Fade to Black (28 page)

E
lizabeth freezes with her hand on the back doorknob.

The phone.

It’s ringing.

Now.

She was just about to leave.

She falters, turning back to look at it.

What if it’s Manny?

Or …

What if it’s Harper Smith?

Either way, she should answer it.

She’s longing to put her mind at ease about Manny before she leaves; it was an agonizing decision, choosing to go without knowing whether he’s all right.

And if it’s Harper—

She has to act as though nothing’s wrong. As though she’s still planning on meeting him at Momma Mangia’s restaurant at eight o’clock.

She has to thank him for the flowers, even, so he won’t be suspicious.

She can’t make him suspicious.

She needs a few hours to make a head start, to get far enough away from Windmere Cove so that he won’t be able to trace her.

She moves quickly through the kitchen, through the house she just bade farewell.

Grabbing the receiver, she lifts it and says breathlessly, “Hello?”

“Elizabeth?”

“Manny!”

“Elizabeth, I need you. I’m in trouble....”

“What is it? Where are you? Are you with your mother?”

“No.”

He’s sobbing, she realizes, and her heart constricts.

Elizabeth, I need you
.

“Where are you, Manny?” she repeats, clenching the receiver in one hand, and in the other, her heavy canvas bank bag, the bag filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars in escape money.

“I’m at the bus station in Providence … in the security office … I need you to come and get me.”

“I’ll be right there, Manny. Just hang on, okay? I’ll be right there,” she promises.

And she never, ever breaks a promise.

H
arper picks up the telephone, listening to the ringing on the other end of the fine.

He’s about to conclude that no one’s going to answer, when he hears a click, and a voice.

“Momma Mangia’s, can I help you?”

“Yes, please, I need a reservation for this evening.”

“What time, sir?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“How many?”

“Two,” he says, then adds, “and can we have one of the booths, please? Preferably toward the back of the dining room?”

It’s darker there. More private.

“A booth toward the back? I think we can arrange that for you, sir.”

Harper thanks him and hangs up, a smile playing over his lips.

He glances at the clock.

Just a few more hours to kill.

P
amela can tell by looking at the big two-story brick house from the driveway that her parents aren’t home.

Still, she gets out of the car, then opens the back door and unstraps first Hannah, then Jason from their car seats. Holding Hannah’s hand and balancing the baby on her hip, she makes her way slowly up the drive, noting that the garage is closed and neither the Honda nor the Pathfinder is parked in the driveway. Since her parents rarely go out separately, that means one of their vehicles is in the garage.

And
that
most likely means they’ve gone up to Maine for the weekend.

Pamela has never been to the vacation home they purchased almost a year ago, when her father retired. She doesn’t even know what town it’s in, only that it’s someplace near Camden. She has the address and phone number written down back at home.

She also knows that the place needs a lot of work. Her parents have spent nearly every weekend this summer up there, painting, shingling, and refinishing the hardwood floors.

“You’ll have to come up,” they’ve been saying since they bought the place. But it was out of the question during the rugged winter; it was too far for her to travel in her pregnancy; and when she brought it up to Frank in late July, he had said he couldn’t get the time off.

“Why don’t you and the kids go up?” he had suggested amiably. “Hannah would love the beach, and your parents keep complaining to you about how they’ve seen Jason only a couple of times since he was born.”

Now she realizes he was obviously trying to get rid of them for a long weekend, so he could have his fun with the tramp next door.

“Where’s Nana?” Hannah asks as they stand helplessly in front of the back door, which is locked up tight, the blinds on the window drawn. “Where’s Papa?”

“I think they’re up at their new house in Maine,” Pamela tells her daughter.

Now she wishes she
had
taken Frank up on his suggestion and visited them there with the kids over the summer. If she had, she would at least know where the house is, and she could drive up and stay with them there.

As it is, she has no place to go.

No place but home to Windmere Cove, and Frank.

“A
re you sure I need to go back home?” Manny asks Elizabeth as she pulls over to the curb a short distance down the street from his house.

“I’m positive,” she tells him, glancing nervously at the digital clock on the dashboard.

It’s seven-thirty.

She has just enough time to dash back home, find Frank Minelli and tell him about Manny’s situation, then grab her bag of money and get out of town.

She still doesn’t know where she’s going. It doesn’t matter. She just has to get away, to start driving anywhere. She’ll figure out her destination along the way.

Manny is looking doubtful, shaking his head. “But I don’t want to go home, Elizabeth. What if my grandfather—”

“He promised when you called him that he won’t hurt you, Manny. Remember?”

The boy nods; his eyes aren’t convinced.

“We’re going to do just what we discussed, okay?” Elizabeth takes a deep breath, struggling not to look again at the clock as she says patiently, “You’re going to go back home to your grandparents’ house, and I’m going home to talk this over with my policeman friend next door. He’ll contact your grandparents, and they’ll do something about your mother’s threats.”

“Grammy sounded angry at me when I talked to her.”

I know
, Elizabeth thinks.
She sounded angry at me too
.

She tells herself that the woman had simply been worried about her missing grandson, trying to dismiss the thought that the grandparents should have called the police when they first realized Manny hadn’t arrived at his rehearsal. The grandmother said she figured he was off playing hooky somewhere and that he’d show up sooner or later.

