by Nora Roberts
“Hey, ease up, pal. We ran some errands, hung out a little. It’s a free country. I did some window-shopping on the way to meet you, and he headed home to catch a nap. Mikey’s not a morning person and you had him up at dawn.”
“How did she know where to find you?”
“Look—”
“You said you ditched him. Just one? What about the other guy?”
He was really bumming out her triumphant mood. “How the hell do I know? Are they joined at the hip?”
“How long after you and Mikey split up did you see him?”
“Jesus, a few minutes. A couple of blocks. What’s the big . . .” But she trailed off as it struck her. “You think the other one moved on Mikey? That’s crazy. He’s not part of this.”
But she’d made him part of it, she realized, and the arm Gideon gripped began to tremble.
“Okay, so maybe they’ll follow him, maybe they will. We’ll just get off at the next stop and I’ll call him on his cell phone, clue him in. He’ll lose a tail as easy as I did. He’ll get a kick out of it.”
But her hands were like ice by the time she pushed her way out at the Thirty-fourth Street stop, got to a phone. And her fingers shook as she punched in the numbers. “You’ve got me spooked,” she grumbled. “Wait till I tell Mikey. He’ll laugh his bony ass off. Answer, damn it. Answer the phone.”
But in two rings his cheerful and recorded voice came on.
“I’m busy, honey, hopefully making sweet love. Leave a message and Mikey will get back to you.” He made his signature kissing sound that ran right into the beep.
“He’s turned it off.” She took a calming breath, then another. “He’s home, taking a nap, and he turned off his pocket phone, that’s all.”
“Ring him on the land line, Cleo.”
“I’m just going to wake him up.” She dialed. “He hates it when you wake him up from a nap.”
The phone rang four times. She was braced for another recording when he answered. The instant she heard his voice, she knew he was in trouble.
“Mikey—”
“Don’t come back here, Cleo!” There was a shout, a crash, and she heard him call her name again. “Run.”
“Mikey.” A second crash and the short scream had her hand going wet on the receiver. Even when the phone went dead in her ear, she kept shouting his name.
“Stop. Stop it.” Gideon pried the phone out of her fingers.
“They’re hurting him. We have to get there. We have to help him.”
“Call the police, Cleo.” He clamped his hands on her shoulders before she could run. “Call them now. Give them his name, his address. We’re too far away to help.”
“The police.”
“Don’t give your name,” he added as she fumbled to hit 911. “Just his. Make sure they hurry.”
“I need the police. I need help.” She ignored the calm voice of the emergency operator. “Mikey—Michael Hicks, four-forty-five West Fifty-third, apartment three-oh-two. Just—just off Ninth Avenue. You have to hurry. You have to help. They’re hurting him. They’re hurting him.”
Gideon depressed the receiver as she began to cry. “Hold it together. Just hold it together. We’re going. Which train do we take? What’s the fastest way to get there?”
Nothing could be fast enough, not with that scream of pain and terror echoing in her head. She all but flew the blocks from the subway stop, but it wasn’t fast enough.
Relief spurted through her when she spotted the two radio cars outside Mikey’s building. “They got here,” she managed. “New York’s finest.”
Uniforms were already setting up barricades, and a small crowd was gathering.
“Don’t say anything,” Gideon warned with his lips against her temple. “Let me ask.”
“There should be an ambulance. He needs to get to the hospital. I know they hurt him.”
“Just stay quiet, and I’ll find out.” Gideon kept his arm tight around her as they stepped up to the barricade.
“What’s going on?” He glanced toward a bike messenger who was straddling his ride and snapping a wad of gum.
“Dude got killed in there.”
“No.” Cleo shook her head slowly from side to side. “No.”
“Hey, I should know. I was heading in to make my delivery when the cops came back out. Said I had to hang out and be interviewed and shit ’cause they had a homicide on the third floor. Suit cops are coming, you know, like on NYPD Blue? One of the uniform dudes told me this black guy got his face and head all bashed to shit.”
“No. No. No,” she said again, her voice rising as Gideon pulled her away.
“Keep moving, Cleo. We’re just going to keep moving for a little while.”
“He’s not dead. That’s a lie, a stupid, fucking lie. We’re going to his show tonight. He’s getting us house seats. We’re going to get shit-faced on champagne. He is not dead. We were just . . . it was only an hour ago. I’m going back. I’ve got to go back.”
He needed to get her some place quiet, some place private. Gideon wrapped both arms around her to hold her still. Where the hell did you find quiet in a city like this? “Cleo, you listen to me, just listen to me. We can’t stay here. It isn’t safe.”
When she let out a low moan, when her knees buckled, he took her weight. He half dragged, half carried her down the street. “We need to get inside somewhere. You need to sit down.”
