Dead Heat (23 page)

“Can you climb trees?” he asked.

“Yes—when I was a kid—What are you doing? Why can't we use the stairs?”

“We'll have to go out a window.” He led her back into the dining room. The big, center window was still sealed with plastic tape against last winter's icy draughts. He removed half the paint on the window frame ripping it off, then heaved up on the sash. His shoulders protested, but it didn't budge. Stuck tight.

“Back off,” he said, grabbing a chair. “I'm going to break the glass.”

It resisted, finally shivered into a thousand glittering shards. He ran the legs of the chair around the edges of the frame to dislodge the jagged remnants.

Then he remembered Pete's files, trapped in cardboard boxes on the floor.

“No,” she said, sensing his intent, “don't go back for anything. Let's just get out of here. Nothing's worth it—”

“Careful of the glass,” he said. “Get your head out the window and scream for help. I'd rather climb down a fireman's ladder than an oak tree.”

The boxes were near the kitchen doorway. The smoke, the towel over his mouth made breathing difficult. He reached around and tucked the ends of the towel more firmly under his shirt collar. A stream of sweat inched down his back.

He'd brought the boxes in from the cab one at a time. Now, he hefted one on top of the other, knelt beside them, and jerked them both off the ground. He staggered back toward the window. The top box blocked his vision.

“Out of the way!” he said to Sharon. His words came from between clenched teeth. He bent his knees and consciously straightened his back. His arms felt like they were about to pull out of their sockets. He positioned himself in front of the window. “Give the top box a shove. Now. Good.”

They both pushed the second box off the sill, heard it thud in the darkness, a long way down.

The room was getting murky, hazy with stinking smoke. They crouched on the floor, towels pressed to faces, hanging out the window, yelling.

He could hear Sharon screaming with part of his mind, see the smoke rising with another, was dimly aware that the towel had slipped down over his shoulder. Fireman's ladder or no, it was time to get out.

“Okay,” he said to Sharon. “Let's go.”

“Where?” She stared out the window. “I can't see.”

“Just below the sill—here, reach out and feel it—the ivy is as thick as your wrist. About four feet down, it intersects with a tree branch. It's a good, solid, sturdy climbing tree. I use it when I lock myself out.”

“You first, then,” she said. “You've got experience.”

“Get your shoes off. I'll go down as far as the tree and then I'll wait for you. Okay?”

She nodded. He tried to gauge the depth of fear in her eyes, but they were opaque. Reason said he should be the first to climb down, so that he could coach her along the way. But what if she panicked, froze?

The door to the kitchen burst into flame.

Spraggue tossed his shoes into the night, crawled out the window. His shoulders ached. Bark scraped his fingers raw; awkward twigs poked at his eyes and mouth. He remembered the upward climb as a frolic; executed always in daylight, with only inconvenience at risk, it had nothing to do with this nightmare descent.

He grabbed the tree trunk, hollered: “Now!”

Framed in ghostly firelight, she balanced on the sill. He could hear her feet scrabbling for holds in the wall's ivy spiderweb, count each of her rasping breaths. He called her name, caught her ankle as it snaked down into his reach, and set her foot on a strong, adjacent branch.

They talked each other down to the blessed ground.

TWENTY-NINE

Every light in the Chestnut Hill mansion was aglow, from the round stone turret to the flood lamps on the lawn to the old-fashioned gas lampposts that lined the driveway like runway beacons for a weary pilot. Aunt Mary had answered his 3
A.M.
phone call, delighted at the prospect of a late-night chat. Her tone had altered with his message. She must have woken the house.

He screeched the car to a halt at the peak of the curve near the front steps, flicked off the headlights, put a hand on Sharon's shoulder. She had drowsed through most of the journey from Cambridge. He didn't know if her sleep was feigned or real, a normal or abnormal reaction to shock. For someone who'd had to deal first with her brother's death, then with narrow escape from a burning building, he thought she was doing fine. Let her sleep. Let her unconscious try to sort out the muddle.

Sleep, exhausted as he was, held no lure for him—not with the memory of the inferno racing like a just seen movie behind his eyes, not with the acrid smell clinging to his hair, his clothes, not with the aching rasp of smoke caught in his throat.

