‘Oh, God,’ Nina said.
Nick reached for her hand. ‘The news isn’t bad, sweetheart.’
‘But they don’t know that, do they?’ Nina said. ‘They don’t know anything for sure.’ Her voice pitched higher. ‘And what about her poor arms? Both in plaster like that – maybe she doesn’t want to wake up.’
‘Take it easy, my darling.’ Ford put one arm around her shoulders and Nina let go of Nick’s hand and leaned against her father. ‘Of course she wants to wake up. She’s going to be all right, I know she’ll be back with us soon.’
‘It’s hard all round,’ Liebowitz said, gently, to Nick, and smiled at him. ‘You need to be very patient.’
Nick looked at Nina and William, at their closeness.
‘Yes,’ he said.
Chapter Twenty-six
An investigator for the insurance company checking into Phoebe’s accident, came to talk to Nina, Nick and William at the hospital on the eighth morning after Zoë’s birth. They found an empty waiting room on the same floor as the premature baby unit.
He handed Nick his card. ‘Lawrence Dinkin,’ he said. He looked around for somewhere to put his raincoat. It hadn’t rained for a while; it seldom did rain much in July in San Francisco. There was an antiseptic smell about him and the expression on his thin face was doleful. He would, Nick thought, have made a fine funeral director.
‘What can we do for you, Mr Dinkin?’ Nick asked.
‘Why don’t we all sit down?’ Dinkin suggested.
‘Will this take long?’ Nina wanted to know. ‘I want to get back to my daughter.’ She was restless all the time, never settling in one spot for long, only sleeping when sheer exhaustion overcame her.
‘I understand that, Mrs Miller.’
Everyone except Ford sat down, Dinkin with his briefcase on his knees. It was a nice enough waiting room, its walls almost covered with photographs of parents and their babies on the point of leaving People’s Hospital.
‘Have you found out what made that damned wall collapse?’ Ford was seldom slow in coming to the point.
‘The wall collapsed, sir,’ Lawrence Dinkin answered, ‘because that’s what it was ready to do.’
‘What does that mean?’ Nick asked.
‘It means,’ Dinkin said, ‘that the wall, front steps and much of 2020 Catherine Street were in an unsafe condition, and that this was known, to the owner and to the building firm which was getting ready to move in to start work.’
‘Are you telling us the house was going to be demolished?’ William Ford stood close to Dinkin, bending slightly from the waist and looking more than a little menacing.
‘Not demolished, sir, no.’ Lawrence Dinkin, accustomed to hostility in his line of work, was unfazed by the older man’s manner. ‘But much of the stonework, and the steps and porch in particular, were scheduled to be strengthened or rebuilt.’
‘Then what was Phoebe doing there?’ Nick asked.
‘She went to value the house,’ Dinkin answered.
‘She wouldn’t do that,’ Nina said.
It was the first time she had spoken since they had all sat down. She had been very quiet – too quiet – too much of the time since the accident and Zoë’s birth. Nick watched her sometimes when she was being particularly uncommunicative, sensing the constant thoughts and fears churning around inside her mind like a laundry overload in a tumble drier.
‘Phoebe and I seldom take on houses in such poor condition,’ Nina explained, ‘unless we have a client we know is especially keen to take on renovation work – and even then we’d discuss it first and probably go together. We hardly ever go to empty properties alone.’
Mr Dinkin opened the briefcase resting on his knees, and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘This was found in your sister’s purse, Mrs Miller.’ He leaned forward and handed it to her. ‘It’s a copy of a facsimile sent to the offices of Ford Realty shortly before Ms Ford went to Catherine Street.’
Nina read it. ‘It’s addressed to me,’ she said.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘May I see it?’ Nick asked. Nina passed it to him. ‘Who’s this G. Angelotti?’ he asked right away, reading the fax and then passing it on to William Ford.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Nina said.
‘A prospective client, it would seem from the fax,’ Dinkin said.
‘What does he have to say about it?’ Ford asked. ‘You have spoken to this Angelotti character, haven’t you?’
