Crazy for Cornelia (15 page)

Then Cornelia saw Nurse Lucy jettison herself out of her chair with startling vigor for such a big woman. Uh-oh. She hadn’t
suspected that Lucy’s time in the chair was a recharging of her booster-rocket. Now the woman blazed across the room at the
very moment she needed her to be deliberate and plodding.

But it was now or never.

She waited for the nurse to go a little farther into the depths of her closet. She had purposely hung the white robe as far
back as possible, a fifteen-foot trek from the closet door.

As soon as Nurse Lucy had disappeared from her sight, Cornelia summoned all the energy inside her. She raised herself stiffly
from the bed. Even her nightgown seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. When she hit the floor, she felt as though she were seeping
through the carpet toward the earth’s core. She lumbered in long strides for the closet, a race through water, her body more
like a barge than a sleek submarine.

She put her arms straight out in front of her like Frankenstein to achieve forward momentum, huffing so hard she was sure
Nurse Lucy could hear her.

Inside the closet, she saw Nurse Lucy’s head turning, sensing her, then turned her bulk around to head back toward the closet
door.

But the Electric Girl thumped ahead, holding her course. She reached the door first by one hundredth of a second. She felt
for the doorknob and pulled. It shut almost all the way.

Almost.

She felt a devastating jerk that nearly yanked her onto the floor, and saw, through the crack of the door, Nurse Lucy’s grim
face. They
each pulled like titans to gain an inch of space between the door and its frame. The door wobbled between them.

She willed her body to create more electricity, to ignite the reserve of adrenaline that she might still squeeze past the
drugs. The door was only inches away from closing, but the torque from the Nurse-Lucy-pull was fantastic, as powerful as the
yank from a big-wheeled tractor. She felt herself losing ground.

Then for an instant, Nurse Lucy faltered.

The Electric Girl whooped, grunted hard, and threw herself backward, pulling the door shut. Nurse Lucy yanked her fingers
back so they wouldn’t get caught.

A click.

The door locked. Nurse Lucy pounded hard on the inside of the door and called out, but nobody would hear her or investigate
until early the following morning. The Electric Girl had already said her dull good night to Chester. O’Connell had gone home.
She shuffled over to close and lock the door to her bedroom for good measure.

The Thorazine Shuffle
.

She had researched the
Physicians’ Desk Reference
carefully a year before when Bushberg began prescribing medicine. She knew that Thorazine, used to calm agitated mental patients,
was the main ingredient in the cocktail Bushberg gave her. She slowly spun around as best she could, in a victory dance.

She had left a box lunch she’d assembled from the kitchen, a turkey sandwich, a bunch of grapes, and a bottle of Pellegrino
inside the closet so Nurse Lucy wouldn’t starve. Although that would probably take quite a bit longer than one night, given
the woman’s carbohydrate reserves. She wished she could toss the Jackie Collins book into the closet, but that would tempt
fate.

She felt around her red bedspread to pull out a duffel bag, efficiently prepacked for a trip to the jungle. It weighed a lot
with her hiking boots inside. She dug out her travel outfit, soft black workout clothes, and slowly slipped them on. Then
she took a black jacket with thick lining from under the chaise longue and managed to pull the sleeves on with great effort.
She didn’t bother with her hair or makeup. This was no beauty contest. She pulled a black watch cap over her hair.

She unlocked the bedroom door, looked both ways, and slunk
slowly down the upstairs corridor. Chester would probably be in his study. She tiptoed down the staircase and shuffled ahead.

When she approached the door of her father’s sanctum, she carefully lowered herself down on the floor, stretched out, and
used her compact mirror at floor level to get a worm’s-eye view. She saw Chester at his desk staring into space, a half-full
brandy snifter in front of him.

Her poor dad. Cornelia felt a cold ping at the base of her spine. She worried about him. His energy had fallen so drastically
over the past six months that she feared for his health. It would help him so much to give her his attention now, since they
were as far apart as hostile countries.

She resolved that, as soon as she returned from South America, and she hoped it would be with a discovery that would impress
him, she would make it her business to reach him. Her father understood duty, had told her time and again how important it
was. He just couldn’t comprehend hers.

