Disillusions

by Seth Margolis

  She stood up, retrieved Valerie Goodwin’s file from its drawer, found a Xerox machine down the hallway, and copied every page from both files. She returned them to the records room, tossed the key on the floor under the receptionist’s desk, shoved the copies in a big envelope, and left.

  A light drizzle was falling as she crossed the sidewalk to the curb and hailed a cab. Traffic was heavy, but every taxi was occupied. Maybe she’d have better luck on Lexington Avenue.

  She turned right on 73rd Street, holding the envelope close, head bowed against the increasingly strong rain. Halfway down the dimly lit street she heard footsteps and turned. The sidewalk was empty. She walked a bit faster. More footsteps. She was turning around a second time when she felt something grip her neck, pulling her away from the street.

  “What…”

  Her voice was choked off by the arm pressing into her throat.

  “Give it to me.” A man’s voice, Spanish accent.

  “I don’t…” But she couldn’t speak, let alone scream, with the arm clamping her throat.

  He had pulled her by the neck into an alcove between two brownstone stoops. As soon as they were off the sidewalk he began tugging at the envelope.

  “Give it to me!”

  She hugged the envelope to her chest and heard footsteps approaching on 73rd Street. He let go of the envelope and stepped back against the triangular wall formed by one of the stoops, dragging her with him. A second later she felt something dig into her lower back.

  “You say anything, you gonna feel this.”

  She felt a sting just above her waist. A knife.

  “Give it to me,” he whispered. She felt warm breath on the back of her neck. A man walked by, heading to Lexington Avenue, the now heavy rain muffling his footsteps. A moment later, East 73rd Street was quiet again.

  “Give it to me.”

  She shook her head. The knife stung her back, but probably hadn’t broken skin.

  Now what?

  Give him the envelope; save your life.

  Give him the envelope and those files will disappear for good. What kind of life will you have in prison?

  Rain poured down her face, blurring her vision. No way he was getting those files.

  “Now!” he whispered directly in her right ear with a quick poke of the knife. “Give it to me now or…just give it to me, bitch.”

  There! His voice was full of anger but it lacked conviction, and she saw her chance. He was about her height, obviously strong, but the arm around her neck, though it held her like a vise, was trembling. He wanted the envelope, God knew why, but he didn’t want to hurt her.

  “Give it to—”

  She jammed her left elbow into his gut. The knife bit into her back, but his right arm slackened around her throat just enough for her to turn sideways and knee his groin. He roared, bending at the waist and cursing in Spanish as she grabbed his left arm and slammed it against the wall with her entire weight. But he held on to the knife…and was slowly straightening up, his moans growing less insistent.

  She took a deep breath, leaned over, and bit into his wrist, shrieking from way back in her throat as her teeth sank into his flesh. The knife fell to the pavement. Gwen dove for it as he began to moan again. When she stood up, holding the knife, he had one hand over his crotch; the other hand, the one she’d bitten, quivered in front of his incredulous eyes.

  “Hey, lady, I don’t want trouble. Take your fucking papers.”

  Gwen spat hard, twice. No blood, at least.

  “Who are you?”

  He looked at her a few moments, dark eyes more fearful than angry. “You some lady, you know? How come your husband leave a lady like you?”

  “My husband?”

  “You Jimmy’s mom, right?” Jeemy.

  She could only nod.

  “Good-looking lady, and strong.” He shook his injured wrist and stepped toward her. Gwen thrust the knife at him.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t do nothing. Keep the fucking envelope, okay? Lousy hundred bucks ain’t enough to get bit.”

  “Hundred bucks? Someone paid you to do this?”

  “To follow you, okay? She say nothing about sticking you. I wasn’t planning on using the knife, honest. She said to follow you and call her when I find out where you going. When I tell her you went into this doctor’s office, this clinic place, she tells me to make sure you don’t take nothing. And if you do…”

  “Who paid you?”

  “Some lady, lives near this…this place I work at. Don’t even know her name.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I don’t know her name, yo juro por dios. First she tells me to set up this meeting with someone named Barry, lives in Brooklyn, you know? Then I don’t hear from her again until today.”

