“Shhh.” She put a finger to her lips in mock embarrassment.
Cassie smiled as the three of them waited for the construction hoist. With a creak and groan, it arrived.
Inside the cage, a glazier with bunched muscles watched over several window panels covered in protective paper. He dipped his head to Cassie. “Special order of smaller panes for the top floor corners. The crane operator’s busy.”
“Go ahead, Andrew,” Cassie agreed.
Charley stuck out a wiry arm and stopped the metal gate. “You can drop me at twenty-seven.”
Mariah stepped forward, but he put out a hand. “Weight limit.” Flashing a smile through the wire mesh, he pushed the button to ascend. “My place tonight. Pizza.”
“Okay.” She’d tell him the latest episode in the saga of her and Rory. Rather than thinking her foolish as she had feared, Charley had listened to the stories of the DCI party and the Marriott with sympathy.
While the hoist rose smoothly up the outside of the building, Mariah craned her neck to follow it. Nothing she imagined could begin to touch the majesty of building a skyscraper.
Above, the car started to slow near the twenty-seventh floor when a sudden sharp crack sounded like a rifle shot. In the same instant, the purring whine came to a halt.
“What’s that?” Mariah squinted up into the midday sun.
The elevator began its descent slowly, but within a second, she realized it was accelerating. A high-pitched whine began, and the frame started an ominous rattle.
“Run!” Cassie ordered.
Mariah tore her gaze from the falling cage and tried to move, but the air seemed to turn to a thick liquid that she swam through. Through the din, she detected the shrill note of screaming. A nearby aluminum shed, set up as a break room, offered the only shelter, but the door was on the opposite side. Out of time, she dove for the space beneath where the shed was propped on cinder blocks.
The loaded hoist smashed into the ground level steel plate. Despite the wire mesh enclosure, shrapnel flew. Although Mariah rolled herself into the small space under the shed, something struck over her left eye.
For what felt like a long time, a cacophonous rain of chunks and splinters hit the ground around her. Her heart raced, so hard she felt sick.
An unnatural silence fell. She listened for the workers’ shouts and imagined everyone staring open-mouthed at the wreckage. In disbelief, she raised her hand and traced a sticky warm wetness on her face. Though the vision in her left eye was blurred, she made out a litter of twisted metal and glass at the base of the building.
Blood spattered the steel frame ten feet in the air.
Rory sat at his drafting table, reviewing a computer plot of an elevation. Normally, he loved envisioning a building he’d conceived, but this afternoon he’d lost focus. As he’d told Mariah, it had taken all his nerve to phone her. Like a fool, he’d thought if he were willing to ignore his father’s wishes, she’d do the same.
His office door opened. “Did you hear?” His secretary babbled.
“Slow down and tell me.” He braced for war news or a report of a terror attack.
Her round face pink, she twisted her hands in her floral print skirt. “The hoist at Grant Plaza fell … killed some people.”
“Good Lord.” Mariah had said …
Leaving his suit coat behind the door, Rory ran through reception and stuck his hand into a six-inch gap to reopen a crowded elevator. The passengers stared owl-eyed. When the car stopped in the lobby, he shoved out through the revolving doors and onto the street.
He ran, heedless that his dress shoes weren’t Nikes. Sweat broke out, and his shirt clung to his back. He ducked around a vending cart selling hotdogs, passed a line of elementary school children on a field trip, and dodged businessmen carrying briefcases. When he turned a corner and saw Grant Plaza on the skyline, he stared at his goal, only to be jerked back to reality by a bicycle courier’s angry shout.
After six blocks, he rushed up to the site and found yellow police tape around it. Without slowing, he lifted the plastic strip and went under. Somebody yelled, but no one stopped his getting to the main construction trailer.
Rory yanked open the door and found a group of hard-hatted men in a heated discussion. One with a black beard was saying, “Zaragoza went up to weld just before, but nobody’s seen him.”
“I saw him on the ground after,” said a blond youth. “Must have come down the stairs.”
