Vigil (43 page)

“Not that it won’t be loads of fun,” Abbie said. “In the right company, and we’ve certainly got that, hanging curtains can be a blast.”

“I’m sure it will be fun,” Beth said, obligingly.

“You’re not going to win any Oscars for that performance,” Abbie joked.

Beth turned to her friend and smiled. “Sorry, the party was draining. All I need is a good night’s sleep, and in the morning I’ll be raring to go.”

Abbie reached over and patted the back of Beth’s hand. “Sleep as late as you like. Even Ben, who hates the whole idea of this house, has to concede that he sleeps like a baby up here.” She was about to add that Beth looked like she could use a good night’s rest, but then thought better of it. Nobody, Abbie knew, ever wanted to hear that.

Even though she’d been up to the house a dozen times by now, Abbie was used to having Ben at the wheel, or right beside her, so she’d never paid much attention to the directions or the landmarks. But now, at night yet, she had to concentrate, and think twice at every intersection or bend in the road. Was it the hard left, or the soft one? Was the old foundry meant to stay on their right side, or were they supposed to cut through it on the service road? Every once in a while, she’d spot something—a familiar Quickie Mart casting its dismal fluorescent glow, or a gas station with its old-fashioned pumps where they’d filled up a few times before returning to the city—and know that she was still on the right track. But it wasn’t easy, and the darkness that surrounded them on all sides was deeper and more forbidding than she ever recalled from a previous trip. In her heart she had to recognize that, despite her little fantasies of solitude and country living, she wouldn’t be making many solo trips up here. At least not at night.

When they finally crossed an old railroad track, with its warning sign ravaged by rust and bullet holes, she knew she was almost home. She slowly rounded the big, sweeping curve of a hill, skirted the pothole she knew was coming, then put on her brights to help her find their driveway. It was partially obscured by a massive old oak that stood like a giant sentinel at the top of the narrow defile.

“My next project is going to be a light of some kind so I can find the place in the dark,” Abbie said, as she turned the car into the drive.

“What’s that?” Beth said, just as Abbie herself saw it—an orange highway cone on the right side of the driveway. Her bumper caught it and sent it tumbling into what she now saw was a deep trench.

“What is going on?” Abbie said, quickly pulling the car to the left and stopping.

“Looks like a construction project,” Beth said, peering down the drive. The trench ran all the way down the hill and stopped just short of the house.

“You’re right,” Abbie said, “it must be the water line. They’ve been replacing them all over the area.”

“They didn’t tell you they were going to do this?”

“Who reads all the notices we get?” She started the car again. “I just hope they haven’t cut off the water.”

They went the rest of the way down, toward the house, black as pitch and almost impossible to discern against the equally black hills beyond it.

Abbie pulled the car into the semicircular drive, its tires crunching on the loose gravel, and stopped near a pile of building supplies—lumber, bricks, a folded ladder—that were going to be used to add a deck onto the back of the house. She started to turn off the headlights, but then thought better of it.

“Maybe we should leave them on until we open up the house,” she said, and Beth nodded.

“And why don’t we leave the curtains in the car, too, until tomorrow morning?” Beth said, and this time Abbie agreed. Neither one of them wanted to say it, but both were anxious to get inside, lock the door behind them, and turn on every light in the house.

Abbie got out, leaving her car door open, the little chime ringing, and hurried up the wooden steps. On the porch, she fumbled through her keys before finding the right one; even then, it took some twisting and turning before the lock gave way and the door opened. Instantly, she reached inside and flicked on the entryway and porch lights, then returned to the car.

Beth had wrestled their bags out of the back, and together they carried them up the steps and dumped them in the foyer. The house was almost as cold inside as the night outside.

“I’ll get the heat going,” Abbie said. “That ought to work, regardless. You can just go ahead and put your stuff in the guest room.”

