Dina Santorelli (34 page)

"Does
this work?" he asked, holding up the Yoo-Hoo.

"That's
fine."

Reynaldo
jumped up on top of the counter and grabbed the lantern.

"Can
you turn that off?" Jamie asked, peering outside the front window.

"Sure."
Reynaldo turned off the lantern, the room went black, and Jamie felt as if she
were again in the woods, alone, running.

"Take
my hand," Reynaldo said.

Reynaldo
waited in the dark, hand outstretched, but he didn't feel anything.

"It's
okay," he said. "I'm going to help you."

He
felt her hand press into his palm, and he tightened his fingers over it and
opened the front door.

There
were no approaching headlights. Everything was still, quiet. Reynaldo locked
the shop door and pulled Jamie behind him toward his car. He clicked open the
locks, which caused the car's interior light to go on, and he opened the
passenger's-side door for Jamie, tossing his aunt's pocketbook, which she had
forgotten, into the backseat. By the time Reynaldo got around to the other
side, Jamie had turned Charlotte around so that she was sitting with her back
toward Jamie's chest.

"Can
I have the Yoo-Hoo, please?" she asked.

Reynaldo
shook it and handed it to Jamie, who opened it and put it near Charlotte's mouth. She maneuvered the can opening so that it was against the girl's lips,
which were unresponsive, and began to pour. Chocolate liquid spilled over Charlotte's mouth and clothes, but a few drops had gone in, because Charlotte coughed and
pushed the can away.

"Please,
honey, drink," Jamie said, bringing the Yoo-Hoo again to her mouth. Her hand
was shaking, and Reynaldo reached over to help steady the can.

"Carlota,"
Reynaldo said, gently. "Carlota..."

Charlotte's eyes opened, tiny slits of recognition, and she
turned toward Reynaldo's face. Jamie put the can to her mouth. "Drink, baby,
drink." But when Jamie poured, the liquid spilled again.

"Oh
my God," Jamie said.

"
Espera
!"
Reynaldo reached into the back seat and pulled Miss Beatrice out of his aunt's
bag. "
Carlota
...
Mira
!"

The
little girl's eyes opened and then grew wide at the sight of Miss Beatrice.

"MaBa..."
the little girl said softly. "MaBa, MaBa..." Charlotte patted the doll's hair
and rested it across her belly.

Jamie
stared at Reynaldo in disbelief. "Who are you?" she asked.

"A
friend," Reynaldo said and pulled into the street.

Phillip looked at the clock
on his nightstand: 11:00 p.m. Time was running out. He had been lying in bed
for the past few hours with the telephone in his hand, trying to decide what
he'd say when they picked up the phone at Stanton. He'd never stayed an
execution before, so this was going to be big news, and he envisioned the
rampant speculation on the next day's news hours when Charlotte turned up
unharmed hours later. Nothing he could say seemed believable or convincing
enough, especially for a vocal, stalwart, card-carrying conservative like
Phillip Grand.

The Executive Mansion was running on auxiliary power, and for a brief moment that afternoon,
when the lights blinked off and then on again, Phillip thought the execution
would have to be postponed and was terrified at the prospect of not knowing
what that meant for his daughter's safety. But he realized that Stanton prison, even if on the same power grid as Albany County, also had supplementary
electrical systems in place. The court-sanctioned killing of Gino Cataldi would
go on as scheduled.

All
afternoon, Lieutenant Governor Waxman Tanner had issued hourly press statements
about the blackout and when power would be restored, as Phillip lay under his
blankets, like a little boy who had been told to go to his room and think about
what he'd done to deserve what was happening to him. Katherine had stopped in
once or twice to check on him, carrying a sandwich both times, but he was
standoffish and curt, and she took the hint, putting the meal trays on the
table and leaving. They were still there untouched, the bread hard, the mayo
soured, as Phillip had only one thing on his mind: Don Bailino.