These people shouldn’t have custody of a child.

They simply aren’t equipped, emotionally or financially, to deal with Manny, or with the threats their daughter has made.

It isn’t that they don’t care
, Elizabeth thinks.

The grandmother
had
sounded relieved when Elizabeth had called them from the pay phone at the bus station, telling them that she was a friend of Manny’s and that he had called her to pick him up there after deciding not to run away.

She didn’t mention the threats his mother had made—that would be up to the police to discuss with them.

Nor did she get into the run-in Manny had had with station security. There was no reason to tell them that. The officer in charge had grudgingly released the boy to Elizabeth after lecturing him about the seriousness of his infraction.

“Providence? How did he get to Providence?” his grandmother had asked Elizabeth in her broken English.

She hadn’t been very happy to hear that he’d taken the local bus alone, transferring at busy Kennedy Square in the heart of the city.

That was when the grandfather got on the phone.

“Put Manny on,” he curtly instructed Elizabeth after she had briefly explained the story again—that the child had run away because he was afraid his mother was going to kidnap him.

And so Manny got on the phone, and started crying, and told the man that he wouldn’t come home until his grandfather promised not to beat him.

He had promised.

Elizabeth prays to God that he meant it.

She reaches out and pulls the little boy into her arms, squeezing him tightly, a painful lump strangling her efforts to speak.

“Will you come back with the police later?” Manny asks, clinging to her blue denim shirt.

She shakes her head, then finds her voice and says truthfully, “I can’t, Manny.”

“But why not? I need you …”

There it is again.

I need you
.

“I would if I could. But I have something that I have to do,” she tells him, swallowing hard around the lump. It refuses to subside. “You just make sure you tell the police officers everything, okay?”

“Is it your friend who’s going to come and talk to me?”

“I’m not sure,” she says, thinking that Frank had said he’d be off duty tonight.

“I want it to be your friend, Elizabeth. Okay? I’ll talk to your friend, but not to anyone else.”

“I’ll try and make sure he’s the one who comes,” she tells him, “but I can’t guarantee it, Manny. You have to cooperate though. Will you promise me that? No more running away.”

He nods, lowers his gaze.

She studies his precious face, longing to reach out and run a fingertip down that tear-streaked brown cheek.

This is the last time she’ll ever see this child who has grown to mean so much to her.

“Be good, Manny,” she says, fighting not to blink and release the tears that are blurring her vision.

He looks up at her, and she sees that his own eyes are filled with tears. He nods.

And it’s almost like he knows, she thinks, her arms still tight around his shoulders.

But he can’t know she’s leaving.

And he can’t know what he has meant to her.

That he’s been the child she has never had …

Will never have.

“Okay,” she says, ruffling his dark hair and giving him one last, fierce hug, “you have to go inside now. Remember what I told you.”

“I will,” he tells her. “And I’ll call you if I need you.”

She doesn’t reply, just watches as he gets out of the car and walks away, shuffling his worn-out shoes on the broken concrete sidewalk.

F
lynn Soderland’s car phone rings as he’s turning his Mercedes onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard, having dropped Rae off at her Burbank apartment five minutes earlier. She’d been in a hurry to get inside, but before she went he told her again how pleased he had been with her performance.

To say that she had surprised him would have been an understatement. She had shocked him, not just with the way she had nailed the character during the reading, but with her apt impersonation of Mallory Eden.

It had been eerie, almost, the way Rae had captured her dead friend.

If he hadn’t known better, he would have believed that Mallory Eden had come back to life, that the suicide really had been a fake. Rae had it all down pat—the sexy saunter, the animated speech, the wholesome sensuality that had sent Mallory from unknown to A-list practically overnight.

Star quality.

It’s that simple.

Rae Hamilton had suddenly displayed the star quality he had failed to see in her back when she first approached him to represent her.

Flynn knows de Lisser had been impressed with her, and so had that studio exec.

Now his phone is ringing, and enough time has passed since they left Napa that he can dare to hope it’s de Lisser calling with a response.

The flight back to the Hollywood-Burbank airport had been delayed by wind, and when they’d finally taken off, it hadn’t exactly been a pleasant trip. Rae had been pale, her eyes wide with terror.

Even Flynn, who has always enjoyed flying, had found it necessary to keep guzzling champagne to numb the fear that the tiny plane was going to be struck by wind shear and go down in the Sierra Madres.

It hadn’t, of course.

As he reaches for the phone in the console, setting his burning cigarette carefully in the ashtray before picking it up, he hopes that the rough ride hadn’t been an omen.

He keeps his eyes on the road as he flips it open.

“Flynn Soderland,” he says efficiently, still feeling giddy with the exhilaration of survival, and being back in the business—or, maybe, simply from all the champagne.

“Please hold for Martin de Lisser,” says a crisp, businesslike voice.

He smiles.

Christ, it’s like he never left.

Please hold for Martin de Lisser
.

He’s back in the business he loves, wheeling and dealing with the best of them.

Why had he ever retired?

Oh.

Right.

He’d retired because he lost his star client.

Mallory Eden had ruined both their careers by jumping off that freaking bridge in Montana.