The scenes replayed themselves, loops of film trapped in his memory: the gust of flame that had burst through the second floor window not two minutes after their escape; the frenzied search for Mrs. Wales, finally found, safe and crying, huddled like a bag of old clothes on the front lawn; the sucking, crackling hiss of tearing flames; the eerie light. The scream of approaching fire trucks. The utter, total helplessness. The relief. The rage.

Oh, but the fire had spread quickly, so fast he never doubted for a moment it had been set. Every face in the nightclad crowd of neighbors, he'd scrutinized, searching for the familiar face of the raincoated man. Only neighbors, arms crossed defensively across their chests, murmuring in fear and wonder. When a section of the roof collapsed in a shower of sparks, they'd breathed a long drawn-out “ah!”, like spectators at a fireworks exhibition.

The windless night, the streaming hoses, the battering, breaking axes wielded by the black-slickered firemen, had kept the blaze from spreading to surrounding homes.

He tried not to run through the final loop of film: the dismal corpselike remains of the house, streaming water and smoke. Shattered windows. Muddy grass. It ticked on through the projector and he felt a cold, hating rage, a bitter anger he'd hoped never to feel again.

Sharon stirred and mumbled. His hand was too heavy on her shoulder.

“We're here,” he said. God, but he was tense. He had to practically pry his left hand from the steering wheel. All the way over, he'd glared at the speedometer, holding back, denying the need to drive fast, flat out, reckless, to let some of that rage escape, burn off. He shook her arm. “Do you want me to carry you?”

She lifted her head, peered at the whirl of lights, and blinked.

He came around to her side, opened the door and helped her out, gave her a hug to steady her, and started for the front steps. Mary had the door open before he reached it.

“Dear Lord, Michael,” she said, in a welcoming rush, “what have you gotten yourself into now?” She kissed him on the cheek, perched on the toes of tiny red fluff house slippers, enfolded Sharon in a warming embrace, urged them into the library, rang for coffee, all the while keeping up a steady flow of comforting, meaningless chat.

“You woke Pierce up at this hour?” Spraggue said as he guided Sharon to the green velvet sofa. “I don't think you pay the man enough.”

“Don't worry about him,” Mary said. “He owes me too many gambling debts to even consider quitting.” She took her cue from Spraggue; if he didn't want to talk about the fire, she would ramble on about other things. “My dear,” she said to Sharon, “forgive me for saying it, but you ought to be put straight to bed. You look even more exhausted than my nephew, who is, I trust, sorry for dragging you into this mess.”

Sharon tried to smile. “I think I dragged him in.”

“No one ever has to drag him a quarter of an inch. He volunteers. He plunges off the deep end with scarcely a glance at the rocks below. Even as a child—I won't go into the horrid details now with you ready to drop. I've had the south guest room prepared, Michael, for Miss Collatos—”

“I'll take her upstairs, Aunt Mary.” He smiled reassuringly at Sharon. “You need a guide in this place. Souvenir maps at the door.”

“Don't badmouth the old relic,” Mary said with a maddening smile. “I've had the tower room prepared for you. You may have to come home for a while.”

Spraggue sighed.

“Follow me, please, ma'am,” he said to Sharon, taking her unresisting arm. He led her up the curving formal staircase that rose from the marble-tiled foyer. She was starting to take notice of her surroundings.

“Michael,” she said with a puzzled frown. “What is this place?”

“My aunt lives here.”

“Your Aunt Rockefeller?”

“My Aunt Hillman. Mary Spraggue Hillman.”

“Spraggue with two
gs
Spraggue.”

“Right.”

“Unbelievable,” she said as they traveled down a wide corridor papered in ivory and gold. “I could get lost in here.” Their footsteps were muffled in thick golden carpeting. Tiny crystal sconces lit their way.

“I did, when I was a kid.”

“Did my brother know about … about this?”

“About what?”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean—”

They turned into a narrower hallway, trod along
a
deep rose Oriental runner that warmed the cream-colored walls. The carved mahogany molding at ceiling and floor glistened.

