Too Close

by Hilary Norman

  They took me away.

  They let me go home again after a few hours. The events of that afternoon are blurry, which is the only mercy. If the drugs thing was crazy, this was beyond insanity.

  They have pictures. Of me playing with naked children by a pool at a house in Carmel. They have to warn me, they said, that I fit a description – as near as damnit – that they have on file of a multiple child molester. And so, these photographs having come into their possession, they want to talk to me.

  You wouldn’t believe the way those pictures make me look.

  All I did was smile, wave my hand and toss them their ball.

  I look like a genuine dirtbag.

  Nina called Chris Field, the lawyer who had spoken with the Narcotics police on my behalf in August. We hadn’t met back then, but now, faced with his youth, efficiency and ice-blue eyes, I couldn’t shake off the uncomfortable sense that he wasn’t as totally convinced of my blamelessness as I needed him to be.

  According to Field, the fact that I have the translation manuscript and Bruno Conti’s letter means little to the police. Paedophiles, the cops say, are adept at creating smokescreens. Paedophiles!

  The bleak fact is that there is no one who can conclusively prove my innocence. Nina did what she could to back up my account of what had led me to Carmel, and then alerted Clare Hawkins, who dropped everything to come and do the same.

  Except, of course, neither she nor Nina was actually there.

  On the good news front, such as it is, the cops don’t have anyone on their side who was there either. The house belongs, Field tells us, to a seventy-three-year-old sculptor who spends most of every summer and early fall on the Côte d’Azur in France. The property stands empty and unstaffed, except on Fridays when a maintenance company cleans and checks out the place.

  There’s no evidence that I – or anyone else – broke into the house. No neighbour to even back up the police’s notion that I might have obtained keys and let myself in. There’s also no Mexican housekeeper, no children, no parents, and definitely no Bruno Conti. Just a bunch of maybe-indecent-looking pictures sent to them anonymously and untraceably.

  So they had to let me go, didn’t they?

  Like I said, I don’t remember – prefer not to remember – every detail of my afternoon with the Juvenile inspectors and the detective from Carmel, but I do know that, some time before Chris Field arrived and told me to keep my mouth shut, I told the officers that it was clear to me I’d been framed. And I told them what had happened last month.

  ‘That was a set-up too,’ I said.

  I knew, as soon as I saw their expressions when they returned from checking my claim with Narcotics, that I’d made another mistake, that I had just voluntarily dived from the rank of ‘possible sleaze’ to ‘unproven major-league scumbag’. The kind they were not likely to have an ounce of sympathy for.

  The kind they were even less likely to forget about.

  The alarm bells that started ringing softly – too softly – in August when Inspectors Abbott and Riley arrived at the hospital with their search warrant, are by now shrieking in my head fiercely enough to give me a force ten migraine.

  Prior arrest. Riley pointed that out, as I recall. Yes, I do have that prior. And I had a beating, too, just before that, from two ugly sonofabitch drug pushers in my New York apartment.

  Another memory zeroes in, from way back. A nasty, dirty little rumour going around my high school that I had sexually assaulted a thirteen-year-old.

  It can’t be Holly, I tell myself again.

  How can it be?

  It has been more than six years. She is a happily married attorney living in Manhattan. We’ve both moved on.

  It cannot be Holly.

  Clare Hawkins – having failed to find any trace of Bruno Conti, and having also ascertained from Lisa Cellini, the Italian author of Graziella, that she and no one else owns the English translation rights to the story – thinks that Firefly may be at the root of this craziness.

  ‘We’re in California, Nick,’ she said yesterday evening when she came over to Antonia Street for a bowl of vegetarian chilli and a pow-wow at the kitchen table. ‘We have more than our fair share of sickies who thrive on child pornography.’

  ‘What does Firefly have to do with porn?’ Nina jumped in before I could, her expression scandalized.