The group dynamic perceived an outsider, and they fell silent. A dozen pairs of eyes focused on Rory’s disheveled state.
“Help you, sir?” asked the fellow sitting at a battered desk.
His chest heaved. “I’m a … friend of Mariah Grant. Supposed to meet her here.”
The man shook his head.
Something clutched in Rory, and he reached to support himself on the doorframe. “She’s not …”
“No,” the bearded man said, “but she was pretty close when the elevator came down. Got some glass … “ He gestured toward his eyes.
“They said somebody died,” Rory got out.
“A laborer and one of the glaziers.”
“That’s rough,” he said, letting a moment of silence elapse. “Got any idea where Mariah went?”
The man behind the desk looked sympathetic as he shook his head.
Outside the trailer, shards of glass, plywood, and metal spread over a wide area. Though the bodies had apparently been removed, the police lines were drawn tight. Several TV vans with satellite antennas lined the curb; one marked with the logo of the sensationalist “On the Spot.”
Seeing the hallmarks of disaster, Rory wondered how many times he had ridden a hoist and felt triumph over the elements. Today, some poor souls like him had risen into the afternoon sky; only their number had been up.
A breeze off the Bay dried his sweat, making him shiver. Everything seemed at a distance, from the growl of city buses to their diesel fumes. The sunlight looked garish; a pea soup fog would be a more fitting shroud for the workers who’d lost their lives.
As Rory turned his back on the bloody ground, his sense of relief over Mariah began to evaporate. The man had implied she’d been cut. Was she at one of the hospitals getting stitched up? What if she’d been disfigured, or lost an eye?
He speeded his steps away from the site, determined to find her.
In the hours since the hoist had fallen, time had lost its meaning for Mariah. It was near midnight when she opened the front door of her apartment house. Bone weary, muscles aching from her frantic dive under the shed, all she wanted was the solace of oblivion.
Though she’d managed a shower at the company workout facility and changed into tights and a sweatshirt, she still felt dirty. Over her left eye, a throbbing cut felt stiff beneath gauze and punctures on her forearms sported Band-aids.
Yet, not all her wounds were physical. She knew she must be pale as a ghost, and her heart ached for her father. His face had borne a grayish pallor as he chaired a nightmarish after-hours management session. Saying he’d rather be alone, he had refused her offer to come home to Stonestown with him.
Now she wished she’d insisted, for Charley wasn’t upstairs watching the news or reading before going to bed. Only last night, she’d heard him stirring around, home from another of his card games. He usually told her he won, grinning and waving a sheaf of bills that might have come from his paycheck — years ago his father had perpetuated that fiction before he joined Gambler’s Anonymous — but today Charley had told her he’d lost.
She shuddered and tried not to imagine his and glazier Andrew Green’s final moments. Routine though the hoist might have been for workers who were there every day, Charley had told her he never tired of riding to the heights. Rising smoothly up the tower, he must have been as curious as she at the snap of the parting cable …
Only it marked the end of his and Andrew’s world.
How difficult it was to believe he’d never flash his trademark grin ag
ain, and even more impossible to imagine Tom Barrett and his wife Wendy already immersed the nightmare of making arrangements. Charley couldn’t be gone. He must be asleep, the way she wanted to be.
Her breath caught.
Her friend wasn’t sleeping, but lying on a slab at the mortuary. The electric essence that was Charley had departed; she’d known when it she saw his crystal blue eyes gone opaque.
Keys in hand, Mariah approached her apartment, making a note to call the manager about the burned out bulb over her entry. Though preoccupied as she reached to unlock her door, she saw a darker shadow in the hall and realized it was a man.
Her heart leaped.
“Didn’t mean to scare you.” Rory pushed off the wall.
She bit back the scream rising in her throat. While thankful it wasn’t a criminal lurking in her hall, she wondered if she was up to dealing with Rory this evening.
“I heard about the accident.” His voice bore a hoarse quality, as though he’d been shouting. “Are you all right?”
