Crazy for Cornelia (29 page)

“Burglary,” she pointed out to Sergeant Cantwell, who grunted as if he’d told her so.

“Hey, Diaz, you make the report,” one of the officers standing by the wall told her, pointing down at the street.

Officer Diaz leaned over the wall and saw a gray sedan with red and blue lights on its front grille pull to the curb below.
A big dark-skinned man in a captain’s uniform got out wearing a blue greatcoat with stripes on the sleeve and white gloves.
Captain Washburn, a hard-ass. He had obviously been plucked from some formal big deal to bail out this flaky debutante with
connections.

Washburn’s scowling face looked up at the grimy, cast-iron subject building. Then he caught Officer Diaz looking down at him
from the adjoining roof.

This better be important, he told her by moving his lips clearly enough to read from six stories up.

They stood in the dark looking at Sebastian glow. Kevin realized they were studying it the way people contemplate real art
in a museum. It made him feel giddy.

“How’s your ankle?” He touched it, a little black-and-blue.

“Watch,” Cornelia said. She hopped up on her feet and jumped up and down.

Then she grabbed a glowing fiber optic coil in each hand and began to dance.

She started spinning in circles. Kevin saw that she could really dance. She’s probably taken courses like ballet or modern
dance, because she sure knew how to be delicate on her feet, even with a twisted ankle. She executed the same little leaps
dancers did on PBS, skipping around him, twirling around to make spinning circles of light with the fiber optics, having fun
putting on a show for him. The little dancer with the perfect, sculpted calves still wore her hospital scrubs and slippers.

But she looked like a heavenly dance of light.

Officer Diaz joined Captain Washburn on the street.

“Sir, the rooftop door’s got a hole in it and the doorknob’s gone. Minimum we got a break-in.”

“Secure the lobby,” the captain ordered.

This was shaping up as more than she expected. Maybe Captain
Washburn was seeing it as a kidnapping now. She started thinking about extra Christmas gifts she would buy with her overtime
before the FBI took over.

Then she remembered her glimpse of the debutante’s face in the male subject’s arms. No, This didn’t feel right. She avoided
Sergeant Cantwell and spoke directly to Captain Washburn.

“Captain, I got to tell you, this girl didn’t look like any kind of victim to me.”

Cornelia’s limbs felt the rapture. The blond hairs on her arms stood up. She was a child again, twirling toward the window.

She loved her dance in the falling darkness with only Kevin for an audience and the fiber optics she spun for light. Then,
as she started her turn right in front of the window, her eyes suddenly locked on to the street below.

She saw, in that microsecond, police cars with black numbers on their hoods. They were stopped right in front of their formerly
deserted building. A gaggle of police officers stood on the street, pointing up. Not exactly toward where she spun by the
window, but close enough.

Without breaking her turn, she twirled back to Kevin and dropped into his lap.

“I’m famished.” She gave his cheek a kiss. “I think I’ll go out to get us something to eat. I can cook on Max’s sculpting
fire.”

A look of concern passed over Kevin’s face. “I’ll go with you.”

“Oh, no. You stay here. Do Sebastian’s torso. I’ll just be a minute.”

She threw her arms around his neck and squeezed his mouth to hers. She recorded the memory of the gorgeous blue corona that
surrounded his hair.

“Are you sure?” His look was heartbreaking.

“Look, Kevin, you have to trust me sometime,” she told him as she opened the elevator and stepped in.

It groaned all the way down. Before she reached the bottom, she took off the stiff new leather coat that belonged to Philip
Grace and folded it neatly, leaving it on the floor of the elevator car so Kevin could
return it. When the elevator stopped, she opened the door and crossed the shabby foyer in measured steps. Then she walked
out into the cold.

A stocky gray-haired police officer in a black leather jacket stood outside with his back to her, scratching the seat of his
pants.

“I beg your pardon,” she said.

He spun around like a madman, pulling his gun out of his holster and leveling it a few inches from her nose. His eyes looked
wild over the black hole of the gun.

“Freeze,” he yelled at her.

“I’m frozen already.” She held her hands up and out, unsure of what to do with them.

