Pursued by Shadows (3 page)

I'll call you when I get in. Please think about this. Thanks.

Jane.

“Agnes is the baby?”

Harriet nodded. “I suppose so.”

“She's not much of a prophet, is she? You were the first thing that occurred to him.”

“I suppose I was,” said Harriet reluctantly. “Although I got the impression that he'd been in Toronto for a couple of days. He might have tried a lot of other people already.”

“And you haven't heard from her? You don't know if she's in town?”

Harriet shook her head. “No.”

Sanders folded up the letter again and put it back in the envelope. “Look, Harriet—are you sure you're all right? Do you want me to stay? What if he comes back?”

“I'm fine,” she said. Bitterness and anger swept over her again like a returning tide. “And he's not going to come back. He's going to go out and get drunk—or drunker, actually—to soothe his wounded self-esteem. And I'd appreciate some time to myself, if you don't mind. I prefer not to be fussed over.”

“Right,” said John. Renewed fury pinched his consonants. “I'm off then.” And he ran down the stairs almost as quickly as he had come up them.

Harriet had the consolation that she had made herself just as miserable as she had made John. She marched through the apartment, straightening out chairs and rugs that had been displaced by her encounter with Guy, and then sat and waited for the phone to ring with an effusive apology from John Sanders. It didn't. She pressed the ice angrily to her cheekbone, deriving a certain satisfaction from the increased pain caused by the cold. It confused her, though, that her rage should be directed at John, whose only crime so far was being on her side. After all, he had done his best to rescue her from the person she should have been furious at. That was it, of course. She should never have needed to be rescued. Or was that it? Her brain was refusing to function. The whole problem was much too difficult to sort out right now. It made her face hurt, and her barely suppressed tears race to the surface again. She was tired, too tired to deal with it all. She inspected her cheek and her left eye anxiously for signs of bruising, got undressed, and crawled cautiously into bed.

While the more sedate elements of the city were turning off their television sets and heading virtuously into their beds, Jane Sinclair was standing in front of a cracked, white-painted door, bouncing a key up and down in her hand, a prey to massive doubt. She had been sitting in the car, parked on the Danforth near Logan, until almost midnight, waiting for Guy to emerge from the doorway between storefronts. When he appeared, she had set the timer button on her watch for fifteen minutes, eased herself out of the car, walked with quick confident steps past three grubby little shops redolent of failure and rats, and made her way up the shabby stairs to the second floor. That was the easy part. Now panic was chipping away at her reflexes. She should have waited to see what he was going to do. To make sure he was really leaving. What if he had noticed her sitting there, and was coming back to trap her? “Come on,” she murmured to herself, “pull yourself together. He's not that subtle.” But what if his brother was home? She'd face that if it happened, and not before. No one else in this scruffy building was going to notice one female more or less wandering the halls. She took a deep breath and unlocked the door.

It opened onto a long, steep staircase, bathed in faint eerie light from a yellow or orange bulb at the top. The Beaumont brothers went in for odd effects. She ran lightly up the stairs, two at a time.

She looked up and down the long narrow hall. Somewhere in here was the piece of paper on which he had written down the name and address—and telephone number—of the dealer he had called from London. The one who was willing to buy it. She knew he had written down the number. For one thing, he was so terrified of forgetting things that he always kept notes. And the more he drank, the more frightened he had become of memory loss. And for the other, she had seen him look for the number in his sketch pad on that Tuesday when he had made all those transatlantic calls. He never moved without his current sketch pads, and always used them for jotting down things that he didn't want her to see, in the innocent belief that they were safe there. She sighed. She had been so terrified in London that he would come in and find her packing, that she had spent no more than a minute or two looking for the address before the cab had come for her. And so here she was now. Even more terrified.

The living room spread across the front of the building. The bay window on the north wall held a giant plant, with a tormented and eccentric stalk and long, spotted leaves, sitting on an octagonal table. Bookcases lined the west wall, a shabby brown chesterfield adorned the south, and various large chairs filled up the remaining spaces. She paused and sniffed the atmosphere. It smelled of paint, stale booze, stale air, and a kind of undefined, unwashed masculinity. Guy. His traces were everywhere. Books, papers, underwear on the floor, clothes on the chairs and spread over the chesterfield. She started to work.

There were sketch pads all over. On the table, in the bookcase, in the closet. In every size and of every quality obtainable. His brother must be storing every page Guy Beaumont had ever scribbled on since he had sketched his first clown at age five. She made a pile of the ones that she thought had been in London with them and doggedly started to examine each one, checking every page as rapidly as she could. They contained hands, faces, letters, ears, necks, buildings, legs, breasts—everything but what she was looking for. She had only three more to look through when a piercing beep exploded from her wrist. She stopped, frozen. The timer. By now he would have given up waiting for her and would be on his way home. She could only count on five minutes at most.

