Precipice

by Tom Savage

  And she was on her feet, knocking the chair over backward in her surprise, in her flight across the little room to the night table next to the bed, to the telephone on the table, and No, her mind cried over and over as she fumbled with the dial, No! It isn’t Germany, it isn’t a valley at all.

  The young woman ran from the room and down the stairs to the beach, calling into the office as she passed. Please come quickly, there’s been an accident—something like that. She wasn’t aware of her words, only of her frantic need to get to him, to see if he was all right. By the time she rushed around to the front of the building, the night manager was right behind her.

  She stopped at the edge of the patio and raised her hands to her face, staring down. The manager, a large, capable-looking man, pushed past her and knelt beside Bob Taylor. He placed his fingers lightly on Bob’s neck at the base of his throat, then lowered his head until his ear was next to Bob’s mouth. He stood up quickly and ran back toward the office, shouting to her as he passed.

  “He’s alive. I’ll call the hospital. Cover him with that sheet. Try to keep him warm, but don’t move him. Understand?”

  She nodded absently, listening as his running footsteps receded. Then she stepped forward and dropped to her knees. She lifted the striped sheet from where it lay and placed it as gently as she could across his body. She leaned over him as the man had done, straining her ears, barely able to make out the shallow, ragged breathing. But it was there. It was definitely there. . . .

  Reaching over, she took his outflung hand gently in her own. She remained there for a long time, whispering quietly to him, unaware of the manager’s return and the gradual assembling of two or three other guests around the patio, the low murmurs and concerned glances, the hot tears that streamed down her cheeks and dropped softly onto the sheet. She didn’t know, would never remember, what she whispered to him, whether encouragement or endearment or confession. All three, perhaps. She would only remember that at some point, somewhere in the long, anxious minutes that she knelt there waiting for the ambulance to arrive, in his room behind the balcony above her head the telephone began to ring. It rang and rang and rang, and then was silent.

  PART THREE

  GODDESS OF THE DARK

  SEVENTEEN

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 1

  “HI, MOMMY.”

  “Hello, darling. How’s Connecticut?”

  “Oh, it’s super! I wish you and Diana could be here. They have two new horses!”

  “That’s lovely. Have you been riding yet?”

  “Sure, we did that first thing. We’ve been twice now. Aunt Fran is taking us to the movies tonight, and tomorrow there’s a big picnic at their school.”

  “Well, sounds like you’re going to be busy. I’ll see you Thursday, sweetheart. Say hello to the kids for me. Now put Aunt Fran back on, all right?”

  “Okay. ’Bye, Mommy. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, darling.”

  “Bolongo.”

  “Hello, I wonder if you can help me. I’ve been trying to reach one of your guests, but he’s not answering his phone. Robert Taylor, in room—let me see, I wrote it down somewhere—”

  “Robert Taylor? Umm—well, ma’am, Mr. Taylor—one moment, please. . . .”

  “Hello, this is the hotel manager. You were inquiring about Mr. Robert Taylor?”

  “Yes, I—”

  “May I ask to whom I am speaking?”

  “This is Margaret Barclay. I’m calling from New York, and I’ve been trying to reach—”

  “Are you a relative, Ms. Barclay?”

  “A relative? I—umm—is something wrong with Mr. Taylor?”

  “Ma’am, are you a relative?”

  “I don’t—yes, I’m a relative. I’m—I’m his mother.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there’s been an accident. Your son is in St. Thomas Hospital. There weren’t any papers among his things, and we weren’t able to ascertain—”

  “Excuse me, what sort of accident? Please, is—my son—all right?”

  “I really—let me give you the number of the hospital, ma’am. They’ll be able to tell you more than—”

  “Yes, but what happened?”

  “He fell, Ms. Barclay. From the balcony outside his room. I believe he has a concussion, and a broken leg, but they seem to think—”

  “Fell? Was he—oh, God—was he—how?”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. The doctors can tell you more. Or perhaps Ms. Meissen.”

