Fidelity (32 page)

“What are you talking about? Is this some kind of joke? Why would I burn my own house?”

“Maybe to destroy the places where the proof could have been hidden, thinking if the evidence was gone, you would have seen the last of me.”

“I didn’t do that, and I didn’t think of doing it.”

“Then you did it because you had already found the evidence.”

“I didn’t do it. I’ll tell you exactly what I did. I looked all over for what you described that night you broke into my house-papers, a case file, maybe tapes or photographs-that would embarrass a powerful man. You never said who the man was, and that didn’t help. But I looked hard.”

“And you’re claiming you didn’t find it?”

“I found hundreds of case files, hundreds of tapes, hundreds of disks that were labeled one thing and could have been another. But nothing seemed to prove anything mysterious about a powerful man. There were the usual divorce and child-custody things, the usual cases of workmen’s-comp fraud, employees stealing from their bosses, missing persons who owed somebody money.” She paused. “The last time you showed up, you demonstrated to both of us that I’m not the kind of person who would be able to use what Phil had to blackmail anybody. You must also know that I’m not a person who would risk going to jail for arson. We both know that. The only one around who might be up to that is you.”

She could hear him walking around her, his footsteps heavy on the linoleum floor, making the wood beneath vibrate her chair. She braced herself, listening for a sudden movement that meant a blow was coming.

His voice came from right above her: “If you didn’t want it, why were you looking for it?”

“A lot of reasons.”

“What are they?”

“I still want to know who killed my husband, and what secret he was trying to protect.”

“I thought your husband was screwing other women.”

“He was. I still want to know.”

“I got a long look at you without your clothes the other night. Your husband must have been really stupid.” He paused. “Unless you cut him off. Is that what happened?”

Emily was beginning to sweat. She couldn’t let him know how horrifying this topic was, or he would pursue it. “I loved him, and I thought I had a good marriage. After Phil died, I was surprised to learn it wasn’t.”

“What were the other reasons you wanted to find the proof?”

“You. I didn’t want you to have it.” She knew she was taking a risk to say that, but it was true, and she had to use what was true. “I hate you.”

“I don’t blame you. You should hate me for doing that to you. You should hate me because you’re sitting here thinking I might do a lot worse.”

She knew that if she didn’t answer, he would feel he had to prove it. “Right.”

“Hmmmm.”

Emily waited. She would scream and hope that someone heard, even though he must have prepared for that. She would fight as hard as she was able, even though she knew it was futile and he would overpower her in a few seconds. And then she would die.

His voice came from farther away, not nearer. “What did the arson investigator say about your fires?”

“Just that the one in my house was intentional. He said there were lots of accelerants. That’s why it went up all at once like that.”

“And what did he ask you?”

“Why there was furniture piled up in the living room. It had looked to the firemen as though that was part of setting the fire. I told him about everything-my husband being murdered, you breaking into my house, and then about my friends and me trying to find out what you had come for.”

“That doesn’t say why furniture was piled up.”

“I was planning on moving it into storage.”

«whY• ?”

“I was searching each piece-every table, chair, or bed-so I could get it out of there, and go through the house itself. I wanted to look for hiding places that Phil knew about but I didn’t. Maybe there were places in the walls or under the floors or something.”

“You really wanted it bad, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You couldn’t live there without furniture.”

“No.”

“So you had a plan. What was it?”

“I was going to wait until this was over, and then sell the house and leave.”

“When did you decide to burn it instead?”

“I didn’t.”

“It’s a lot easier than selling it. And you knew that as long as the house was standing, I might be back. It wouldn’t matter if there was a new owner. I might still think that the evidence would be hidden somewhere in the house. And you couldn’t stand that. You didn’t want to be responsible to them for me, and you didn’t want me to find it. So you burned it.”

“No. I didn’t. I wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s wrong. It’s illegal. The idea never occurred to me.”

“But once you found the evidence, the house was a liability. If they can’t prove you torched it, you get the money.”