She struggled with her lock. “I’m fine.”
“Like hell you are.” He placed his hand over her shaking fingers, inserted her key, and swung the door wide. She brushed the wall to find the switch and flooded the room with light.
Rory looked as haggard as she felt, in wrinkled jeans and a black DCI golf shirt that proclaimed his allegiance. Deep shadows lay beneath his eyes, bruise-like. “May I come in?”
She should send him away, for nothing either of them could say or do would change their situation.
“Please,” he said softly, without pleading.
With her usual frame of reference upside down, she gestured him inside.
He shut the door behind them. “Where’s your liquor?”
She waved toward a kitchen cabinet and made her way to the living room. Soft cushions on her couch took her into a welcome embrace.
Rory poured two glasses of amber liquid and brought one to her. Taking it, she swallowed raw whiskey around the hard place in the back of her throat.
He frowned and gently touched the bandage above her eye. “That was close.”
“Eleven stitches.” The quaking in her grew worse when she recalled how she and Cassie had nearly been on the hoist.
Rory sat beside her. “Did you know the victims?”
“Not Andrew Green.” She drank again, coughed. “But Charley Barrett …”
“The fellow who went sailing with us.”
She nodded. In June of that long-ago summer, the three of them had cruised beyond the Golden Gate to toast the limitless lives ahead of them. “That’s him … was him.” She swallowed. “My best friend in the whole world.”
“Charley was a good man.”
“Tom’s a good man, too, who shouldn’t have to go through this.” If there were anybody to blame, it might make it easier. She took another burning drink, and a seed that had been planted when the hoist crashed germinated. “I’ll bet your father’s glad.”
Rory surged to his feet. “Look here … I can’t control what he thinks.”
“We can’t do anything about our fathers.” Her glass trembled. “Don’t we settle that every time we see one another?”
He moved swiftly, taking Mariah’s drink and setting it aside. He pulled her to her feet and gripped her shoulders. “To hell with our fathers. When I heard about the accident, I ran through the streets to Grant Plaza like a wild man. I had to know you weren’t hurt or … I crashed the police barricade, went into the trailer …” His voice broke. “I only knew people had died.”
His anguish penetrated her haze. He gathered her to him, her face against the side of his neck, the smell of his skin familiar, yet new. They were both alive and Charley …
Rory’s mouth came down, crushing hers so she felt his teeth behind his lips. The desperation that had been in his voice a moment now before flavored his embrace.
For a wild instant, response flickered in her, a sense of “what if.” Should she twine her arms around his neck and give in to this treacherous tide of feeling, it would be all or nothing, the way it had been with them from the start.
Then his intensity became too much for her, after all she’d been through this day. All she could imagine was to lie down in the dark and find her way to a sleep where she wouldn’t dream of blood and broken glass.
She pushed at his shoulders.
His lips softened on hers, then were withdrawn. “What am I doing? You need rest.”
Even so, he drew her back against his chest. Beneath her ear, she heard the pounding of his heart, the way it must have been when he raced through the city streets. But could she trust he was his own man and not his father’s?
“You need to go.” Her tears were coming, and if she cried in his arms, she’d be lost.
Rory smoothed her hair and set her away from him. Torn by the temptation to call him back, she watched him leave his untouched drink on the table and let himself out.
She curled into a ball of hurt. Salt stung her eyes and cheeks … how cruel that she and Davis Campbell’s son had been placed by accident of birth on their fathers’ chessboard.
Yet, tonight Rory had said, “To hell with our fathers.”
CHAPTER 4
Charley Barrett’s closed casket sat against a marble wall surrounded by banked floral arrangements. Mariah vaguely remembered the mortuary, a venerable city tradition, as the place family and friends had paid their respects upon her mother’s death. Her father did not speak of Catharine, but looked around the viewing room with its green damask drapes as if it were familiar.