  “Ms. Meissen?”

  “The young woman who saw it.”

  “She saw it?”

  “Yes, ma’am. She was with him when it happened. Here’s the number of the hospital. . . .”

  The young woman replaced the receiver in its cradle and wandered away from the phone booth, down the walkway in front of the tourist shops of Havensight Mall, toward the piers where two cruise ships were docked.

  So, she thought. That’s that. The end.

  She hugged her upper arms with her hands, regretting her decision not to wear a sweater. Evening in St. Thomas could be so chilly: she should know that by now. At the moment she didn’t seem to know anything, couldn’t think clearly.

  Car: poor, sweet, wonderful Car, my dearest friend. Gone.

  There was a bench near a row of little palm trees in front of the entrance to the dock. The shopping center was nearly deserted at this hour: the stores were closed, and the passengers aboard the ships would be sitting down to dinner now. She was alone in the tiny park. She sat down and leaned back, staring up at the enormous liner before her. Lights shone through the portholes, and she could hear faint music and laughter from the decks above. Her eyes traveled slowly along the majestic hull to the prow. She squinted through the gloom of dusk to make out the name of the vessel: Song of Norway. Lovely, she thought vaguely. A beautiful name for a beautiful ship. Song of Norway: that was the title of a Broadway musical, the story of Grieg. Car used to play the original cast recording on his stereo. The two of us would sit in his living room together for hours, listening. “Strange music in my ear. . . .”

  Car. Carson Fleming. Gone.

  Margaret had never known about him. He had been her secret. He had visited her twice when she was in the hospital, bringing candy and flowers. Once his wife had been with him. After that she hadn’t seen him again for eight years, but every year he’d sent her birthday and Christmas cards. Then, when she was fourteen, the day after her first expulsion for fighting with the other girls who teased her about her parents, she’d gotten on a train and gone to see him at his home in Suffolk County. His wife was ill by then; she died the following year, just before . . .

  It was difficult to describe the bond that existed between herself and Car. She’d read somewhere about the Japanese custom of indentured servitude: if you saved someone’s life, you became responsible for that life. Car apparently subscribed to that theory, even though he hadn’t technically saved her from anything. But he’d unwittingly played a part in the most terrible event of her life, and their fates had become inextricably intertwined.

  She’d sneaked out of the house almost every day in the weeks after Mrs. Fleming succumbed to cancer, tending to the shattered, lonely old man. They would have seemed an odd pair if anyone had observed them: the fifteen-year-old girl making meals and cleaning up after the elderly widower, who sat in the big, battered chair in his dingy living room, staring at the walls. But nobody did see them. Their friendship had remained a private matter.

  In their mutual isolation, they had reached out to each other. She had visited him at every opportunity, often coaxing him out of his house for trips to the movies or the park or the shopping mall. She always paid for everything: his meager pension had been depleted by his wife’s long, costly illness. She even took to giving him an allowance of sorts. He always accepted reluctantly, promising to pay it back. He never had, of course. Even at fifteen, she was wise enough to realize that he drank too much. Never in her presenc
e, but she knew just the same.

  He had returned his young friend’s charity with a far greater gift. It was Car—not the doctors or the priests or Margaret—who had slowly convinced her that she had done nothing wrong on that awful night all those years before. She had been traumatized, and the shock had served to blot out the entire incident from her memory. All she remembered was a face wearing a mask, and the moment, the next morning in her mother’s bedroom, over her mother’s body, when she blurted out her macabre confession.

  “Mommy’s dead,” she’d whispered to an astonished Carson Fleming. “I killed her.”

  For eight years, until she met the mailman again, she had actually believed her own words. She thought she had somehow caused her mother’s death and her father’s subsequent suicide. The old man had helped to banish that misconception. It had taken him the better part of two years.

