by Chris Gilson
Chester stewed in misery. Thanks to him, Cornelia had broken down in a way he could not have believed possible. He tormented himself with her display of anger and, well, insanity. No other word described it. His little girl broke his heart as, clearly, he had broken hers.
His chest suddenly heaved with difficult breaths. An anxiety attack? No. His brain signaled a physical danger ahead.
Through the windshield covered with sticky white frosting, a black apparition came at them, something from another time. Chester pressed his face against the glass. A horse trotted toward them and, behind the horse, a crazy woman stood on the prow of a hansom carriage. Yes. A woman with curly hair that flew out from under a top hat. She steered the horse directly at them.
“Mike, for God’s sake, watch out.”
“Yes, sir.” He slowed down. Then headlights lit up Chester’s back window.
They veered over as a yellow taxi, driving much too fast, barreled past them.
Mike hunched over the wheel honking the horn. He flashed his brights, trying to warn the cab driver about the horse carriage. Then Chester saw the taxi’s red taillights brighten, the driver obviously jamming on the brakes as the yellow cab lunged toward the horse.
Chester’s heart banged in his rib cage as he saw the horse rear up, front legs windmilling, trapped in the taxi’s headlights. The driver of the carriage seemed unable to control him.
The Panda limousine swayed. Chester tried to grip on to something, sliding across the rear seat as the car weaved on the ice. He saw the taxi barely miss the body of the carriage, but its steel, bull-bar bumper tore through both of the wooden wheels.
He heard the terrible shrieking of metal splintering wood. The tearing of the fragile wooden wheels sent kindling-sized pieces flying into the windshield of Chester’s limousine.
They had sped past the accident now, Mike trying to brake in the slush, while Chester looked back to see the carriage tumble on its side, throwing up a massive wave of white like a snowplow. The driver’s gangly black frame fell off into the snow and seemed to somersault, like a paratrooper landing.
As the carriage scraped along the ground spraying sparks in the haze of flying snow, Chester could make out a bundle of horse blanket rolling onto the street from the carriage.
“Shit,” Mike yelled. He stuck his head out the window. Ahead, the taxi stopped and its driver threw open his door and ran back to the scene.
Chester grabbed at the car door, something awful overcoming him. The hansom driver struggled onto her feet and looked at her broken carriage. He focused, for a reason that he could not explain, on the odd bundle in the street that looked like an old Scottish plaid blanket, like one he used to share on the beach with Elizabeth and Cornelia, those comfortable old picnic blankets covered with sand and smelling faintly of tuna sandwiches. But this, he felt with a vile tug on his chest, was a very bad blanket indeed. He needed desperately to see what was inside it.
“Mike, go back.”
As Mike obediently shifted into reverse and gunned the engine, the car began fishtailing.
“Oh, God, be careful.” Chester stared out the rear window, transfixed at the bundle in the snow that now glowed in his limousine’s backup lights.
Time slowed for Chester, unbearably so, as the bundle began kicking like a giant beanbag. His limousine was skidding backward toward it. Whoever struggled inside would be run over by his vehicle.
Then an arm stuck out of the blanket.
“Cornelia!” Chester yelled.
Chapter Thirteen
Kevin held the big black umbrella to protect Mrs. Stern while he helped her out of the back seat of her Rolls.
The car smelled musty, a curvy black-over-burgundy sort of antique with cloth seats and bud vases. Mrs. Stern’s chauffeur held the car door while Kevin gave the scowling matriarch his arm, so he could drag her up and out like a heavy sack of sable and diamonds. Her fingers were strong, a wrinkled condor’s claw seizing his arm. He lifted her up onto the patch of sidewalk he’d swept free of snow, then escorted her toward the lobby, angling the umbrella to keep the blizzard from knocking her down.
He heard a horse snort, a car horn. Then brutal sounds of destruction, metal on wood, from Fifth Avenue. He gaped out through the snow. Taillights lit up a horse in red. It reared up before an old carriage lying on its side.
Then his eyes came to rest on a bundle lying on the street. His heart skipped as a woman’s arm shot out, grasping to find purchase in the slush. He sensed that it would be Cornelia Lord. The flaky Cinderella had smashed her own pumpkin. Then he saw a limousine careen through the slush, ready to back up over her.