“I didn’t.”

She heard him take in a breath and let it out in a sigh. “All right. We’ll talk about it again. I’m going to take you to the bathroom now. You can’t get out through the window, and there’s nothing left in that room you can use as a weapon. It’s all been taken out. I’m warning you not to try anything. If you do anything that lets you see my face, I’ll have to kill you. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

He led her in and attached her handcuff to a metal towel bar that was bolted to the wooden cabinet that held the sinks. “I’m locking the door. I’ll be back when you least expect it.”

She heard him walk to the door, heard the door close, and heard the key in the lock. She waited and listened, holding her breath. She didn’t hear the other door close, didn’t hear a car. She whispered, “Are you still here?” There was no answer, but she wasn’t sure he had really left. She waited for minute after minute, listening for his breathing or some slight movement, but she heard nothing.

Emily was aware that people in situations like hers imagined much more time was passing than really was, so she began to count. She realized that she had never been good at counting seconds. She tried thinking “one Mississippi, two Mississippi,” but it was still too fast, because she was impatient and scared. She counted to one hundred instead of sixty and called it a minute. After ten of her minutes, she still had not heard anything, so she used her free hand to pull the tape from her left eye. She was alone. The room was old, with octagonal white tiles an inch across, and a bathtub with feet that had been painted pink, then gold, then white again.

She felt a sudden need to urinate. He was gone now, but he could return soon, and then she might never be left alone again. She managed to use her free hand to accomplish it, and to pull her slacks back up and refasten them, all the time watching the door and dreading his return.

Now she looked at the room. She could see that the one small window had been boarded up. The room would have been completely dark, if he had not turned on the light so he could see when he had brought her in here. She carefully examined the towel rack that held her handcuff. She found no screws on this side, and she couldn’t stretch far enough to open the cabinet and reach in with her free hand. The handcuff was the kind that Phil had owned; he never used anything that wasn’t police issue or better.

Emily had tried slipping the cuff off her wrist when her hands were behind her, and had no luck. She tried again, but the bracelet was too tight. She could almost stand up, bent over a bit, and halfturn to face the medicine cabinet, but the mirror was gone. Did the man think she would break it and use shards of glass as weapons against him? Or against herself? What was he planning to do that would make her want to kill herself?

She sat down again, listened, and waited, ready to push the tape across her eyes again. There should be a way out. She stood and examined the toilet, looking for something she could unscrew or tear off to use as a tool. The lid was off the toilet tank, and the parts inside were the newer, plastic kind, not the old copper rods and bulb.

She tugged at the towel rack with both hands, but it held tight and strong. She grasped it and used her legs to lift, but it didn’t move. It must be held with very strong bolts. She looked at it closely and realized it wasn’t for towels at all. It had lines etched into it so the steel wasn’t slippery. This was a handhold, so a weak or handicapped person could lower himself onto the toilet and get up again. It was made to hold a person’s weight.

She kept searching. Maybe she could pry up an old tile and scrape her way through the wood of the cabinet. She tried, but they were all tight. Maybe she could undo the faucet, or at least one of the handles. She couldn’t reach them. She wondered if she could pull the plywood off the window and call to some passerby. She got one knee up on the counter, but couldn’t quite get to the window, either. Maybe this wasn’t a freestanding building. Maybe it was an apartment building. If she hammered on the pipes or the floor, she could send a distress signal. She had nothing hard, so she took off her shoe and hit the heel on the faucet. It made a dull thump that she could barely hear.

She stamped her feet on the floor. She yelled. She rattled the handcuffs against the bar and rapped her knuckles on the wall. After a time, she knew that the house was freestanding and that the neighbors weren’t a few feet away. Hours went by while she tried to attract attention.