“Hey,” a serious-looking woman officer with a cap that sat very high on her head moved beside him. “Cool it.”

“I’m very cool,” Cornelia trembled.

A giant officer in a long blue coat like an admiral stepped up to her. Even as she stood shivering in the flimsy hospital
scrubs with her bare arms stretched out, she felt protected by the man’s authority. His coat sported gold stripes on the sleeve.
He scowled, then put his hands in the white gloves behind his back and inspected her.

“Ms. Lord, I’m Captain Washburn,” his voice rumbled. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“We had a report that you might have been abducted.”

“Well, I haven’t.”

“If that’s so,” he said, “why don’t you just let me escort you home.”

Then he held his arm out with the white glove, as though asking her to waltz. She folded her own arms and kept her distance.

“Do you promise to leave that building alone?” she asked.

“Ms. Lord,” the captain sounded a little bemused. “I don’t have any orders concerning that building. If you swear to me there
was no criminal activity going on in there, we’ll just leave quietly before anybody notices you’re gone.”

He held the door of the gray sedan open for her.

And from above, Kevin watched the straw-blond head duck into the back of the car and vanish in silent waves of white and blue.

C
hester, listen to me,” Cornelia told the lapel of his charcoal suit, as he hugged her close to him in the study.

Chester pulled back. She observed from his sad eyes that his melancholy had joined with something new. A sharp glint of resolve.

“No, darling, this time I have to insist that you listen to
me
. You need to confront these Tesla issues.”

“Forget about Tesla. Tucker’s the problem here.” Her voice sounded a little wild, even to herself.

“Tucker?” He stood dumbfounded. “No, I’ve decided that a time-out will be good for you now. I’ve made all the arrangements.”

O’Connell arrived in the doorway clutching two of her suitcases.
Uh oh
.

“Time-out, good idea.” She made a frantic T with her hands. “Stop the clock and listen a minute. Tucker lied to me about things.
He told me you needed my help to stop the Kois from taking over Lord & Company.”

“He wasn’t lying, darling. It’s true.”

She felt poorly organized, at an awful disadvantage. “I know, I mean, about other things.”

“About what?”

“I believe that Tucker is involved with Han Koi in this takeover.”

Her father sucked his breath in. “Why?”

She needed to fight for both of them now. And quickly, with her luggage already in the hall.
Sent away
. That inevitable fate of Electric Girls who knew disturbing truths. She grasped for facts, but they seemed slippery and inconclusive
at best.

“Tucker promised to take me to South America if I’d marry him. He claimed that he’d found a Tesla Tower and…”—
the old man
—“…an engineer. But the engineer turned out to be a senior without a partner. I found that out because all the supplies for
the trip wound up in your office…”

This wasn’t helping. Chester looked baffled.

“Darling, I take full responsibility for anything that Tucker may have told you. He asked my permission, I gave it.”

Tucker’s planning had tied her up in knots, leaving Chester to administer the last little nips and tucks. It made her stomach
boil with injustice that her father could trust him so implicitly.

“I suppose you told him to behave suspiciously with the Kois.”

“Suspicious in what way?”

“There was a distinct connection between them.” She gave up and tears burst onto her cheeks. “Please, Daddy. I have to ask
you to take it on faith. Keep an eye on Tucker. Look at his motives.”

“
You
look, Cornelia.” His exasperation had smoldered like firewood. Now it snapped at her. “Tucker brought the takeover to my
attention. If he was involved, I wouldn’t have known about it until it was too late. And it wouldn’t have gone well for us
after that, I assure you.”

“Tucker warned you?” She tried to process that new information.”

Chester turned one palm up, continued his grating reasonableness.

“Cornelia, contrary to what you said in front of my business associates, Tucker did not lie to you or make underhanded deals
with Han Koi. Tucker had every intention of taking you to South America, he assured me. Now he’s more concerned, as I am,
with getting you help. O’Connell, please put Cornelia’s bags in the car.”

“Wait, O’Connell,” she pleaded. The butler stood frozen in the doorway. “What kind of help?”

“A more residential sort of help than Dr. Bushberg can give you.
There’s a place in Armonk called the Sanctuary.” He paused. His palm spun in a circle while he searched for words. “We’ll
come up to visit…”

“‘We’ should be you and me, Daddy.”

