Necessity (20 page)

Cradling the baby, cooing while Ellen sucked at the nipple, she went out the nursery door with her pulse pounding so heavily it poured little black waves across her vision.

Past the kitchen door. Philip putting cups away on their hooks. Don't go straight down the hall now; might make them suspicious. Go into the living room. Keep talking to the baby. Make it seem aimless—a random wandering through the apartment.

The glasses, half full with the ice mostly melted in them, remained on the bar from Jack Sertic's visit. She carried the baby to the window and looked down at the avenue. Nothing remarkable down there: traffic crawling uptown in its usual afternoon snarl.

The subway was the best bet at this hour. There was an entrance just a block uptown on Lexington. She'd already decided that; she knew precisely where she'd go with the baby—down the Lexington Avenue line to Grand Central Station, change for the crosstown shuttle, get off at Eighth Avenue, walk two blocks to a car rental agency and hope they had something immediately available. If not, walk straight down the street into the Port Authority bus terminal and catch a bus to any town across the river in Jersey where they rented cars.

Speed was the trick. Get out of Manhattan; get into a car. After that there'd be time to breathe, time to find an open supermarket, time to study maps. But first she had to get the baby out of this apartment.

She carried Ellen to the front hall closet. The bottle wasn't empty but the baby must have sensed her distress. Probably felt the bashing of her heartbeat. Ellen spurned the nipple and began to cry.

She put the bottle down on the hall table, hooked her handbag over her wrist and reached into the closet: folded the leather jacket over her forearm and picked up the suitcase, cradling the wailing baby in one arm, and turned to struggle with the deadbolt on the front door.

A torrent of adrenaline slammed through her; her palsied hand was barely able to turn the knob.

When Philip Quirini cleared his throat she nearly dropped the baby.

Perhaps it was the tone of the baby's yelling; perhaps something else. Whatever it had been, she was caught. The Quirinis, husband and wife, came down the hall with carefully expressionless faces, their eyes taking in everything: the suitcase, the baby, the half-open apartment door.

Philip Quirini said very politely, “Let me give you a hand with that suitcase, Mrs. LaCasse.”

Marjorie contrived a sliver of a smile. “I'll take the baby for you now.”

He had his hand on the edge of the door, blocking her exit; Marjorie was reaching for Ellen. Over the infant's howls Marjorie said, “The baby's not supposed to go out in this weather”—what weather? It was a normal day for early summer—and she saw Marjorie's glance fall upon the suitcase again and saw the determined set of Marjorie's jaw under the polite cool subservient smile and she knew it was no good: she couldn't get away with the baby but neither could she turn back now because within two minutes Bert would be told what she'd tried to do and her next stop, and last one, would be commitment to that rubber room.

No choice. None at all.

She surrendered the baby. “Tell my husband I'll be away for a few days. Tell him not to worry.” And picked up the suitcase and took it with the jacket through the door. They didn't move to stop her. That wasn't included in their instructions. They only smiled and she watched the door swing shut, cutting off her view of the baby.

She could still hear Ellen's yowling when she crossed the vestibule and put her key in the switch that summoned the elevator. The sound dwindled as the baby was carried away toward the nursery.

Would they awaken Bert right away?

Probably.

Chances were she only had a minute or two to get away. Where was the damned elevator?

What else could I have done? There must have been something. Can I go back now and get her? Isn't there some way?

She scrambled feverishly amid the labyrinth of visions. But all of them were dead ends.

She heard the elevator mechanism. At least it was moving. But where was the car?

Back in the apartment she thought she heard a door slam.

My God. Come
on!

Nothing to do but run for it. Hide. Set up a nest somewhere safe. Then come back when he's no longer expecting it and take the baby away from him.

Footsteps in the apartment. Pounding hard on the carpet. Coming forward. Bert's stride.

The car arrived; the doors slid open. She kicked the suitcase into the elevator, swung inside, jabbed her key into the slot.

