Woman in Black (15 page)

“Yeah, Mom. Aren't things weird enough around here as it is?” Phoebe demanded. “Besides, how do we know she's not as bad as that creep she was married to who stole all that money?”

Truth to tell, Abigail hadn't given any thought at all to the possible ramifications of hiring Lila. Now the wheels in her head began to spin. Was there a way she could turn this to her advantage? Use the publicity to make her appear the champion of the downtrodden, even if the downtrodden in this case happened to be a Park Avenue socialite fallen on hard times, not a disenfranchised Mexican?

She looked up to find Kent and Phoebe eyeing her with identical looks of reproach. Often she had the disquieting sense that her husband and daughter were somehow joined in conspiracy against her. As if, in her frequent absences, they'd formed a closed corporation, from which she was more or less excluded. For one thing, Kent was the only one who could have gotten Phoebe to eat an entire burger. And even if it had been only half a burger, it was still more than Abigail had lately seen her consume in one sitting. Even when Phoebe had been younger, it was her daddy whom she'd called for whenever she'd had a “boo-boo” or couldn't get back to sleep after a nightmare. And Phoebe and Kent's Friday night ritual of pizza and a movie had withstood even the storms of adolescence. Often Abigail didn't get home until too late to join them, but on the occasions she had, she'd gotten the distinct impression, though nothing had ever been said, that they weren't too happy about her “crashing” their little party.

“I'll deal with it when the time comes,” she told them, feeling a heaviness settle over her, like when she'd been up half the night going over mockups or page proofs. “In the meantime, I think you could both show a little more support. I was only doing what I thought was best.”

“You should have consulted us. That's all we're saying.” Kent eyed her wearily, as though tired of going over the same old ground. As if it mattered less and less what she did, except where it directly involved him or Phoebe.

The realization made her suddenly fearful. What if he were to leave her? But she dismissed the fear as irrational, saying, “Well, it's too late now. If she decides to take the job, you're just going to have to deal with it.”

A loaded silence fell.
Nothing good will come of this
, whispered a familiar voice in her head. Her mother's voice. But who was she doing this for, if not her mother?

Out of the blue, she thought of Vaughn. She hadn't heard from him in ages. All she knew was that he traveled the globe as a freelance cameraman—when she'd Googled his name, up had come a number of cable shows and documentaries for which he was credited—but now she wondered what
he
would make of all this. Would he suspect her motives had been less than pure in offering his sister the job? And if so, would he despise her for it? It was strange, because she hadn't laid eyes on the man in more than twenty years, but the thought was almost enough to make her think better of her decision where the combined efforts of her husband and daughter had failed.

5

It had been a long trip. Three days just to get from Namibia to Johannesburg, beginning with the nearly four-hundred-mile jeep ride from the crew's desert camp to the capital city of Windhoek, where he'd caught a lift on a transport plane headed south. Following that had come four days of medical tests at the hospital in Johannesburg before his flight to JFK. Now here he was, at six-thirty in the morning, in a taxi bound for Manhattan, all one hundred and sixty-five stripped-down, bloodshot, beard-stubbled pounds of him.

The sun was just coming up, revealing a gray November sky streaked with cirrus clouds, like a dirty window that had been given a few halfhearted swipes with a cloth. Vaughn had beaten Old Man Winter, but not by much. The trees along the access road down which they were currently traveling, the cabdriver having taken a detour to avoid the traffic on the Long Island Expressway, were skeletons on which only a few dry leaves rattled, and high overhead a flock of migrating geese sketched a dark, slow-moving chevron against the lightening sky.

He gazed out at the houses lining the aptly named Horace Harding Expressway.
(Who the hell was Horace Harding, anyway?
he thought.) Ranging from shabby to well kept but all fairly uniform in size, with identical patches of khaki lawn and identical views of the traffic crawling along the LIE, they made him think of packing boxes on a stalled conveyer belt.

He wondered about the occupants of those homes. How did you end up in a place like that, looking out every day at the same view of cars zipping by (or in this case crawling) and breathing in the fumes from their exhaust? Was it by choice or through a slow process of elimination? Were those people content to stay put, or did they ever itch to explore the world beyond?

