“When did they let you out of your playpen, yesterday?”
Frustrated, Leigh put up her hand to stop any further argument. “My mind is made up. Don’t try to change it, because you can’t. Here,” she said, holding out her other hand. “This is for you.”
He eyed the gift-wrapped box she was holding as if it were a container of rat poison. “What’s that?”
“A memento of the occasion. Open it later and find out for yourself.” When he refused to reach for it, she stepped around him and put it on the bottom rung of an old wooden stepladder, next to some textbooks. “Are those yours? What are you studying?”
“Law,” he said sarcastically, and Leigh choked on her laugh, horrified that her laughter would give away the fact that she knew he’d been in prison. And, unfortunately, it did. “If you’re finished slumming,” he said shortly, “I’ve got work to do.”
“I didn’t mean—” she said, backing out of the room. “I’m sorry for interrupting. I’ll just—”
“Leave?” he suggested.
She never knew if he’d opened the gift she’d given him. But she had a feeling that if he had opened it, he wouldn’t have liked or wanted the small pewter figure of a knight in armor she’d found in an antique shop. He never addressed a voluntary word to her after that, but at least when he saw her, he nodded curtly, acknowledging her presence. If she spoke to him first, he answered, and Leigh always smiled at him and said hello.
A few weeks after Falco had frightened off her attackers, Logan and she went to Angelini’s for late-night snacks. Leigh introduced Logan to Mrs. Angelini; then she saw Falco and introduced the two men. After that, Mrs. Angelini always asked Leigh about her “young man.” Falco never referred to Logan by any name or description, and not long afterward, he vanished completely. Mrs. Angelini said Falco had “gone back to school.”
LYING IN HER HOSPITAL BED, Leigh thought of all that because the night she’d nearly been attacked had been the most terrifying experience of her life—until now, when Logan was missing. Then as now, she’d felt the same sense of terrifying helplessness, the feeling that she should have been more prepared, should have been able to anticipate this and safeguard Logan and herself from it.
Chapter 9
* * *
Leigh’s doctor, her nurse, and the hospital’s administrator escorted her down in a wheelchair to an ambulance backed up to the rear entrance of the hospital. Brenna was waiting for her there, wearing a heavy jacket and red woolen cap. “Security says the coast is clear,” she told Leigh.
The security guard standing beside her nodded. “Most of the press people left when they heard you were being discharged this morning,” he told Leigh with a grin. “Two of them hung around though, hoping for a look at you. They gave me ten bucks to tip them off when you were leaving, so I pointed out that empty ambulance you arranged for; then they hopped in their cars and went after it. I figure they’re sixty miles ahead of you by now.”
Leigh asked Brenna to give him twenty dollars more for being so helpful. Two paramedics tried to help her out of the wheelchair, but she waved them away. “I can do it myself,” she insisted, wincing with pain as she slowly eased herself into a standing position. All she’d done that morning was sign some autographs for the staff on her floor, shower, and get dressed, but she was already feeling weak and shaky. Mentally, however, she was alert and filled with purpose. The prospect of retracing her path and locating Logan in the next few hours had her geared up and ready to go the distance.
Brenna got into the ambulance behind her, and the vehicle began moving slowly down the driveway. “Where’s our car?” Leigh asked.
“About two miles down the highway, at the American Legion Hall. I’ve already told the ambulance driver to take me there so I can get my car. He knows where the place is.”
Shortly afterward, the ambulance slowed and turned into a parking lot filled with enough deep potholes to rock the vehicle and make Leigh grit her teeth in pain. “Are you okay?” Brenna asked worriedly.
Leigh slowly expelled her breath and nodded. “The hospital gave me some painkillers to take with me, but I don’t want to use them because they make me feel woozy. I need to be completely focused and clearheaded right now. Would you help me up?” Leigh added as the vehicle drew to a stop.
