Helen nodded, eager to have him off in pursuit. He was walking past the sycamore table in the hall when the phone rang. "Maybe the bank," he said, pausing to answer.
But it wasn't the bank. Nat's face looked startled, then glad, then calm by turns. "Hey," he said casually. He gave Helen a fierce look, then put his index finger to his lips before he said, "How's it goin', Russ?"
Chapter 28
Russell. It was all Helen could do not to cry out his name. With a wrenching effort, she made herself keep silent as she crept up to Nat's side and tried to overhear what her son was saying.
But this was Russell. He wasn't saying much. Between Nat's "uh-huh's" and "mm-hmm's," she wasn't able to make out a single word, only that it was definitely Russ's voice, mumbly and reluctant.
Was he hungry? Was he safe? Was he near? Helen tried to mouth the phrases for Nat to ask, then abandoned the attempt when he turned his back on her to concentrate.
"Yeah, I thought it was you ... yeah ... sure, I don't blame you. Mm-hmm ... okay See you soon."
Nat hung up. Helen grabbed his arm and cried, "'See you soon'? He's coming home? What does that mean, 'See you soon'? Is he all right? Is he—?"
Nat cut in quickly to say, "He sounded okay, Helen. Tired. Disheartened, maybe. But he sounded okay. He wants to meet with me to talk."
"Meet with you! Where? When?"
"Right now. I can't tell you where; he asked me not to."
"What? You have to tell me!"
"I gave him my word, Helen; don't ask me that."
"Nat—I'm his mother. You have to tell me, Nat!" she cried, cut down by his impossible demand.
Nat frowned, then shook his head with an anguished look of his own. "Don't look at me like that, Helen. If Russ and I are going to have any kind of life together, then he has to feel he can trust me."
"Yes," she said numbly. "I understand." She was almost to the point where she did understand. Instead she bowed her head and whispered, "All I ask is where he is. That's all."
Nat let out an exasperated, tormented sigh. "All right! I'll tell you, but on God's honor, you can't ever let him know that I did. He's at the Common. With any luck I can bring him back here to you and still make it to the bank in time to intercept Peaches."
Peaches! Helen had forgotten completely about her. "Yes ... hurry," she urged.
He left her and she rushed to the salon that fronted the street, throwing open the inside shutters in time to see him tear off in the Porsche. Light poured through the formal, empty room, highlighting the subtle patina of well-polished wood, the bleached antiquity of the patterned rug, but making the room look, somehow, more unused than ever. Too many ghosts. Helen shuddered and fled upstairs to tend to poor, neglected Katie, an innocent pawn in a game to which only Peaches knew the rules.
But Helen found that she could no more focus on Katie than she could memorize the Constitution. Her concentration was somewhere else entirely, with her own lost child. The decision she made to call Becky was no decision at all; it was an act of pure, driving instinct.
"Becky!" she said when her daughter answered the phone. "Thank God you're home. Russell's back. I'm at Nat's. How fast can you get here? Don't ask questions, honey—move!"
Becky, loyal soldier, said excitedly, "I'm on my way, Mom!"
Helen waited and paced, beside herself with anxiety. What if Nat couldn't persuade Russ to stay? Only mothers could do that. No one was closer to a son than his mother. Nat couldn't understand about Russell and Hank. He said himself he hadn't been close to his own father. And in any case, she was the one who'd said the hurtful things that drove Russ away; she was the one, the only one, who could take them back.
Before Becky got the chance to put a foot over the threshold, Helen was out the door.
"Watch Katie!" she cried over her shoulder to her astonished daughter. "I just want to make sure Russ is okay. I just want to see. I'll be back... few minutes, tops. Watch Katie!"
She ran to her Volvo—amazingly, still in the street with its engine running and driver-side door open—and got in, racing toward the rendezvous spot while trying out excuses in her mind to account for her presence on the Common if she were seen.
****
A block away on Summer Street, Peaches watched from her car as the white Volvo streaked through the intersection.
Goodness. Everyone's in such a hurry today, she thought with a grim smile. She pulled back out into traffic, ready to make the loop back around to Chestnut Street.
