Hush (27 page)

She switched off the light on the end table and closed her eyes wearily. How different her couch seemed from Archer’s. There was no hint of wood smoke from the fireplace still in the fabric, no reassuring footsteps overhead.

The phone rang then. It was Archer, as if she had conjured him up.

“How are you?” he asked. “Sorry it took so long to phone you back. I got stuck in an endless, mind-numbing meeting with our lawyers.”

“Well, my doorman is missing, which is scaring the hell out of me, but on the other hand I have some good news.”

She filled him in on what Rory had shared about the transported eggs and her agreement to help. Archer pelted her with questions and then turned back to the doorman issue.

“Do you want to crash on my couch again? Do you want me to crash on yours?”

For a split second she considered both. But she felt uneasy about leaving the apartment this late, and it wouldn’t be smart to have Archer stay there. It was the kind of thing Hotchkiss had warned her about. And she’d already paid too high a price for ignoring his advice once before.

“I appreciate that. But I think I’m okay. I’ve got the door barricaded.”

“Why don’t we touch base tomorrow?”

“Sounds good. I may be out of reach for a while, though. I’m running up to my kids’ camp and the cell service is spotty on the way there.”

She slept restlessly, and kept waking, thinking she’d heard a noise. The next day she was on the road by one, giving herself more than enough time to reach the camp just before five, when Will would be returning. Before pulling onto the highway, she’d driven up and down a few blocks in Manhattan, making sure no one was following her. She couldn’t take the chance of anyone discovering where the camp was. By the time she merged onto the West Side Highway, the back of her summer dress was wet with the sweat of pure anxiety.

She tried to calm herself by focusing on her kids. She craved seeing them, if even for a few minutes. She looked forward to making sure Amy was okay and pampering her a little. She also thought of Rory and felt a surge of hope. Finally she had someone on the inside to help her.

And yet for every comforting thought, there was a troubling one to match. What if Rory got cold feet or came up empty-handed? Then what was she going to do about the kids when they eventually returned? How in the world could she protect them?

SHE STOPPED FOR
a late lunch on the deck of a roadside tavern. It was hot out, but a light breeze tousled her hair. She glanced up. Though the sky had been clear when she’d left Manhattan, big cumulus clouds had begun to herd together along the horizon.

When she rummaged for her wallet to pay the bill, she checked her BlackBerry. This was a stretch of the road where she had service back and she noticed there was a missed call—from Rory.

“Call me as soon as you can,” the message said. “It’s important.” There was an edginess to Rory’s tone.

She tried calling Rory back, but an answering machine picked up. “You’ve reached the Deevers,” Rory’s voice said. “Leave a message and we’ll get back to you. Have a nice day.”

Next she tried Rory’s cell and got voice mail as well. When they’d met yesterday, Rory had said she might want to talk this weekend to review the plan. And yet the word
important
in her message was a flag. Lake just hoped Rory hadn’t changed her mind.

The last leg of the trip was only thirty minutes long. The wind had picked up and the clouds were growing darker and thicker, crowding each other so that they pushed up high in the sky. It was going to rain, and rain hard, probably thunder and lightning. Lake pictured the counselors at the water park, hurrying the kids into their clothes and onto the bus.

The camp seemed nearly deserted when she arrived. There were only four or five cars in the parking lot, and once she climbed the hill and reached the main grounds, she saw just two people—a male counselor collecting an archery board that had toppled over in the wind and an older man dragging a net bag of soccer balls across the parched lawn.

She approached the counselor and asked for directions to the infirmary. He pointed to a small, roughhewn cabin nestled in a cluster of fir trees. As she entered the building, with its row of old-fashioned, metal-framed beds, she saw that Amy was the only patient. At first Lake thought her daughter was sleeping—she lay with her eyes closed and her thick braid of brown hair flopped on the pillow. But at the sound of Lake’s footsteps, Amy’s eyes shot open.

“Mom,” she said hoarsely. She let out small moan of relief.

“Oh, sweetie,” Lake said, sitting on the edge of the bed and pulling Amy to her.

“I don’t have strep,” Amy told her with a weak smile. “I mean, my throat still hurts a lot, but they said it’s a
virus
.”

“Well, maybe it will clear up faster, then. Is the nurse here?”

“She went over to the mess hall to get me some Jell-O.”

“I brought something to cheer you up.” Lake pulled a tissue-wrapped package from her purse and offered it to her daughter. Inside was a small, funky bracelet she’d bought weeks ago and put aside for Amy’s birthday.

Amy tore the tissue off and beamed when she saw the bracelet.

“I love it. Thanks, Mom. I’m so glad you came.”

“Me, too.”