One of the paramedics got out and went around to the rear of the ambulance to help Brenna down. He opened the doors, saw both women on their feet, and stepped back, staring at them. “I promised I’d leave the hospital in an ambulance,” Leigh explained to the young man, “and that’s exactly what I’ve done. However, I did not promise to stay in it all the way to Manhattan.”
“I can’t let you do this, Miss Kendall!”
Leigh managed a little smile and held out her hand to him for help. “You really don’t have any choice.”
“But—”
“If you make me jump down from this thing,” she warned lightly, “the jolt will probably kill me.” She stepped forward, and left with no other choice, the paramedic reached up to help her. The ambulance driver came around to see what was causing the delay, and Leigh held up her hand to halt his outburst. “There’s no point in arguing,” she told him.
They helped her into the silver Chevrolet Blazer Brenna had rented. “My secretary has your names,” Leigh told them with a grateful smile. “She’ll arrange for you to have four tickets to Blind Spot next Saturday night.”
Normally, the promise of complimentary tickets to a sold-out Broadway play made even the most jaded New Yorker extremely happy, so Leigh was understandably taken aback when both men looked a little disappointed.
“If it wouldn’t cause you any extra trouble,” the driver said after exchanging a glance with his companion, “we’d rather wait until you’re starring in the play again, Miss Kendall.”
They were so young, and they saw so much suffering and horror, that Leigh had to restrain an impulse to pat his cheek. “Then, I’ll arrange for that,” she promised. “Brenna will call you when—when everything is back to normal,” she finished. Normal. . . .
Leigh clung fiercely to the concept; she yearned for it—prayed for it as Brenna started the Blazer’s engine.
Chapter 10
* * *
Snowbanks piled as high as the Blazer’s hood, and sometimes its roof, lined the main highways and made the secondary roads so narrow that it was often difficult to squeeze two cars heading in opposite directions past each other.
For the first hour, nothing looked particularly familiar to Leigh except some major landmarks she’d noticed soon after she reached the mountains, landmarks she’d already been familiar with from her few previous trips to the Catskills. However, the deeper into the mountains they went, the more unfamiliar the landscape became and the more uncertain she was of the directions Logan had given her. Three hours after they started searching, Brenna insisted they stop for lunch and pulled into a McDonald’s. “Has anything seemed familiar since we passed that little gas station back there?” she asked as they waited at the drive-up window for their order.
“I might as well have been driving blindfolded in a tunnel that night,” Leigh said bleakly. “The visibility was so bad that I could only see a few feet beyond my headlights.” She pressed her fingers to her temples, trying to massage away the tension and anxiety that made her head feel as if it were going to explode. “I should have been concentrating harder on Logan’s directions, but I was concentrating on keeping the car on the road. And Logan’s instructions weren’t the kind you’d normally give someone. He was so excited about our ‘mountain hideaway’ that the map and directions he gave me were more like a treasure hunt—”
Leigh stopped herself from repeating that explanation yet again to Brenna. “Even so,” she said bitterly, “I should be able to remember if the directions said to turn right when I was four-tenths of a mile past the stoplight in Ridgemore, or four miles past it! When I wrote the directions for the detectives on Tuesday, I thought I remembered ever
ything important. But now, I’m not sure of that or anything else.”
“You have to stop beating up on yourself,” Brenna warned.
Leigh couldn’t stop, but she tried not to do it aloud, for Brenna’s sake.
After two more hours of searching and turning back whenever Leigh thought she might have recognized something, everything was beginning to look familiar to her. In desperation, Leigh began systematically exploring side roads and private roads, and even driveways, looking for the cabin Logan had described. She was prepared to explore every overgrown, rutted path that might have been a driveway long ago—but the snow made that impossible.
Several times they nearly got stuck, but Brenna was surprisingly skilled at handling the heavy four-wheel-drive vehicle—a skill she said she acquired growing up on her parents’ farm. Brenna’s ability to maneuver the Blazer through snowbanks, and the change that occurred in the weather that afternoon, were the only two positive events in an otherwise heartbreaking day. Shortly after they stopped for lunch, the sun appeared. In the space of an hour, the heavy clouds parted, the sky turned a brilliant blue, the temperature climbed above freezing, and the snow began melting.
