'Til Death Do Us Part (22 page)

Back in my Jeep I fired up the engine, desperate for the warmth of the heater. Night was falling quickly, and as I drove away from Wellington House, its ground-floor rooms blazing with light, the terrain ahead seemed as bleak as an arctic tundra. The road was fairly deserted. Only a handful of cars passed me, and I caught sight of just one in my rearview mirror, far back, driving slowly. I found myself looking forward to being at Peyton’s house, in front of one of the forty or fifty fireplaces and eating gourmet food.

Once back in downtown Greenwich, I found my bearings and headed out the other side of town toward Peyton’s. I’d been driving for just a few minutes when car headlights once again appeared in my rearview mirror. One second they were small and pale, then they quickly exploded in size until they were a wall of blinding white light. Not only did the driver have his high beams on, but he was tailgating me. I didn’t want to speed up—the roads were slick with ice in places—so I tapped on my brakes a couple of times, in what my brother Cameron once described as the universal “get off my ass” signal. But the driver didn’t back off. Instead he accelerated, coming even closer. In the flash of a second, I realized the driver was after me.

CHAPTER 11

I
HAD NO
clue what to do. I was still a good two miles from Peyton’s house. My cell phone was in my purse on the passenger seat just inches away, yet I didn’t dare take my hand off the wheel to fish for it. For a split second I considered pulling into a stranger’s driveway for help. But the homes were all set so far back off the road that I couldn’t even see which houses had lights on. If I drove down one of those long driveways, I could find myself at the end of it with no one but the maniacal driver of the other car.

Out of desperation I leaned on my horn, letting it pierce the night. There was no one on the road to send an alarm to, but I thought the noise might make the other driver back off. It didn’t. The car behind me accelerated, the sound of its engine roaring in my ears. It seemed only inches away from my bumper.

We were at the base of a hill now, and instinctively I pressed down on the gas pedal, trying frantically to put distance between us. My Jeep hit a patch of ice and started to fishtail. With my heart thumping so hard it hurt, I tapped the brakes lightly just to get control again. The next thing I knew, my chest was hitting the steering wheel—the other car had rammed into the rear of the Jeep. I hit the brakes, harder than I should have, and before I knew it I was sliding into the left lane and headed right for a snowbank. I forced my foot down on the brake pedal, but there wasn’t enough time to stop. The Jeep slammed smack into the snowbank. My body flew forward and then right back against the seat.

In relief I heard the other car roar by me. I sat there for a second, watching the taillights and trying to get my wind back. My chest felt bruised from hitting the steering wheel, but other than that I seemed okay. With one eye on the receding taillights of the other car, I turned the key in the engine. It had died when I hit the snowbank, yet miraculously it started right up again. I put the car in reverse and tapped the gas lightly. The Jeep made a loud groaning noise and refused to budge.

I tried putting the Jeep in drive this time and then reverse, hoping to dislodge it. But it was wedged firmly into the snowbank. Anxiously I glanced back up the road. The taillights had disappeared, but a car was now backing out from a driveway at the top of the hill on the right. I knew instantly what had happened. The person who’d rammed me had pulled into a driveway and was headed back.

I grabbed my purse. The smartest thing, I thought desperately, would be to stay in the car and call 911. Yet what if the driver had a weapon—a gun or even a crowbar that he could smash my window with before the police arrived? I needed to take another course of action. After releasing the locks on the doors, I ducked down and opened the driver-side door. It went only halfway, blocked by the snowbank. I shimmied through the space. Looking around frantically, I saw that there was a driveway about thirty feet below me—though the area was so wooded, I couldn’t see where the house was. As I scrambled over the snowbank my Jeep was protruding from, I could hear the car slowly making its way down the hill. The temperature was below freezing, but I was sweating so much that I could barely feel the cold.

Once I was in the wooded area on the other side of the snowbank, I headed toward the driveway. Running, it turned out, was nearly impossible. Not only was the ground thick with snow, but the surface had iced over, and with every step, my boot would plunge through the hard crust into the powder below and I’d have to arduously drag it out again before I could go farther. I wanted to call 911, but I was afraid to stop for even a second. Finally I spotted the driveway through the woods, winding like a dark ribbon. Rather than run along it, I decided to stay in the woods, moving parallel to the driveway in case the car turned in. I sped up, anxious to reach the house. As I did, my right foot caught on the rim of the hole it had just torn in the snow and I went flying. I hit hard, with my legs and arms splayed on the icy surface. My gloveless hands felt as if they’d landed on broken glass.

I struggled up, near tears, grabbing my purse. As I reached my feet, I heard the sound of a car engine idling—the driver must have stopped out on the road. I started to move again, my heart pounding in my ears, my right side burning. This time I tried to be more careful. Finally I spotted the house, a sprawling Tudor. The top floors were dark, but several lights were blazing on the ground level. After checking once to my left, I shot out of the woods, across the driveway, and up the snow-covered lawn to the house. When I reached the front door, I pounded as hard as I could. What if they didn’t answer? People in Greenwich surely knew enough not to open their doors at night to strangers. As I stood there panting, terrified, I heard noises behind the door, and it was opened by a man of sixty or so.

“Please help me,” I said, nearly breathless. “Someone ran me off the road.”

He glanced past my shoulder, then back to me, trying to decide in an instant if I was telling the truth or part of some Manson family-like cult, out to rob and murder him.

“Yes, come in,” he said, urging me along with an anxious wave of his hand. Maybe it was my stupid cloche that won him over.

“I’m Richard Crawford,” he said after he’d shut and bolted the door. “Tell me what happened.”

