you more than you’ll ever know until you have a son of your own someday. And I know you’re having a hard time right now, but I promise you, we’ll get through it. We’ll just take one day at a time, and everything’s going to be all right. Okay?”
Ryan put his arms around her and buried his face in her chest. “I didn’t mean to get kicked out of school,” he said, his voice muffled.
“It’s all right,” Caroline soothed. “And it’s only for a couple of weeks. If you have to come to work with me, so be it. Maybe you can be the youngest antique salesman in New York.”
Thirty minutes later Caroline stepped off the elevator, with Ryan — who had at least finally conquered his fear of the rattling brass cage — close behind her. As Rodney tipped his head and bid them both a good morning, she felt Ryan slip his hand into hers, and quicken his step until he was almost tugging on her arm as they went through the doors and out into the bright sunshine of Central Park West. “For heaven’s sake, Ryan,” she said as they turned south. “He’s not going to bite you.”
But Ryan wasn’t listening to her — he had stopped short, his eyes fixed on someone coming up the sidewalk toward them. For a moment Caroline wasn’t certain who he was staring at, but as a woman clad in a light coat came closer, Caroline realized she looked familiar, yet couldn’t quite place her. A moment later the woman had moved on up the street, nodding a greeting as she passed, and Ryan had turned around, his eyes still fixed on her.
“Ryan, stop that. It’s not polite to stare at people. Especially strangers.”
“But it’s that woman,” Ryan said, his gaze still on the retreating figure. “The one who wanted to touch my face.”
For a second Caroline didn’t understand what he was talking about, but then it suddenly came back to her. Helena Kensington? But that was impossible — Helena had been carrying a white tipped cane and— Before she could complete the thought, the woman Ryan was watching turned in at The Rockwell, mounted the three steps, and started to pull open the front door. But before the door swung wide enough to block her view, the woman looked back down the street and Caroline got a clear look at her face.
Ryan was right: It was Helena Kensington, but there was no sign of the white-tipped cane she’d been carrying the last time Caroline had seen her. Caroline was still staring at her when she smiled and nodded once more, then disappeared into the building.
Helena Kensington paused to let her eyes adjust from the glare of the daylight outside to the soft illumination of The Rockwell’s lobby, savoring every moment of the time it took for the furniture around the fireplace and the paintings hanging on the walls and the wonderful mural overhead to come into focus. The lobby was looking better — the mural seemed brighter than she remembered it, and the upholstery on the furniture appeared to have been cleaned. Not nearly as gloomy as it had looked before her eyes had begun failing her. Or maybe it hadn’t changed at all — maybe it was just that she was able to see it clearly again. Not that it mattered, really; the only thing that counted was that she could see again. In fact, she could see well enough now to get a license to drive, at least according to the eye doctor she’d gone to see this morning at some place called LensMasters that she’d found on Amsterdam Avenue, where all you had to do was walk in and ask to see someone. Helena wasn’t sure she liked the system, but she was well aware that if you tried to live in the past the world soon passed you by.
“Perfect,” the optometrist had pronounced after having Helena peer through the eyepieces of a peculiar- looking machine that hung in front of the chair she’d been seated in. “You have the eyes of a teen-ager.”
“Not quite,” Helena had retorted. “But they’ll do.” Assured that she probably wouldn’t even need reading glasses for another twenty years, she’d paid the strange-looking young woman at the counter with cash, and continued with her walk along Amsterdam, taking in all the new shops and restaurants that had opened over the past few years.
The neighborhood, Helena had noted, was changing, but at least this time it seemed to be changing for the better.
Now, back in the familiar surroundings of The Rockwell, she started toward the elevator, but paused to speak to Rodney.
“Did Mrs. Fleming and her son just leave?” she asked.
Rodney nodded. “Not more than a couple of minutes ago.”
Helena frowned. “I thought Virginia Estherbrook said she was watching the boy today.”
“Not Miss Estherbrook,” Rodney gently corrected. “Miss Shackleforth.”
“Whatever. But should he be going out?” Before Rodney could say anything, she turned away. “Oh, never mind — I’ll just go find out what’s going on for myself.”
Getting into the elevator, she pushed the button for the sixth floor, and a minute or two later was rapping sharply on Virginia Estherbrook’s door. When there was no response at all, she rapped again, then gave up and went back to the elevator, this time stabbing irritably at the button for the third floor. Her foot tapped impatiently as the elevator ground slowly downward, and when it finally clanked to a stop she didn’t even wait for it to come completely level with the floor before pulling the accordion door open. Walking quickly down the hall with no sign of the uncertain shuffle that had been her gait only two days earlier, she knocked at Irene Delamond’s door. To her surprise, it was Lavinia rather than Irene who opened the door a few seconds later.
“Well, look at you,” Lavinia said, stepping back and pulling the door wide. “No cane?”
“Not since yesterday,” Helena said in a tone that made Lavinia Delamond’s smile of greeting fade quickly away. “I was just up at Virgie’s. She’s not at home.”
“You mean ‘Melanie’s,’ ” Lavinia said.
“Very well, have it your own way. The point is, where is she? She was supposed to be looking after young Ryan today, wasn’t she?”
The rest of Lavinia Delamond’s smile vanished. “Isn’t she?”
Helena glared at the other woman. “I highly doubt it, since I’m sure I just saw him on the street with his mother.”
Lavinia seemed to deflate like a sagging balloon. “Oh, dear. What do you think it means?”
Helena uttered a snort of exasperation. “It means something’s gone wrong. Where is—” She paused, searching in her mind for the name that now both Rodney and Lavinia had used. “Melanie!” she finished, the name suddenly popping into her memory.
“Perhaps she’s at the Albions’. Alicia said Mrs. Fleming’s little girl was up there yesterday, asking about Rebecca.”
Now it was Helena who stepped back as if she’d been struck. “What did she say?”
“That Rebecca went to New Mexico, of course.”
“And did the girl believe her?”
“I suppose so. Why shouldn’t she? It’s a perfectly reasonable thing — don’t tuberculosis patients go there for the climate?”
Helena closed her eyes. “Not for fifty years, at least. I think perhaps I’d better call Anthony.”
“Oh, dear,” Lavinia fretted, her fingers nervously toying with a crumpled hanky. “Do you think that’s wise?”
Helena glared balefully at the other woman. “Well, I don’t know,” she said, her voice taking on a hard edge of sarcasm. “Let’s think about it, shall we? Do you want to get back in your wheelchair?” Lavinia shook her head. “I didn’t think so. Any more than I wish to go back to that cane, or George Burton wishes to tolerate the pain of his failing kidneys. And as for poor Rodney—”
“He’ll be all right for a little longer,” Lavinia broke in, the hanky in her hands twisted into knots now.
“Will he?” Helena Kensington shot back, her voice dropping to a furious whisper. “Will he live? Will any of us? Or will we start rotting away, piece by piece, like any other corpse? Is that what you want, Lavinia? Do you want your bones to start crumbling while your flesh rots and your skin peels away?” Lavinia Delamond was cowering now, pressing back against the wall as if to steady herself against Helena’s words, but Helena only leaned closer. “That’s what will happen, Lavinia. If the mother gets suspicious — if those children get away — that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
Shoving Lavinia Delamond roughly aside, she picked up the old-fashioned telephone that sat on the hall table and dialed a number from memory. “Mr. Fleming,” she said when a voice answered at the other end. “Tell him it’s
