What now? Hike into the nearest town, find a phone, and call Neesy to come get him? That would get him out of his present jam.
But it would get her into it.
The authorities now knew he was in Florida. If she showed up, wouldn’t they make the connection to him? Aiding and abetting was serious business.
He thought of her pluck and her smile. Her eyes glowing with an affection he didn’t deserve but cherished. She’d proven she wasn’t afraid of a fight, but did that mean he had to lead her into one?
Besides, the closer he got to Julia, the closer he got to Dutch. Which endangered any woman around him. And he already had enough lives on his conscience.
But how could he just go off—no explanation, no good-bye? Just thinking about it gave him a cold, dark sensation, not only for the callousness of it but also for the barrenness it would leave behind. He’d be on his own again, isolated, solitary. Could he even go back there?
He thought of the night he’d confessed the one thing he’d never shared with anyone—how he’d taken Julia. Neesy had opened her arms to his past, and he loved her for it. Loved her then, and later, during the blizzard, when she’d confirmed her trust and belief in him. And now. Just picturing her filled him with a billowing warmth he ached to grip tight.
And yet, he’d never told her. Never said those words women liked to hear. He said them now, inside his head.
I love you, Neesy Brown.
Fat lot of good it would do her now.
He searched for excuses: it was unkind to leave; Neesy would worry. She’d be furious. She’d be sad.
But worry, anger, even hatred, were better than prison or, worse, death.
And that was the final hand. Game over. All his chips gone.
So he didn’t call Neesy. Not then. Not ever.
He pictured her free and heading back to Crossroads. Telling the new grill man about cinnamon in the French toast batter.
It gutted him. Like someone had taken a hot blade and seared through every sinew. And when it was done, he was dead to everything but rage.
He made it outside the park on foot. At a gas station, he bought a few supplies and shaved his beard in the men’s room, leaving a thick mustache. He dyed it and his hair blond at a hooker hotel off the highway, and when he was done and checked himself in the mirror, it stirred up memories. Only this time, he didn’t have an infant gurgling at him from an open drawer.
He took a bus to Orlando, where he saw the press conference on a TV in a run-down bar with a HAPPY NEW YEAR garland draping the counter.
Dutch wore that smooth smile. He had an arm around Julia, who stared straight ahead.
“Turn it up,” Mitch said quickly to the bartender.
Dutch was in the middle of a sentence. “—has had enough excitement. It’s time she got settled into a normal life in New York.”
Reporters threw questions at him, but Mitch didn’t listen.
The bastard was taking her home.
39
New Year’s came and went while Neesy waited for Mitch to show up. She lived on peanut butter crackers and Coke, afraid to leave the hotel room for fear he would call, yet worried he was outside somewhere waiting for her to appear so he could signal her.
At ten in the morning, two in the afternoon, and again at ten at night, she rushed downstairs when the lobby was the least crowded. She wore the wig and stuck a pair of sunglasses on her nose, and sat for half an hour. She took a side entrance and loitered outside, slowly cruising the property in hopes he was out there. Then she raced back to the room, hoping the phone’s message light would be on.
It never was.
She cried on the third night, sure he’d dumped her, and again in the morning, sure he was dead.
Either way, he was gone without a word.
There’d been no fights, no hard words or rough treatment leading up to it. In the end, though, it was the same: she was alone again. Why did she think Mitch would be different? She’d placed her trust in him, and he’d betrayed it like every other man she’d known. He’d walked off without telling her. Without a word of explanation. Without a single good-bye.
Dully, she thought about slinking back to Crossroads. Returning to the life she thought she’d left behind. It just about killed her. But she couldn’t stay here—this place was draining her dry, and Mitch had left her to pay the bill, damn him.
She turned on the TV so she didn’t have to think about it. That’s when she saw the press conference. If Mitch had left to look for Julia, he hadn’t succeeded. There she was with her real father squeezing her tight. God, he was a gorgeous man. How could a man who looked like that do such terrible things?
In the middle of the news report, she snapped off the TV. She was done. With Mitch, with Dutch, with feeling sorry for herself. The whole sad, sorry mess could go on without her.
But that still left Julia.
She powered up the TV again. The program had moved on to other stories, so she switched channels. And again.
There it was. The same snippet. Dutch joyous and triumphant; Julia safe.
Neesy muted the sound and stared at the girl. Not much expression on her face. She looked… dazed. Not bruised or roughed up. Just diminished. Dulled down. Where was the smart-mouthed, Mark Twain–quoting kid she knew?
Was it stage fright, having all those cameras and lights and voices shouting at her? Or was it something else?
Amid all the self-pity came a clear, sharp memory: Dutch coming down the hallway with Julia in tow. Julia staring out at the long black car at the curb.
“You promise?”
“On my honor.”
Mitch said his brother had no honor.
What would Neesy have given for someone to have made sure she was okay? How many times had she wished for a fairy godmother to sweep in and take her away?
She would never call herself a fairy godmother. With these hips and cha-chas, light on her feet wasn’t one of her best qualities. But how could she go home not knowing if Julia was all right? Mitch had trusted his child to her, and she’d let someone walk right out the door with her.
