Beyond Midnight (70 page)

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 a
l
ready 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: s
he 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.
Ha
lf 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 hal
l 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 hal
l 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
frustratio
n she ran back out into the hal
l, 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 a
ll
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.

"I
f 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, devastating 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.