Lawrence Dinkin looked up at William Ford, still standing over him. ‘We haven’t been able to trace any such person, sir.’
‘What about the fax-back number for the secretary?’ Nina asked.
‘That number belongs to a machine in a public fax bureau on Market Street,’ Dinkin replied. ‘Unfortunately, they don’t keep records of customers, so it wasn’t much help.’ He paused. ‘Ms Ford did send a reply, by the way, Mrs Miller.’ He checked his notes. ‘At three forty-seven – probably just before she went to see the house. Your manager, Mrs Hill, found the original on her desk, and the bureau confirmed receipt, but no one ever came to pick it up or called about it.’
‘So we don’t even know know if Angelotti’s a man or a woman,’ Nick said.
‘Not yet,’ Lawrence Dinkin confirmed.
‘Maybe you’d better try a little harder to find out,’ Ford suggested.
Dinkin gave a thin smile. ‘We’ve been very thorough, sir. The property at 2020 Catherine Street is owned by a woman named Mary-Anne Brown.’
‘So what does she say about it?’
‘Nothing at all. Mrs Brown is ninety-eight years old and lives in a nursing home in New Mexico. Her affairs are handled by a law firm by the name of Dwight, Abraham and Shapiro. I’ve talked at length with Joseph Shapiro, and it would seem that neither the fax nor G. Angelotti has anything to do with either the law firm or with Mrs Brown.’
‘How can you be sure of that?’ Nick asked.
‘Mary-Anne Brown owns several properties in that section of Catherine Street,’ Dinkin explained. ‘Five of them are in roughly the same state of disrepair as 2020. Neither Mrs Brown nor any member of her family has expressed a wish to part with any of the properties, the intention being to renovate, restore and rent.’
There was a brief silence as Dinkin’s information sank in.
‘You’re saying someone, under false pretences, deliberately got Phoebe to go and inspect a dangerous house,’ Nina said slowly.
‘The fax was addressed to you, Nina,’ Nick reminded her.
‘Indeed it was,’ Dinkin agreed.
William Ford sat down at last, suddenly pale.
‘You’re telling us this was no accident, aren’t you, Mr Dinkin?’
Dinkin nodded. ‘It would seem to look as if that might be the case.’ He paused. ‘All Mrs Brown’s other properties on Catherine Street have danger signs clearly displayed on their windows, and tapes marked DANGER tied across the steps to alert people to the risks.’
‘What about 2020?’ Nick asked.
‘The passer-by who found Ms Ford after the accident,’ Dinkin said, ‘told the police that he didn’t remember seeing any danger signs. He was correct – there were none when the paramedics arrived. But according to Joseph Shapiro, the builders swear the signs were on 2020, just as they were on all the others. If the builders are telling the truth, then that means the signs were removed.’
‘By this Angelotti?’ William Ford stared down at the copy of the fax still in his hands.
‘By someone,’ Lawrence Dinkin said.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Lawrence Dinkin spent a while longer with us this morning. He seemed to want to talk about us as a family, about how we relate to one another, the time we spend together, working and otherwise. He seems a dry kind of a man, not the type of person to be particularly interested either in art or in the world of children’s literature, yet he expressed fascination in the way Firefly came into being and how we all felt and still feel about its great success
.
Nina stood Dinkin for about another five minutes after she’d established that he had nothing more to offer on the cause of Phoebe’s fall. ‘If you don’t need me,’ she said, ‘I have a new baby who does,’ and then she simply walked out of the room. That left William, Dinkin and me. If I say that Lawrence Dinkin spent the next fifteen to twenty minutes pumping me about my relationship with my sister-in-law, and if I say that he gave me a nasty feeling that he was trying to decide if I might have some deep, dark reason for wanting Phoebe to take a dive off a derelict building, that probably makes me sound paranoid. But it is the way I feel – or rather, it’s the way I would be feeling if I had the time and space in my brain to give a fuck what Dinkin thinks about me. Not to mention William, who spent the last portion of that interview staring at me with blatant suspicion, all his paternal antennae bristling, while the investigator asked his irritating, insulting, crazy questions.