A screen door banged and they looked in unison in that direction. The nurse, a fortyish woman with a short choppy haircut, was back. She introduced herself and set a tray down on the little table that swung out from Amy’s bed. There was a cup of tea and the promised Jell-O, along with a stainless-steel spoon that was dull and thinned from a thousand washings.

“Did Amy tell you that the strep test came back negative?” the nurse asked.

“Yes. Though that means there’s nothing you can give her, right?” Lake said.

“Only bed rest. But the good news is that it should run its course in just a couple of days.”

Lake chatted politely with the nurse for a minute and then turned her attention back to her daughter. Amy seemed needy of her company, and yet it clearly hurt her to talk.

“Why don’t I give you a back massage?” Lake offered.

“Hmm,” Amy murmured happily.

As her hands kneaded the muscles in Amy’s back, Lake realized that her daughter’s body had become more muscular this summer, and yet there was still something so girlish about her soft skin and thin shoulder blades. Lake found herself getting tearful, almost fraught. I can’t lose you, she thought. I have to make things work.

After a while she glanced at her watch. It was just before five. The bus might already be back.

“I hate to go, honey,” Lake said, stroking Amy’s cheek. “But I’m afraid Mr. Morrison will slap me in cuffs if I overstay my welcome. Plus, you need to rest.”

“Mom, I did one bad thing,” Amy croaked. “I told Will you were coming. That was before I saw your fax and you told me not to.”

“That’s okay. They told me I could say a quick hello in the parking lot when the bus gets back.”

“That’s good. He was so mad that he might not see you.”

Lake said goodbye to her daughter, hugging her almost too hard. She had to be careful, she knew, or Amy would once again pick up on her fear and anguish.

“See you in just another two weeks,” Lake said, as lightly as she could. “We’ll have fun shopping for new school clothes, okay?”

Outside it hadn’t started to rain yet, but the sky was now a mass of dark, angry clouds, and the wind was chasing herds of fallen leaves across the campgrounds. Lake made her way to the administrative office, where she thanked Morrison for letting her come and learned that the bus was behind schedule. She didn’t look forward to driving home in the inevitable downpour.

Descending the hill, she checked her BlackBerry. No call back from Rory. As soon as she was in the car, she tried the home number again. This time Rory answered. Her hello sounded anxious.

“What’s going on, Rory?” Lake asked. “Is everything okay?”

“Thanks for calling back, Lake. I’m just feeling really nervous.”

Lake’s body sagged; she couldn’t have Rory getting cold feet.

“Are you worried someone will see you looking through the file drawers?” she asked. “Why don’t you wait and try to do it when most people have left?”

“I’m afraid it’s too late,” Rory said fretfully. “I think someone
did
see me.”

“What do you mean?” Lake asked.

“I already went through the files. After I met you, I decided to go back to the office. I was anxious about what you’d told me and wanted to see the charts for myself. I knew some of the staff was going to be there for a late procedure and I told them I came back because I’d forgotten something. When I left the storage room, I had the sense someone had been watching me in there.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No—it was just a sense I had. And then this morning I got this weird hang-up. And then another one a little while later. I’m all alone here this weekend and I’m just really scared.”

Lake’s stomach knotted. She’d put Rory in possible jeopardy and she had to do something about it.

“Is there any way your husband could cut his trip short?”

There was a pause as Rory seemed to consider the option.

“No, I can’t ask him to…It’s—it’s a really important client and so much depends on this trip.”

“Do you have anyone else you can call? Someone from your family—or a neighbor?”

“No, no one. We only moved here about a year ago, and people haven’t been very welcoming. It’s not an inclusive community here at all.”

“Maybe the calls are unrelated,” Lake said, though her alarm was growing. “Just because someone saw you going through files doesn’t mean they think you were doing anything wrong. You might have been just checking out some patient info, right?”

“But they probably saw that the files were missing,” Rory said, almost pleading. “They probably know what I was up to.”

“What do you mean,
missing
?” Lake asked.

“I took some files with me. I didn’t dare photocopy them.”

“You have the files with you now?” Lake said, incredulous.

“Yes. About ten of them.”

“
And?
” Lake asked. “Do they show anything?” She held her breath.

“Yes,” Rory said. “They have those letter codes you talked about. Not every file I checked had them, but I took the ones that did.”

With her free hand, Lake ran her hand roughly through her hair. This was exactly what she’d hoped for. She had to see those files—and she owed it to Rory to make sure she was safe.

“Rory, why don’t I come to your place? I’ll take the files so you don’t have to worry about them.”

“Are you sure? I’m all the way up in Bedford Hills. It’s over an hour north of the city. I can make photocopies tomorrow and figure out the best way to get them back in the drawers.”

“I’m actually upstate now—a ways north of you, even. I can leave in a few minutes. Just tell me the address and I’ll use my GPS.”

“Well, if you really wouldn’t mind, that would be great,” Rory said. “I just feel so nervous.”

