“Ryan!”
For a second Ryan froze, but then he heard his mother. “Run!” she screamed. “Run, Ryan!”
Her voice galvanized him, and Ryan charged toward the door, running as fast as his legs could carry him. Behind him he could hear his stepfather’s feet, pounding after him, getting louder by the second. Suddenly his stepfather spoke his name again, and this time he was so close that Ryan could feel his breath on the back of his neck. But this time Anthony Fleming’s voice didn’t freeze him like a faun caught in the headlights of a truck; this time it spurred him on, and just as he felt his stepfather’s fingers touch his shoulder he burst through the door.
Caroline was ready, slamming it as hard as she could the instant Ryan was through. For just a split second the door seemed to catch before it slammed into the jamb, but once again Caroline was ready, and as Ryan spun around and threw his weight against the door, she twisted the key that was already in the lock.
A howl of rage rose on the other side of the door, but Caroline ignored it, lifting Laurie back into her arms and starting toward the stairs. But once again Ryan wasn’t following her. Instead he stood frozen by the door, his eyes fixed on something on the floor. Her gaze following her son’s, Caroline felt her gorge rise once more.
On the floor by the doorjamb were four severed fingers, still twitching reflexively as if trying to close on their intended prey.
“Don’t,” she said, as Ryan stooped over, as if to get a closer look.
Then, as one of the fingers twitched again, he jumped back, and turned away.
A few seconds later, they burst through the door into the lobby, and Ryan ran ahead to hold the front door open so his mother could carry Laurie out onto the street. Hesitating only a second, Caroline started south. “Do you have any money?” she asked as they crossed 65th Street. Ryan shook his head. Swearing silently to herself, Caroline tried to figure out what to do — she still wasn’t willing to go to a police station, not with the possibility that Dr. Humphries, or someone with the Biddle Institute might have already warned them to be looking for her. And without any money—
Suddenly a cab appeared by the curb a few yards ahead of her, and as Caroline stopped short, its front window rolled down.
“You need a ride, lady?” the driver asked.
Caroline stared at the cabbie, her feet suddenly feeling rooted to the sidewalk. “I–I don’t have any money,” she finally said. But Ryan was already at the back door of the cab, pulling it open.
“Come on, Mom! Get in!”
Still Caroline couldn’t move. Then, as she looked down into Laurie’s pale face, she saw the blood that streaked the front of her stolen nurse’s uniform. If she didn’t get in the cab, and someone else saw her — Making up her mind, she eased Laurie into the cab, then climbed in after her.
“There’s a hospital a few blocks away,” the cabbie said. “It’ll only take a coupla minutes.”
A hospital, Caroline thought. They’ll ask questions. Questions she couldn’t answer, at least not now.
Not tonight.
Maybe not ever.
“No,” she said. “I can’t go to a hospital, and I can’t go to the police.” She saw the cabbie eyeing her in the rearview mirror, his sympathy of a moment ago rapidly devolving into suspicion. In her mind, she raced through the possibilities, rejecting one person after another until suddenly she knew the one person she could call, the one person who wouldn’t ask questions, the one person who would simply take her in. “Do you have a cellphone?” she asked.
The cabbie seemed to consider for a moment, then finally handed one back through the open divider separating the front seat from the back. Her fingers starting to shake, she punched in a number and pressed the send button. Be home, she silently begged. Please be home.
On the eighth ring, an answering machine picked up, but even before the message had played through, Caroline was already talking. “Kevin? Are you there? Mark? Oh, God, if you’re there—”
“Caroline?” Kevin Barnes’s voice cut in, indistinct over the outgoing message that was still playing. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I have to come over. Right now. With the kids.”
CHAPTER 39
Kevin Barnes was waiting on the sidewalk when the cab pulled up and after paying the driver he tried to take Laurie from Caroline’s arms, but Caroline only shook her head, clinging even tighter to her daughter. Sensing that there was no point in trying to argue with her, Kevin held the door to his building open for her and Ryan, then hurried ahead to call the elevator. The door opened just as Caroline and Ryan got to it, and no one said anything as the car ground slowly upward, then jerked to a stop at the seventh floor. Halfway down the hall, Mark Noble stood framed in the open door to their apartment.
“Good lord, what are you got up as, woman?” he drawled as he stepped aside to let Caroline pass. “Isn’t impersonating a nurse against federal law or something?”
Kevin rolled his eyes. “If it were, you’d be in Sing-Sing right now.”
Oblivious to both of them, Caroline carried Laurie into their living room, and laid her gently on the sofa, then knelt beside her. “Honey?” she whispered. “Honey, can you hear me?”
For a moment Laurie made no response at all, but then her eyes opened, and she reached for her mother’s hand. “Th-thirsty,” she breathed, the word drifting from her lips in a nearly inaudible sigh.
“I’ll get something,” Kevin said. “Back in a second.” He disappeared from the room, reappearing a moment later with a glass of water. “I put some tea on,” he said as he held the glass to Laurie’s lips. As she tried to take the glass with a shaking hand, he got his first good look at the girl’s ashen face, and his gaze immediately shifted to Caroline. “She should be in a hospital.”
Caroline shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. “I—” And suddenly she could hold herself together no longer. With a great shudder she suddenly began to cry, her body shaking with sobs, and as Kevin gathered her into his arms, Ryan looked as if he might start crying to.
“Don’t you dare,” Mark Noble said, reading Ryan’s expression perfectly. “One of you has to tell us what’s going on, and since your mother’s bawling her brains out and your sister looks half dead, I guess it’s going to have to be you.”
His tears drying up instantly in the face of Mark’s words, Ryan gazed up at him uncertainly. “They were going to kill Laurie. And they already killed Rebecca, and some boy.”
“All right,” Mark said as calmly as if what Ryan had just said was the most reasonable thing in the world. “How were they going to do that? And just so I can keep clear on things, who are ‘they?’ ”
“Tony Fleming, and that Melanie person, and the doorman, and everybody else in that building!” Ryan’s voice took on a note of belligerence, and he glared at Mark as if he was sure he wasn’t being believed. “It’s true!”
“Hey, did you hear me arguing?” Mark asked, holding up his hands as if to fend Ryan’s words off.
“It is true,” Caroline said, fumbling for a handkerchief, not finding one, and finally wiping her eyes on the sleeve of the nurse’s uniform. “Look.” Very gently, she loosened the sheet she’d picked up along with Laurie, so the two men could see the needle marks on her arms and legs.
“Jesus,” Mark whispered, his doubts about what Ryan had told him now erased. “What’s going on over there?”
For the rest of the night, Caroline did her best to explain, telling Kevin and Mark everything that had happened since the day she’d moved into The Rockwell. They listened silently, never interrupting her, never questioning anything she said. Every now and then one of them brought Laurie more tea, or something to eat, and by the time Caroline was finished, dawn was starting to break, Ryan had fallen asleep in one of the big recliners facing the television set, and Laurie was starting to regain a little color in her face.