Her Every Fear
Page 30
Jim fell asleep with the game still on, and Lina turned the television off. Jim’s breathing was labored and raspy. She was worried, but figured he’d be okay for one night without his apnea mask.
Before falling asleep herself, she allowed herself one selfish moment, one moment of remembering Henry when he had been an infant, just five or six months old. She used to put him on her thighs while she sat on the couch, hold his tiny chest in her hand, and gently shake it, and Henry would laugh and laugh, staring up into her eyes.
Then she let the memory go, and told herself she could never think of it again.
Chapter 38
“I’ve decided I want to stay here, just for a short while.” Kate said these words on her second night at the large hotel near to the hospital. She was eating dinner with her parents at the restaurant called Foliage, the one restaurant of the three in the hotel that wasn’t squarely aimed at the business traveler with a hefty expense account.
“Why?” her mother said, a quivering spoonful of crème brûlée halfway to her lips.
“Where?” her father asked.
“Just for a little while. I can’t explain it. I might take the ferry over to Provincetown and spend a couple of nights alone. I haven’t been—”
“We could all go, darling,” her mother said.
“No, I want to do this alone. I think if I go straight back to England, and back with you to your house, that I’ll never leave again. It’s just for a few days.”
To Kate’s surprise, her parents agreed without putting up too much of a fight. They went with Kate to the concierge and found information on taking the ferry directly from Boston Harbor to Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod. The concierge offered to book Kate a hotel room for when she got there, but she insisted that she’d find her own place to stay. Kate’s parents offered to book a return ticket to London, but Kate told them she’d book it herself when she was ready to come home.
“Not too long, okay, darling?” her mother said.
“Your grandparents are not going to believe we’ve let you stay here after what happened,” her father said.
“Tell them I’m a grown woman, and I’ll be back soon.”
Kate’s parents put her on the ferry on the afternoon of their return flight to England. Before leaving, Kate called Detective James from the hotel and told her where she was going to be, in case they needed to further question her. She doubted it, though. And there wasn’t going to be a trial. Corbin Dell and Henry Wood had died together.
“Provincetown is nice,” the detective said.
“I heard it was.”
“Take care of yourself, Kate. You’ve been through a significant trauma.”
“Story of my life,” Kate said.
The midsized ferry chugged out of Boston Harbor toward the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, sparkling under a cloudless sky. Kate stood on the front deck for the entire ninety minutes, her face tilted toward the sun, occasionally closing her eyes. She didn’t really know what she was doing. She only knew that she didn’t want to return home to the coddling of her parents, to questions from relatives and friends, or worse, silence. And she couldn’t return to the apartment on Bury Street. And she still hadn’t made a decision about Alan Cherney, even though he’d been right when he told her in the hospital that there was something special about their one night together. There had been. She had felt it. But she had also felt that enormous fear upon waking, the terror of putting your life and happiness in someone else’s hands.
Kate spotted the long spit of Cape Cod, shimmering along the horizon. Then she could make out a tall stone monument and a water tower looming above a town packed tightly with houses. The ferry moved through Provincetown Harbor, studded with moored boats, and tied up at a concrete pier. She walked down the rickety gangway and onto solid ground, slightly nauseous from the boat trip but happy, suddenly, to be somewhere new. To be a stranger.
She got a fried clam roll at the first place she hit coming off the ferry, sitting outside at a wooden picnic table even though the air was cool. It was before the season, she knew, the calendar having just flipped from April to May, but there were lots of people about. She knew Provincetown was famous for its heavily gay population, but the residents and visitors who walked past Kate during her lunch seemed as varied as any place she had ever been to. There were heavily muscled young men in couples and groups, families of tourists, two old women still dressed in their winter coats, both pushing bicycles, a fat man in a business suit smoking a cigar, a group of twenty-year-old women in rugby jerseys. After lunch, Kate wandered, finally checking into a guesthouse up Howland Street. The Spartan room was perfect: painted wooden floors, four-poster bed, no television, and a narrow window with a view toward the water.