The doors were closing and she just had a glimpse of Bert as he came plunging out of the apartment. He was stretching forward, trying to claw at the closing doors, but they came together before his hand reached them.

The car lurched and began to slide downward.

She wept and wept and wept.

47
All the way up the seventeen miles of one-lane blacktop she's tense and rigid at the wheel. If you get trapped on this road—if Bert's decided to come up a day early this week or if one of them is driving toward you from the house right now and recognizes you …

She remembers evenings on this road when you had to stop and wait for the deer to finish bounding across the road—counting them as they leaped: five, six, seven. One time, with Ellen hardly ten weeks old in her arms, she counted out twelve of them.

A car coming forward: she glimpses a glitter of sun reflection as it moves toward her beyond a bend in the trees.

Oh Jesus. If it's one of ours …

Every quarter mile or so there's a pullout to allow oncoming traffic to pass. This one happens to be on her left as she approaches it; that's good in this case because it will put her on the far side of the vehicle—harder for the oncoming driver to see clearly; and her door opens directly onto the woods in case she's forced to duck and run.

It comes in sight—a white Lincoln, muddy and bug-spattered. She pulls her head back into the shadows of the cab and peers through her sunglasses. The driver of the car—quick glimpse of a black man in a grey windbreaker—waves his thanks and drives by. The car has M.D. plates.

A doctor? No one she's ever seen before. Possibly from one of the other houses along the road.

Sweating, she drives on.

The gate is shut of course; it's always shut—a forbidding grillwork of steel appended to stone gateposts amid no-nonsense signs: Private and No Trespassing and Beware of Dogs.

Her palms are damp and she sits taut for a moment, gulping breaths, remembering how she never used to pay much attention to the gate; she always had one of those remote-control transmitter gizmos in the car—you just pressed it and the gate rolled open and you drove through it and it slid shut behind you with a silent assurance that made you feel safe.

She doesn't even remember which side the lock is on. Getting out of the Jeep she examines the left-hand gatepost, sees nothing on its mortared fieldstones, and crosses to the right-hand post.

There's the lock. A small brass plate; a keyhole into the mortar.

She's had these keys for three years. Certainly after she disappeared from the New York apartment two and a half months ago he would have changed all the locks there. But has he bothered to change them here as well?

She's riding on a big assumption here: that his natural arrogant carelessness toward mechanical details will have extended as far as this gate. Bert's a good driver but he rarely drives the car himself, especially here in the mountains; he's usually in the back seat of the limo talking on the phone or hatching plans with whichever of the boys have accompanied him on this weekend's trip to the cabin. The union bosses or the casino architects or the international bankers or the ones Bert never introduced to her.

So—count on the likelihood that, rapt in scams and schemes, invisible behind the tinted windows of the limousine, he usually can't be bothered to notice when the car stops for a red light or the opening of an automatic gate.

The key fits in the lock. She turns it against spring pressure. The gate begins silently to slide open.

Blinking with gratitude she climbs back into the Jeep and drives through.

Can't take the Jeep anywhere near the house; they'd hear it. Got to cut through the woods here. Stay on the downwind side of the house so the noise won't carry in that direction. Drive tangentially around to the far side of the place—intersect the rough-cut pioneer road back beyond the ridge somewhere.

That's why the four-wheel-drive vehicle is necessary.

She's driven these before but nevertheless she has trouble shifting it into the low range and has to break the instruction manual out of the door pocket. After a bit of study and several tries it finally gnashes into gear and to be sure of her bearings she checks the angle of sun shadows on the ground, then tests the wind—a light breeze coming from her left—and goes bucketing to the right across a meadow, crushing flowers and knocking down saplings and trying to avoid the litter of hard New England rocks that could block her passage or puncture an oil pan.

It doesn't matter about the tracks she's leaving behind. By the time they're discovered and followed, either she'll be long gone with Ellen or it will have failed.