  ‘Not a thing, to you or me or Phoebe,’ Clare said. ‘But there are weirdos around who may have found those fragile, sensuous illustrations of Nick’s some kind of turn-on.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Nina said.

  ‘You don’t want to believe it,’ Clare told her. ‘And even if that’s not it, there are plenty more low-lives who get their kicks out of stirring up gossip and innuendo – the dirtier the better. Any one of them could be looking to try to make big bucks out of selling this story to the media.’

  ‘That makes no sense,’ I said. ‘I’m not famous, so no one would buy the story – and if they were going to try blackmail, surely they’d have sent the photos to me, not the police?’

  ‘So what does it mean?’ Nina stirred her chilli disconsolately.

  ‘I’d go with my sickie theory,’ Clare said.

  ‘It’s horrible,’ Nina said.

  I said nothing more. I didn’t believe in either of Clare’s explanations last night and I still don’t this Thursday morning.

  It is crazy even to think of linking my troubles with the cops to Holly Bourne. Yet I do. Suddenly it seems perfectly feasible to me that she might have let me alone for a few years because she knew I was just treading water, buying time. Until I met Nina. Or maybe Holly was happy for a while herself, with her career, with her husband. God knows what it is that makes Holly do the things she does. What made her lie and steal as a child and then lay the blame like a gift at my feet, all the while telling me how much she loved me.

  This morning Nina talked to William in Arizona and found out the latest news on Phoebe – no significant change, more’s the pity – and now she’s gone to Ford Realty and I’m in charge of our daughter.

  Zoë is in perfect shape, according to Sam Ellington. He’s trained us to get used to calculating her ‘corrected’ age when we’re studying her physical and behavioural development. Zoë may have been born just over two months ago, but because she came along four weeks early, we should be expecting her to react the way she would if she were only one month old. It’s just an infancy thing, Sam assures us. In time, he says, we’ll be able to forget all about corrected age and the other vestiges of prematurity. In many ways, I think Nina and I have almost forgotten them already. To us, all that counts is that Zoë’s here with us and that she’s healthy. Her mother aside, I have to tell you that I truly believe our daughter is the most beautiful human being I’ve ever laid eyes on. Her hair seems to be turning from golden peachy fuzz to an unmistakable red, just like her aunt’s, and her skin – that disturbingly mottled born-too-soon appearance long gone – is exquisitely, delicately pale.

  Light of our lives.

  I’ve been afraid of the past for a long time. But until now there was at least always a blanket of certainty that it was the past that I could throw over my fear to douse my nightmares. And now that blanket has been snatched away.

  By Holly.

  I do know that it’s Holly. Everything points to her, no matter how hard I try to fight the suspicion. Nothing else makes real sense to me.

  Which means that, finally, I have to tell Nina the whole story. Every last, ugly piece of it. There’s no choice left to me. This is more than phoney drugs charges and damning photographs.

  Because if Holly is behind those things, then doesn’t that have to lead on to far worse, far more monstrous suspicions?

  I think back to Julie in New York and remember Holly trying to destroy that relationship. And that was just a relationship, not lasting love. Not a marriage.

  I hope to God that I’m wrong. That Holly really is the happily married, stable and responsible lawye
r her parents claim, who has long since put the past behind her. But I can’t go on ignoring the possibility that I may be right. Nina and Zoë are the most precious people in my life, and Phoebe is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a sister.

  Except for Holly, of course, who used to call me her big brother. When she wasn’t calling me her lover.

  That is why, when Nina gets home this afternoon, I will have to sit her down and tell her the whole truth.

  And risk losing everything.

  Chapter Forty

  Holly is finding the waiting frustrating. Keeping things together with Jack at home and at Taylor Griffin is getting harder every day. She lost one of her few clients only yesterday because she allowed her attention to wander during a meeting, and he walked out on her. Not that she gives a damn. He was nothing, a petty fraudster, a nobody.