Around Charley’s casket stood a clutch of men wearing dark suits and women in black. Some approached to study the bronze box while others did not, but everyone conversed in hushed tones. Beneath a translucent alabaster fixture, Tom Barrett stood slumped in a wrinkled pinstripe, his usually clear blue eyes red-rimmed. Though clean-shaven, a rash of bumps said he’d made a mess of it.
Mariah’s father moved toward the taller man, and they clasped hands. “God, Tom. Your boy …”
“John. Of all the rotten luck …” Tom trailed off, taking his old friend into a bear hug while the rest of the mourners pretended not to notice two men sobbing out loud. When they broke apart, both Tom and John wiped unabashedly at tears.
Tom hugged Mariah in turn, lifting her cleanly from the floor. Her ribs compressed, and her breath came out in a rush before he set her down.
With a thick finger, he touched the framed photo atop the casket. The camera had caught Charley laughing, his arm around the neck of his Golden Retriever, Luke. Sunlight glinted on the dog’s smooth coat and on the young man’s bright hair.
“I’m sorry it had to be Charley,” Mariah said. It must have occurred to Tom that if she and Cassie had taken the hoist first, his son would be alive. “Such an unfair twist of fate.”
“Fate?” With a glance around, Tom bent to her. “That may not have been an accident.” His words were soft, yet struck with force.
“Who’d want to hurt Charley? Or one of our glaziers?”
“It was almost you on that elevator.”
Mariah’s stomach churned.
“Promise you won’t gamble with your safety,” Tom insisted.
Surely, he didn’t think there had been foul play. He must be grasping at straws, a father’s attempt to avoid admitting the senseless nature of the accident. The single detective assigned to the case viewed the matter as an equipment failure, as did she.
Turning away from Tom, she saw her own father’s concerned face and realized he’d overheard. “I promise I’ll be careful,” she said to mollify both him and Tom.
Wendy Barrett, a bird-like woman who moved in fits and starts, came and hugged Mariah. She returned the embrace, shocked by the older woman’s pallor. Usually fit and healthy from daily tennis, Wendy seemed to have shrunk by inches.
It made Mariah ache inside. Charley’s mother had watched out for him and her when they were preschoolers. As they grew older, she’d ch
aperoned after school hours, driving them to club meetings and ball games. One of the fondest memories was of a crisp fall day when Wendy called her and Charley to the back porch with a plate of homemade caramel apples.
“I’m so sorry that you were there … that you had to see …” Wendy glanced toward the closed casket.
Mariah was trying to forget the bloody flesh, the protruding bones, telling herself it had nothing to do with Charley.
Wendy pulled a wad of tissues from her jacket pocket and offered one. Mariah took it and dabbed at her eyes.
In the midst of blowing her shiny nose, Wendy suddenly straightened. “Oh, no.”
Mariah followed her gaze to the viewing room door.
Beneath a recessed spotlight, Davis Campbell and his wife made their entrance. The owner of DCI bore an emotionless expression on his hawklike features, his mourning suit somehow blacker than every other man’s. Though Kiki’s dress matched her husband’s somber suit, her red hair made a beacon.
Wendy flushed and fiddled with her crying rag. “Why did they have to come?”
Mariah touched her arm. “It’s what people do.”
Wendy moved to her husband’s side, and the battle lines were drawn. Tom Barrett stared at Davis with what looked like hate, but there was something else. It almost looked as if the big man were afraid. Mariah’s father joined the Barretts, standing shoulder to shoulder with his friends to accept Davis’s smooth political greeting.
Mariah stayed back, watching the ritual exchange until some sixth sense made her look again toward the door.
In a dark suit like his father’s, with an appropriately muted tie, Rory was every inch the scion of DCI. Though his eyes passed over Mariah without pause, she noticed a subtle change in him, a delicate sharpening of every feature. Seized with the desire to adjust the scarf on her coatdress or tame the errant strands of her hair, she forced herself to remain motionless. He might have come to her apartment under cover of night, but here they were on display. Speaking publicly in any but the most cursory manner would wound the Barretts as well as her father.
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