Stomach pressed to the carpet, she crawled past the den door with her duffel bag held carefully on her upraised palms in front
of her. She inched ahead as though she were pushing a peanut forward with her nose. It took her a full two minutes to clear
Chester’s door.

Ten feet past the study, she dragged herself to a standing position, pressed through the dark to find the utility room off
the kitchen, and disabled the apartment’s alarm system.

Then she opened the door out to the cramped service foyer and rang for the service elevator.

Her next maneuver, leaving the building, would depend on who she found on duty downstairs.

Chester Lord thought he heard a sound at the door of his den. He looked out in the hallway, but saw nothing. He sipped a long
draught of brandy, feeling his nervous system race, and went back to staring out the window at the distant lights of the West
Side skyscrapers twinkling over the dark forest of Central Park at night.

He had to stop fuming over Bushberg and set his mind to Tucker’s plan. In truth, the Kois’ hostile takeover play of Lord &
Company frightened him to his shoes.

“A big, fat target,” he muttered, that was all that being rich made
a person today. In his snifter of 1890 Courvoisier, he saw a long line of scoundrels trying to slice off an unearned piece
of the Lord pie. Now it was the Kois. Contemplating their villainy made him see the fine points of Tucker’s solution.

Should he trust Tucker? Actions spoke louder than words, that tired but annoyingly apt cliché. Tucker had saved him at Lord
& Company. Didn’t he deserve the benefit of the doubt with Cornelia? He sipped thoughtfully, trying to recall how badly Tucker
had ever really let him down. Tucker had been the one to urge the partnership with the Kois five years before. But now that
Han Koi revealed his serpent’s head, Tucker had stepped forward like a man, assumed responsibility. Tucker
did
have character. Chester’s inability to glimpse it much of the time was just a generational thing, he concluded, like his
inability to become computer-literate. He couldn’t expect a boy Tucker’s age to show his feelings exactly the same way as,
well, Elizabeth had.

His tangled thoughts settled a bit. He inched like a worm toward that zone of solace, letting Tucker have his way. The boy
would come through as he had in the past. And if Cornelia decided to marry him, perhaps she could feel protected enough to
find her way back to, well, normalcy.

He ached to talk to Elizabeth. She had soothed him when he revealed the slender threads that held his confidence together.
Their time together seemed only an instant now. Elizabeth’s love used to evaporate so many of his doubts, when he had let
her. He couldn’t help that he was at heart a reticent man who kept his distance from other people, including his wife. And,
in her way, she mirrored his own reserve. Elizabeth’s emotions flowed freely with Cornelia, but could squeeze slightly shut
with Chester. Perhaps that was what his father had meant when he told Chester, “Cousins can marry cousins, but Presbyterians
should never marry Presbyterians.” The important thing was that Elizabeth gave Cornelia her goodness and intelligence.

He took to his feet a bit unsteadily. His doubts and anxieties only poisoned what Tucker was trying to accomplish. If he were
honest with himself, Tucker performed better at everything than Chester.

There was no doubt that, of the two of them, Tucker was the better equipped to save his daughter.

* * *

At his post by the door, Kevin watched a video monitor of the service elevator. He could see who it was, and felt a pinprick
of curiosity.

“Hey Vlad, I’m taking a break,” he told the Russian, whose eyelids were already at half-mast.

This morning, he had seen the picture of the back of his head on page three of the
Daily Globe
. It showed Kevin and Tucker Fisk carrying Cornelia Lord, passed out. “Don’t Drop Deb,” Philip Grace’s headline read.

His copy of the paper was now carefully folded in his locker. Such total bullshit, and why he was excited about it, he didn’t
exactly know. Except that he enjoyed seeing Tucker’s tortured face in the photograph, raging at the camera.

He didn’t go to the staff room but stopped at the service elevator.

The door opened and Cornelia Lord stood inside. She wore all-black clothes and clutched a duffel bag, a knit cap on her head
like an armed robber.

“Don’t shoot,” Kevin smiled, lifting his palms up.