He shook off Mrs. Stern’s claw and began running toward the body in Fifth Avenue. Hitting a patch of ice, he took a skipping dive on the curb, landing on the icy street scraping his hands. A face stuck out from the bundle only nine feet away, and it was Cornelia’s tiny nose and straw-colored hair. The backup lights from the limousine sickeningly lit her face and the snow around her. She tried to pull herself out of the heavy blanket twisted around her and inch toward the curb.
“Stop,” Kevin yelled at the limousine. He tried to stand up but couldn’t, and began scuttling toward her on his knees in the slushy street.
Cornelia’s eyes bulged like a trapped puppy’s, terrified but unable to act.
He hauled his body up off his knees and lunged for her outstretched arm, felt the cold flesh of her fingers, pulled her forward. Her bare legs kicked back at the tangled blanket. But not fast enough. The limousine, out of control, plowed directly toward her. He could actually see the tread of the spinning tire that would crush the leg now flailing helplessly from the blanket.
Kevin’s lungs exploded as he bent way forward, grasped the blanket that held her, and lunged backward.
He’d done it.
Not exactly a heroic save, Kevin thought, seeing her body lying in a jumble beside the car lumbering past, but it worked.
Then something cold and hard as a steel hammer whacked Kevin from behind. He heard the sound of slapping meat, and his ear and shoulder suddenly felt as detached from his body as if they’d moved to some other borough. He saw the limousine’s side-mirror rip off on his shoulder and go flying over his head, landing in the snow. Blood roared and pounded in the artery in his neck.
His shoulder might have come off, too. He wasn’t sure. He stayed on his knees, looking for his arm, and found it right where it belonged, but with pins and needles jabbing through. He saw Cornelia Lord wriggle out of the blanket. It dragged behind her like a bridal train as she ran toward him.
Everything seemed otherworldly now. The limousine swung away after sideswiping him, and plowed broadside into the street sign on the corner of 65th Street. When it hit, the center of the stretched-out sedan cracked on impact. He watched the limousine snap exactly in half against the pole, like a child’s toy.
The front end of the limousine threw sparks and stopped first, with its hood jacked up and headlights turned up illuminating the snowflakes. The rear half kept running, like a detached nervous system. Then it dug into a mound of slush and stopped dead.
Kevin heard cursing, astonishing in its venom. He turned to watch the carriage driver yelling and banging on the front half of the limousine.
Cornelia Lord’s fingers clutched at his sleeve. She was trying to help him. Her velvet dress looked grubby like a refugee’s, her pantyhose torn on her legs. She cried as she touched him, her hands frozen and her lips open and fearful. But not for her, for him. Kevin struggled up and they helped each other to the sidewalk. He tasted his own blood. She seemed to move well, not limping.
He wondered if she would walk inside and leave him bleeding.
He saw Philip Grace and, in the totally irrational way of accident victims, focused on the reporter’s new coat of pewter leather. It zipped across his mind that Cornelia Lord had bought it for him, in an indirect way. Philip led three other stalkarazzi on a charge toward them. Camera lights went pop, pop, pop. Flashes
and floating blobs filled his eyes from the white explosions.
“You guys okay?” he heard Philip shout.
Kevin squeezed Cornelia’s hand tightly and led her toward the front door. They held each other up, panting. Philip and the stalkarazzi followed. Now under the awning of 840 Fifth, Vlad the Self-Impaler appeared. He gently took Cornelia’s arm and tried to draw her inside the lobby door.
“Wait,” she told Vlad.
She squirmed away from Vlad’s grip and turned to Kevin. “Are you all right?”
His ear throbbed mercilessly; it felt like a searing knife tearing through his rib cage and right arm.
“Yeah,” he said. “What about you?”
She looked at his ear and tears appeared on her cheeks. She reached down and scooped up a handful of fresh snow from the side-walk, rolled it into a snowball. Then she touched his ear with it, very gently.
“Kevin Doyle,” she spoke softly.
The pain and shock gripped him. “I used to be.”