He scanned the street, the shops, and spotted a bar. There was nothing, he decided, like an urban dive for a little privacy.
He pulled her inside, keeping his arm banded around her. There were only three patrons, all hunched at the bar. None of them even bothered to glance over as he poured Cleo into a dim corner booth.
“Two whiskeys,” he ordered. “Doubles.” He dragged out bills, slapped them on the bar.
He carried the glasses back to where she was curled in a ball in the corner of the booth. He slid in beside her, took her chin firmly in his hand and poured half the shot down her throat.
She choked, sputtered, then simply laid her head down on the table and sobbed like a baby.
“It’s my fault. It’s my fault.”
“I need you to tell me what happened.” He lifted her head again, held the glass to her lips. “Take another drink and tell me what you did.”
“I killed him. Oh God, oh God, Mikey’s dead.”
“I know it.” He picked up his own untouched glass of whiskey and urged it on her. Better drunk, he thought, and half passed out than hysterical. “What did you and Mikey do, Cleo?”
“I asked him. He’d have done anything for me. I loved him. Gideon, I loved him.”
Now, he thought, in grief, she finally used his name. “I know you did. I know he loved you.”
“I thought I was so smart.” Her tears plopped on his hand as he made her take another swallow. “I had it all figured out. I’d sell that bitch the Fate, skin her for a million dollars, give you a nice cut to keep you happy and dance in the goddamn street.”
“Christ. You contacted her?”
“I called her, set up a meet. My turf. Top of the fucking Empire State,” she continued with her voice slurring now with liquor. “Like King goddamn Kong. Mikey went with me, just in case she got testy. But she didn’t. Butter wouldn’t melt. Didn’t have a good word to say about you or your brother, but that’s beside the point. Gonna give me a million dollars tomorrow, cash money. I give her the little lady. Sensible deal, no harm, no foul. Mikey and I got a good laugh out of it. I told him the whole story, you know.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
“Gonna split it with you, Slick, sixty-forty.” She swiped at tears and smeared mascara over her cheek, over the back of her hand. “You got a four-hundred-thousand-dollar bird in the hand, why beat around the fucking bush, right?”
He couldn’t work up any anger. Not when she was shattered. He pushed her hair back from her damp cheeks. “No, I guess you don’t.”
“But she was never gonna
give me the money. She played me. Mikey’s dead because I was too stupid to know it. I’ll never forgive myself, never, not for as long as I live. He was harmless. Gideon, he was harmless and sweet, and they hurt him. They hurt him.”
“I know it, darling.” He drew her head down on his shoulder, stroking her hair as she cried. He thought of the man who’d fixed French toast that morning, had given up his bed to a stranger because a friend had asked.
Anita Gaye would pay for it, he promised himself. It was no longer just about money, about principle, it was about justice.
So he stroked Cleo’s hair, drank the last swallow of the whiskey.
He could think of only one place to go.
Eleven
DR. Lowenstein had his own problems. They included an ex-wife who had successfully skinned him in the divorce, two children in college who were under the delusion he owned a grove of money trees and an administrative assistant who’d just demanded a raise.
Sheila had divorced him because he’d spent more time working on his practice than his marriage. Then she had sucked the financial benefits of that practice up like a Hoover.
The irony of it had been lost on her. Which, Lowenstein decided, only proved he was well rid of the humorless bitch.
But that was neither here nor there. As his son, who changed majors as often as he changed his socks, was given to say, it was only money.
Tia Marsh had money. A steady stream of interest and dividends and mutual funds. As well as, he supposed, a reasonably substantial trickle of royalties from her books.
And God knew the woman had problems.
He listened to her now as she sat tidily in the chair facing him and told a convoluted tale of sneaky Irishmen, Greek myths, historic disasters and thievery. When she ended with a police impersonator and tapped phones, he rubbed his steepled fingers on his thin blade of a mouth and cleared his throat.
“Well, Tia, you’ve certainly been busy. Tell me, what do you think fate represents in this context?”
“Represents?” Finding the courage to tell the tale, and telling it, had used up most of her steam. For a moment, Tia could only stare. “Dr. Lowenstein, it’s not a metaphor, it’s statues.”
“Determining your own fate has always been one of your core dilemmas,” he began.
“You think I’m making this up? You think this is all some complicated delusion?” The insult of it kicked her energy level back up again. Certainly she had delusions, or else why would she be here. But they were much more simplistic, much more ordinary.
And he, at two hundred fifty dollars for a fifty-minute hour, should know it.
“I’m not that crazy. There was a man in Helsinki.”
“An Irishman,” Lowenstein said patiently.
“Yes, yes, an Irishman, but he could have been a one-legged Scotsman, for all that matters.”