Over
the years, Phillip had watched Don rise up the ranks of the local business
scene, but always from a distance. Following their discharge from the army in
1992, he and Don, having grown very close during their time in the service, had
tossed around the idea of getting an apartment together downstate in one of the
outlying boroughs of New York City. The idea had intrigued Phillip, who'd
yearned for an adventure, a life away from the Grand legacy, but his father
wouldn't hear of it.

"Do
you know who that fellow's family is?" he had said. "Who they associate with?"

Phillip
did know. Don had told him. They had talked about lots of things in the extreme
heat of the constant desert sun when they thought that they would drop from
fatigue, when they thought that they may not live to see another day. Still,
feeling the pressure of being an only heir, Phillip obeyed his father. He and
Don had that in common—they felt that overpowering need to make their fathers
happy, two capable men trapped within a course that had been predetermined,
including their enlistment in the military.

From
that point on, the relationship had strayed. Years passed, and the contact
dwindled. On the night Phillip was elected to the state assembly, his assistant
had tapped him on the shoulder to tell him he had a call. "Who is it?" Phillip
asked, champagne glass in hand. "Don Bailino," she said. A wave of nervousness
overcame him. "Take his number, and tell him I'll call him back," he told her.
But he never did. He'd kept that telephone number, scribbled on a piece of
paper, in his desk drawer for years until he finally threw it away; he hadn't
seen it again until it popped up on his caller ID two nights ago.

Although
their paths hadn't crossed until Wednesday, it would be a lie to say that
Phillip didn't think of Don often—he'd been an important influence on Phillip
during the years they served together. It was Don who had counseled him when
he'd hesitate during a shooting exercise at boot camp. "The people who die are
supposed to die," he'd say. It was Don who pushed him to make a decision based
on instinct rather than knowledge, a concept foreign to Phillip. Ever since,
Don Bailino remained, hovering in the background of his life, silently
influencing his political decision making, until Gino Cataldi decided to kill a
fellow inmate while in prison, making him eligible for the death penalty—a core
issue of Phillip's ascendance to the governorship. Phillip had pushed hard for
capital punishment in the Cataldi case—harder than he ever had—and most
political pundits assumed it had been to make good on the campaign promises
that had gotten him elected. But Philip always wondered if part of the reason
he doggedly pursued Gino's case was to banish the ghost of the man who, while
once his friend and confidant, always made him feel like the lesser man in the
room. On paper, Don Bailino had nothing on Phillip Grand—he dropped out of high
school, lived a life on the streets in a forgotten section of Brooklyn, had a
police record with a string of minor offenses—but in reality he was quite an
extraordinary man. After all, it was Don Bailino who had saved his life in Iraq, a feat for which he earned the Army Medal of Honor, and as he lay in bed, Phillip
also wondered if his taking on the Cataldi case was, at heart, some kind of
perverse desire to see his old friend again. Although Bailino had visited
Cataldi countless times at Stanton according to the prison logs, he never
showed up in the courtroom or tried to contact Phillip after that phone call he
made to his state assembly headquarters that first election night.

Since
then, Phillip went out of his way to avoid crossing paths with his old friend,
and he wasn't sure if it was out of embarrassment or fear. When Don's new Upackk
factory opened last year and had gotten accolades not only from the trade but
from Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design—a big to-do in today's
eco-friendly world—Phillip had feigned a conflict and sent Tanner in his place
for the recognition ceremony. Don was doing very well for himself, and although
there was a part of Phillip that was competitive and jealous, for the most part
he was glad. In the absence of a true relationship, with his only knowledge of
Don Bailino coming from local or trade-press clippings or what he could glean
online, Phillip found himself conjuring a new life for Don in his mind, one of
the self-made businessman who was free from the constraints of his childhood
and familial obligations. Phillip fantasized that Don had managed to do what he
couldn't—escape the leash of his father. He imagined Don visiting old Gino
Cataldi in prison more as an act of paying homage to his father than a
harbinger of illegal activity, as the Feds would have him believe. Phillip was
well aware that the government was keeping a close eye on Upackk and all of Don
Bailino's business dealings, but until this point they had found nothing, and
Phillip took that as a good sign that Don had left the bad behind. He probably
would have lived the rest of his life under that delusion if he had not
received that phone call Tuesday night.