She flipped through the first pad so quickly she created a kaleidoscope of motion out of it. No writing whatsoever in it. The second was composed of stiffer paper, forcing her to move more slowly. Even so, she almost missed it. There it was, in the middle of the pad, beside a study of some tree branches, a neat little list. Not one name, but four. He must be trying to set up an auction. She reached in her pocket for pen and paper, and began to scribble furiously.

She was halfway through the last name when the key turned in the front door. Heavy footsteps shook the stairs. “You home, Nigel?” a voice called. “The bitch didn't show.” It echoed it the silence. “Stupid bastard, leaving lights on everywhere,” the voice muttered. The footsteps clattered into the bathroom.

Crouched as low as she could without losing speed, Jane flew out of the living room, along the hall, and down the narrow staircase. The flushing of the toilet covered the delicate sound of the apartment door clicking shut.

Harriet was dreaming that Guy Beaumont was painting her, nude, for a fourteen-foot-high mural to be installed in her neighbourhood supermarket. For some reason, he had to paint elaborate designs on her body before he could begin to do the actual wall. Each brush stroke tore her flesh and rang in her ears like a fingernail scratching on slate, making her shrivel in pain and fear, but leaving her powerless to move away. At the last agonizing stroke of the brush, she woke up, drenched in sweat, her heart pounding frantically. With a gasp of relief, she rolled over to turn on the light by her bed and exorcise the demon of her old lover. A scraping sound on the other side of the door stopped her in mid-movement. The sounds she had been hearing in her dream were only a few feet away from her.

The handle of her bedroom door gave a slight squeal as it turned and the door began to open.

“Who in hell is out there?” yelled Harriet, driven beyond caution by exasperation. She reached for the light, changed her mind, and drew back her hand. In the same movement she slipped out the far side of the bed onto the floor.

“Shit, but you startled me,” said a male voice. The hall light clicked on and a figure appeared, outlined in the doorway to Harriet's bedroom. “Where are you?” he went on, peering unsuccessfully into the relative darkness in front of him.

“
Who
are you, breaking into my bedroom in the middle of the night?” Harriet demanded, trying not to panic. Unfortunately, her voice was muted and muffled by the heavily lined window curtains that concealed her and the effect was less than impressive.

“That is you, Harriet, isn't it?” said the voice, apparently unaware of any hostility in his reception. “Where's Jane?”

“Who are you?” she repeated to the silhouette, and then stepped out from behind the curtains, picking up her dressing gown from the foot of the bed.

“Don't you remember me?” he detached himself from his position and sat down comfortably on the edge of the bed, clearly in no doubt of his welcome. “It's Peter. Peter Bellingham. Remember? I was one of Guy's students at the College of Art. I was here at a couple of parties.”

Harriet reached over to switch on the light before perching warily on the other side of the bed to examine him. The small reading lamp picked out shiny light brown hair and a soft, pretty face. “Of course,” she said, yawning. “Peter. One of the groupies,” and was amused to see him flush with embarrassment. “Look—if we're going to have a conversation, I'd prefer to have it upstairs. If you don't mind.”

“You want some coffee?” asked Harriet once she had shepherded the young man into her living room. Coffee was the last thing she needed, but at least it would give her something to occupy her hands while she figured out what to do with him. “Now—would you mind explaining what you're doing here?” she asked, with another enormous yawn.

He didn't seem to notice that his hostess was both annoyed and on the brink of falling asleep. “Harriet—I'm desperate.” The baby-faced sweetness of his expression destroyed any force that might have existed behind the word. “I need your help. I have to find Jane. You have to tell me where she is. It's important. Terribly important. More than you can possibly realize.”

“Look, Peter,” said Harriet, smothering another yawn, “if I knew where Jane was I would probably tell you. If only to get you out of here, so I could go back to bed. But I don't. I haven't laid eyes on Jane Sinclair in almost two years. For reasons that I won't bother explaining to you, we haven't been in constant correspondence, either. Do you believe me? If you think she's here, hiding in the darkroom or something, you're welcome to look around. Why would she be hiding from you, by the way?”

“She isn't, Harriet, that's just it. We were supposed to meet in Toronto. She's left Guy, you know. And we took separate flights in case it looked like—”

“—you were running away together? Are you?”

“Sort of,” he said with hesitation. “Guy was terrible to her, you know. The things he did— You wouldn't believe it if I told you.” He spoke mechanically, like someone repeating a lesson learned by rote and recited too often. “I was shocked. Anyway, I was staying with them—they'd borrowed this wonderful big apartment in Chelsea—”

“How handy,” said Harriet, with a great deal of irritation. In spite of her incredulity at the unlikelihood of the thing, she was drearily certain what he was about to say. She had no interest in Peter Bellingham's sex life, real or imaginary, and she resented having to listen to cozy confidences in her sleeping time.