Beth took her bag to the corkscrew staircase and maneuvered her way up it, which wasn’t easy; the house had been built as a one-story, and it was only when some previous owner had decided to turn the attic into a second floor that the staircase had been wedged into the existing layout. The guest bedroom, with an adjoining sitting room and bath, made up the entire top floor.

Beth, exhausted, tossed her bag onto the quilt-covered bed. She hadn’t found the light switch yet, so the room was still dark, and she could look out at the barren branches of the trees in the abandoned apple orchard, and the outline, etched in silver, of the ruined barn beyond. Ben had joked that they were going to invite the neighbors over for a barn burning, but Abbie had said she liked it, that it gave character to the place. Right now, it just reinforced Beth’s feeling that they had come to the end of the earth. If the curtains had already been up, she’d have yanked them closed.

“It looks like you can take a bath, after all,” Abbie called out from the foot of the stairs. “The water heater’s on, and the water’s running fine.”

“Thanks,” Beth called back; the house was so small you hardly needed to raise your voice to be heard. “I think I will.”

“See you in the morning,” Abbie said. “First one up turns on the coffee maker.”

Beth found the light switch and flicked it on. Then she went to the window, which was open a few inches, and was about to close it when she stopped. The night air was cold all right, but it was also so fresh and so fragrant that she had to stop and savor it for a moment. It reminded her of the way the woods had smelled after a rain shower when she’d taken a road trip through the Cotswolds. She left it open an inch—sleeping with fresh air and no city noise might be a nice change—then started to unpack her bag. Most of it she decided to leave until the morning; for now she took out her nightgown, robe, and toiletries and carried them into the bathroom. Abbie and Ben had already had the bathroom remodeled, with an etched-glass medicine chest, a porcelain sink stand with two gold faucets, and a big, high, claw-footed tub. Unfortunately, as Beth turned on the hot-water spigot, she remembered what had bothered her the last time she and Carter had come out for a weekend; the tub stood directly across from a big window and there still weren’t any curtains or blinds up.

“Who’s going to be watching from a barren field?” Carter had said, and Beth had to remind herself of that now. Plus, she thought, it’s almost midnight.

Still, as the tub filled up and she got undressed, she stood away from the window. She could have turned off the bathroom lights, but not tonight, not here; she’d rather take her chances with the most enterprising peeping Tom in history than bathe in a darkened bathroom.

She hung her white robe on the back of the door, piled her clothes up under the sink—noting, unhappily, that her panties were indeed spotted with blood—and swished a finger through the bath water. Any hotter and she’d melt. She put a couple of folded towels on top of the toilet seat, next to the tub; then, after adjusting the tap to run a little cooler, she stepped into the bath water. It was deep, and as she settled down into it, the water rose to cover her knees. She sank lower and the water went higher, up over her body and breasts, and she gently rested the back of her head against the still-cold porcelain.

Relax,
she told herself,
just try to relax
.

But she might as well have been talking to a prisoner on the gallows. Her mind was still teeming with a thousand different things. She should call Carter, as soon as she got out of the tub, if only to leave a message that she had arrived safe and sound. And the next morning, she should call the gallery, to apologize for slipping out of the party early. She should even call Bradley Hoyt, to thank him for covering for her.

And then she should call her gynecologist, and get an appointment to investigate this bleeding. No point bothering Dr. Weston with it. It was probably just the result of an infection of some kind—it had happened once before—and some antibiotics would wind up taking care of it. But it was one more thing to worry about until then.

She settled even lower in the tub, the water rising over her shoulders. With one foot, she was able to reach out and slow the water from the tap even more, leaving it running at a warm trickle. She closed her eyes and tried again to clear her mind, but no matter how much she wanted to, she couldn’t do it—no matter how hard she tried, there was no way she could turn off the stream of thoughts that led, inevitably, inexorably, to the one thing she feared the most. Arius.

Where was he now? What did he want from her? And how could she ever be rid of him?

Involuntarily, her face twisted into a grimace, and she felt herself, even submerged in the hot water, seized with a cold dread.