My personal priorities right now are clearly sorted. I need my baby daughter to be released from that incubator into her parents’ arms. I need Nina’s sister awake and functioning and back to being Phoebe again, not this terrifyingly pale-faced, sleeping woman on white sheets. And then, after those two top-priority prayers have been granted, I need someone to find out who on God’s sweet earth sent that fax, took away those danger signs and tried their damnedest to steal Phoebe away from us.
Except that G. Angelotti, whoever the hell he is – if he even exists – didn’t send that fax to Phoebe, did he? He sent it to Nina. And as I told Lawrence Dinkin, that’s just as wild, just as improbable as if it had been aimed at Phoebe, because everyone who knows Nina loves her, and Ford Realty is in the business of buying, selling and renting property, not making serious enemies.
‘This has to be a mistake,’ I told Dinkin. ‘It has to have been an accident.’
‘Under the circumstances,’ the insurance man came back smoothly, ‘that hardly seems possible, given that neither the owner of 2020 Catherine Street nor anyone connected with her, either knows a G. Angelotti or has even considered putting the house on the market.’ He paused. ‘Unless you have some alternative explanation, Mr Miller.’
I had none then. I have none now.
What Dinkin says is patently right. There is no mistake. Whoever sent that fax to Nina meant her to go to Haight Ashbury and, presumably, to climb those steps. And to fall.
I guess that gives me another priority, every bit as overwhelming as the others.
I need to protect my wife.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Not long after Holly moved out of my Christopher Street apartment in 1987, my mother wrote to me again to report that Holly had been back to Bethesda on a visit, and had told Eleanor and Richard all about our ‘break-up’.
Your father and I – Kate wrote – are both surprised and disappointed in you for the shabby way you’ve treated Holly. We can’t help wishing you could have acted with a little more sensitivity.
It’s hard to say who I was more angry with right then: Holly, for her lies, or my own parents for believing them. I called home, told my mother very coolly that in future she might consider asking me for my side of a story before accepting someone else’s version. Startled and defensive, Kate asked me a few loaded questions and instantly concluded that I was older, that Holly was all alone in the big city in her freshman year, and that it was, therefore, my fault.
Why didn’t that surprise me more than it did?
Less than three weeks later, my next-door neighbour Frank Zilotti moved out of his apartment. That same night I got home late after working my shift as a waiter at Bradley’s (cash had been tight enough even when Holly had been sharing the rent, but now I was waiting tables and tending bar at the Village Gate to make ends meet) to hear the unmistakable sounds of a new tenant moving in. Furniture being moved around, doors opening and closing, soothing music playing. For a while it was Mozart, then Bach, then Sinatra and Jimmy Van Heusen took over with ‘All the Way.’
I was not particularly unhappy. It was late, but at least their taste was okay.
The song ended, there was silence for a second or two, and then it began again. I looked at the clock, saw it was almost two, thought about knocking on their door, decided to give my new neighbour a first-night break and went to bed. I was bushed anyway – I was generally tired enough to sleep through almost anything in those days.
‘I’d lost track of how many times Sinatra had told me someone loving me was no good unless they were going to love me all the way, when mercifully, I crashed.
Next morning there was blissful silence and I figured, as I poured my first cup of coffee, that the obsessive Sinatra-fest had probably just been some moving-trauma-related coping device. I forgot about it. I put in an hour’s sketching, assembled my notes in readiness for that day’s lecture on Chinese painting in the Yuan Dynasty, and was just closing my own front door when the door to Zilotti’s old place swung open.
‘Good morning.’
Holly was standing there in the doorway wearing frayed cut-off denims and a white T-shirt with red strawberries printed over the right breast. She looked like someone who’s fixed up a surprise party and expects the recipient to be ecstatic.
I was not. I was shocked.
‘Isn’t this great?’ Holly said.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked, though it was, of course, perfectly obvious.
‘It was all such a big, fabulous coincidence,’ she told me, ‘Zilotti’s place being up for grabs just exactly when I was looking, and I decided it had to be fate dragging me back here. Don’t you think it must be?’