Vaughn had been born with an itch. He couldn't recall a time when he hadn't longed to explore distant lands. As a boy, he'd immersed himself in the writings of Thor Heyerdahl and Peter Matthiessen, Jan Morris and Paul Theroux, dreaming of one day seeing those exotic places for himself. As soon as he'd turned eighteen, he had signed up for the Peace Corps. After a two-year stint in the Mariana Islands, where he'd taught rudimentary English to the natives, he'd returned home to find his sister engaged to be married, his father headed to the altar for the third time, and his mother headed off to her fourth or fifth rehab (he'd lost count by then).

He'd moved in with a couple of buddies from high school and had subsequently managed to talk his way into a job as production assistant at CNN's Atlanta headquarters. Within two years he'd acquired the skills necessary to become a cameraman, and before long his natural fearlessness and facility for languages had gotten him dispatched to various hot spots on the continent and abroad. He'd developed a reputation for navigating quickly to the front line of any action and always nailing the operative footage—in '83, he'd been among the first to capture the carnage of the marine barracks in Beirut after a suicide bomber's attack. In war zones, he'd become adept at dodging gunfire, land mines, and diplomatic snafus. It wasn't until he'd narrowly missed being hit by a sniper's bullet in Somalia that he'd lost his stomach for what his buddy Matt McFettridge called the “bang-bang.”

Vaughn had parted ways with CNN shortly after that, picking up freelance work wherever he could and restlessly sitting out the periods between gigs like a wild animal deprived of its natural habitat. The rise of cable TV had opened up new opportunities, primarily in the form of the National Geographic and Discovery channels, where previously there had been only PBS and the BBC, with the occasional documentary film thrown in. For the past fifteen years, Vaughn had been more or less constantly on the move, his only fixed address a post office box in Grand Central Station and his true home whichever corner of the globe he happened to be in at any given time. This was his first trip back to New York since his brother-in-law's funeral.

And quite possibly it would be his last.

But he wasn't going to think about that right now. Such dark musings were best tackled on a full stomach, after a good night's rest, he reminded himself. At the thought of food, his stomach muttered in complaint. He hadn't eaten since yesterday morning, having slept straight through the meal service on the plane. He'd grab a bite in the city before heading over to his sister's temporary digs. He didn't want to be banging on her door at this hour; she might still be asleep.

They took the Triborough Bridge, and soon they were rattling over the familiar streets of Manhattan. Vaughn asked the cabbie to drop him off at the corner of Madison and 89th, tossing off a few phrases in Arabic that prompted the man to glance over his shoulder at him in surprise. From the huge smile that broke out on the cabbie's seamed brown face, the ten-dollar tip Vaughn slid him might have been a fifty. He jumped out of the driver's seat to liberate Vaughn's luggage from the trunk before Vaughn could get to it himself: a backpack and olive-drab duffel bag, both of which had seen more miles than a Boeing 747 and which constituted the sum total of Vaughn's worldly possessions, apart from the HD camera and various cases of equipment he'd had shipped.

Vaughn clasped the man's hand in parting. “Stay well, my friend,” he said in Arabic.

“May Allah be with you,” replied the beaming cabbie.

Vaughn found a cafe that was open twenty-four hours and ordered a full breakfast of eggs, sausage, pancakes, and hash browns, which he washed down with copious amounts of black coffee. He caught the waitress glancing at him a bit curiously from time to time, probably wondering how anyone who consumed such gut-busting quantities could stay so lean.
Lean
wasn't the word; he'd grown downright scrawny—the result of a recent bout with amoebic dysentery that had melted ten pounds from his already rangy frame. He might have been someone newly sprung from a POW camp. Certainly, he didn't look as if he were from around here. His longish blond hair was bleached nearly white from the sun, and his deeply tanned face, into which lines were carved like rills on a barren hillside, stood out in marked contrast to the pasty complexions around him. In his travel-worn fatigues, he could hardly have been mistaken for an early-rising businessman catching a bite to eat on his way to work. These days, he felt more a stranger in his own land than in any of the far-flung places he'd roamed.