  “Red hair, dark skin…”

  “Yeah, that’s her. Sinverguenza.”

  “Sin…”

  “You know, bitch on wheels.” He peered closely at his wrist. “You don’t got no diseases or nothing, do you?”

  “When did you contact my husband?”

  He began edging along the wall toward the sidewalk, eyes fixed on the knife. “Early in the summer. I gave him a paper with an address, that’s all. Some kind of meeting she wanted.”

  Gwen followed him to the sidewalk, still pointing the knife at him. But what was she going to do when he ran away, chase him brandishing a knife?

  He began backing away from her, toward Third Avenue.

  “Fifty bucks, I got that time, when I gave that paper to this Barry person.” He turned and began to run.

  “Wait, I need to ask you…”

  But he kept running until he reached the corner and disappeared. She waited until her legs felt steady enough to walk, put the knife in her jeans pocket, and headed in the opposite direction.

  It took her several minutes to find a cab on Lexington Avenue. She gave the driver the address of her hotel and did her best to remain calm during the ten-minute crosstown ride. Valerie had hired him to follow her, told him to grab anything she took from Ellikin’s office. No surprise there. Valerie had also hired the guy to contact Barry back in June. That cleared up at least one question.

  What now? Should she call the police? And if she did, what would she tell them—that a young man with a Spanish accent had shoved a knife in her back? That he’d been hired by Valerie Goodwin? Valerie would deny it, of course. And the Puerto Rican or Cuban or whatever he was would be hard to track down. Fingerprints on the knife might help, but only if he had a record. Anyway, she was a murder suspect out on bail…Who would believe her? And even if the police did buy her story, following it through would delay her return to Sohegan, and Jimmy.

  She held the envelope to her chest, hands trembling. She needed to understand the truth about Tess’s kidnapping and Priscilla’s murder. Only then would she be out of danger. Accusing Valerie of having her followed wouldn’t help; she needed to get back to Sohegan with the evidence she had just risked her life to hold on to.

  Gwen felt her heart beating against the envelope. It contained merely clues, she had realized immediately, back at the clinic; the photocopies supported what she’d suspected earlier that day in the lab. Definitive proof was in her room at the Boulevard Hotel.

  She entered the hotel room, double-locked the door, tossed the envelope on the bed, and retrieved the photograph from the nightstand drawer. For a moment she was afraid to examine it too closely. Winning her freedom would mean exposing an evil worse than Priscilla’s murder—the theft of a soul. She would do it, of course, she would save herself. But the consequences would be ghastly for many people.

  Finally she looked at the photograph: Priscilla smiled nervously, Tess in her right arm, also smiling. Perhaps it had been Nick behind the camera, coaxing those smiles as only he could. As he’d coaxed smiles (and much more) out of her. She studied Priscilla for a few more moments and decided the smile wasn’t nervous at all. It was merely sad. Why hadn’t she seen the sadness in th
at smile before?

  Gwen held the photograph closer, blocking out Priscilla with her thumb, concentrating on Tess. She recalled Dilianna Flores’s words as she looked at the photograph the day before: I thought she look familiar.

  Not Priscilla.

  Tess.

  Slowly she brought the picture closer, then back, then closer again, as if focusing an old-fashioned stereoscope. Closer, closer still…there! Just inches from her face, Tess Lawrence came into true focus for the first time in all the months Gwen had known her. Tears began to run down Gwen’s cheeks. The entire story of the Devil’s Ravine was written in that beautiful face, that perfectly, perfectly beautiful face.

  In Tess Lawrence’s face was the truth.

  Part IV

  Chapter 44

  On the drive back to Sohegan Wednesday morning, Gwen relived her flight from New York nearly six months earlier. Then, she’d been terrified, angry, confused. Now she felt unexpectedly clearheaded. Then, it had been nighttime. Now it was a cloudless August morning. Then, she’d been fleeing. She wasn’t running away anymore.

  Nearly three hours after checking out of the Boulevard she left her car in front of the Cunninghams’ house, sprinted around the side, through the hemlocks, and across the great lawn behind Penaquoit. This time no one tried to stop her, though it would have done little good.