I didn’t think I ought to say exactly what I thought, so I kept silent and let her ramble on.
‘And all our problems – your problems really, since I never had any – were mostly because of our living together in the same apartment. This way,’ she went on, ‘it’ll really be almost like the old days in Bethesda, don’t you think? Best friends and neighbours. Could anything be more perfect?’
It was borderline alarming. It was so much like listening to an echo of what Holly had said almost a year before when she’d talked me into letting her become my lodger. All kinds of thoughts swerved through my brain and veered away again: thing I ought to say to her about her lies, and about her nerve in coming back, and about how she shouldn’t bother unpacking because I had no intention of letting her stay there.
But there was no point saying any of those things, because it was no business of mine whether she lived in Zilotti’s old apartment or not. Holly had presumably signed her lease and paid her rent.
And short of either breaking the law and physically throwing her out, or making my feelings blindingly clear and making an enemy out of her, there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it.
As it had when we’d first shared my place, it started out well enough. We led different lives. I was in my junior year, Holly was a sophomore. I was majoring in fine arts with film arts as my minor; she was studying prelaw. Much of my time – when I wasn’t at the Tisch School – was spent uptown in and around the Duke and Chan houses and museums; Holly’s working life centred around Washington Square and the law library in Vanderbilt Hall. If her evenings were free, I didn’t know or care, because I was invariably working.
It seemed to be working out. Several times in the first month or two, Holly asked me to come in for a cup of coffee, and when I told her I was either working, painting, studying or planning to sleep, she showed no signs of taking offence. Yet by the end of 1987, I knew that Holly’s outward breeziness was masking the return of her old, almost-but-never-quite-forgotten craving for risk-taking.
I knew it, because Holly made sure I did.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Holly rang Nick’s doorbell one December morning.
‘I got you a present.’ She handed him a parcel wrapped in blue paper printed with bright yellow balloons. It was a cold morning and the heating in their building was notoriously inadequate, but she was wearing a w
hite man’s shirt and her toenails were painted scarlet. ‘Let me know if you like it,’ she said, and went right back home.
It was a brown Ralph Lauren sweater.
Nick rang her bell a few minutes later.
‘I can’t accept this,’ he said and held it out.
‘Why not?’ Holly was peaceable about it.
‘Because you shouldn’t be buying me expensive gifts.’
‘I didn’t.’ She took a step back. ‘Coming in?’
‘I don’t have time,’ Nick said. ‘Holly, Ralph Lauren doesn’t come cheap, even on sale.’
‘It wasn’t on sale,’ Holly said.
‘All the more reason.’ Nick held it out again, insistently. ‘Come on, Holly, take it back, please. It’s much too expensive.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
He got tougher. ‘You have to realize we don’t have that kind of relationship any more. We’re neighbours, nothing else.’
Holly smiled. ‘Nick, it wasn’t expensive because I didn’t buy it.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘What do you think it means?’ She paused. ‘How did I always used to pick up little things I wanted in the good old days?’
It took him a moment. ‘You stole it?’ He was incredulous.
‘Sure I did.’
‘Jesus, Holly.’ For the third time Nick thrust the sweater at her. ‘Take it back right now.’
‘It’s not my size.’
‘So take it back to where you stole it from.’ He threw it hard past her and it landed on the rug behind her.
Her grey eyes were calm. ‘You never used to be so fussy.’
‘I was a kid. I grew up.’ Nick shook his head as he turned away.
‘Pity,’ he heard her say.
That was just the start. Holly knew that Nick was determined not to get involved, but that didn’t stop her trying to tell him about the stuff she got up to. He refused to spend time with her, so she took to ambushing him on the stairs, or she would just happen to be coming out of the building when he was coming in, or she waited for him outside the Tisch School or wherever she knew he was going to be working. He did his best to ignore her, began to realize that she was sick in some way, but one of the most remarkable and disconcerting things about it was that he knew that Holly’s image with others was as intact as ever. Only Nick knew that she hung around crazy, dangerous places to buy dope, that she shoplifted, that she got a huge buzz from eating at expensive restaurants and skipping out without paying.
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