first two years of construction, the builder worked solely on the foundation and subterranean spaces.
No budget. Turnbridge spent whatever was required.
Exquisite marbles and granites were purchased in matched lots. The exterior of the house would be clad in French limestone; sixty seamless limestone columns, from plinth to abacus, were fabricated at a cost of seventy thousand dollars each.
Turnbridge had been as passionately committed to the company he had created as to the house he was building. He believed it would become one of the ten largest corporations in the world.
He believed this even after a rapidly evolving Internet exposed flaws in his business model. From the start, he sold his shares only to finance lifestyle, not to broaden investments. When his company's stock price fell, he borrowed to buy more shares at market. The price fell further, and he leveraged more purchases.
When the share price never recovered and the company imploded, Turnbridge was ruined. Construction of the house came to a halt.
Pursued by creditors, investors, and an angry ex-wife, Thomas Turnbridge came home to his unfinished house, sat in a folding chair on the master-bedroom balcony, and with a 240-degree ocean-and-city-lights view to enchant him, washed down an overdose of barbiturates with an icy bottle of Dom Perignon. Carrion birds found him a day before his ex-wife did. Although the three-acre coastal property is a plum, it has not sold after Turnbridge's death. A snarl of lawsuits entangle it. The actual value of the land now appraises at the sixty million dollars that Turnbridge overpaid for it, which allows only a small pool of potential buyers.
To complete this project as specified in the plans, a buyer will need to spend fifty million on the finish work, so he better like the style. If he demos existing construction and starts again, he needs to be prepared to spend five million on top of the sixty million for the land, because he will be dealing with steel-and-concrete construction meant to ride out an 8.2 quake with no damage.
As a hope-to-be real-estate agent, Holly doesn't dream of getting the commission for the Turnbridge house. She will be content selling properties in middle-class neighborhoods to people who are thrilled to have their own homes.
In fact, if she could trade her modest real-estate dream for a guarantee that she and Mitch would survive the ransom exchange, she would be content to remain a secretary. She is a good secretary and a good wife; she will try hard to be a good mom, too, and she will be happy with that, with life, with love.
But no such deal can be made; her fate remains in her own hands, literally and figuratively. She will have to act when the time comes for action. She has a plan. She is ready for the risk, the pain, the blood.
The creep returns. He has put on a gray windbreaker and a pair of thin, supple gloves.
She is sitting on the floor when he enters, but she gets to her feet as he approaches her.
Violating the concept of personal space, he stands as close to Holly as a man would stand just before taking her in his arms to dance.
'In Duvijio and Eloisa Pacheco's house in Rio Lucio, there are two red wooden chairs in the living room, railback chairs with carved cape tops.'
He places his right hand on her left shoulder, and she is glad that it is gloved.
'On one red chair,' he continues, 'stands a cheap ceramic figurine of Saint Anthony. On the companion chair stands a ceramic of a boy dressed for church.'
'Who is the boy?'
'The figurine represents their son, also named Anthony, who was run down and killed by a drunk driver when he was six. That was fifty years ago, when Duvijio and Eloisa were in their twenties.'
Not yet a mother but hopeful of being one, she cannot imagine the pain of such a loss, the horror of its suddenness. She says, 'A shrine.'
'Yes, a shrine of red chairs. No one has sat in those chairs in fifty years. The chairs are for the two figurines.'
'The two Anthonys,' she corrects.
He may not recognize it as a correction.
'Imagine,' he says, 'the grief and the hope and the love and the despair that have been focused on those figurines. Haifa century of intense yearning has imbued those objects with tremendous power.'
She remembers the girl in the lace-trimmed dress, buried with the Saint Christopher medal and the Cinderella figurine.
'I will visit Duvijio and Eloisa one day when they are not home, and take the ceramic of the boy.'
This man is many things, including a cruel strip-miner of other people's faith and hope and treasured memories.
'I have no interest in the other Anthony, the saint, but the boy is a totem of magical potential. I will take the boy to Espanola—'
'Where your life will change again.'
'Profoundly,' he says. 'And perhaps not only my life.'
She closes her eyes and whispers, 'Red chairs,' as if she is picturing the scene.
This seems to be encouragement enough for him right now, because after a silence, he says, 'Mitch will be here in a little more than twenty minutes.'
Her heart races at this news, but her hope is tempered by her fear, and she does not open her eyes.
'I'll go now to watch for him. He'll bring the money into this room — and then it will be time to decide.'
'In Espanola, is there a woman with two white dogs?'
'Is that what you see?'
'Dogs that seem to vanish in the snow.'
'I don't know. But if you see them, then I'm sure they must be in Espanola.'
'I see myself laughing with her, and the dogs so white.' She opens her eyes and meets his. 'You better go watch for him.'
'Twenty minutes,' he promises, and leaves the kitchen.
Holly stands quite still for a moment, amazed by herself.
White dogs, indeed. Where had that come from? White dogs and a laughing woman.
She almost laughs now at his gullibility, but there is no humor in the fact that she has gotten inside his head deep enough to know what imagery will work with him. That she could travel in his mad world at all does not seem entirely admirable.
The shakes seize her, and she sits down. Her hands are cold, and a chill traces every turn of her bowels.
She reaches under her sweater, between her breasts, and extracts the nail from her bra.
Although the nail is sharp, she wishes it were sharper. She has no means to file it to a keener point.
Using the head of the nail, she scratches industriously at the drywall until she has produced a small pile of powdered plaster.
The time has come.
When Holly was a little girl, for a while she feared an array of night monsters born of a good imagination: in closet, under bed, at the windows.
Her grandmother, good Dorothy, had taught her a poem that, she claimed, would repel every monster: vaporize those in the closet, turn to dust those under the bed, and send those at the windows away to swamps and caves where they belonged.
Years later, Holly learned that this poem, which cured her fear of monsters, was titled 'A Soldier — His Prayer.' It had been written by an unknown British soldier and had been found on a slip of paper in a trench in Tunisia during the battle of El Agheila. Quietly but aloud, she recites it now:
'Stay with me, God. The night is dark, The night is cold: My little spark Of courage dies. The night is long; Be with me, God, and make me strong.'
She hesitates then, but only for a moment. The time has come.
Chapter 64