He stared at the girl’s liquid eyes and his heart skipped. The tender way she treated his wound made his chest feel full, until he felt the pain very little. He wanted to put his arm around Cornelia Lord, deb escapee, and try to protect her some more.
“Miss Lord, come inside and get warm,” Vlad the Self-Impaler begged. He took her arm again with his white glove.
She shrugged it off. “No, thank you.”
Kevin used only his right arm, which didn’t seem hurt, to slip his doorman coat off and wrap it around Cornelia, now trembling violently in her skimpy wet dress.
Life began to turn red and blue, with sirens.
The first police car swerved into the curb and some officers jumped out in a hurry. Then more blue and white cruisers slid in behind them. He heard whoop-whoops and hi-lo bleats, saw grim-looking men and women in uniform.
“Where’s the woman you called about?” a police officer asked Vlad.
“Here,” he pointed.
“I’m fine, but this man’s hurt,” Cornelia told the officer, still holding the melting snowball to Kevin’s ear. “He needs a doctor.”
Kevin felt as remote as a spectator in the very last row. His vision had turned into a single wobbly lens thrown out of whack and unfocused. A red film formed over the circle. He began to see people around him as more horizontal than vertical. Philip Grace grabbed him before he could fall down, then Philip and Cornelia held him up between them and moved him toward the police car.
“Officers,” Philip spoke like the police were derelict. “Get these people to a hospital. This here’s Cornelia Lord. And this young man just threw himself in harm’s way to save her life.”
“Okay,” the older cop said, “get in the car.”
The back seat of the police car released a blast of previous-perp body odor, strong as animal fear. The police officer packed Cornelia and Kevin carefully inside. Then Grace hopped in, closing the door behind him.
“All accounted for,” Grace announced.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Kevin asked him.
Grace banged on the Plexiglas partition. “Our hero’s rantin’ and losin’ consciousness back here.”
The officer behind the wheel whipped the car out of the nest of blue and white police cruisers onto Fifth Avenue, siren wailing. As they sped down the avenue, weaving around the hulking remains of the carriage and the limousine like some war-torn city, Kevin saw Tucker Fisk jogging in a tuxedo, his face and hair dripping wet.
“There’s your boyfriend,” he weakly told Cornelia. “Looks like he missed the carriage. You want to tell him you’re okay?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Thank you so much for what you did, Kevin.”
She took his hand in both of her palms, now warm, and smiled directly into his eyes, only glancing occasionally at the top of his head while they sped to the hospital.
He wondered why, jogging through the storm in a tuxedo to find his runaway girlfriend, Tucker Fisk had been grinning.
In his traumatized funk, Chester clung with both hands to the hand grip in the rear half of the broken Panda. He looked out the ragged cave mouth made by the destruction of his car, which had torn away the facing seat along with the driver’s compartment.
“Jeez, I’m sorry, Mr. Lord.” Mike the driver stood just outside the cave looking in, trying to coax him out. Then police officers pushed Mike aside, bending down to throw their flashlight beams in to see Chester. The lights blinded him. The carcass of the half-limousine shook as two officers climbed in to help him out.
“Where’s Cornelia?”
“She’s on her way to the hospital,” a young cop told him.
He let go of the hand grip, and began sliding down, until the officers grabbed him and frog-walked him out so he wouldn’t bump his head.
“How badly is she hurt?” He felt a shivery pall settling over his soul. At every misstep in this horrible debacle, Chester believed that he could never be more afraid of what was to come next. But this was the coup de grâce, hitting his daughter with his car. Or had he? Had his car hit her? Hadn’t the doorman appeared, seemed to whisk her away?
“Don’t worry, sir. We’ll take you to see her,” an officer said.
Odd sounds assaulted him as he stepped out of the broken limousine. He heard snorting. The horse, a sturdy beast, had got up on all four legs, pawing the snow with his hooves. And he heard a female voice yelling. It was the woman in the black suit, the driver of the carriage. She yelled at him in what sounded like a drill sergeant’s parade-ground snarl.