All in all, it had been a good decision not to race them to the bank. Why risk everything for six months' wages when there was a whole damned pension plan, wrapped up in velvet, waiting under a seat cushion in Nat's study?
****
If Helen had been born two hundred years earlier, she might have been going off to the Common—known then as the Swamp—for no other reason than to fetch the family livestock after a day of grazing. But she was a thoroughly modern woman on a desperately modern mission: to reconnect with her son.
Surely the Common was the place to do it. The family shared a lifetime of memories there, all of them happy. Concerts, kites and ice cream; May Days, Haunted Houses, and caroling—nothing bad had ever happened to them at the Common.
Pray God today was no different.
She pressed forward on her mission, leaning over the wheel like a jockey over his steed, urging the car forward. Pointless: traffic was bumper to bumper. Worse still, there were no parking places anywhere near the Common. Since it was midday on a Friday, it should've come as no surprise; but Helen was moving in a dream, where neither time nor days had meaning.
She crept along Hawthorne Boulevard and then, in desperation, brazenly fell in with the cars looping around the Common, scanning the triangle of green for signs of Russ and Nat. She passed almost under the shadow of the memorial to Roger Conant, the site of the mischief that had started it all; but her mind, heart, and soul were focused on the park.
She saw them before they saw her and slammed on her brakes. They were sitting on a bench at the north end, as far from the crush of tourists milling around the Witch Museum as they could get. Helen let out her breath in a burst of relief, like a diver who's been under water too long. He's home ... alive ... safe ... with Nat.
Her heart went out to both of them: to the man and to the boy, both of them feeling their way gingerly through the conversation, both of them in clothes that could use a wash. Nat was turned part of the way around to face Russ, listening intently to him. He was leaning with his right forearm on his thigh, his left hand gripping the backrest behind Russ's shoulder. Russ was sitting bolt upright, his palms flat on the bench alongside him, the toes of his Nikes lifting and falling alternately. Once or twice he lifted one hand to make a point.
It was clear, even to Helen, that they were connecting on some level; that Russ was ready to come home. She had to smile. She'd already seen him say more in the last two minutes than he'd said in the last twelve months. It was like a dream, a dream come true.
And like most dreams, it ended abruptly.
The car behind Helen, patient so far, decided that she had no real point in stopping there and gave her a couple of polite toots. No big deal; but Russell turned around, saw the Volvo, and jumped up, clearly outraged. Then Nat saw her and stood up, just as outraged.
And then, perhaps because she'd been jolted out of her euphoria, Helen suddenly remembered the biggest outrage of all: Peaches was still at large.
And Becky and Katie weren't afraid of her.
In an agony of decisiveness, Helen took off in a rush, leaving her son to fend for himself. What was she doing, skulking around the Common? She should be at Nat's house, guarding the children. Her heart went flying into her throat and there it stayed, nearly choking her as it hammered home the simple, pounding thought: she knows we know.
Helen rejoined the procession headed vaguely in the direction of Chestnut Street. Cursing the crosswalks, gnawing her lip, pounding on the wheel with her hand
in frustration—none of it did any good. The cars continued to creep along, one behind the other, like a row of fuzzy caterpillars going as fast as they can. She stopped at a red light. A UPS truck, turning out of the intersecting traffic, pulled in front of her as her light turned green, further adding to her torment. Now she was not only paralyzed, but blind, seeing nothing ahead of her but a vast brown wall.
Almost in self-preservation, to keep herself from going mad, she reverted to a dreamlike state where neither time nor distance had any relevance at all. Only the goal mattered: the wish that had to be fulfilled if the dream were to stay a dream, and not crumble into a nightmare.
She tried to make herself think the way Peaches would think, and she succeeded only too well. Half a year's wages is nothing to her. Her appetite is more voracious than that. She knows where the valuables are kept; Nat said so himself. She'll use her key to get in. Becky will be upstairs, playing with Katie in the nursery. She won't possibly hear Peaches come in.
