A Heartbeat Away (14 page)

For today was special, and I was sure I would soon know why.

B
en ran until his lungs began to hurt, along the bustling street, barging past eager shoppers and smartly dressed office workers, bumping into baby carriages pushed by harassed young women, until at last the pain in his chest forced him to stop.

Oblivious to his surroundings, he finally stumbled to a halt. Leaning forward, hands pressed on his muscular thighs, he struggled for breath. And all the time the sound of the heart monitor filled his ears, the single high-pitched tone that made his head feel it was about to explode. How could she be dead? How could anyone so vibrant and full of life be there one moment and gone the next?

His face was crimson with exertion, his skin damp with sweat, and his breath came in great racking gasps that tore at his lungs. How long had he known her—if you could call it knowing? Fifteen minutes, was it? Fifteen minutes that felt like a lifetime.

She had run through the piles of autumn leaves in those silly red shoes, slipping and sliding with a smile so wide that it seemed to take over her whole face. In all his thirty-two years, he had never been so instantly drawn to anyone or felt so acutely in tune with another person. And now she was gone, before he had even had a chance to find out who she really was.

They told him he had saved her life. Yet he hadn't, had he? Oh, he may have prolonged it for an hour or so, but it wasn't enough. The pain that welled inside him as he imagined her face, dark eyelashes like perfect fans against her stark white cheeks, made him want to cry out. He closed his eyes against the pain, breathing deeply, trying to visualize her in the moment they'd first met, but he could get no further than her smile. Her beauty was so much more than wide gray eyes and a glorious cloud of thick dark hair. It was sheer vitality, a radiance that cast its glow around her, making her appear more alive than anyone he had ever met. She wasn't alive, though, was she?

Desolation overwhelmed him. He walked in a daze, alongside the river, where, had he but known it, she, too, used to walk. The water rushed by on its way to the sea. Children fed the ducks in the shallows, giggling and laughing as the cumbersome birds flocked around them in a riot of sound. Ben walked on, unaware, lost in his own tormented world.

For over an hour he wandered, gradually making his way toward the guesthouse where he always stayed when he came to the city. Fletcher Park Hotel. It was just through the park, along a quiet street that backed onto the smart new houses of Fletcher Park Lane. He often wondered what sort of people would want to live in those faceless perfect houses. Fletcher Park Hotel was built in mellow old stone. It was comfortable and homely, with spacious rooms and slightly crumbling woodwork. Ben's kind of place.

He wandered across the park, trudging through the thick bed of brown leaves where her silly red shoes had skipped and run. She
had
looked back for him, hadn't she? In the moment before she'd stepped off the pavement into the path of the fast-moving black car and the bastard driving it, who hadn't even stopped. Did that make the accident Ben's fault?

The guilt that had been weighing him down for so long deepened. Was it their brief attraction for each other that had been the cause of her death? Suffocating pain rose up. He wanted to scream out his agony to the whole sorry world, but what good would that do? For despite the fact that the girl in the red suit had made more impact on him in fifteen minutes than any other girl had managed to do in a lifetime, it was already too late.

As he walked in through the front door of Fletcher Park Hotel, Mrs. Minton, the elderly proprietor, appeared from the kitchen. She was carrying a tray piled high with crockery, but as soon as she saw Ben, she placed it carefully on a side table and looked up at him with a gentle query in her clear gray eyes. He had stayed with her so many times over the past few years that she thought of him as a friend. Now the misery etched on his face made her shake her white head in dismay.

“Whatever have you been up to, young man? You know you mustn't overdo it.”

Ben sighed, forcing a smile onto his stiff face. “It's been a long time since the days when I wasn't supposed to overdo it, remember? I'm as fit as a fiddle now. I just ran a bit too far, that's all.”

“Hmm!” she exclaimed. “Well, you'd better go and get yourself into the shower. I'll see if I can rustle you up a nice cup of tea.”

Grabbing the opportunity to escape, Ben raced up the curved wooden staircase two steps at a time and burst into his large, sunny room, the room that he always asked for when he stayed with Mrs. Minton. It was quiet and peaceful, overlooking the park, a place to stop and take stock, a place where he had spent many an hour just doing that—stopping to take stock of his life. Now he threw himself onto the bed in despair, for this time it was not his mortality that was in question.

Should I have remained?
he asked himself.
Should I have gone back and seen her after…?
But
he
had been there, hadn't he? The well-dressed, cold-eyed callous man whom the nurse had called Mr. Lyall. How could
she
have been with someone like him? How could warmhearted, lovely Lucy McTavish be with someone so totally wrong for her?

He had felt so close to her, but why? It was crazy that he just couldn't stop thinking about a girl he had known for so short a time. Was it just because she had the same name as the girl he had been waiting so long to see? He shuddered, remembering how her name had infiltrated his dreams, weighing on his conscience for so long. What if she
was
the same Lucy? No! That was impossible. There must be a thousand Lucys living in the city.

To take his mind off her, he lingered in the shower, allowing the scalding water to cascade down his body. Soaping himself again and again, as if to wash away all the pain that was screwing him up. He finally stepped out, his skin tingling, rubbed himself dry, draped the towel around his hips and walked across to peer out the huge bay window. A pot of tea sat on the side table, steaming gently on a silver tray, and he felt a surge of affection for Mrs. Minton, who thought a cup of tea could solve anything. But there was nothing that could solve this problem, was there? It was too late now to save Lucy McTavish.