  The kitchen door was locked, as she knew it would be. She rapped on the window, waited, then knocked harder. A shadow moved inside; then Rosa Piacevic opened the door, expressionless.

  “I need to speak to him,” Gwen said.

  Rosa shook her head slowly. Gwen pushed open the door and angled around her.

  “Don’t try to stop me, Rosa, I—are you all right?”

  Rosa’s eyes were red and puffy.

  “They’re gone,” she said.

  “Who?” Gwen asked, but she knew right away.

  “This morning, I wait for Tess to wake up. At seven-thirty I still don’t hear her, so I go up to the nursery. She is not there. I start to go to Mr. Lawrence room; then I see her favorite things, her brown bear, the little music box, they are missing too. I know then, they are both gone.” She wiped tears from her face with a tissue balled up in her hands. “I ask Mr. Piacevic to check in Mr. Lawrence room. Mr. Lawrence is gone from here too.”

  “When did you last see them?”

  “When I give Tessie dinner last evening. Mr. Piacevic, he thinks he heared the car leave about seven-thirty. This morning, the big green car is not here.” Rosa began to sob. “My poor little zamer, he leave all her bottles, the spoon she always like me to feed her with, even her blanket…”

  “Mrs. Piacevic.” Gwen touched her shoulder and shook it gently. “Mrs. Piacevic, who have you told about this?”

  “My husband, he tell me to call Mr. Cunningham at the factory. He is coming here now.”

  Gwen charged up the back stairs and sprinted down the long hallway into the master bedroom. The bed was still made, the drapes closed, but several drawers were open, and empty. She quickly searched the night tables, the desk drawers, the garbage can, but found no clue as to where they’d gone. The room felt not merely deserted but dead, the air already thick and stale. She headed downstairs to the living room and sensed right away something was missing. In a second she knew: his music books, which usually lay in piles on the piano and on every other horizontal surface in the room, were gone.

  Nick Lawrence wasn’t coming back.

  “Nooooooooooo!”

  She jumped at the sound, a savage roar from somewhere in the house that reverberated for several seconds. Then approaching footsteps. She ran to the French doors that opened onto the terrace; she had neither the time nor the stomach for a confrontation with Russell Cunningham. Before leaving the room she looked back and confirmed a suspicion: the large tape recorder Nick always kept near the piano was nowhere to be found.

  She ran across the lawn, heading toward her car next door. Halfway there she heard a second roar, then shouting.

  “Where are they? Where are they? Where the hell is my granddaughter?”

  Inside her car, heading away from the Cunninghams’ house, something in the rearview mirror caught Gwen’s eye. Maxine Cunningham stood by the front door, waving her arms to get her attention. Gwen braked the car, reconsidered, and hit the gas.

  Let Maxine hear the truth from someone else, if she had to hear it at all. Gwen had her own ass to save.

  Chapter 45

  “He set me up, from the beginning.” Gwen glanced from Kevin Gargano to Dwight Hawkins. “He chose me.”

  She saw her attorney exchange a doubtful look with Hawkins. Fuck them both. Maybe she’d been wrong to drag Gargano out of a meeting in his Whitesville office and insist that he accompany her to the Sohegan police station. She’d wanted a witness to her accusations against Nick Lawrence, not another skeptic.

  “Maybe you better start from the beginning,” Gargano said with irritating gentleness. Gwen could have sworn he was wearing the same suit, tie, and shirt he had on at her arraignment.

  “It started three years ago, in New York.” She hesitated. This was the hardest part, the idea that her life, hers and Jimmy’s, had been manipulated long before she’d ever heard of Penaquoit or Nick Lawrence. “Actually, it began before that, when Nick met Valerie Goodwin. I don’t know when that was, but the two of them go way back.”

  “Who is Valerie Goodwin?” Gargano asked.

  “Friend of his,” Hawkins said. “Continue.”

  “Three years ago, Valerie Goodwin was working as a receptionist at a fertility clinic in Manhattan in which Dr. Mitchell Ellikin was a partner. She put the doctor and Nick together in a prescription drug scheme.”