In addition to bringing Leigh some clothes to wear, Brenna had also brought her a handbag with some spare items she’d found at Leigh’s apartment. The sunglasses came in especially handy because they hid the tears that began gathering in Leigh’s eyes and spilling over with increasing frequency as the afternoon wore on.
“If you’re going to be on time for the press conference tonight,” Brenna said, “we need to turn around and head back to the city pretty soon.”
Leigh heard her, but she was craning her neck to see down a lane that had a steep drop-off. “Slow down—” she said excitedly, and Brenna stepped on the brake, slowing the Blazer to a crawl. “There’s a house down there; I can see the roof.” At the end of the steep drive, Leigh caught a glimpse of a large old house with a green roof, but Logan had said the only dwelling on their property was a tiny, three-room cabin, and its roof was gray slate. “That’s not it,” Leigh said bleakly. In the wake of her frustration and disappointment, a burst of anger swept over Leigh. “I haven’t seen the helicopters Commissioner Trumanti was supposed to send out here today. What is he waiting for, anyway—summer?”
“The sky could be full of helicopters,” Brenna pointed out gently, “but if they were over the next rise or around the next bend, we probably wouldn’t be able to see them.”
“Are you sure your cell phone is turned on?” Leigh asked.
Brenna kindly refrained from pointing out that they’d already had this discussion several times that day. “Positive. I checked it again when we stopped to use the rest room.”
“I’d like to call Detective Shrader and Detective Littleton. I left voice mails for them this morning with your cell phone number, but maybe they didn’t get my messages.”
“My cell phone is in my purse on the seat behind us.” As she spoke, Brenna tried to stretch her right arm between the front seats, but the purse was beyond her reach. “I’ll have to pull over,” she added, glancing in the rearview mirror.
“No, I’ll get it,” Leigh said, “keep driving.” Leigh drew a deep breath, bracing for the pain in her ribs, and slowly, awkwardly, managed to twist herself around in the front seat and reach behind her for the purse. Brenna’s purse was the size of a large airline carry-on bag, but the phone was on the top. Leigh’s hand shook as she pressed the tiny keypad and put the phone to her ear.
Detective Shrader answered her call right away. “Have you had any news about my husband?” she asked him without preamble.
“No. If we did, I would have called you at the phone number you left on our voice mails this morning. Where are you now?”
“I’m in the mountains, trying to find the roads I took on Sunday.”
“Having any luck?”
It took several seconds before Leigh could make herself admit the truth aloud. “I have no idea where I was, or where I was supposed to be.”
Instead of commenting on that, Shrader said, “In your phone message this morning, you mentioned you were planning to give a press conference at your apartment tonight. Is that still on?”
When Leigh said that it was, he told her the police artist had a sketch of Leigh’s rescuer ready to hand out to the media at the conference. “Detective Littleton and I could be there tonight and bring it with us,” he volunteered. “It might be helpful to you to have representatives from the NYPD present—”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Leigh admitted, but she decided to decline. “I truly appreciate your willingness to drive back to the city tonight, but I would rather you stay in the mountains and keep searching for my husband.”
“Detective Littleton and I can drive to the city tonight and drive straight back up here early tomorrow morning to resume the search. We can always use the overtime.”
“In that case, thank you, I’d like you to be at the press conference. One more thing,” Leigh said swiftly. “Commissioner Trumanti said he was going to send helicopters to help with the search, but I haven’t seen any of them today.”
“Two of them have been in the air since noon, more will arrive tomorrow, but until the snow melts, the choppers can’t cover as much territory as you think. The problem is, snow-covered roofs all look pretty much alike from the air, so they have to fly low and slow.”
“I hadn’t considered that,” Leigh said, but she couldn’t keep the despondency from her voice. Nature itself seemed to have declared war on her on Sunday.