Chester winced but didn’t budge. She felt a sudden cold shudder.

As bad as this was, it could get worse. What if she kept protesting, and Tucker began snooping into her past thirty-six hours?
He would certainly uncover Kevin Doyle. Poor Kevin, so innocent under his beautiful corona. Tucker could hurt him, if he found
out, in ways that might not end just with Kevin losing his job.

“Darling,” her father intruded. “Tucker’s waiting for us in the car. All I’m asking is that you take an evaluation for thirty
days. The Sanctuary is practically a resort.”

“Oh? Do they let you leave?”

“Not immediately. You’ll take some tests first, talk to the doctors.” He softened a bit. “Tell them whatever you can’t confide
in me.”

O’Connell stood firm, becoming better acquainted with his heavy shoes. Her father had folded his hands stiffly in front of
him like a parson.

The Sanctuary
.

Her thoughts drifted to soft foods and even softer walls. She would need to get word to Kevin, and to Dr. Powers, to let them
know that she would be away temporarily. But what else could she do? Chester didn’t believe her.

It dawned on her that she would be more likely to find a sympathetic ear at the Sanctuary than here at home.

Kevin lay on his bed in the dark bedroom, staring at his telephone.

He had slept fitfully, trapped in that netherworld of people in crisis, where spasmodic dreams solved all problems. The painful
throbbing in his shoulder had woken him. He felt punches in the shoulder over and over again, imagined a burly Irishman slamming
his shoulder with an overgrown fist. And his first thought was about light reflecting on blond hair that vanished in the back
of a car.

You have to trust me
.

When she had left the studio, he disciplined himself to not go to
the window and look. He finally decided to take just a small peek, not because he didn’t trust her but because he just liked
to watch her. All he could make out, pressing his mouth and fingertips against the cold glass, was the halo of bright golden
hair in a dirty back window. Then he felt panic, the need to take action.

He had steeled himself to act cool, phoning Andrew to see what he knew, just pretending he wanted to stay in the loop of building
events while on sick leave. Andrew told him nothing except that they whisked Cornelia Lord away in a brand-new Mercedes limousine,
her father and Tucker Fisk, less than an hour after the police brought her home. And the driver loaded the trunk with two
suitcases.

Kevin pulled the covers up over his head. His ear and shoulder pounded, drowned out by the wailing in his chest.

Suddenly, feeling like the whole floor buckled under his bed, Kevin understood why he’d never fallen in love before. Who would
want this hollow longing, to feel ripped open from inside out? And the lust part. He’d been lonely and disillusioned for so
long, he’d almost forgotten about the lust part. After she’d gone, he realized she’d awakened that in him, too.

He rolled over, twisting in his sheets.

Just when his hands and eyes had seemed shriveled and useless, she’d brought him back from his Art Death. Soul mates were
the elusive wonder of the world. He’d always worried deep in his gut that his real soul mate might be someone so unappetizing
he’d never get to know her. Like the nasty waitress with the bleached arm hair in the coffee shop. But Cornelia Lord? She
was so unattainable, he might as well fall in love with the Pope. Still, he desperately needed to find her. He climbed out
of bed and looked at the print of
Saint Sebastian
.

Lucky Sebastian with only a few arrows to think about.

His body felt so wretched, he wished he could just check out of it like a cheap hotel room. This would not be a temporary
loss if he let her run away.

This would be another permanent one.

A deadly, freezing loneliness crept over him. This time, he wouldn’t just take the hand he was dealt. He’d turn over the table
if he had to.

This was the time for performance art.

* * *

Kevin marched to Gus Anholdt’s little building manager’s office, with its shabby aura of punishment.

“Back two weeks early?” Gus had a high forehead and small wire-rimmed glasses that pinched his nose. He looked unhappy. “I’m
supposed to tell you, Chester Lord’s very grateful to you.”

Gus handed him an envelope.

“He said thanks for not talking to the media, exploiting the whole thing. If there’s anything more you need, doctors or whatever,
he said you ought to call the phone number on the note.”