thought, thank God he was a stickler for ventilation, or for giving access to window washers. This move was going to be tricky, though—the toughest one yet. The wall was chest high and his shoulder was killing him. Clearly he’d injured it in the fall. All the athletics since then had exacerbated the problem and the chase had metabolized the last of his pain medicine.

Nick held onto the window ledge with one hand and used the other to open the latch. Then he took a deep breath, braced himself inwardly and outwardly, mustered all his focus, and hoisted himself partially through the opening. He had a few terrifying moments kicking against the air as he squirmed his way painfully across the metal edge of the window frame, but he made it through.

He lay on the roof, panting, nearly hysterical. He rested for several seconds, trying to calm himself, then crawled around to face the window and knelt in front of the opening. He reached into the room to take hold of Phoebe’s wrists. Then, despite the screaming pain in his shoulder, and an embarrassing howl from his own lips, he lifted her out onto the roof.

They sat clinging to each other for a few seconds, dazed, then looked around. They were back outside, still on the roof, but this time they were two stories closer to the ground. From here it was only about twenty feet down to the cobbled driveway. Nick scrambled to his feet and cast about frantically, hoping to see some way to get down there that wouldn’t end in them breaking their necks, but there was nothing.

They had to keep moving, though, so he trotted across the copper roof as it curved around the protruding glass ceiling. On the other side were windows that led back into the house. He hoped these windows would take them into an area that wasn’t easily accessible from the Banqueting Hall.

Phoebe got unsteadily to her feet and even though she was wobbly, she carefully followed Nick around the edge of the glass to the other side of the Winter Garden roof.

The chateau was a rabbit warren of eccentric wings and towers. That was both the good news and the bad news. Their progress was now the subject of tremendous interest on the part of not only the bad guys, but also the tourists, and especially the house staff. The astonishing chase through the Banqueting Hall had created a spectacle and their movement around the edge of the glass roof was visible to everyone coming in the main entrance of the house as well as the crowd inside, directly below them, because the Winter Garden faced onto the main ticket counter.

Dozens of rapt faces could be seen upturned, watching in amazement as Nick and Phoebe trotted along the roof. The crowd was now definitely on their side. The tourists had become an outraged mob running fierce interference on Nick and Phoebe’s behalf. That turned out to be a real blessing because when they arrived at the windows opposite the Banqueting Hall they discovered there were no latches on the outside.

They were locked out. This made sense, of course. They were on the roof, not a balcony or a staircase, so in ordinary life, no one would be standing where they were, unless they’d come out through a window to perform some maintenance task. And in that case, they’d be able to go back inside the house the same way they’d come out.

But Phoebe and Nick stood, holding hands, gasping for breath, staring at the locked windows. Phoebe had to lean against the wall for support. Nick looked at her in despair. He’d failed her. They were going to get caught.

He decided to kick one of the windows in, but then he heard some muffled voices and the click of a latch. A window near where they were standing opened wide and the heads of two children popped out. A pre-teen boy and girl waved extravagantly in the universal gesture of,
Over here!

Not another freaking window
, Phoebe thought, but she was nevertheless grateful for the help and she followed Nick as he crawled through and dropped onto the floor of a bedroom. The children and their mother were giggling and happy to be participating in the game, whatever it was.

“Thanks,” Nick gasped.

The room had several doors, each leading to parts unknown. “Stairs?” he asked.

The children’s mother pointed at one of the doors. Nick and Phoebe were both winded, but their run had gone on long enough at this point to release endorphins, so now they were both high as well.
This would make a heck of a weight loss boot camp
, Phoebe thought. If she survived, maybe she’d mention it to the Chateau St. Cloud marketing people.

They left by the door indicated and dashed across another of the open reception areas that bordered each landing for the grand central staircase. This time they made it down to the ground.