“Not a woman. She’s a child.”
He ignored the comment. “Your jealousy is making you lose your sense of proportion. You’re making terrible threats and wild demands, one after another. Isn’t this really about `who is the fairest one of all’? It’s not as though you were still interested in me, and were fighting for my affection. You just don’t want to lose, even if you don’t want the prize.”
“It’s about a crime, Ted. A felony.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of? You could hardly be implicated. You know that in all the time you’ve lived in my house, we’ve been able to tolerate each other and you’ve been treated well. I’m willing to go on that way, if it suits you. If it doesn’t, we can arrange a divorce with a fair settlement, and you can do something you like better.” He paused. “However…”
“However?”
“Yes. You must know that I’m never going to let you get me committed into a mental institution or arrested. It just isn’t going to happen.”
“You’re going to prevent it by imprisoning me?”
“Oh, please! You’re in the wine cellar of our own house.”
She glared at him but kept her distance, retreating a step until she backed into one of the floor-to-ceiling racks full of wine bottles. He could see that she was already beginning to feel the chill of the wine cellar. The two-ton temperature-control unit her decorators had insisted on kept the room at a constant fifty-five to fifty-seven degrees.
Forrest stepped out of the room, closed the door, and turned the key, but left it in the lock as usual. He heard her pounding on the door as he went to the long wooden table in the center of the tasting room and picked up the silver bucket Caroline had provided for people to spit their wine into at the ridiculous tasting she’d held down here last month. When she heard him turn the key to unlock the door, she stopped pounding.
He opened the door and saw her standing her customary six feet away, a smug expression on her face. He set the bucket inside. “I thought you might need this at some point.”
“You son of a bitch.”
He closed the door and locked her in. He walked upstairs and then along the hall to the suite where Maria, the chief housekeeper, lived. He knocked on her door, then knocked again. “Maria? It’s Mr. Forrest.” There was no answer, so he opened the door and looked inside. He walked through the small sitting room where she had her television set and the coffee table that held her sewing and a few magazines in Spanish. He went into her bedroom and looked at the perfectly made bed, the dresser with its top bereft of the usual cosmetics and hairbrushes, then stepped to the closet and opened the sliding door. The suitcase she always used when she took time off to visit her family in Ventura was gone. He looked at the clothes hanging along the pole, and saw that some of the outfits he was used to seeing on her were gone, too.
Caroline had told the truth.
27
Emily squinted in the morning sunshine outside the front door of the green stucco apartment building and rang the bell. It sounded terribly loud to her, and made her glance behind her to be sure nobody was close. The three-story buildings were identical, each with the same thick, heavy entrance door protected from above by a small curved overhang like half a barrel, and square windows beside it, two above it, and two above those. She knew she must have imagined that someone was watching her. How could he be watching? If he could see her, she could have seen him.
For most of her life, she thought of a stalker as a spectral presence, maybe a murderer who had been hiding in the back seat of her car when she had driven off, or sitting in the bushes near her house when she fumbled to get the key in the lock. She would feel a chill on the back of her neck, almost as if someone were breathing on it, and whirl quickly to protect herself. The stalker was never there, and so she had never given the enemy a specific shape. Until now.
It was not as though the man in the ski mask had accidentally stepped into place and merged with the stranger she had always feared. It felt as though he had always been there, and she had finally made the mistake of turning too fast, before he could vanish. Once she had opened her eyes that night and seen him standing over her bed, she had made him real.
There was a click from the speaker in the wall, and she heard April’s voice: “Yes?”
Emily leaned close to the grating over the microphone. “April? It’s me, Emily. I’m sorry to come so early, but it’s important.”
There was a moment of silence, as though April were trying to find a way not to have answered the ring. Then she said, “Emily, I’m sorry, but I really don’t want this. I don’t want to talk.”
“Please, April, I’m in terrible danger. My house and the office were both burned down last night. I need your help.” Emily waited for April to reply. Seconds passed, and then the loud buzz let her know that the electric lock on the door was being held open for her. She tugged the door open and hurried inside. She couldn’t help looking behind her one more time, half-expecting to see the spectral figure in the act of reaching for her before the door swung to. She waited until she heard the click before she left the small lobby, turned the corner, and went up a couple of steps to the carpeted hallway.
The unwelcome thought came to her that she was walking in Phil’s footsteps. He must have walked along this hallway often, stepped on this carpet. She kept down the mixture of hurt and anger and went on. When she found the apartment and reached up to knock, April opened the door. It made Emily remember apartments where she had lived, first alone and then with Phil. She could always hear someone coming toward the apartment door from the time they set foot in the lobby-something distinctive about the direction of their footsteps, and something audible in their intention, too.
April was wearing a pink sweatshirt and a pair of pink sweatpants, running her fingers through long blond hair tangled from sleep. “Come in.” She turned away, and Emily saw that ACTRESS was spelled out across the rear of the sweatpants.
Emily stepped inside and closed the door. The living room was furnished sparsely with cheap furniture that was small enough for a woman to drag in alone and assemble, a few framed photographs of pink camellias and yellow daffodils vastly enlarged. There were magazines on the seats of each of the stuffed chairs arranged in homage to the television set, and Emily could see that April had not yet cleared the table from her breakfast. “I’m really sorry to bother you.”
“You said there was a fire?”
“Two fires, both at the same time. My house and the office were both destroyed. I don’t know if the person who did it was trying to make me run outside in the dark where he could kill me, or just trying to scare me. A man came to my house a couple of nights ago and wanted something that Phil had. He said it was information about a powerful man. When I said I didn’t have it, he was going to kidnap me. Dewey came to my house and scared him off.”
“I’m sorry,” April said. “I heard that part of it, and I almost called you, but I wasn’t sure you’d want to hear from me.”
“Ever since Phil was murdered, I’ve been looking for something that would explain it-maybe a case that got out of hand, or some personal dispute. After that man came, I had Ray helping me tear the house apart looking for this evidence, and had Dewey and Billy doing the same at the office.”
“I feel bad,” April said. “Dewey asked me to help search the office, but I just couldn’t. It was just too much for me.” She was crying now. “I want to let this part of my life be over. I’m sorry for what I did to you-what I took from you. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t. I thought a detective agency would be exciting, and then I thought I loved Phil. Now I know I was stupid.”