  Then, when she was sixteen, on the eve of her departure for boarding school upstate, exactly ten years to the day after the nightmare in Islip, he had again come to her aid. She would never forget that day in the beginning of September when she had risen as usual and gone downstairs for breakfast with Margaret. She’d been in the act of lifting a spoonful of cereal to her mouth when she happened to look up at the open newspaper Margaret was perusing. There, across the table, four feet in front of her face, was the front page with the photograph and the lurid headline: “HOTEL HEIRESS SLAIN.” Her idly curious gaze had traveled down from the young woman standing beside the rattan chair in the well-appointed tropical home to the desolate face of the victim’s grieving husband.

  And everything had stopped. Been changed. Forever.

  It was the eyes: she’d recognized them immediately.

  As soon as she could get away, she’d stumbled onto the train and made her way—blindly, automatically—to Car’s house in Islip. With trembling hands, she’d held out the newspaper for his inspection. He’d stared at the photograph, not at all convinced. But she had been adamant, and finally—for her peace of mind more than for any other reason—he’d agreed to her hastily drawn-up plan: she would go off to school, and he would be her “legman.” That was what he’d called himself. She’d paid for everything, even putting him “on retainer,” which she’d continued to pay every three months for the rest of his life. And he’d actually gone to Hawaii. . .

  Five days later, she’d been summoned to the telephone in her dormitory in New Paltz and heard his hoarse, incredulous affirmation of her worst fears. He had seen the figure in the mask. He had stood ten feet away, on the steps of a courthouse in Hawaii, staring, looking past the black hair and beard at the face of Andrew Phillips.

  The face of Albert Petersen.

  The next time they met, weeks later at his house in Islip, she’d made it clear to Car that they would not go to the police. They would wait and watch. But she rested easier in that time because she knew, at last, the identity of the figure in the mask.

  And she knew where he was.

  Then, three years later, the yacht in Hawaii had blown up and the body had been found. The woman and her child and the mate from the yacht all disappeared, along with the hotel woman’s fortune. Only two people in the world could guess what had really happened. She’d been nineteen then, and she and Carson Fleming had known, even as the story broke, that the remains on the yacht were mostly likely those of the mate, and that the mistress, Kimberly Brown, and her child were probably at the bottom of the sea.

  Remembering her own childhood, she’d told Car her suspicions about her baby-sitter, Karen Lawrence. He’d agreed with her this time: Lawrence was presumably dead. She’d even wondered whether the friend from the Merchant Marines—Charlie something, who’d carried on so at the memorial service—might have been involved.

  The next day, she’d quit Nassau Community College and flown to Hawaii. By the time she arrived there, the figure in the mask had once again disappeared. Her frustration, her despair of ever finding him again had prompted the reckless drink- and drug-soaked excursion to San Francisco. She’d blocked out the following months just as she’d blocked out the night of her mother’s murder. When she came to her senses, she was strapped into a bed in a rehab center on Long Island. The baby that had been growing inside her had been taken away from her, and with it her will to live. Then her half-hearted excursion to Harvard and the suicide attempt, and Juana Velasquez, and a vague new idea of becoming an actress. Not for fame or fortune, however: she knew innately that if the phantom who plagued her ever turned up again, her best chance was to play by his rules.

  Which was exactly what she’d eventually done.

  Car had been frantic all the time she was in California and at the clinic on Long Island. He’d received the usual money every three months, in envelopes postmarked San Francisco, but he had not otherwise heard from her. He’d even considered the possibility of approaching Margaret Barclay, but then—wisely or unwisely, he was never certain—changed his mind.

  Upon her release from the clinic, she’d immediately gone to see him. He had been overjoyed to find her again, and he threw himself into the role of “legman” with even more energy. He decided, privately, that it was his sacred mission, his quest, to find her enemy again in whatever new lair he had chosen. He had the idea in his head that this intense young woman was in need of a champion of sorts, a protector, and he would play that role.