And a sense of being watched.

She opened her eyes and glanced fearfully around the room. No one was there.

But the bath water was tinged pink with blood and was just beginning to lap over the sides of the tub.
What a mess,
she thought, as she sat up and fumbled for the tap handle. She twisted it quickly, but the wrong way, and a stronger gush of water created an even greater spill.
Damn
.

She turned it again, the right way this time, but it still wouldn’t shut off entirely. Maybe it just hadn’t been used enough yet; it was still sticky. She flicked the drain open, and now that was resisting her too. The only thing to do was to get out of the tub quickly, let the water level drop, and use some towels to mop up the puddle before it spread any wider. She was just about to do it when she got that feeling again—the feeling that she wasn’t alone.

Her eyes jumped to the big, uncovered window, and even though it was dark outside and the freshly washed panes only reflected the inside of the bathroom, she sensed that there was movement behind them. Something, impossible as it seemed, was hovering in the air at the second-story level. Could it be a bird? A bat? Was there a tree branch, something she’d forgotten, that the wind might be blowing toward the glass?

Her hand froze on the lip of the tub and as she watched—not believing her own eyes—she saw the bottom of the window shudder, as if it were being pried up from the other side. But the window, like everything else in the house, had been freshly painted, and it screeched as it was forced to go up.

This isn’t happening,
she told herself.
This isn’t happening
.

And then it was.

Carter was relying more on his memory than on any
sense of direction; he’d only been up to Ben and Abbie’s country house once before, and on that trip he’d been in the backseat the whole time, and not paying much attention.

But his field training, apparently, hadn’t let him down. Even on that one occasion he must have been making mental notes on the terrain and the local landmarks. It was only now, as he got closer to the actual house, that he had to think especially long and hard about every turn in the road, every curve, and every intersection; he could not afford to make even a single mistake.

The car, thank God, had had plenty of gas in it and ran like a dream. Before heading upstate, he’d wrestled Ezra into the backseat, then driven straight around the corner to the hospital’s emergency entrance. An orderly hurried out with a wheelchair, and Carter escorted them in to the reception desk. As quickly as he could, he gave them Ezra’s information—his name, address, home phone number—and an account of what had happened. “He fell against a curb, hard, and landed on his head.” It was as close as he felt he needed to come to the truth.

When they’d asked about his insurance, Carter had said, “You know who Sam Metzger is?”

The nurse said, “The real estate guy?”

“Yes,” Carter replied. “This is his son.”

Then he’d run back to the car and taken off.

Traffic at this hour, fortunately, had been light, and once he was out of the city, nearly non-existent. He remembered the foundry, and then the gas station with the old-fashioned pumps. At a railroad crossing, where the old sign was pockmarked with bullet-holes, he recalled Ben making a joke about the local sport. He knew he was getting very close.

Which only increased his dread. The whole way up to the house, he had tried to tell himself that everything would be fine, that up here Beth would have been out of harm’s way. He’d have called, but either Ben and Abbie hadn’t had the phone connected yet, or it was unlisted. The leopard-print pajama top rested on the front seat beside him, next to Maury’s
Daily Racing Form
s and cigar wrappers. She’d be fine. She’d be fast asleep in that upstairs bedroom, and the worst scare she’d get would be when he knocked on the front door of the house in the middle of the night.

Ahead he saw a sizable pothole in the right lane, and he remembered that too. Ben had had to slow down and swerve around it.

The big old tree, the one that had hung over the driveway, ought to be coming up soon.

But what kind of plan did he have? He had to decide, and right now. Was he going to just drive up and knock on the door? Or would it be wiser to approach quietly, and get the lay of the land first?

There it was, the old oak, and Carter slowed down.
The stealthy approach—that would be the smart move
. As he turned onto the drive, he cut his headlights. Down below, in a sort of hollow, he could see the house, and Abbie’s car parked out in front. So far, so good.