by Linda Barlow
The body that had sheltered and nurtured that tiny beating heart was lying still beneath the ground. And today— the sound that had seemed invulnerable—the sound that he’d always figured would go on in the world long after he was in the ground, too—had nearly been silenced forever.
It’s all my fault.
It was as if a curtain had been torn away and he was able to see clearly for the first time in years. This was what it had taken. He looked at his daughter and felt the tears gathering in his eyes. This.
No more. No more.
Enough is enough.
It ends here.
“It’s over, Charlie,” Isobelle said.
He blinked noncomprehendingly. “What?”
“I don’t want to see you anymore. We’ll work something out at the office. It will be hard for a while, I’m sure, but it will get easier as time passes. I’m sorry, but this is the way it has to be.”
She had invited him over. She would have preferred to break off with him by phone, but that seemed too cowardly. He’d accepted the invitation eagerly, clearly anticipating many kinds of pleasures, although considering what had just happened to April and Kate, she couldn’t believe he was so insensitive.
He shook his head as if what she was saying to him was making no sense. “Isobelle, I don’t understand. What do you mean, it’s over? I’m in love with you!”
“I’m sorry. I warned you not to fall in love with me. I never promised you anything, Charlie. I told you not to get too dependent on me.”
“You’re the one who’s dependent on me!”
Jesus—is that what he thought? No wonder she’d been getting so many alarming vibrations. “That’s your fantasy. That’s what you want me to be. You want to take care of me, I know. You want to protect me.” She was trying to sound gentle but firm. She didn’t want to give him even the slightest hint of hope. “But I don’t need that from you—or from anyone—and it’s vital that you understand it.” She poured all her convictions into her voice. “I run my own life and I take care of my own problems. I always have and I always will. I don’t want anyone meddling in my affairs. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but I’ve warned you before.”
“Look, I know you’re upset about your niece getting shot and all that,” he said. “The killer’s on the loose again, and that’s scary. And that’s why you need me. You need me to protect you. My God, Isobelle, next he could come for you.”
“This has nothing to do with that.” She could hear her voice shaking.
“Of course it does, Isobelle. It has everything to do with that.”
She turned her back on him. Her stomach was churning. How had her life turned so crazy? When Rina had been alive it had been hard, yes—the fights, the misunderstandings, the competition, the struggle for power. Working with Rina had never been easy, either for her or for Charlie, despite his seeming good nature. But it had been easier than this.
“Please leave, Charlie.”
There was a long silence. Then, “There’s someone else,” he said heavily. “You’ve got another lover, don’t you?”
She didn’t think of Justin that way. Justin was a good friend. He’d given her something that she’d desperately needed, and in the process he’d helped her make up her mind. But Justin—his dungeon, his toys, his body—had been the instrument, not the cause.
“This has nothing to do with anyone else except you and me. I can’t see you anymore. Our relationship isn’t working. It’s you and I who are alone responsible for that, so please don’t go looking for outside causes.”
“But why?” His voice had turned plaintive, perhaps even a little scared. “I love you, I’d do anything for you, please, Isobelle, don’t do this to me!”
“My God, I don’t want a man who would do anything for me,” she said, impatient now. “I want a man who respects himself more than that. I don’t want an obsessive man, a man who tries to mind-read, who thinks he knows what I need and desire, and acts accordingly. Don’t you understand? You’re suffocating me.”
She regretted the words as soon as they were out. Dammit, she thought, would she ever learn to think before she blurted things out?
He was shaking his head. He looked as if he were about to cry. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I just can’t believe you could think such things about me. I love you. Damn you, doesn’t that count for anything?”
“It counts for a lot. It makes me very sad and regretful. But it doesn’t change my mind. You’d better leave.”
He reached out for her, trying to embrace her. Isobelle retreated, but he followed her, seized her around the waist, wrapped one arm around her shoulders. She made an involuntary sound—she was a little sore back there. Charlie looked into her face, his brow furrowed, then without warning, ripped at her blouse.
“No!” she cried, enraged that he would attempt such a thing. But he persisted, pulling the light summery fabric down over her shoulders to reveal the thin faint marks that lingered there. She should have waited to confront him. In a few more days all traces of her session with Justin would have been gone.
“I can’t believe it!” he shouted. “You let somebody do that? You let somebody dom you? Who is he? Who is he, dammit, I’ll kill him!”
“Get out,” she said. “Get out now, Charlie, or I’ll call the police.”
He slapped her. Right across the side of her face. She staggered and nearly fell.
“Get out,” she said, her voice icy with her effort to control it. “Get out of here and don’t ever come back. We’re through, you son of a bitch.”
He left, cursing and slamming his fist into the wall. Isobelle locked the door behind him and went into the living room. Shaking, she dug out a cigarette from a pack she hadn’t opened in days and lit it. As she inhaled deeply nightmare images filled her head. He had hit her. Her ears were still ringing with the force of his blow. Until recently, she would never have dreamed that Charlie Ripley could be capable of violence, no matter how upset he was.