Phillip
got out of bed and walked toward Charlotte's nursery. The entrance had been
cordoned off with crime-scene tape. He stuck his arm through, flicked the wall
light switch, and peered into the empty room. The stuffed animals of the mobile
over the crib, usually rocking in a gentle breeze, were still, the window
closed. The familiar smell of baby powder and Desitin was faint.

He
pulled the tape off the wall, each strand floating down and hanging along the
doorframe, and stepped into the room. Out the window, he saw that the rain had
stopped, and the picketers had grown in numbers as the clock ticked closer to midnight. Phillip watched the to-and-fro of the throng of people, thought of how small
everyone looked from this high up, and wondered how Don had managed to pull
this off. Had someone in the mansion betrayed him? He still didn't know.

A
scuffle broke out among the picketers, resulting in a shoving match between two
young women, one of whom was holding a sign that read,
Governor Grand: Can you live with this?

Could
he?

Phillip
picked up a framed picture that was sitting on a small table next to the crib.
It was a photo he had taken of his wife and daughter immediately after the
birth, at the moment the doctor had placed Charlotte on Katherine's belly for
the first time. Katherine hated the photo—"Look at me," she'd said, "I look so
fat"—and only kept it there because of Phillip's insistence.

"Katherine,"
Phillip muttered to himself, as he placed the frame back down. He thought about
what his wife would say about the last-minute stay of execution. She'd know if
he placed the call that something was wrong, and she wouldn't let it go until
she knew what. And he could never tell her, because she wouldn't be quiet, she
wouldn't sit on the sidelines and watch Don Bailino go unprosecuted for the
kidnapping of her daughter. It would be a wedge between them for the rest of
their lives, and that's assuming they would be lucky enough to live them.

"Phillip?"

Katherine
was standing in the doorway to Charlotte's room. She held up her hand, which
held the baby-monitor receiver; the transmitter was located near the crib, next
to the photo he'd picked up.

"I
thought I heard you call me," she said to her husband who, standing there in
her daughter's room, looked sadder than Katherine had ever seen him.

Phillip
opened his arms, that familiar, welcoming gesture he always made toward her,
and Katherine ran into his arms.

"I'm
sorry," Katherine whispered into her husband's ear.

"I
told you. Nothing to be sorry about," Phillip said.

"It
doesn't look good, does it, Phillip?" She held him tightly.

"Have
hope, honey."

Katherine
pulled away. "I do need to tell you something," she said.

Phillip
looked at his watch: forty-five more minutes.

"Can
it wait?"

Katherine
shook her head.

"What
is it?" Phillip sat down on the rocking chair.

Katherine
held onto the crib. "This is difficult to say..." She took a deep breath. "A
few months ago, I attended the opening of the Lystretta Gallery downtown. I'm
not sure if you remember... You were committed to a dinner of some kind, and
I'm not even sure I put it on your agenda. The place is so tiny, and it wasn't
even that impressive of an exhibit, actually, but the owner of the gallery, Jim
Lystretta, is a board member of the New York State Council of the Arts, and
you're not the biggest arts supporter, so I thought I should make an appearance
and dragged Maddox with me. Anyway, I had had a bad day, the teachers' union
had been on my back, and I was in a foul mood, and..." She took another breath.
"I was standing there looking at a digital painting, and... this man came over,
and we started talking."

"Who?"

The
vivid image of Don Bailino flashed through Katherine's memory, but she shook
her head; she just couldn't tell him that part yet. "It doesn't matter. He just
came up to me and introduced himself politely and started talking about that
detestable artwork. We talked for about thirty minutes that night, far longer
than I ever expected to stay there. And when we parted, he said that he enjoyed
chatting with me and hoped he'd see me again sometime." Katherine frowned. "It
seems so silly now."

Phillip
shuffled his feet. "What are you saying, Katherine?"

"I'm
saying that..." She paused. "I'm... saying... that..."

"Are
you telling me you had an affair?"

"No,
I did not." She looked Phillip in the eye. "I. Did. Not."