Rory rattled off the address and Lake said that it would take her at least an hour to get there. She told Rory to lock all the doors and windows and to call her on her cell if she had any problem. And if she felt in danger to call 911.

By five forty-five the bus still hadn’t arrived. Lake was torn about what to do. If she split now, Will would be upset, and yet she was anxious to get to Rory’s. Finally, at six, just as she was firing up the engine of the car, an old yellow school bus waddled into the parking lot. Will was one of the first to trip down the steps, and after scanning the parking lot for his mother’s car, he bounded toward it and climbed in. A counselor waited outside.

Will’s silky blond hair was still damp and his cheek bore the crease from a nap on the bus. He seemed more than happy to see her, and also hyper, on a sugar high from the junk food he’d probably consumed at the water park.

“I went on the log ride five times, Mom. My clothes were soakin’.”

“It was fun, huh?”

“Yeah, awesome.”

“And what about tonight? What’s planned for later?”

“We’re having pizza. They ordered like a hundred pies.”

“Excellent.”

“Yeah, we were supposed to have a cookout but it’s gonna rain. There’s gonna be this big thunderstorm.”

As he glanced out of the car window, clearly wondering what he was missing up the hill, Lake stole a nervous look at her watch.

“Why don’t I let you catch up with your friends now?” she said. “I just wanted to be sure to say hi.”

“Okay, bye, Mom.” He offered her a tight hug and flashed his crooked grin. “Tell Smokey I said hi.”

She’d been on the road just ten minutes when the rain started, big fat drops that pelted the roof of the car and seemed to explode on the windshield. She needed to call Rory with an update but she didn’t dare take a hand off the wheel. At the first chance she pulled off the road and into the parking lot of one of the caboose restaurants Jack had loved to mock. It was growing dark, and through the streams of rain the blue and white lights from the restaurant sign undulated eerily. This was one of the times of year she’d never loved being up here—when the days grew shorter and there was an utter forlornness in the air.

Rory picked up on the first ring. There had been no more hang-ups, she said, but with night coming, she was feeling more and more scared. Lake explained how far behind schedule she was.

As she pulled onto the road again, barely able to see, a sense of dread began to build in her. What if someone
had
seen Rory take the files? What if Levin—or whoever—decided to dispatch the man with the knife to retrieve them? Lost in her thoughts, Lake jumped in her seat when a clap of thunder rocked the car.

The rain was coming down in torrents now and at times she had to plunge the car through huge pools of water that had formed on the blacktop of the two-lane road. Things were better on the interstate, and yet more than a few cars had pulled onto the shoulder to wait out the storm. Lake kept going, feeling she had no choice. As it was, she wouldn’t reach Rory’s until after eight.

Three-quarters of the way there, the rain stopped as quickly as it had started. She picked up the pace and the GPS recalculated her arrival time. When she was just fifteen minutes away, she peered through the windshield, surprised at what she saw. Rather than the suburban sprawl she’d expected, she was in horse country. The roads were lined with split-rail fences, and occasionally through the dark she caught sight of a huge house set back from the road and lit up like a cruise ship. She remembered that Rory had said she lived in an old gatehouse.

As soon as she pulled into the driveway she understood why Rory felt so afraid. The house was down a long driveway and there wasn’t another house in view—not even the main estate house that the gatehouse must have once been a part of.

After turning the car off, Lake twisted her body and surveyed the area. Rory’s gatehouse, she saw, was two stories and made of stone. The first floor was brightly lit and a security light above the small garage illuminated the driveway. The garage door was open, showing the front of a small car butting out. There was no sign of anyone outside, and yet Lake knew that with all the trees and hedges on the property, it would be easy for someone to lurk in the shadows.

Before climbing out of the car, Lake called Rory’s home phone number.

“It’s me out here,” Lake said when Rory picked up. “I didn’t want to scare you.”

“Okay, I’ll meet you at the door.”

As Lake tore across the yard, the muddy ground sucked at her clogs. Rory flung open the front door just as Lake reached the top step of the porch.

Rory’s blond hair was held back in a simple ponytail today. She was wearing stretchy black capris, obviously pregnancy pants, and a matching maternity tunic. It was the first time Lake had seen
her without makeup, and on her left cheek there was a patch of inflamed skin that looked as if it had been picked at worriedly.

“I’m so sorry,” Lake said as Rory relocked the door. “Because of the rain I had to drive at about fifty most of the way. Are you okay?”

“I just got another hang-up,” Rory said. She shook her head back and forth quickly, as if that would make everything stop. “It’s like they’re trying to figure out if I’m here or not.”

“Okay, let’s talk about what to do.”

“Why don’t we go into the kitchen? I can make us some tea.”

“All the other doors are locked—and the windows?” Lake asked.