He paid the check, tipping the waitress handsomely. Hanging on to money was another habit, like settling in one place or staying with the same woman for very long, that he'd never really acquired. Earning a wage was no problem—he got paid quite well, in fact, for doing what he'd just as happily have done for free—but for him, it was little more than a means by which to take care of life's boring little necessities. Thus it had a way of accumulating: in his pockets and drawers, in half-forgotten money market accounts, and occasionally in the form of uncashed checks.

He'd gladly have given every cent he owned to his sister, but she'd stubbornly refused to take any more than he'd lent her already. “Who knows? You might need it yourself one day,” she'd said in that lightly ironic tone she always used when making reference to his inability, or perhaps refusal, to plan further ahead than booking his next flight. Words that seemed prescient now.

Duffel bag in hand and backpack slung over one shoulder, Vaughn walked the three blocks to where Lila was staying. As eager as he was to see her, he dreaded giving her the news that would only add to her already onerous burden, so he ambled along the sidewalk at an unhurried pace. Besides buying time, it allowed him to acclimate to the city's rush and tumble, the blare of horns and squall of traffic. All the while, as he strolled along, he found himself traveling back in time to other places he'd known. Marrakech, with its ancient, mazelike warrens and the ululating cries of the muezzins summoning the faithful to mosque. The Marianas, where villagers made less in a year than most of the people scurrying past him now probably made in a week, yet were far more content. In his mind, he saw the sun coming up over the Greek isle of Limnos, where he'd been on assignment around this time last year, setting fire to a sea of such achingly pure turquoise translucence that it had seemed almost a sin that the fishermen onshore, hauling in their nets, were oblivious to it.

He would miss all that. He'd miss waking up to the crowing of roosters and falling asleep at night to the chirping of crickets or peeping of tree frogs. He'd miss the giddy sense of possibility he always felt walking down the streets of an unfamiliar town or city for the first time, a feeling that was a little like falling in love. He'd miss the street food in Ho Chi Minh City and the home-brewed tequila in San Juan de Alima. He would miss the women as well, no two of them alike and each beautiful in her own right, with whom he'd been privileged to share a bed through the years.

Hunched inside his well-worn aviator jacket, its sheepskin collar pulled up around his ears, Vaughn thought ahead once more to the difficult conversation he was going to have to have with his sister. Poor Lila. Hadn't she endured enough already? But he would put that off until after they'd had a chance to catch up. He hadn't seen her since the funeral. Why spoil it the minute he walked in the door?

He found the address she'd given him, a tony building where the smartly uniformed concierge phoned upstairs to announce his arrival. Minutes later, he emerged from the elevator, on the thirtieth floor, to find Lila waiting for him. She flung her arms around him, hugging him so tightly that Vaughn, laden as he was by his bag and backpack, was momentarily thrown off balance. When she finally drew back, it was to scold him affectionately.

“Look at you, nothing but skin and bones. What did you live off over there, roots and berries?”

“More like lizards and insects,” he replied with a roguish grin.

“Ugh.” She made a face.

“And you? I was expecting the wreck of the
Hesperus
. And here you are, looking almost like your old self.” She was thinner than he would have liked, but she was no longer the walking dead.

“It's only because I knew you were coming. God, it's good to see you!” She hugged him again, quick and fierce, before pulling back to wrinkle her nose. “Good Lord. When was the last time you bathed?”

“Water's pretty scarce out in the desert,” he replied impishly.

“In that case, you can shower while I get breakfast on the table. I know you prefer living out in the bush, but civilization does have its compensations.”

Vaughn groaned inwardly at the mention of food. He should have known that Lila would insist on feeding him. Now he'd have to find room in his already full belly, or she would be miffed that he hadn't come to her straightaway.

“Nice place,” he remarked, stepping into the apartment. But he barely glanced at the art deco furnishings or bold minimalist canvases on the walls as he crossed the living room, heading straight for the picture window with its panoramic view stretching all the way to the East River.