“Well, he should have expected it,” said Peter defensively. “After the way he treated her. What else did he think she was going to do?”

“And then he caught you at it,” said Harriet, cutting short his bravura performance, and adding, with deliberate crudeness, “Bare-assed and toes up between the sheets? That must have been quite a scene.”

“Well—he didn't exactly catch us,” said Peter, sulkily, turning pink, “but he was getting suspicious and Jane decided she'd better leave.”

“And you were supposed to meet her here?” Every syllable quivered with disbelief. “In my apartment?” The trouble with his story was that it was just peculiar enough to be true.

“Yes. She gave me a key to let myself in. In case you were out.”

Harriet was torn between annoyance and amusement. “How very thoughtful of her,” she said finally. She really must use the chain and change the lock.

“I'm sorry about that,” he mumbled. “It was a bit much, I suppose. But we didn't have time to make arrangements and Guy is ready to kill her, he's so jealous. He really will, you know—I mean literally kill her—if he finds out where she is. So I have to find her first.”

“You don't have to worry about Guy knowing where she is. He doesn't. He tried to find out from me.” Involuntarily, Harriet's hand went up to her bruised cheekbone. “And I didn't tell him, partly because I didn't know, but mostly because I wouldn't give him directions down to the lake if he was dying of thirst.” She stopped for a moment to consider how much she should say to this self-described hopeful lover. “Okay—I did get a letter from Jane, but it didn't have anything in it you don't know already. She mentioned coming here, but I haven't heard from her. That's it. I've told you everything I know. And now I would appreciate my key back and my place to myself. I've had a rough day.” Harriet walked over and unplugged the kettle.

Spring had clouded over and chilled down overnight. A gray morning greeted Harriet as she backed her car down the driveway, gray with a brisk and nasty wind. She was exhausted, aching, and hungry. An hour ago she had been dragged from a sound sleep—two hours after she had fallen into it—by a telephone call from Nina Smithson. Because in spite of her determined words to Peter Bellingham the night before, it had taken her at least another half-hour to get rid of him, and when she had finally double-locked the door behind him and fastened the chain, she realized that he still had her key. At that, sleep was only a distant memory. She had spent until dawn alternating between lying wide awake in bed and drifting wretchedly around her apartment, clutching an ice pack to her face, and wondering whether her bruised ego would permit her the comfort of a middle-of-the-night phone call to John.

And now Nina Smithson—Guy's guardian angel, his agent and the only woman he had ever listened to in his life—was insisting that Harriet rush over to the house and shoot a recent shipment of little art treasures Nina had picked up here and there before they were stolen or broken or burned to cinders. Harriet had made herself a cup of the very stale instant coffee she had been offering to Peter and had decided to forgo the moldy bread. It was past time to shop. Her only other accomplishment since dragging herself out of bed and showering herself awake had been a not very successful attempt to cover up the bruising around her eye and cheek. Staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, she managed, somewhat optimistically, to convince herself that it could have been worse, all things considered. She didn't look
that
battered. There wasn't too much discolouration and only moderate swelling. Either Guy hadn't hit her as hard as she had thought or the ice had made a difference. John, damn him, had been right. She derived no comfort from the fact. In all, she was not in a good mood.

The wide-branching trees of Forest Hill hid thousands of birds that were quarreling, fighting, singing, and generally being very busy in spite of the gusty wind and lowering clouds. Dunvegan Road looked as quietly opulent as always, unaffected by weather, mood, or any number of downturns in the economy. There had been a time in Harriet's life—the time when Guy Beaumont had been part of her existence—when she had been a frequent guest in these quiet precincts. Nina hadn't crossed her path since, and Harriet was surprised to realize how hot and uncomfortable she felt as she got out of the car. It only took an instant to identify the reason. Forget Jane, or Harriet, or anyone else. Nina owned Guy Beaumont, body and soul, and she had summoned Harriet so peremptorily because she wanted to probe into yesterday's squabble. Squabble! Harriet winced to realize that she had been guilty of borrowing one of Guy's cute little terms for their desperate quarrels. Tiffs. Squabbles. Tussles.

But yesterday's battle couldn't possibly affect Guy's working life. His psyche wasn't that delicate. If quarrels with women could have prevented him from painting, Guy Beaumont would never have laid brush to canvas. Then why did Nina want to see her? Nina Smithson could hardly be in immediate desperate need of emergency photographic services. Of course, an even more interesting question was why she had obeyed the summons. “We'll worry about that one tomorrow,” muttered Harriet uneasily as she rang the bell.