In his pin-striped suit pants and shirtsleeves, he looked as if he had just made it home from Manhattan and were about to imbibe his first cocktail of the night. After giving him the Cliff Notes version of the incident, I dug my cell phone out of my purse. I asked him for his address, then hit 911 and told the operator what had happened. Richard kept a furtive watch at the window. Next I phoned Peyton. Clara informed me that she was upstairs soaking in her Jacuzzi, but when I described my situation, she took the phone in to her. Peyton started to shriek when I told her what had happened. She calmed down long enough to explain that David had just gotten home and she thought Trip had arrived as well. Either, she said, could come and get me. I told her that I needed to wait for the police and would call back later with an update.

While I was talking, an older woman, Mrs. Crawford, I assumed, dressed in gray slacks and a matching sweater, hurried into the hallway, looking completely perplexed. I overheard Richard filling her in, and her hand flew to her mouth in shock.

When I got off the phone, she introduced herself as Evelyn Crawford and immediately went into kindly-mother-in-law mode, leading me to a couch in the living room.

“Let me get you some tea,” she said. “This all must be perfectly dreadful for you, dear.”

My mother had always discouraged us from accepting offers of food and drink in the homes of people we didn’t know well, but I felt so ragged, I said yes. While I waited I made idle chitchat with Richard. He was a tax attorney, he said, who practiced in the city and had lived in Greenwich for twenty-five years. Above the mantel was a nearly life-size portrait of three towheaded children, who Richard explained were now all in their twenties. I figured they all probably appeared in Ralph Lauren ads as a sideline. Just as Mrs. Crawford returned with the tea, a black-and-white police car pulled up in front of the house, its lights flashing.

There were two officers, a male and a female. I described in detail what happened, including my suspicion that the vehicle that had run me off the road might have been an SUV—the lights had seemed high. I also told them that I’d been interviewed by Detective Pichowski on another case and that I thought the incident tonight was connected to it. After taking a few notes, the cops turned on their heels and headed outside. From the hall window we saw them set off down the driveway, letting their flashlights bounce around the wooded area I’d traveled through, and then we lost sight of them.

They returned about ten minutes later with news. Based on tire marks and footprints they’d observed with their flashlights, they could tell that not only had a vehicle pulled up alongside my car, but the driver had apparently followed me into the woods, stopping only a few feet in before returning to his car. My heart started to race again, imagining the person on my tail. If the lights hadn’t been on in the Crawfords’ house, he might have stayed in pursuit—and caught up with me.

The cops also said they had radioed the station and learned that Pichowski was not on duty tonight. They’d arranged for crime scene technicians to inspect the area first thing tomorrow morning.

That meant that getting my Jeep towed tonight was out of the question. They also didn’t want me going into the Jeep to retrieve my overnight bag because I might muck up some of the footprints in the snow. The female patrol cop offered to drive me where I needed to go while her partner stayed behind and protected the scene. The Crawfords gave me their home number, and we agreed to talk in the morning. Despite the cold, they followed me outside and shook hands with me, wishing me luck.

The drive to Peyton’s took only a few minutes—as it turned out, I’d been a bit closer to her place than I realized. The cop waited in the patrol car while I rang the bell. I could hear a flurry of footsteps, and then David flung open the front door, still dressed in his suit pants, dress shirt, and tie. Peyton and Trip stood right behind him.

“Peyton’s been worried sick about you,” David said. “We all have been.”

I gave a quick wave to the cop and stepped inside.

“It was awful,” I said. “But the police came right away, and they’re going to document the footprints in the morning.”

“Footprints?”
Peyton exclaimed. “I thought this all happened in your
car
.” She had changed since I’d seen her last, into black slacks and a soft white blouse. Her hair, in its trademark French twist, was damp around the edges, obviously from her Jacuzzi soak.

“After he rammed me, he drove up the road, turned around, and came back,” I said. “I’d gotten out of my car by then and taken off, but he apparently started to follow me.”

“This is fucking horrifying,” Peyton proclaimed in something near a screech.

I had slipped off my coat as I was talking, and now I stooped to unzip my boots. For the first time I realized that my socks were soaked. Snow must have been forced down inside my boots as I scrambled through the woods.

“When exactly did this happen—and where?” David asked.

“About an hour ago on Rolling Ridge Road,” I said. “I was on my way here.”

David glanced at Trip, who was just standing there, taking everything in.

“God, Trip, you must have just missed it. You came that way, didn’t you?”

“Actually I came the back route tonight,” he said. “I wasn’t coming from home. By the way, nice to see you again, Bailey. Sorry it has to be under such circumstances.”

He offered his hand for me to shake; his grip was so tight that it pinched a little. How obnoxious, I thought. It didn’t matter that someone had driven me off the road and I was still totally rattled by it. The guy had a power handshake, and goddamn it, he was going to use it.

“Look, if you’ll excuse me, I want to freshen up,” I announced. “I feel like a wreck.”

“Of course,” said Peyton. “Where’s your bag?”

“In the back of my Jeep. I’m not going to be able to get it until tomorrow. Do you think you can loan me a dry pair of socks—and some Advil?”

“Of course, whatever you need. And then why don’t we eat? You must be famished.”

Peyton accompanied me upstairs, and while I found my way to the guest room, she headed off to her room for the socks. In the reflection of the bathroom mirror, I saw that I looked as horrible as I felt. My face was deadly white, and there was a scrape on my temple—probably the result of hitting a tree root or rock when I belly-flopped on the snow. And I had the worst case of hat hair I’d ever seen—it was matted to my head like the fur of a yak. I splashed water onto my face and, without drying my hands, used my fingers to fluff up my hair. From my purse I pulled out blush and lip gloss and used a little of each. The impact was next to zero.