And what about Mitch? Was she going to spend the rest of her life wondering if he was alive or dead?
If he was alive, eventually he’d make his way to wherever Julia was. Did Neesy want to be serving up ham and eggs when he did?
She thought of that old, scratched-up table in the kitchen. That was her, sitting and sitting, waiting for someone to come along and fill in the cracks and polish the chrome. Well, she was done with that. Done with waiting for someone to rescue her. Time to rescue herself. Not to mention a child and her daddy.
She fished in her purse, found the phone, and dialed Loritta.
“Got some bad news,” she told the waitress. “Trisha wrecked her car and broke every bone in her body. I’m going to stay down here for a while longer. Don’t know when I’ll be back. If Crick opens, better not hold my spot.”
Neesy had never been to New York. She had all sorts of images in her head—mostly from the movies—about what it might be like. But the reality of it, the hordes of people, the buildings so tall they blocked out the sun, the sheer noise of everything—the screech of the subway echoing in her ears; the car horns; the grinding of gears; the shouting in Spanish, Korean, and who knows what—was more than she could absorb in a year, let alone a day.
Plus it was bitter cold, especially after the Florida sun. The air rushed down between buildings, turning them into Arctic wind tunnels. Her ears nearly froze off her head.
So it wasn’t surprising that she spent her first night deeply regretting her impulsive decision to come.
But she regained her sense of purpose by morning, especially after she found a tiny doughnut shop and had a chocolate glazed and a cup of coffee for less than a fortune.
The stay at that Disney money pit had nearly wiped her out, even with the cash Dutch had left. She had two assets: her car and the gun under the driver’s seat. She didn’t want to mess with
the latter, so she removed the clip, tossed it in one Dumpster, and threw the gun in another.
As for the Olds, it took a while, but eventually she found someone who’d buy it without papers. She thought it would kill her to sell it, but in the end it was less painful than she thought. It was just a car—nothing compared to the human lives at stake. And she got enough money to buy a plane ticket and keep her in coffee and doughnuts for a while if she was careful. She was staying at the cheapest place she could find, but her money wouldn’t last long if she didn’t find a job real quick.
New York was full of restaurants, even the kind she was used to, with grills and eggs over easy. But there were fewer up where she needed to be. She’d done her homework, knew that the Hanover mansion was on the Upper East Side between Madison and Fifth, where the super-rich had built massive homes at the turn of the last century. Most of them had long since been co-opted into apartments, condos, schools, and businesses. Some, like the Frick, were now museums. Hanover House stood alone, one of the few mansions that still housed a single family in much the same way it had when it was built in 1908.
She tried to reconcile what she knew about Mitch with what she learned about Hanover House, and she couldn’t keep the two images in her head at the same time.
And what about Julia? Was she in there? Did her bedroom have fifteen-foot ceilings and a fireplace? Did the wealth and the luxury and the toys compensate for the loss of the father she’d always known? Was she happy?
Was she safe?
Hanover House was a city landmark, and Neesy took an architectural walking tour that included it. She’d set off with the insane hope that when they got there, she’d run into Julia on the street. Or coming out of the house. But Neesy almost fell over when she first saw it. The sheer mass of the place made a casual meeting seem as impossible as flying to Mars.
The huge limestone façade looked more like a bank than a home. The tour guide said it encompassed nearly 20,000 square feet, contained thirty rooms, seventeen of them baths, plus a hotel-sized ballroom. Neesy couldn’t imagine growing up there, coming home from school, flinging books on the kitchen table, sitting down to milk and cookies. Maybe people like the Hanovers didn’t fling their stuff around or sit at the kitchen table.
As the tour continued, she scouted the area for coffee shops. She found five within walking distance, one on the corner of 68th and Madison. She had lunch there one day, watching the tired faces of the women behind the counter and wondering if any of them remembered Alicia Ruiz.
She chatted one up, mentioning she was looking for a job, and said she would check back. She repeated this in all five restaurants, telling stories about Crossroads and Crick’s and generally sympathizing with whatever they had to say. And she tipped generously.
It took her longer than she’d hoped, but eventually she got a bite at the place on 68th. One of their waitresses had fallen and broken her arm. It was strictly fill-in till the other girl healed, but Neesy was there the next morning, uniform pressed and ready to go.
Food was culture as far as Neesy was concerned, and there were a few things to get used to here. The bagels were hard and chewy, neither grits nor biscuits were on the menu, and when it came to tuna, there wasn’t a sweet pickle in sight. And what was a knish? Or a nosh? Luckily she was a fast learner, and customers seemed to get as much of a kick out of her accent—which she swore she didn’t have—as she got out of theirs.
She was bone tired that first night, but tips had been pretty good. Not enough to keep her in MetroCards over the long haul, but enough for now. Until she could figure out some kind of plan.
Until she’d actually seen Hanover House, she’d had some vague notion of snatching Julia off the street. Or finding some pretense to waltz in. But once she’d seen the place, she realized how foolish that was. Ain’t no one getting inside that building unless invited.