She opened her mouth to speak, then held her lips open. Her eyes seemed to be fighting a dense fog. Still, a glimmer remained
of the searching eyes. She trembled slightly.

“Hey, you okay?” he asked her.

Her face resembled cold white china. She barely moved for a second, didn’t even twitch, then her head cocked slightly to the
side like a puppy and her mouth curved around a word.

“Hello,” she said. He could see it was an agonizing labor.

Kevin felt a twinge of sadness for Cornelia Lord. Her tongue seemed to be glued to the bottom of her mouth. As he looked her
in the eye he saw, deep in the soupy gray, a dim sparkle. Then tiny pinpricks of violet light gathered and began breaking
through the gray. She looked—he couldn’t think of another way to describe it—happy to see him. She moved forward in inches
and stuck her head out of the elevator, looking both ways to make sure nobody else was around. Color seemed to pump through
her body as she stepped from the elevator into the dimly lit shadows of the service hall.

“Look, can I help you with your bag?” he asked her. She stood still. “Get you a cab?”

Then she put her hand lightly on his arm. She wanted Kevin to follow her. He fell into step beside her, but quickly got ahead.

He recognized her movement. The Thorazine Shuffle was what they called it on the psych ward of Bellevue. He’d seen it about
a thousand times, patients slogging around on meds like creatures from
The Night of the Living Dead
. And there were other side effects. He remembered one patient complaining that her throat felt so dry, she worried that a
brush fire would start inside it.

He slowed down to stay beside Cornelia Lord while she shuffled into the staff room. She really put her heart into it, he had
to give her credit.

Kevin closed the door behind them.

“Thank you,” she said with difficulty. “I really need your help.”

She pronounced it
rilly
, maybe an upper-class thing. But his heart beat at the part about needing his help.

“I need you to lie for me,” she told him, her tongue rolling around every word. “If my father comes looking for me, you have
to tell him you haven’t seen me.”

“Are you trying to kill yourself?”

Her eyes flared. “No, of course not.”

“Because I have to tell you,” Kevin said, “that’s a distinct possibility if you plan on drinking tonight. You’re on meds now,
right? You could get a bad reaction.”

He’d caught her by surprise and she recoiled slightly. She slowly lifted her hand and almost—but not quite—touched his cheek.
It was his turn to move back a little.

“I promise I won’t drink. But I have to do something important. Just help me get out of here. Please.”

Kevin thought about it. All he really knew about this girl was that Lord comma Cornelia would probably be trouble comma massive
for anybody she touched. Look at what she did to her boyfriend, Tucker Fisk, that slick mogul, practically foaming at the
mouth like a junkyard dog on page three of the
Globe
.

But Cornelia Lord had heart. She had to, sneaking out of whatever custodial care they had kept her under in Penthouse A, loaded
up with Thorazine by her slimy psychiatrist.

He thought about the building rules he was supposed to follow.
What did they call it? Not “fraternizing” with the residents, namely Chester Lord’s daughter. He had no doubt at all he could
lose his job if he helped her.

“Let me go out to the alley first,” he told her. “Or you’ll have company. Follow me, stay in the dark when you get outside,
wait for a cab, and get ready to run. Can you run?”

“Of course,” it took her five seconds to say.

He went ahead and opened the service door against the cold. He knew that Vlad never watched the monitor inside to see the
security vidcam mounted by the door over their heads. She followed him in what seemed like dog years. They got out the door.
He walked up the short alley where he’d lifted her out of the limousine the night before, and onto the street.

He peered out into the dark and spotted two other photographers besides Philip Grace tonight. Philip’s competition had caught
up with him. They probably saw that Grace’s
Debwatch
column won about fifty percent more space in the
Globe
today than usual, all because of Cornelia Lord. When he saw Philip’s face, it wore a kind of gas-pain look. The other photographers,
a ratty pair, were only there to invade the turf Philip had carved out for himself, and Philip kept apart from them.

The Thorazine Deb was still perched just outside the service door in the shadows, counting on Kevin to help her.

“Hey, Philip,” he called out, hushed but excited, like he just discovered gold in the garbage Dumpster.