Nina herself swept out of the den to intercept her housekeeper at the door. “My dear,” she said, “I am so pleased to see you. It's been so long—much too long.” She caught Harriet's hands and deposited a chilly kiss somewhere near Harriet's cheek. The onset of middle age had not dimmed Nina's striking good looks or ruffled her expensive elegance. The honey blond hair still gleamed as it fell smoothly around her face, not a strand brave enough to leave its place. The eyes, the hollow cheeks, the makeup, all were as perfect as ever. Except for a slight, but increasing, softness in the jowls, Harriet noted with a quickly stifled twinge of malicious satisfaction.

“My equipment is in the car,” said Harriet flatly. “I wasn't sure where you were keeping the stuff you wanted photographed.” If it exists.

“Don't worry about that now. We'll have coffee in the den, Bernice,” she said to the hovering white-clad woman in the background. “Those things won't take a moment. Two vases and a piece of carved ebony. Charming, terribly expensive, but uncomplicated, I think, from your point of view. Come along. You look pale and frozen, my dear.” She stared at the swollen patch, the dark ring under Harriet's left eye. “And much too thin. Have you been taking care of yourself?” She nudged her, as she spoke, into a pleasant little room where firelight flickered palely against the gray of the late morning sky.

Within seconds a large round tray bearing coffee and a plate heaped with muffins and pastries appeared on a small table in front of them; Nina poured out two cups of coffee and pointed Harriet at plates and napkins and the pile of goodies. She stirred a tiny amount of sugar into her cup and then pulled the corner off a large muffin. Suddenly remembering Nina's eating habits—without ever putting anything on her own plate, she had been known to reduce an entire tray of sandwiches to half-nibbled broken fragments in a matter of minutes—Harriet rescued a substantial carrot muffin and some coffee and carried them over to a chair near the fire.

Nina reached out and broke off an end of almond croissant. “I do need that photography done,” she said, rather tentatively. “I've been a bit careless about records recently. I'd be in the soup if we had a fire. And I do appreciate your coming here this morning on such short notice, but actually I had another reason for asking you over at this particular time.”

“Oh, really?” said Harriet. Surprise, surprise.

“Do you happen to know—this is so embarrassing, Harriet, to have to ask you this—but do you know where Guy is? Or Jane?” She raised her hand in a forestalling gesture. “Don't say it— You're the last person in the world who would want to keep track of Guy Beaumont's movements. Or Jane's. I realize that. But you knew both of them so well, you might just know where we could look for them, at least.”

Harriet shook her head. Why should she help Nina Smithson in whatever games she was playing with Guy? “I really wouldn't know where he is,” she said, making her best attempt to sound convincing. That, at least, was technically true. He could be anywhere in the city, or even the province, although the chances were near perfect that at this very moment he was in his brother's apartment, fast asleep. Guy didn't believe in paying for accommodation any more than he believed in getting up early. Harriet was surprised that Nina didn't know that.

“They didn't get in touch with you? Neither one of them?”

Stubbornly, but still avoiding the lie direct, Harriet shook her head again.

“I'm surprised,” said Nina, looking hard at Harriet's swollen eye. “I assumed that Jane at least would have called you. She doesn't have that many people to turn to in the city, does she? And I know that both of them admired you and trusted you very much, in spite of what happened.” She leaned forward confidingly, infusing her voice with warmth and sincerity. “You are the logical person for them to contact, after all. Or one of the logical people.”

“How about you?” asked Harriet, unimpressed. She had heard Nina con the unwary often enough and knew her techniques. “Isn't the gallery representing Guy anymore?”

“Of course we are,” said Nina quickly. “But you know how moody and difficult he can be. I think that
he
thinks that we haven't been doing enough for him lately, and he's become terribly upset.” She shrugged. “He hasn't answered his mail, he hasn't been home when I've phoned—you know what he's like.”

“Mmm,” said Harriet, even more surprised. She did know what he was like, and she couldn't imagine Guy ignoring anything that smelled of money.

“Anyway, this is a fabulous commission,” Nina was saying as Harriet tuned back in again. “Exactly the sort of thing he does perfectly. And they want it now—not next year some time. They expect an answer by next week. Early next week.” She paused.

Harriet looked innocently at her hostess and then went back to work on the muffin. It was, of course, excellent. And beautifully spiced by the sight of Nina Smithson on her metaphorical knees.

“It's for a paper company,” she said, doggedly plowing on in the face of Harriet's lack of response. “Their head office. They're redoing it all and they want a huge mural. You know—the sort of thing that Guy does so well.” She paused again for comment. None was forthcoming. “They want something that makes them look more like tree-huggers. They feel that they've been getting terribly bad press lately, and they need something to shift the balance a little their way.”