The overbearing woman must be insane. She’d carted his daughter the wrong way in a blizzard. Perhaps all female lunatics had a secret understanding like Freemasons and helped one another, a subculture running on scrambled brains and estrogen. Thanks to him, Cornelia had officially joined them. Chester felt a deep sucking wound in his stomach, and not a physical one.
The fault line between Chester and his daughter had stretched so far apart it had finally snapped, like his stupid Panda. Now it would take more than words or good intentions to put her back together again.
Outside the emergency room entrance of Manhattan Hill Hospital, in the confusion of the ambulances and snow, Cornelia and Kevin were gently extracted from the police car. Placed in wheelchairs, they were quickly rolled off to separate destinations.
A top-heavy team of doctors and a few nurses crowded around Cornelia Lord on her way to the Lord Pavilion. This special wing of the hospital had been donated by Cornelia’s grandfather Chester II to treat VIP patients, who could recover in teak-paneled rooms with sweeping views of the East River. Chester II was its very first patient.
Nurses gingerly removed Cornelia’s clothing. The highest-level staff doctors examined her closely for unseen wounds, internal bleeding, hard-to-detect injuries. While the medical team scrambled, a woman with thin hair and a nervous rash who worked as the hospital’s staff attorney monitored her treatment.
“Her leg is fine,” a doctor reported. “Basically a turned ankle. No head trauma. A few bruises, but nothing serious.”
“Keep testing her anyway,” the lawyer said.
Philip Grace hung back in the emergency room. He assumed, correctly, that he would be ignored as he hunkered down in a plastic chair between a minor gunshot wound and an ulcer. Then he took off his coat and rolled up his sweater sleeves like a hospital employee. Pressing as close as he could to the doors leading to the Lord Pavilion, he slipped out the Minox spy camera he kept in his pocket for emergencies.
All he managed were a few candid shots of a dismayed Chester Lord and a stoic Tucker Fisk.
Chester and Tucker were escorted by police officers who pushed away other reporters yowling like mad dogs. A senior-looking official met them at the doors to the belly of the hospital. Then two hefty security men stepped in front of Philip Grace, preventing him from following them into the Lord Pavilion.
“You need some tests, Mr. Lord,” the head of emergency services insisted.
Che
ster waved him away. “No. Just a conference room, please.”
They led him to a mahogany-paneled, plum-carpeted staff room. The moment Tucker sat Chester down, Dr. Bushberg rushed through the door. Cornelia’s psychiatrist fumbled in the pockets of his Burberry raincoat and Chester felt an odd twinge of satisfaction to see that Bushberg had forgotten his pipe.
“Cornelia was riding in a horse carriage,” Chester icily told Tucker. “To get away from us, I imagine.”
A doctor with a short gray beard popped in the door without knocking. He shook Chester’s hand with a surgeon’s careful squeeze.
“Cornelia looks like she’s going to be fine, Mr. Lord. It doesn’t appear that the car even touched her. We’re running tests to be on the safe side.”
Edgar Chase, Chester’s lawyer, bustled in after the doctor. Edgar’s intimidating presence always reassured him. Even when Edgar had little to say, as was often the case. The tall, barrel-chested attorney wore a well-tailored dinner jacket and white scarf as though he had been interrupted at a tête-à-tête of great splendor.
“How is she?” Edgar Chase’s baritone rumbled, as he peered over tortoiseshell half-glasses at Chester.
“So far, so good. No injuries, apparently,” Chester answered, his voice trembling. “A building employee saw the accident coming and pulled her out of… harm’s way.”
Edgar settled into the conference table and took a legal pad from a slim leather portfolio. Chester saw the note he wrote.
Bldg. Emp. involved: Will he sue?
A shrill whistle tortured Kevin’s eardrum and he couldn’t remember the past few minutes clearly. Now some people were picking him up and putting him on a gurney. A woman in white asked him about his blood type and whether he was allergic to any medications, then put a Plexiglas mask over his face.
His gurney was being wheeled through swinging doors marked “Trauma Bay” that banged open at his feet, into a trauma unit where several gunshot victims, a sad club, lay bleeding. He felt a little lightheaded. It was exciting to be in the middle of all the life-saving activity—orders being shouted out in jargon and quickly followed. He admired the sense of life-or-death importance.