Her fears grew as she became exhausted. When her mind drifted to the question of why he had insisted that she had set the fires, she couldn’t stop thinking about them. He could easily have set some kind of delayed fire to burn her to death, and left. He could be hundreds of miles away by now. She could not see the light outside, but she was almost sure that it was evening. In a short time, she might be seeing smoke seep in under the bathroom door. He had burned her house and the office. Arsonists were all supposed to be crazy. They had some kind of sexual-power problem going on, and she could easily imagine this man getting a charge out of burning her to death. There was also some practical value to killing her that way. He would leave no fingerprints, hairs, or threads. He wouldn’t have to carry a heavy, bloody corpse anywhere, either. She waited, but no fire appeared, even after a couple of hours.

She thought of Ray Hall. He must have found the Volvo at his house by now, searched all the easy places for her, and called the police. The man who had taken her had made no mistakes, had left nothing, had touched nothing. He had succeeded, and now there was nothing anyone could do for Emily. She was lost.

Ray Hall had been running, and he felt winded and sweaty. He had gone from one neighbor to another, knocking on doors and asking questions, but he had learned nothing. He had an idea that was unlikely to be worth anything, but he knew that he had to test it. He had to try every idea now because in a few hours it might be too late. As soon as he had thought of it, he had run up the street and around the block to the house that was opposite his house and one block north.

He rapped on the door. This was an old house, taller than the rest of the houses in the neighborhood, officially two stories, but with a dormer above that. An elderly woman lived here. He had seen her many afternoons, sitting in the back window of a second-floor room, gazing out across the yards at the mothers and children walking home from the school, or at the mail carrier, or the man who lived next to Hall walking his dog.

He knocked harder. The cops were moving from house to house along his block, canvassing the neighborhood in the usual way, asking a person in each house what they had seen, what they had heard, what time they came home, and whether the white Volvo had already been parked there. He knew they were doing precisely the right things. Thoroughness brought bonuses, and often investigators learned as much from things that weren’t seen or heard as from things that were. Already the police knew that there were no shots, there was no noisy struggle, there were no signs that Emily had been hurt.

It was still possible that she was okay, that the man with the ski mask had not taken her. She could have seen him and be hiding somewhere, or even be doing some perfectly untroubled investigating without her car. Ray Hall looked across the street and saw that the long shadows were fading into the general shade already. The sun was down.

He rapped on the door, and heard a high voice from deep in the house. “Coming!”

He waited, and it seemed to take so long that he wondered if the woman had forgotten or looked through the peephole in the door, not seen him, and assumed he had gone away.

The door opened a crack, and he saw one faded blue eye. It moved down to his feet and backup to his face. “What?”

“Hello, Mrs. Kelly. I’m Ray Hall, your neighbor from one block over that way.”

“I recognized you, or I wouldn’t have opened the door. What are all the police doing over there?”

“They’re searching for information about what happened to a friend of mine, somebody who was visiting me. I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve noticed that from your upstairs window there’s a clear view of the block where my house is.”

“You have, have you?”

“Yes.”

She looked irritated and moved back, as though she might close the door.

“Please, I think she’s been kidnapped, and I wondered-“

“Kidnapped?” She looked skeptical, not shocked, as he had expected.

“Yes. It would have been after one o’clock or so. She parked her white Volvo in front of my house, and-“

“Oh, that one. I think you’ve got it wrong. I saw her leave.”

“Was she with a man?”

Mrs. Kelly forgot her precautions and let the door swing open wide. Ray Hall saw a sadness come into the old eyes. She said, “Oh, I’m sorry, dear. She was with a man, but he didn’t make her go. She was just going with him. They came down the driveway and walked over to the curb in front of the house next to yours and got into his car.”

“Neither of them was acting strangely?”

She looked at him in deep sympathy. “I’m sorry. He had his arm around her all the way. When they got to his car, he opened the door, leaned in and helped her find the seat belt and clicked her in. He leaned in very close to her for what seemed like a long time. I can’t be sure what that was about. When he came around to the driver’s seat, she had sunglasses on. And he drove off.”