48
Thank God it isn't heavy primeval timber. There was a forest fire six years ago in the fall when nobody was in residence; that was during the reign of Bert's previous wife, Aileen, the one who fell in love with the head-waiter at the Englewood Country Club and eventually married him. She too had been a former model. The house that autumn was scorched but saved by air-dropped firefighters. By the time the fire was contained it had taken out most of the middle-sized trees. What's left is second growth that has sprouted around the occasional granddaddy tree that survived the blaze.

Mostly she follows game trails through the woods, splashing through puddles left by the hard rain. Where the track squeezes through gaps too narrow for the Jeep she backs up and finds a way around.

It reminds her of treks during hunting season with her father when she was nine or ten or eleven years old and he was trying to teach her to be a boy. He was very serious about knowing how to survive in the wilderness. When they were stationed at Elmendorf he'd been forced down twice by freak weather in the Alaskan wilderness; he came out on foot both times, to the amazement of experts who'd presumed him dead.

Backing up for the third time to find yet another way across a steep-sided creek, she is thinking, I wish I'd paid more attention to what he had to say.

Then she thinks: don't make a habit of recollecting things like that. You'll never dare repeat them to anyone.

Not even Ellen?

That's a question she hasn't answered: whether it will be safe someday to tell Ellen the truth.

There isn't much breeze. She's worried that the sound of the Jeep may be carrying as far as the house—it can't be much more than three-quarters of a mile off to the left.

Something stirs to her left. It draws her quick alarmed attention. She gets a glimpse of movement—tawny fur bolting into the trees. Doubtless a deer. There are quite a few of them in these woods, trapped on the property by Bert's brutal fence: they're born here and they grow up here and they die here, mostly from bullet and shotgun slug wounds inflicted by Bert and his hunting cronies.

It all seems to be taking much longer than it ought to. The boundary fence should have turned up before now. She's had time to cross the entire property twice over. It's only 320 acres, for Pete's sake.

Has she lost her bearings? Running in circles like a fool?

No. She checks tree shadows along the ground; the sun is there—that's the proper angle; she's still heading toward the fence. It ought to be right in front of her. She ought to have smashed into it by now.

So where in hell is it?

There. Just up the slope, concealed by brush.

She turns to the left, fighting the wheel, braced against the seat as the tires lurch across rocks and root systems and unexpected holes. The rough pitching flings her against the shoulder belt and at intervals it cuts into the side of her neck; by the end of this ride she'll have a welt there and a purpling bruise on the side of her elbow where it bangs into the door. Without the belt to hold her down she'd have smashed her skull against the ceiling by now. She feels shaken to pieces.

It isn't the sort of establishment into which an innocent party would wander by accident. The fence goes all the way around the property. It is nine feet high, a chain link metal barrier topped by an arrowhead pattern of electrified barbed wire strands. Once a week Bert's man has to walk the length of the fence with a pole cutter to trim back branches and leaves that threaten to drop across the line and short it out.

Be just dandy if he's making his rounds today …

Now she knows where she is. Anxious about the draining of time she vectors to the left across an open meadow and guns the Jeep to reckless speed.

At the top of the meadow she slaloms amid tree trunks, some of them jagged and blackened. Must be almost there now. Got to be …

Wheels spinning, engine whining, she bursts out of a tangled thicket into the rutted pioneer road. The front wheels plunge down and the Jeep nearly stalls.

Hitting the clutch, gathering breath, she remembers when they bulldozed the road through from the house to the landing strip: a rough pioneer track, unsurfaced, barely graded but sufficient for the Bronco.

Twigs and branches lie askew in the ruts now, some of them crushed. There are a lot of puddles. She sees dark grease stains on the bent weeds that make a spine along the hump of the middle of the track.

It's been used fairly recently, then.

Of course that doesn't prove they're still using the airstrip. It doesn't prove they haven't rolled up the steel mesh and taken it away.

If they have—suppose the strip has become boggy from yesterday's rain: too overgrown for Charlie's airplane to land?