What had Charlie said a couple of weeks ago: April Harrington won’t last long, I promise you. She’ll be gone in a blink, and Power Perspectives will be ours.
What would the police say, she wondered, if she told them that?
“The worst of it is, I did what he ordered me to do,” April said. “It was like a dream. I couldn’t believe it was happening. I knew he’d come to kill me but I didn’t believe I would die.”
“I know,” Blackthorn said.
The crime scene techs were still working on her apartment so he’d taken her back to his place after several hours with the police, then Marty over at FBI headquarters. She was exhausted, and more rattled than he’d ever seen her.
“And now that it’s over, it’s all getting fuzzy. As if I can’t quite remember, somehow.” She looked at him, her blue eyes alarmed. “I remembered when I talked to the police. Why can’t I now? Is this some kind of stress reaction?”
He nodded. “Don’t worry about it. Our bodies are wiser than our brains at times like these.”
“I remember his face,” she said and shuddered.
“You’re probably one of the few people who has seen it and lived.”
She looked puzzled again. “I have images, but it’s as if my linear memory is shot. You know? I know some of the things that happened, but I can’t seem to clarify the exact order. It’s all confused.”
He said nothing. He’d dealt with enough trauma victims to know that what she was feeling was entirely normal. There was no way to stop her from trying to sort it out. He’d urged her to take the tranquilizer that the doctor had prescribed to calm her, but she had refused.
“I think I resisted at one point, and so he forced my head down into the bath water. I couldn’t breathe, and it was just like people say—I felt total panic because all I wanted to do was breathe, but I knew that if I opened my mouth all that dirty bath water would rush into my lungs and I’d be dead. And then it didn’t matter and I didn’t care and I was just about to
do it anyway because my body was screaming at me to breathe, to breathe… and he let me up. After that I think I did whatever he told me to do.”
“Anybody would have.”
She looked at him. “Not you.”
“Yes, me.”
“No. You’re strong. You would have resisted all the way.”
Blackthorn pictured himself drunk with a bottle and laughed shortly. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me. I’m not so strong. Sounds to me as if you showed a couple minutes of weakness, that’s all. Then you kicked his ass, you and Kate.”
“Kate,” she whispered. Tears popped into her eyes.
He held her. “She’s going to be all right, hon. She’ll be fine.”
“I thought she’d left. I was sure of it. I still don’t understand what she was doing, pretending to leave, then hiding out in the kitchen.”
“Spying on you, probably. You know how kids are. Or maybe she knew something was wrong.”
“He shot her. She’s just a child. He—”
“Ssh. Stop replaying it. You both survived. In fact, the two of you were really something. He had a gun, but you drove the asshole off with your bare hands.”
“He got away.”
“We’ll get him,” he assured her. “He fucked up. He’s dead meat.”
She looked at him. “You sound so hard.”
“I’m harder than you know.”
She nodded, then her eyes slid away again.
“I need a shower,” she said a few minutes later. Then as if hearing her words for the first time, she shuddered. “No,” she whispered. “No, no, I can’t.”
“You’re cold. Come, I’ll carry you to bed.”
“I feel dirty. I want to wash—but how, after that happened… I never want to get into a bathtub again.”
He lifted her unresisting body and carried her into his own small bathroon, the one with the stall shower. He set her down and reached into the stall and turned on the taps. The crime techs had worked her over earlier, taking scrapings from underneath her nails and going over her entire body with a laser, looking for evidence. He wasn’t sure how much of it she remembered. Maybe she had blotted it out just as she had the details of the attack itself.
“No, please,” she said as he urged her toward the shower. “I can’t, I can’t.”
He slid his arms around her and kissed the side of her throat. “I’m here. I’m not leaving you. You don’t have to do a thing. Trust me, my darling, trust me.”
She pressed her face against his neck. Slowly, she nodded.
With slow careful movements, he stripped off the bathrobe he’d given her and let it pool beneath their feet. He caressed her and told her she was beautiful. The steam from the shower was already beginning to warm up the bathroom. He pulled off his T-shirt and shucked his jeans.
“Rob, I don’t know—”
“You’re okay,” he said, and, supporting her tightly around the waist, helped her step into the shower. She shivered as the warm water struck her naked body; he held her close. He gathered up a bar of soap and gently began massaging her back with it. She pressed herself against him and shuddered, and then she began to cry.
“I’ve got you,” he murmured. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.”
Her body convulsed against his into loud, wracking sobs. He held her close, continuing the gentle massaging of his soapy hands over her neck, her scalp, and the supple muscles of her back.
When she’d cried herself out and seemed more relaxed, he soaped up a washcloth and smoothed it over her body from head to toe. He tried to prevent himself from becoming aroused, but this was impossible. He wondered if the killer had become aroused at the thought of killing her, and the idea that he might have made Rob feel dirty, too. He scrubbed his own body as well; as if it could wash away the evil that had enveloped them all.
“Daddy?”
The voice was low and groggy, a little plaintive, a little uncertain, but Christian leapt to his feet. He leaned over her. One of her hands was moving, and her eyelids, barely visible in the swath of head bandages, were fluttering.