He smiled, gently. “Your month of travel was a big step for you, Tia. I believe it opened you up to yourself. To the imagination you often stifle. The challenge now will be to channel and refine that imagination. Perhaps, as a writer—”
“There was a man in Helsinki,” she said again, between her teeth. “He came to New York to see me, pretended a personal interest in me when, in fact, he was only interested in my connection to the Three Fates. Those Fates are real, they exist. I’ve documented it. My ancestor owned one and was traveling to England on the Lusitania to acquire the second. That’s fact, documented fact.”
“And this Irishman claims his ancestor, also aboard the ship, stole the statue.”
“Exactly.” She huffed out a breath. “And that Anita Gaye stole the statue from him—the Irishman. I can’t substantiate that. In fact, I had strong doubts about it until Jack Burdett came to see me.”
“The one who pretended to be a police detective.”
“Yes. See, it’s not that complicated if you just follow the steps in a linear fashion. My problem is I’m not sure what to do about it, what step to take next. If my phones are tapped, it seems to me I should report it. But then there’ll be all sorts of awkward questions, won’t there, and if the phones are, subsequently, untapped, Ms. Gaye will know that I know she had them tapped, then I lose the advantage of working behind the scenes, so to speak, to find the other two Fates.”
She took a long breath. “And I don’t actually talk on the phone that much anyway, so maybe I should leave it alone for now.”
“Tia, have you considered that your reluctance to report this stems from your subconscious knowledge that there is nothing wrong with your phones?”
“No.” But his calm, patient question planted the seed of doubt in her mind. “This isn’t paranoia.”
“Tia, do you remember calling me from your hotel in London at the beginning of your tour and telling me you were afraid the man staying down the hall was stalking you because twice he rode in the elevator with you?”
“Yes.” Mortified, she dropped her gaze to her hands. “But that was different. That was paranoia.”
Except for all she knew, for all anyone knew, she thought, she’d been right and had had a lucky escape from a crazed British stalker.
“You’ve made great strides,” he continued. “Important ones. You faced down your travel phobia. You confronted your fear of dealing with the public. You spent four consecutive weeks exploring yourself and your own capabilities, and expanded your safety zone. You should be proud of yourself.”
To show he was proud of her, he leaned over, patted her arm lightly. “Change, Tia, change creates new challenges. You have a tendency, as we’ve discussed before, to manufacture scenarios within your mind—exotic, complicated scenarios wherein you’re surrounded or beset by some sort of danger or threat. A fatal illness, an international plot. And so beset, you retreat, constrict that safety zone to your apartment. I’m not surprised that finding yourself in familiar surroundings again, dealing with the natural physical and mental fatigue of a long, demanding trip, you’d need to revert to pattern.”
“I’m not doing that,” she said under her breath. “I can’t even see the pattern anymore.”
“We’ll work on that during our next session.” He leaned over to pat her arm again. “It might be best if we go back to our twice-weekly sessions for the time being. Don’t think of that as a step back, but as a new beginning. Angela will schedule you.”
She looked at him, the kindly face, the trim beard, the dash of gray at the temples. It was like, she realized, being indulged and dismissed by an affectionate parent.
If there was a pattern in her life, she thought as she got to her feet, this was it.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“I want you to continue your relaxation and imagery exercises.”
“Of course.” She picked up her purse, walked to the door. And there, turned. “Everything I just told you is a hallucination?”
“No, Tia, of course not. I believe it’s all very real to you, and a combination of actual events and your very creative imagination. We’ll explore it. In the meantime, I’d like you to consider why you find living inside your head more comfortable than living outside it. We’ll talk about it during our next session.”
“It’s not comfortable inside my head,” she said quietly. She stepped into his outer office. And kept on going.
He hadn’t believed a word she’d said. And worse, she discovered as she rode the elevator down to the lobby, he’d stirred up doubts so she wasn’t sure she believed herself.
It had happened. She was not crazy, damn it. She wasn’t some sort of loony who wore aluminum foil on her head to keep out the alien voices, for God’s sake. She was a mythologist, a successful author, a functioning adult. And, she added as temper began to rise, she was sane. Felt saner, steadier, stronger than she’d ever felt in her life.
She wasn’t hiding in her apartment. She was working there. She had a goal, a fascinating one. She would prove she wasn’t delusional. She’d prove she could stand on her own two feet, that she was a healthy—well, moderatel
y healthy—woman with a good brain and a strong will.
As she strode out on the street, she whipped out her cell phone, punched in a number. “Carrie? It’s Tia. Get me an emergency appointment at your salon. When? Now. Right now. It’s coming off.”
“ARE YOU SURE about this?” Carrie was still winded from her