Nightmare thoughts. Helen picked her way through them, turning them over, looking for glimmers of light. If the jewelry, the securities, whatever, are in Nat's study, she may just sneak in, take what she wants, and leave. It was one small ember of hope.
Helen's next thought was like a bucket of cold water on it: If the things are in Nat's bedroom, Becky will probably hear her.
Suddenly she remembered the tea party: remembered Katie, running into the room clutching a diamond tennis bracelet in her hand, and Peaches, stepping in to relieve the child of it.
She should've known then! The evidence was all around her; but it was in shards, like the wreckage of a broken mirror, and she was too blinded by fragments to see.
Helen tortured herself with reminders of missed signals and wrong assumptions all the way to Chestnut Street. But when she turned onto the broad, quiet avenue and saw the Toyota parked in the drive of the shuttered mansion three doors down from Nat's, that's when she knew. Her latest, worst fears were right on target.
She's back, and she knows Becky's in there. By now Helen had no doubt that Peaches recognized the car Becky drove. By now Helen assumed that Peaches was practically omniscient. She was giving Peaches, too late, the credit she deserved.
She parked her Volvo across the rear end of the Toyota, blocking it from being able to back out. Fear clawed at her heart as she ran down the street to the red-brick mansion, then took the steps in a bound. Without much hope, she tried the door. Locked.
Her one recourse was to frighten Peaches out the back. Noise; it was the only weapon she had. She thought of a blueberry farm she'd once gone to, where a cannon boomed every fifteen minutes to scare away crows.
Her mind was working on some new, unplumbed level as she glanced frantically around, then snatched up an iron boot scraper that sat on the stoop. Taking aim at the elegant deadlights that lined either side of the door, she began smashing through the intricate pattern of lead-framed panes of delicate, aged glass, setting up a horrendous, SWAT-like racket. If the alarm went off, so much the better.
But it didn't. She heard nothing inside—no screams of panic, no slamming doors, no fleeing footsteps—as she fumbled with the broken glass, gashing her arm in the process, and then threw open the deadbolt from inside. She pushed at the heavy door with her wounded arm, leaving a slash of blood across its deep green surface, and burst into the hall, more terrified by the silence than she would be of gunfire.
She ran straight to the study, foolishly holding her arm up to slow the flow of blood on the Turkish carpet there. In one sweeping glance, she took in the marine painting tossed carelessly on the desk; the wide-open safe on the wall; the long brown envelopes and blue-bound documents scattered beneath it. A hoarse groan of anguish caught in her throat.
Where was Becky?
She fled from the study back into the hall and took the curving stairs two at a time, her breath coming in long, ragged gasps, her brain spinning light-headedly. She no longer knew or cared if she was behaving rationally now; it was irrelevant. She ran to Katie's room and saw the feed-and-wet doll, alone on the bright blue rug.
Where was Katie?
Nearly blinded by fear now, she turned, stumbling, and fled down the hall to Nat's room.
No one. Nothing. Not even the scent of Enchantra, which deep down inside she'd been hoping to detect.
With a moan of frustration she ran back out into the hall, then threw open the door to Peaches's room, but it, too, had nothing to say and no one to show.
I didn't look in the music room, she realized. She ran back out to the second-floor landing, peering over the mahogany handrail and past the enormous chandelier into the vast expanse of the hail below.
But she could see nothing beyond the rich kaleidoscope of Oriental rug that seemed to shift and pulsate below her. She whipped her head back, afraid that she was going to faint and pitch headlong over the rail, and closed her eyes, taking deep draughts of air, trying to reverse her giddiness.
She opened her eyes. On the landing above her, across the open expanse of extravagantly empty space, stood the woman who had taken profound and obscene liberties with Helen's life and the lives of all she held dear.
She was dressed in a short loose shift of teal silk and, as always, she looked nothing like a nanny. Anyone would've thought that the petulant child in pink overalls that she held in her arms was her daughter.
"Where is she?" cried Helen. "Where's Becky?"
Peaches smiled. "Your daughter is refreshingly naive for a sixteen-year-old."
"If you've hurt her," Helen said in a shaking voice, "I'll kill you."