She stayed three days, taking long walks, reading several Barbara Pym novels that she’d found in a used bookstore in town, and eating most of her meals at the long curving bar of a Portuguese restaurant on the east side of town. The fear was still there. Walking home after dark, all the footsteps she heard were following her, and the shadows between houses were filled with murderers and rapists. During the day, Kate waited for some drunk driver to veer onto the narrow sidewalks of Commercial Street and crush the pedestrians. She watched the skies for storms that would rip the roofs off the salt-weathered houses. And she even watched for George Daniels, seeing him as she always did in the long-legged strides of distant strangers and in the haircuts of waiters. It was funny that it was still George who haunted her, now that he’d been joined by Corbin Dell and Henry Wood. She knew that Henry, or Jack, as she still thought of him, would show up in her dreams eventually with his twitchy body and his white teeth. It would be okay when he did. He couldn’t hurt her anymore.
She wondered if Corbin would ever enter her nightmares. Even though she’d found out that there was strong evidence he was involved in at least two murders, the college girl in London and the woman from Hartford, Connecticut, Detective James had told her that they were now positive Corbin had not been involved in Audrey Marshall’s death.
He had come back from London to save her. Whatever he once had been, he’d changed, hadn’t he?
Packing up to leave Provincetown, a slip of paper fell out from between two sweaters that Kate hadn’t worn on her trip. It was a note from her mom:
Darling, letting you out of our sights and not bringing you back home with us has been the hardest thing I’ve had to do, but Daddy insists you’re okay, and I tend to agree. I want you to know how proud we are of you. We know that life isn’t easy for you at the best of times, and you’ve weathered the worst. Twice. I’ve always been a little fretful myself, but I’m not worried about you now. You are going to be fine. We’ll see you at home soon. Love you, darling, Mummy
Kate read the note several times, then placed it within the pages of the book she was reading.
It was early evening when she got back to Boston. It was warmer in the city than it had been on the Cape, but the skies were half filled with clouds, the air heavy with the possibility of rain. She took a taxi from the harbor to Bury Street, expecting the driver to make some comment about what had happened in the building, but he didn’t. He merely helped her with her bag and left her on the sidewalk in the approaching dusk. The apartment building looked unchanged. There was no police tape, no news vans. The only thing she noticed was a young couple slowing down as they passed the building, the woman pointing toward the windows of Corbin Dell’s apartment.
Kate entered the lobby, surprised to see the doorman named Bob at the station, since he didn’t usually work evenings. He was more surprised to see her.
“Hello, miss,” he said. “Nice to see you.”
“Hi, Bob. I’m actually here to visit Alan Cherney. Do you know if he’s in?”
“I’ll check for you.” He picked up his handset, and after a brief conversation, sent Kate up the stairs toward Alan’s wing.
She had no plans, beyond wanting to see him again. Heart beating, Kate Priddy
walked to Alan Cherney’s door. It was open and he was standing there, a nervous grin on his face. She put down her luggage and stepped into the small circle of his waiting arms.
About the Author
Peter Swanson is the author of The Kind Worth Killing and The Girl with a Clock for a Heart. He has degrees from Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Emerson College. He lives with his wife in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he is at work on his next novel.
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Also by Peter Swanson
The Kind Worth Killing
The Girl with a Clock for a Heart
Credits
Cover design by Gray318
Cover images: © Shutterstock and © iStockphoto / Getty Images
Title page image © by Michiel de Wit/Shutterstock, Inc.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
her every fear. Copyright © 2017 by Peter Swanson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Excerpt from “A Staffordshire Murderer” from Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1984 by James Fenton. Copyright © 1985 by James Fenton. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
first edition
Digital Edition JANUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780062427045
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-242702-1 (hardcover)
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-266210-1 (international edition)
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