Every day she walked to and from the subway along a route that took her past Hanover House. She scanned the stone, staring at the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Julia, trapped and waving haplessly to anyone who could scale the walls and free her.
Neesy tried not to think too much about Mitch, her feelings still raw over the way he’d abandoned her. But every once in a while, she found herself dreaming about him taking her to the fancy places she saw on her way to work. Restaurants with Italian and French names, shops where a single blouse cost a month in tips. And at night? What would it have been like at night? She’d imagined him moving above her, the width of his shoulders, the cut of his jaw strong in the streetlight spilling through the window. Sometimes, to make it more real, she even brought herself to climax, pretending it was him.
But when the alarm went off in the morning, she woke up alone. Took the subway alone, squished between all the other nameless people going to work. On those days, when she felt sorry for herself and longed for her springtime lotion to brighten up her day, she reminded herself why she was here. For Julia, not her daddy.
Then, three weeks after Neesy first clapped eyes on the Hanover House, she was walking to the subway after her shift, and there she was, that small, familiar form, getting out of a long black limo in front of the mansion. Neesy stopped short, her breath clogged in her lungs.
She would have killed for a pair of binoculars, because from where she was across the street, she couldn’t get a good look at Julia. Except to note that she was bundled up for the weather in a scarf and hat and the kind of coat you go to church in, not the kind you play in. The scarf hid half her face, and besides she was mostly looking down. Two giant men, one white, one black, towered over her. They wore suits and ties and looked respectable enough. But they kept to either side as they walked her through an iron gate. Bodyguards? Prison guards? Julia disappeared into the mansion before Neesy could cry out.
After that, she grew impatient. Mitch had disappeared. Who knew if he was even alive? There was no one but her to make sure that child was protected. But the house was too big and too intimidating to just march up to the door and knock, much as she wanted to.
Instead, she wrote a letter. She told Julia she’d read about her going to New York with her new father. She told her about Trisha and her accident and how Neesy missed Crossroads and wondered if Julia missed it, too. She gave Julia her cell number and told her she could call anytime, especially if she was feeling down and needed the name of that mad-at-the-world lotion. She signed it “love,” bought a stamp, and mailed it.
She waited a few more weeks for Julia to call. It was well into February, and school was under way. But she never saw Julia coming or going again. If she hadn’t glimpsed her that one time, Neesy might have thought she wasn’t even in New York, and all this spying was for nothing.
But she had seen her. And those two brutes, who had grown exponentially ever since in Neesy’s imagination.
When another week went by without hearing from Julia, Neesy took a risk. She sent another message. She didn’t sign her name, didn’t put a return address, and didn’t even mail it. She just folded up a take-out menu from the restaurant and slipped it into the handle of the iron gate she’d seen Julia walk through.
That day she got a couple of orders wrong, spilled a cherry Coke all over a customer, and gave incorrect change. When the manager screamed at her, she blamed it on getting some bad news from home. Truth was, she hadn’t gotten any news—good or bad—because Julia never called.
She repeated the same trick with the menu the next day and the day after that. By the fifth day, she had stopped being nervous. In fact, by closing time she almost forgot to take a menu with her for the morning. It seemed silly and useless anyway. But she gave herself one last day of trying and plucked the single sheet of paper out of its holder by the cash register.
She was folding it so she could fit it in her purse when she was stopped outside.
“Miss Brown?”
One of the giants stood in front of her.
She froze.
“Miss Denise—Neesy—Brown?”
He had a deep, buttery voice and smooth black skin with small, precise features that contrasted sharply with the size of his neck. As he waited for her response, his expression was polite enough, but there was something cold in the center of his eyes. She swallowed and nodded.
“Come with me, please?”
Not on your life. “Uh… where exactly?”
“I understand you’d like to see Julia.”
She blinked in surprise. “Is she all right?”
“Come with me and see for yourself.”
Could it be this easy? She studied him, hoping to probe his true intentions. But all she could fathom from his face was cool courtesy.
She hadn’t forgotten what Mitch had told her about his brother. Was this a trick? She pictured herself in one of those movies when the heroine is standing at the top of the basement steps and everyone is yelling at the screen, “Don’t go down there!” and, as if she didn’t have a lick of sense, she does.
But if Dutch wanted to hurt her, why bother going to all this trouble to get her inside the house? Those giants could take her out anytime, anywhere. This was her chance, maybe her only chance, to see Julia. Risky or not, did she really have a choice?
“All right,” she said, and he gestured with an open arm for her to precede him into a waiting car.
She was on her guard as she got in. Hanover House was only a few blocks away; there was no need for a car. But maybe the rich never walked anywhere. In the meantime, she watched the route carefully, making sure she knew where she was going, one hand on the door so she could jump out if she needed to.
The giant, who introduced himself as Gus, said nothing. In a few minutes they’d gone around the block and were at the curb in front of the mansion. Gus opened her door, stood until she got out, then used some kind of electrical device to unlock the iron gate. With a slow, ponderous arc, it widened on its own.
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