“In case you haven’t caught a weather report lately, this sunshine is supposed to stick around for another day or two. We have a team searching the roadsides for signs a vehicle went over the embankment and more searchers are due to arrive tomorrow. If the snow keeps melting the way it did today, we should be able to find the spot where you went off the road very quickly. Once we find that, the helicopters will be able to narrow down their search area for the cabin. Try not to worry,” he finished. “Your husband was planning to stay in an old house with no power and no phone. If the road out of there is impassable, then he’s built himself a nice fire and he’s been waiting for us to figure out how to get him out of there.”
Leigh thought that sounded completely unlike Logan. He’d have hiked through the snow to the main road the next morning, if for no other reason than that he’d have been worried about Leigh. “You’re probably right,” she lied.
“You’d better start back to the city right now,” Shrader said. “If you intend to be there when that press conference starts, you’re cutting it pretty close.”
Thoroughly depressed, Leigh touched the red disconnect button on Brenna’s cell phone. “Detective Shrader said we need to start back right away,” she said, staring out the window at the snow-covered mountains dotted with towering pine trees. Somewhere up in these hills, she’d lost her car, and her husband, and nearly her life. She felt as if she were dangerously close to losing her grip on sanity, as well.
“Are you all right?” Brenna asked softly.
“I’m fine,” she lied. “Everything’s going to be okay,” she added, trying to make herself believe that. “Logan is perfectly safe. We’ll all laugh at this someday.”
A MILE BEHIND THEM, in an unmarked Ford, Shrader glanced at Sam Littleton. “She’s going to turn around and go home.” Moments later, the silver Blazer passed them going in the opposite direction, heading toward the city. In his rearview mirror, Shrader watched the Blazer until it rounded a curve; then he made a leisurely U-turn and drove slowly along, no longer following the vehicle at all. “Considering how many times they’ve passed us on the road today,” he said with a smirk, “it’s amazing they haven’t made us.”
“That Blazer is one of the few clean vehicles in the Catskills,” Sam murmured, studying the map in her lap that Leigh Manning had given them Tuesday night. “The rest of us all look alike—filthy.” With a sigh, she folded the map and slid it into a plas
tic evidence bag. “This morning, she seemed to be trying to follow roughly the same directions she gave us in the hospital. Then, around noon, she started backtracking and retracing her route in wider circles.”
“Yeah, and after that, she started sightseeing. She figured we might follow her today, so she decided to take us for a ride—literally. You owe me a quarter, by the way.”
He held out his hand, and Sam looked at his open palm and then at his smug profile. “For what?”
“Because I said that following her wasn’t going to get us anywhere, but you thought she could be up to something interesting.”
“Call me suspicious, but when I notice a badly injured, supposedly frantic woman getting out of an ambulance in a deserted parking lot on an open highway and then climbing into a vehicle that heads north instead of south, it just naturally sparks my interest.”
“Ante up,” he persisted. “Where’s my quarter?”
“I’ll deduct it from the seven dollars and forty-three cents you owe me for your M&M’s and Cokes this trip.”
“What?” he exclaimed, giving her his ferocious doggie look. “I don’t owe you seven-forty-three, Littleton. I owe you six-forty-three.”
Sam smiled at him. “Right, you do. And don’t forget it.”
Chapter 11
* * *
Trish Lefkowitz was waiting in the apartment’s outer foyer when Leigh and Brenna finally stepped out of the elevator, five minutes late for the press conference. “My God!” the publicist burst out, rushing forward to take Leigh’s arm, “you look positively awful, Leigh. Which, in a way, is perfect,” she added, always thinking of the public-relations value of everything. “Those reporters will take one look at you and be dying to help you.”
Leigh scarcely heard her. She was looking around at the elegant black marble foyer with its carved gilt console tables and silk-covered Louis XIV chairs. Everything was exactly the same as when she left it on Sunday, except that now Logan was missing from her life. So nothing was the same.