  If only she could have been at the Juvenile Division on Valencia during Nick’s questioning. If she could have seen for herself the shock on his face when they first picked him up and later, when he saw the photographs. Her photographs. Best of all, if she could have seen him talking to his wife about it. Seen Nina’s face.

  But you can’t have everything. Not all at once, anyhow.

  The rest was all so simple to organize. A few calls and a little action. Not so hard with the contacts she’s been making. No shortage of hungry, vulnerable, desperate people willing to help out an anonymous woman with ready cash to hand over.

  It was hearing Dina Stimson, the wife of one of Jack’s friends, talking about Graziella that sparked this particular idea. Dina, who fancies herself something of a linguist, told Holly at a party that she’d been reading to her daughter from a veritable suitcase of French and Italian children’s books brought back from a recent trip to Europe, and that this particular story had really captured her attention. A telephone call to Rizzoli in Rome, a platinum American Express card and Federal Express brought Holly her own copy within forty-eight hours.

  She chose Carmel partly because its artistic nature made it an appropriate location for the fictitious Bruno Conti to stay while on the West Coast; and partly because one of her most grateful clients (a married hospital orderly who’d been caught performing indecent acts with a hooker in his wife’s old Mustang in West Hollywood – a catastrophe which Charlotte Taylor had contrived to keep both from his wife and employers) had a cousin living in Santa Cruz who worked for the postal service on the Monterey Peninsula and who was, therefore, in a good position to pinpoint a suitable empty house in or around Carmel. For one thousand dollars, the same man in Santa Cruz saw no problems in arranging for another cousin – an illegal – to pose as a housekeeper for a few hours one Sunday, and to bring along three of her children to help. Naked would cost another five hundred, the cousin told the orderly to tell Holly. She handed over another three.

  Taking the pictures was the hardest part.

  Seeing him, after so long, and having to stay silent and invisible.

  He looked wonderful. Older, but still handsome, still lean. Better than ever, in spite of the fact that he was hot and uncomfortable. He had cut his hair and shaved his beard, which emphasized the strong lines of his face and chin and the seductive bend on his nose that was the legacy of the night the dope pushers had beaten him up.

  Christ, she wanted to touch him.

  The father of her unborn child.

  Their miracle.

  But then she remembered Nina.

  And got down to business.

  He didn’t have any idea she was there. The sounds of the children, laughing and splashing in the pool, covered the sounds of her Nikon. He didn’t hear her, didn’t see her, didn’t sense her. Which was good, of course, since his finding her there would have ruined everything, everything, for ever. Yet it wounded her, at the same time, that he didn’t somehow feel her presence in that backyard. If it were the other way around, if she were that close to him, in a garden, in a house, even in a park, she would know he was near, she would just know it.

  She thought she’d screwed up once. Just after she had captured a great, really compromising shot of Nick tossing the beachball back to the naked boy, just at the moment when the water had splashed the blond girl and made her shriek, the other little girl’s huge dark eyes had veered suddenly away from the pool. Right at the California fuchsia. Right at her, Holly thought, holding her breath, getting ready to run.

  And then she saw that what had caught the child’s gaze was a tiny lizard resting in some droplets of water under the bush a few feet in front of where she was squatting. Holly waited to see if the girl would be sufficiently intrigued to get out of the pool and come over to try to touch the creature, but then the lizard darted away and disappeared somewhere behind the scarlet lobelia, and the child’s attention returned to the game with the ball.

  It was all over too soon after that.

  She watched Nick getting hotter, losing patience; snapped a few more shots when he went over to the pool and crouched down to talk to the kids; and then he walked back into the house, and the boy, the leader of the pack, remembered his instructions and got the girls out of the water, grabbed their towels and headed for the gate at the back of the garden.

  Holly heard Nick calling for Bruno Conti.

  She saw him come back out, saw his confusion, his irritation, watched him pick up his portfolio.

  And vanish back inside the house.