“Your room is the fourth doorway in the Oriental corridor. Here it is. There's a bath attached, and if I know my aunt, there is a new toothbrush in the medicine cabinet and a selection of nightgowns in the closet. Press that button in the morning and you'll get breakfast. Oh, and your dress cleaned. I don't think Dora's up to see to it tonight, but she may waltz in. This place runs on odd hours.”

“Who else lives here? Besides your aunt?”

“Pierce. He's the butler and chief card player. Dora cooks. There's a chauffeur who's so old my aunt has to drive him around, and a gardener, but I think he has a room in the gatehouse.”

“What your aunt said—about coming home. Is this yours?”

“I think of it as belonging to my children.”

“Are you … Do you—?”

“No. I don't have any kids.”

She took her cue from his tone and didn't ask any more questions for a while. Her eyes made a search of the room from left to right, lingered on the silk-embroidered Chinese tapestries, the huge canopied bed. She giggled, but the noise came out strained. “Are the sheets satin?”

“They might be.” Spraggue put his hand on her chin, tilted her face up, and brushed her lips with his mouth. “I wish we could check them out. But you're giggling and I've never heard you do that before, and you're totally exhausted, and possibly in what people call a state of shock. And my aunt would probably interrupt us by sending Pierce in with a glass of warm milk at a crucial moment.”

He had to lean far over to kiss her; she was so small.

“Good night,” he said.

“Where will you be? What are you going to do?”

“I don't know.”

She turned away. He could hear her deliberate deep breathing, see her back straighten. When she faced him again, her mouth had stiffened into a line of resolve. “Look,” she said, and her voice had iron in it, “it may have been your house, but it was my brother and I'm not planning to go nicely off to bed, thank you, while you plot revenge alone.”

“Go to sleep. Nothing major is going to happen tonight, believe me. I'm too damn tired.”

He left her there, gazing into the gilt-framed mirror, retraced his steps downstairs.

Back in the library, Aunt Mary stared at him and he could read a hundred questions in her eyes, some dealing with the length of his stay upstairs. Pierce poured him a cup of steaming coffee. He shook his head, and the butler, with an upward flick of an eyebrow, brought the cup to Mary instead.

“The radio is calling it arson,” Mary said. “I've been monitoring the police band since you called.”

He sank onto the green velvet sofa, noticing that Dora or Pierce or someone had smoothed out the indentation of Sharon's head on the pillow.

“Are you all right, Michael?”

He leaned forward, elbows pushing into his thighs, chin and mouth pressed into his triangled hands. “Great.”

She nodded at Pierce, who took his silent leave, closing the oak doors behind him. Spraggue shut his eyes and listened to the clock tick, to the swishing of Mary's slippers across the parquet floor, the splashing of liquid in a glass. She put the brandy glass in his hand, startling him by her silent approach. She waited until he'd downed half the glass.

“Michael—” she began.

“Please. No questions tonight, Mary Paper?”

“The
Globe
?”

“Writing paper, please.”

“In the desk.”

She followed him to the huge mahogany block that sat in the exact center of the vast Oriental rug, opened the top right-hand drawer and set a sheet of blank stationery on the maroon leather blotter.

He didn't bother sitting in his great-grandfather's leather armchair. He leaned over, lifted a pen out of a marble block and wrote, handed the piece of paper to Mary. Two lines of scraggly print danced across it.

“Tomorrow at nine o'clock,” he said. “I want these two men here. Can you get them for me?”

She studied the list. “Will they want to come?”

“Hand them a line. Either of them should be willing to dance to any tune you want to whistle.”

“Nine o'clock.”

“Get me up by eight. I'll wake Sharon. She's got to be in on it. And I'd like you and Pierce to be available too.”

“No explanation?”

He tried to stretch his mouth into a taut smile.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

THIRTY

Spraggue shifted his weight forward in the huge leather chair. The change of clothes he always kept in the tower room felt stiff, unworn and overstarched. They didn't stink of smoke, though, and he was grateful for that. He'd spent almost an hour last night—this morning—standing under a pounding, steaming shower, trying to get the burning stench out of his hair, his nostrils, out of his mind. He nodded up at Pierce who stood ten paces inside the library's double doors. “On schedule?” he asked.