  He and the girl had at least one lead in their quest for the man in the mask: their quarry’s positive mania for keeping to old patterns. They knew that their search would probably end in a place somewhere in America, near the ocean and sailboats. And money. An oceanside playground with plenty of attractive, rich, available women. That had narrowed the field considerably.

  While she went off to Harvard, Car took to collecting daily newspapers from the most likely locales. Every day—thanks to old acquaintances at the post office—he received some thirty newspapers, and he spent a good portion of every afternoon and evening scanning the society pages. Her dismissal from Harvard and her attempt at suicide spurred him on, bringing an even greater sense of urgency to his search.

  He eliminated New York and Hawaii and anywhere close to them: their quarry was not insane—not in that respect, at any rate. He eliminated lakes and rivers: a serious boat person seeks only open water. He eliminated colder, northern reaches such as Maine and Washington and Canada. The Gulf Coast and the Caribbean were the most likely suspects. . . .

  He slowly became aware during this time—and he mentioned it to the girl—that he was beginning to think like their quarry. This filled him with an odd satisfaction, gave him the truest pleasure he’d experienced since the death of his wife. He began to realize that he was actually enjoying it.

  Florida. Louisianna. Texas. Southern California. Cape Cod. Chesapeake Bay. The Carolinas. Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. The papers arrived, were perused and removed. Once or twice in that long, long time he felt a fleeting sense of despair, but he suppressed it and soldiered on. There would eventually be a new wife, he reasoned, and that woman would definitely be rich—the sort of person who occasionally made headlines.

  The headline—and the all-revealing photograph—had appeared on the society page of the Virgin Islands Daily News one day in June, three years ago: “LOCAL WIDOW MARRIES SPORTSMAN.” He’d passed it on to the girl, and she’d pasted the notice onto the last page of her album, but the sight of the happy, smiling people had upset her so much that she’d removed the photograph and destroyed it. But now they knew: his name was currently Adam Prescott, and he was living in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

  Car had left immediately for St. Thomas. A few days later he was back, with names and addresses and a now-familiar story. A rich widow, a yacht, and a house near the ocean. This woman, Kay Belden, now Prescott, had a child. A girl named Lisa.

  She’d thought about all of this for a long time. Car had left her alone, waiting for her to decide what they were going to do with their new knowledge. He was all for going to the pol
ice, but he knew his young friend would not agree with him. She would probably come up with some other plan.

  As, indeed, she had. She’d gone to work every day in the little dress shop in Glen Cove and enrolled in acting classes at the Herbert Berghof Studio. She’d had to audition for a place in the class, of course. Uta Hagen herself had been her monitor. She’d never been so nervous—well, almost never—but she relied on her instincts and trusted in her material.

  For the audition she had chosen Antigone. Not the speech she’d declaimed so melodramatically in school; this time she used the final scene of the play. An audacious, presumptuous move: Miss Hagen had probably played the part herself at some point, and she’d be familiar with the interpretations of Katharine Cornell and Irene Papas and Genevieve Bujold and Heaven knew which other illustrious colleagues in both the original version and the modern retelling by Anouilh. But it felt right—it was a role that she alone understood completely.

  No toga this time, just street clothes. She’d stood in the classroom before the great actress and allowed the emotions to flow through her. She had been condemned to execution for attempting to bury her brother, defamed as a traitor. She spoke of duty, of honor, of the sacred demands of blood. Of her need, regardless of the pronouncements of kings, to bury her dead and thus preserve the name of her family. Her crime had been one of necessity, beyond the petty laws of men, and the gods, she knew, would forgive her. As the soldiers bound her hands and led her away, she turned at the last moment to the watching, weeping chorus.

  “Behold me,” she’d commanded, “what I suffer. . . .”

  And so her acting training had begun. She’d studied, storing every lesson of characterization and carriage and makeup, waiting for the day when they would be put to excellent use.

  She’d waited for almost three years. She knew that Kay Prescott and her daughter were safe for the present, though she did not share that knowledge with Car.