  The photographs were developed and on their way to the Carmel and San Francisco police departments twenty-four hours later.

  Holly knew that Nick’s height, weight and appearance were a close enough match with a sleazeball who had been molesting small children in San Francisco and all points in Northern California for the past several months.

  Knew that the photographs would give the cops more than enough cause to pull him in.

  Easy.

  She imagines Nina’s reaction over and over again. The wife. The other woman. That’s how she thinks of her. The elegant blonde with the long nose.

  She was sitting down when Holly saw her that time in the book store in New York, so Holly doesn’t know what her legs are like. Long and shapely, she supposes. Her own legs are pretty damned perfect, of course, but in her case, in the eyes of men, it’s the whole package that counts. It certainly used to count where Nick was concerned. And will do again, when the time is right.

  Holly remembers that when she dictated the Wordsworth quote to Nina Ford, the pregnant blonde made no comment. But Holly caught the flicker in her eyes. It was tiny, but there just the same.

  Fear.

  She enjoyed doing that to Nina.

  Chapter Forty-one

  I’m going for a walk,’ Nina told Nick after he had finished telling her.

  Nick looked at her. ‘It’s past midnight.’

  She looked right back at him. ‘In more ways than one.’

  Nina got up from their sofa, her movements slow and weary. He watched her, not moving, not wanting to crowd her. She walked out of the living room into the hall, and he hoped she would turn left and head up the stairs, but she turned right instead, towards the front door.

  He jumped up. ‘Nina, you can’t.’ He followed her into the hall.

  She stopped and turned around. ‘Why can’t I?’ Her face had grown very pale again, the way it had with each of the successive blows she had been dealt in the last several months. There was defiance in her eyes. Defiance, anger and shock.

  ‘It’s late.’

  ‘You said that already. This is a city. People go out at night.’

  Nick felt sick, as if something had died.

  ‘You’re not wearing shoes,’ he pointed out, very gently.

  Nina looked down at her feet. She had kicked them off hours ago, she couldn’t remember where. They had begun talking in the kitchen, she remembered that, and she thought they’d gone upstairs for a while, but she wasn’t certain. It suddenly seemed too much of an effort to think about her shoes.

  ‘I’ll go to bed,’ she said,
and walked past him to the foot of the staircase, where she paused for an instant. ‘Please don’t follow me,’ she said, without looking back. ‘I’ll check on Zoë.’

  ‘Nina, we need to talk.’ Desperation made his throat tight.

  ‘I’d have thought you’d talked enough,’ she said.

  And went up the stairs.

  Nina did not sleep. She feigned it when she heard Nick coming into the bedroom three separate times. She kept her eyes closed and her breathing even, and she sensed him looking down at her. Probably, she thought, he knew she was faking, but he wasn’t going to challenge it. If she was pretending to be asleep, then that was as clear a message to him as a turned back or a walk-out.

  She lay in their bed and tried to analyse how she was feeling. She wanted a drink – she knew that much. The rest was harder to figure out. Nick had told her so much during that endless ugly evening that it had seemed, at times, like listening to someone reading aloud from a journal, telling tales from his life in precise order, relating every remembered detail, whether his audience wanted to hear those details or not.

  Not. Not.

  He could have told it so swiftly and concisely. I fell off a mountain, a person with a broken back could say. No need to give chapter and verse on how they climbed the damned mountain, or whether they knew it was a bad idea to climb the thing in the first place but they did it anyway.

  ‘I got involved with Holly Bourne again even though I said I didn’t, only she didn’t like it when I broke it off with her, and she turned into a crazy lady and followed me everywhere and made my life a misery until I finally lost my mind and beat her up.’

  That was all there was to it, really.

  ‘Oh, yeah, and she half-flushed dope down my john and got me busted for it.’

  That was all he would have needed to say. If only he had said it a couple of years ago when they met and were telling each other their secrets. Or at least she was telling him her secrets.