“It’s okay, baby, I’m here, I’m here.”
“Daddy, where am I?” She sounded scared. Her eyes came open, then shut again against the bright ICU lighting. “My head hurts.”
“You’re in the hospital. But you’re going to be okay, Kate.” Christian sat on the edge of her bed and took her small hand in his. Her fingers clutched convulsively.
“What am I doing in the hospital?” She sounded astonished by the idea.
“Never mind, sweetie, just rest. We can talk about it later.”
“I want to know now,” she insisted, and Christian found himself smiling with relief. She was, thank God, her normal contrary and impatient self. She sounded alert and clearheaded.
“You got shot, Kate,” he told her. “Probably by the same guy who murdered your grandmother. Fortunately, in your case, his aim was off. The bullet grazed your skull, which is why your head hurts. But it didn’t cause any significant damage.”
“Someone tried to murder me?” She thought about it for a moment. “Wow.”
“Do you remember anything, Kate?”
Her expression changed from wonder to fear. “April. What happened to April? Is she all right?”
“Yes, she’s okay. Your going to her apartment when you did put you in danger, but it probably saved her life.”
“She’s not dead? You’re not lying to me, Daddy, are you?”
“No, I swear to you. April’s fine.”
“And I saved her life?”
He smiled and kissed her gently on the cheek. “You did indeed. You’re quite a heroine, as a matter of fact.”
“You think so?”
Oh, God! Did she think he wasn’t proud of her? Hearing the uncertainty in her voice, he remembered the ways he’d failed her, the ways he simply hadn’t been there for her. Things were going to be different from now on. “I’m very proud of you, sweetheart,” he said.
She broke into a smile. “I love you, Daddy.”
He hugged her as tightly as all the tubing and monitors would allow.
Chapter Thirty-one
April stood at the window in her office looking out over the city. In the background one of Rina’s audiotapes was playing. In an earnest, upbeat tone Rina was saying:
What a mistake we make when we believe ourselves to be buffeted by fate! The truth is, our destiny is in our own hands. We become who and what we are because of the choices we make. Not big, momentous choices, but the little unconscious habitual decisions that we make over and over every day.
We make these decisions because of our beliefs about ourselves and each other. If, for example, I believe for whatever reason that I am lazy, disorganized, and incompetent, I will act in a manner that is lazy, disorganized, and incompetent. What you are to be, you are in the process of becoming. The role you act is the role you own.
The place where you have arrived in your life is entirely logical. You placed yourself upon the road that led there a very long time ago. There is no mystery about the condition of your finances. There is no mystery about your professional success or your personal relationships. Where you are now is where you ordained yourself to be.
And if you are not satisfied—as most of us aren’t, at some point in our lives—there is only one person who can do something about that. That person is you. You can change your life. You can reshape your destiny. You can take control of your own power and recognize the joy and the vitality of your own existence. You can change all your negative beliefs about yourself. You are not trapped, you are not helpless! As long as there is breath in your body and determination in your heart, you can still have everything you’ve ever dreamed of and be whatever it is you really want to be!
She sounded so positive, April thought. She believed what she was preaching. She spoke as if she had been there, done that. As if she had intimate knowledge of exactly what it felt like to be powerless.
&nbs
p; How could this be?
April reached out a finger and pressed the button to stop the tape. Then she rested her chin in her hands and stared at the faded photograph in the tin frame that her mother had left to her. She had been ridiculously attached to the picture. She carried it to work with her in the morning and home at night, setting it carefully on the table beside her bed. She studied it often, as if it were the key to the mystery of Rina de Sevigny.
Mother and daughter. Waitress and brat leaning against their dilapidated summer cottage. Had Rina felt powerless then, during the summer when she’d successfully seduced the president of the United States?
Had she felt powerless when she’d convinced Armand de Sevigny, scion of a wealthy, snobbish family to take her as his wife?
When had Rina ever felt powerless?
Why had she started Power Perspectives in the first place? Why had she needed it?
Dammit, I need to think!
April got up, went to the closet, and grabbed a nylon athletic bag. She removed a T-shirt and a pair of running shorts and changed into them. Then she pinned up her hair and covered it with a Boston Red Sox cap.
She left her office. Blackthorn’s orders were that she should stay in. Ever since the attack in her apartment five days ago, he and his staff had hovered over her constantly.
But it was a beautiful summer day, and she was so tired of looking over her shoulder and being afraid.
Carla’s gaze followed her as April passed her post and headed for the elevator. She did a double take and jumped up. “Hey! Almost didn’t recognize you in that get-up. Where’re you going? You didn’t tell me you were going out today.”
“I didn’t know,” April replied as she stepped into the elevator car.
Carla followed her. She patted her pocket—probably checking her gun. “So where are we headed?”
“Central Park. I need some exercise.”
“No way,” Carla said. “Too dangerous.”
“Look, I can’t stay cooped up forever. It’s been nearly a week and there’s been no sign of the guy.”
“He’s out there,” Carla said grimly. “I can feel it.”