  “They got caught,” Hawkins said to Gargano. “No charges filed—it was some kind of medicine for kids. The FBI has been through this, Miss Amiel.”

  She nodded. “Valerie did something else while she was working at the clinic. She found Priscilla Cunningham, the only child of one of the country’s richest men. Beautiful, sophisticated, but with one major flaw.” She paused and looked slowly from one man to the other. “Priscilla couldn’t have children.”

  Hawkins leaned toward her. “But she had a—”

  “Listen to me. About fifteen years ago, in her twenties, Priscilla had Hodgkin’s disease. She was completely cured, but the radiation and chemotherapy damaged her ovaries. It’s in Ellikin’s report.”

  She slid the photocopies across the table. Hawkins glanced at them only briefly.

  “She went to Ellikin for an evaluation, between two and three years ago, before she’d met Nick Lawrence. She was referred by her regular gynecologist. Ellikin confirmed that her ovaries were malfunctioning. Valerie Goodwin was working at the clinic at the time and must have seen the chart, figured out who she was, and set her up with her lover, Nick Lawrence.”

  “Whoa,” Gargano said, holding up a hand. “Why would Valerie introduce her own boyfriend to Priscilla Cunningham?”

  Gwen waited a moment before replying. Even she had trouble wrapping her mind around what she was about to say.

  “Valerie and Nick were alike in many ways. He was a failed concert pianist, she was a failed actress. Both had big ambitions, expensive tastes…and no money.” A vision of Valerie’s apartment flashed in her head: a millionaire’s accoutrements jammed into a single dark room. Nick had lived there with her, his dreams of international acclaim reduced to that dreary, sunless bunker. He’d even told her about it, obliquely, that strange first morning at Penaquoit:

  It’s like being trapped inside a room that’s too small for you. You want to break out, you need to break out, but you can’t. You know your talent is too big for the room you’ve been placed in, but you also know, on mornings like this, that you’ll never escape.

  “They were desperate,” Gwen continued. “They were broke and had no practical, marketable skills…other than their charm. And their health.”

  “Health?” Gargano unbuttoned the top of his
shirt and loosened his tie. “I’m not following you.”

  “Stay with me,” Gwen said. “In the midst of their desperation, along comes Priscilla Cunningham—reasonably attractive, fabulously wealthy, lacking only two things. A husband…and functioning ovaries. Nick would supply the first, Valerie the second.”

  “What?” Gargano almost choked on the word.

  “Go on,” Hawkins said softly.

  “Valerie introduced Nick to Priscilla; he seduced her…I don’t think he had much trouble.” She waited a moment, remembering her own capitulation. “At some point Priscilla must have told him about her fertility problem. It must have been very difficult for her. Here she’d met the man of her dreams; now she had to tell him she couldn’t bear his children. And think of the pressure on her to produce an heir. I think she’d have done anything to avoid having to tell her father that she was the end of the line.”

  “Nick already knew about her problem, though,” Hawkins said, slowly shaking his head. “From her medical files.”

  “Though I’m positive he acted very surprised when she told him. In fact I’ll bet Nick was incredibly understanding.” He was good at empathy, a master.

  “Go on, Miss Amiel,” Hawkins said.

  “I’m sure it was Nick who suggested egg donation. I can hear his arguments—with egg donation, it would be his sperm, his genetic contribution, to the child.” She paused just a beat. “The egg, of course, was Valerie’s.”

  “What makes you think Priscilla would agree to…to carry Valerie’s child?” Hawkins asked.

  “Because she didn’t know. Read the medical reports. According to Ellikin’s notes, the donor wished to remain anonymous. The only person who knew both the donor and the recipient was Ellikin; at least that’s what Priscilla thought. In fact, Nick and Valerie both knew who donated that egg.”

  “And Ellikin went along with this because…” Hawkins was nodding.

  “Because he owed Nick, big time, for not turning him in on the Ritalin charges.”

  “Holy shit,” Gargano said. “Then that little girl…”