Time dragged as he stared out over the park, and he flicked on the TV, then threw himself onto the bed and leaned back against the pillows, arms up behind his head. A woman was talking in a high, agitated voice, but he didn't hear what she was saying, for his mind just kept going “around and around” in circles, from when he'd first caught sight of Lucy in the park to the endless, horrific moment when she'd stepped off the pavement. And all the time he kept reaching the same conclusion. It was his fault. She had been looking back for him and that was why she didn't see the black BMW hurtling around the corner.

The sound of her screams filled his head. The image of her still, white face made his stomach churn. And at last he could stand it no longer. As evening shadows replaced the autumn sunshine, he scrambled into his clothes and headed for the door.

Darkness fell softly around him as he walked beneath the tall trees in Fletcher Park, shoulders hunched against the night air. Winter was already exerting its grip on the world and the air was icily cold, its silence broken only by the mournful howl of the wind in the branches above his head and the distant hum of traffic from behind the high wall that surrounded it.

Ben relished the eerie singing of the wind in the treetops. He was oblivious to his surroundings, but his head rang with the melancholy wail and he closed his eyes for a moment, unaware of the two young women who hurried along the pathway toward him. They glanced at him shyly, clinging to each other, chattering as he passed them by. The taller of the two stopped and peered at him, her face puckered with concern.

“You okay, mate?” she asked, poising herself to run. He walked on, totally unaware.

“Weirdo,” she called.

Her small, plump companion rolled her eyes. “Nice-looking weirdo, though,” she giggled, and they hurried off, uncomfortable to be in this lonely place after dark, where crazy strangers with closed faces wandered aimlessly.

“He'll be drugged up to the eyeballs, of course,” remarked the tall girl again as they approached the light and safety of the street.

Her companion turned back to where the man had been swallowed up by the dark shadows of the park. “I think he just looked sad,” she said.

 

Ben went in no particular direction, but allowed his feet to lead him where they would. It came as a shock when he suddenly glanced around and realized that he was at the exact place that Lucy had stepped off the pavement. He shuddered, wrapping his arms about himself against the sharp night air. Here she had stood, right here, looking back at him…and then!

Lights seemed to flash all around him. Warm yellow light from store windows, bright white lights from passing cars, and the buzz of voices filled his head, high-pitched happy voices. People out for a night on the town—people who knew nothing of the tragedy that had happened here not so long ago. Anger welled inside him. How could life just go on like this, when only a few short hours earlier her red-clad body had lain motionless on the cold gray pavement?

And then he saw it, discarded, farther along on the edge of the busy street. It must have been dragged there by passing cars. One single, silly, strappy red shoe. With shaking fingers, he bent to retrieve the forlorn, forgotten object, then cradled it against his cheek. Her shoe. It was
her
shoe, torn from her foot as her body was hurled into the road.

A middle-aged couple slowed their steps, staring curiously. Ben ignored them, veered from the place that would haunt his nightmares forever. He walked slowly back through the park where they had met, holding the red shoe tightly against his chest as he dreamed of what might have been. But she was gone, and it was over before it even had a chance to begin.

 

It was almost midnight when he arrived back at Fletcher Park Hotel. Apart from a low light in the hallway, the whole place was in darkness. He carefully locked the front door behind him and headed for the stairs, still clutching the red shoe.

“Ben?”

Beryl Minton's reedy voice floated through from the dining room. He hesitated, then hurried on, not wanting to talk.

“Ben,” she repeated more firmly, and just as he reached the bottom of the curved staircase, she appeared beside him.

Her thin fingers closed around his arm with deceiving strength.

“I think you had better tell me what the problem is,” she insisted.

Ben felt himself beginning to droop, as if all the energy were seeping out of him, deflating his body and leaving him weak and helpless.

“Come on. I'll make you a nice cup of hot chocolate,” she suggested, “and then you can tell me all about it.”

He followed her into the large warm kitchen, and it was only when she pulled him a chair close up against the oven that he realized just how cold he really was. He clung to the heat while she made them both a drink, then she placed a bright-yellow mug in his shaking fingers and sat just opposite, on the other side of the old cream cooker.

“Well?” she began.

Ben sighed, taking a sip of the hot sweet liquid before attempting to explain the impossible. “I met this girl in the park,” he eventually said, reliving the moment. “She was so full of life. I've never met anyone like her. It was odd, as if we were meant to be together. Fifteen minutes—that's all we had. Just fifteen minutes. When we got to the street, she looked back at me and stepped in front of a car.”

Beryl Minton gasped, but Ben carried on, needing to talk.

“I tried so hard to save her,” he cried in a broken voice. “And they said that I had. In the hospital they called me a hero. I waited in the corridor outside her door. I just wanted to see her open her eyes, you see. To speak to her again.”

He dropped his head into his hands, tears coursing through his fingers.

“But it was all just a waste of time. The beeping of the monitor went into a single tone—I can't get the sound out of my head—and then there were people everywhere. I heard the banging as they tried to revive her…”

For a moment he faltered, then his words rushed out in a jumble.

“Someone shouted, ‘She's gone, ' and I started to run. I feel as if I've been in a nightmare ever since.”

They sat for a while then in silence, the tall athletic young man and the small white-haired old lady.

Ben felt somewhat better for sharing his grief. “Sorry for burdening you,” he said, making an effort to smile.

Beryl Minton shook her head forcefully. “You know I'm always glad to help,” she told him, remembering those other nights when they had sat like this, but then it had all been about him.

“One day perhaps I'll be able to help
you,
” he sighed.

She smiled softly. “There is one thing you could do. It's not much, but it might help.”

“Anything,” he cried, clutching the red shoe.

“Why don't you contact her relatives and find out when her funeral is?”