"Ta. What kind of talk is that for a pillar of the community?" Peaches asked, letting the nylon carryall that was slung over her shoulder slide to the floor. She shifted Katie from one hip to the other.
It was such a mild response; Helen made herself believe it meant Becky was safe. "Why did you come back?" she asked, almost in a wail. "Why couldn't you just keep going—away from here, away from us?"
Again the nanny smiled. "You're not stupid, Helen. You know why."
"Take what you want, then! Take it and go!"
Katie began to squirm. "Pee-e-ches," she whimpered. "I wanna get down."
"In a minute, sweetie," Peaches crooned. She gazed across the hall chasm at Helen from behind the balustrade, its painted balusters standing like short white sentinels in front of her. In a pleasantly musing voice she said, "Do you have any idea, Helen, how awkward you've made things for me?"
"I've done nothing to you," Helen said. "And neither have the children. Especially the children. Please ... put Katie down." Where was Becky? Where?
"Yes, Peaches," Katie pouted. "I wanna go down. Put me down," she said, trying to squirm out of the nanny's grasp.
"All right, Katie," Peaches said suddenly. "Here. Sit." She twisted Katie to face forward and flopped her down on the banister like a rag doll on a Christmas mantel.
For a second, the child was too stunned to say or do anything. Then she looked down over her shoes at the open space beneath them and began to wriggle and scream. In a panic she tried to turn back to Peaches—her little arms were groping wildly—but Peaches held her pinned to the rail.
It all happened so fast. Helen stared wide-eyed and disbelieving at the drama playing out on the landing across from her. It was beyond dream, beyond nightmare, beyond anything her imagination could possibly conjure. "Oh, Peaches ... don't ... please ... I'm begging you," she cried as the child became more and more hysterical.
"Begging? That must be hard, for a woman like you," Peaches said loudly over Katie's screams.
"If you want me to, I'll beg. I'll do anything. Only tell me what you want."
Where was Katie's mother? What good was a ghost if it had no power? Why wasn't Linda smiting Peaches with one fell cosmic blow? The question, then the answer, zipped through Helen's mind like consecutive flashes of lightning. If Peaches is felled, then Katie will fall.
"What I want," said Peaches with a sudden, devasta
ting shift in tone, "is to get the hell out of here!" She added more calmly, "I'd prefer that you didn't follow me."
Helen said, "I won't! I won't! As long as I can have Katie." She was becoming more and more lightheaded, maybe from loss of blood; every second counted now.
Katie was almost totally unmanageable, screaming and kicking to be let off the rail. It was a wonder that Helen was able to hear Peaches say above the din, "You want Katie? Why didn't you say so? Come and get her."
She lifted the child up and held her over the banister, suspended in space.
By now Katie was completely out of control, screaming and twisting in Peaches' grip. Helen began warily but quickly moving from her side of the landing to where the nanny held her charge. It would take a strong woman to hold a hysterical child like that for long, and Peaches was too slender and elegant to project much in the way of strength. Whatever power she had wasn't in her arms; it was in her ability to strike terror in the hearts of the innocent.
"Peaches ... please. Let me have her," Helen said in a voice she could barely control. It was all she could do not to shriek. She was within a couple of feet of the nanny when Peaches seemed suddenly to tire and lowered her arms to rest against the outside of the balusters. The outside, not the inside. Deliberately? Who knew?
But Katie was two feet closer now to falling onto the marble foyer.
Everything happened at once after that, like a slow-motion ballet. Katie wrenched herself violently away and Peaches let go of her hold, first with one arm and then the other, while Helen simultaneously bent over the bannister in desperate lurch at Katie. She managed to hook a strap of the child's Oshkosh overalls: one little corduroy strap. But it was enough to bind rescuer and victim together as the weight of the child pulled Helen, bent over double and holding the strap in a vice-like grip, over the banister and into a free fall.
Slow motion became slower still as together woman and child fell through the air. In the infinite span between wood balustrade and marble floor, Helen had time to form the thought: So this is what it feels like to fly.
Beyond Midnight Page 34