“Didn’t you hear it? Oh, my God. I guess you didn’t. She called on the line in your office. I saved it after I heard it so I could hear the others.” She stepped across the foyer to the small door beside the library, went inside, and returned with the wireless telephone from his desk, punching the buttons for the messages. She stopped a few feet from him and handed it to him.
He took the telephone and turned away from her. “You have no new messages, and four saved messages. To hear your-” He pressed the one key and heard “Hi, Ted.” It was Kylie’s voice. “I called your cell phone, but it must have been off, so I figured I’d try your private line. I missed you tonight. I was hoping that I would be in bed right now. Not alone. With you, silly. Instead, I ended up at a stupid party with Tina. I couldn’t stand it, so I came home early and now I’m just lying here thinking about you.” He had heard enough. He pressed the three key and heard, “Message erased.”
He could think of nothing to say. Caroline knew who Kylie was and had found out how old she was. He was suddenly exhausted, his body stiff from sitting in the car, and his mind seemed to be racing, but nothing came to him. He walked to the staircase, set the phone on the step, picked up his suitcase, and prepared to climb.
“Ted?” She said it quietly at first, then, “Ted!”
“I don’t want to talk about it now.”
“You have no choice.”
“I have nothing to say to you.” He took the first step, and from the silence he knew she was following.
Her voice came from behind him. “You have one chance, Ted. One, and then it’s over. You can help me try to fix this-break it off with the girl, pay her off if necessary, get into therapy-or I’ll have to call the police.”
He spun around to look down at her. He felt his neck and temples pulsing. Caroline looked as though she were wreathed in a red haze. He saw her step backward, and her expression of alarm seemed to tell him what to do. She pivoted and leaned forward as though she was going to run.
In a second, he was on her. His arm shot out and hooked around her waist and swung her off her feet, and then he was half-carrying, half-dragging her across the foyer.
She shrieked, “You’re hurting me!”
He kept his arm around her waist and pulled her into the corridor that led toward the kitchen. He opened the door beside the pantry, held her at the top of the stairs to the basement, and turned on the light. She began to scream and struggle as though she thought he was going to throw her down the stairs, but he closed the door behind him, tightened his grip, and carried her down. She stopped screaming. Now she was just breathing hard from struggling against a bigger, stronger opponent.
Ted Forrest pulled her into the wine-tasting room with the theatrical-looking stone walls and false ceiling Caroline’s decorators had added, past the long table surrounded by leather chairs and the glass-fronted cabinets of glassware to the end of the room. He opened the heavy oak door to the wine cellar and turned on the light. As he pulled her inside the long, narrow room lined with wine racks that reached the edge of the arched ceiling and shut the door behind them, she began to scream again. “Shut up!” he said. “Nobody can hear you.”
She was wide-eyed and disheveled. “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”
“We’ve already had this conversation. No, I’m not crazy. I’m just giving you a chance to sit quietly for a while and think before you do something stupid that you can’t undo when you cool off. I want you to step back and consider the fact that you’re angry now because I’ve been seeing a younger woman.”
“Not a woman. She’s a child.”
He ignored the comment. “Your jealousy is making you lose your sense of proportion. You’re making terrible threats and wild demands, one after another. Isn’t this really about `who is the fairest one of all’? It’s not as though you were still interested in me, and were fighting for my affection. You just don’t want to lose, even if you don’t want the prize.”
“It’s about a crime, Ted. A felony.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of? You could hardly be implicated. You know that in all the time you’ve lived in my house, we’ve been able to tolerate each other and you’ve been treated well. I’m willing to go on that way, if it suits you. If it doesn’t, we can arrange a divorce with a fair settlement, and you can do something you like better.” He paused. “However…”
“However?”
“Yes. You must know that I’m never going to let you get me committed into a mental institution or arrested. It just isn’t going to happen.”
“You’re going to prevent it by imprisoning me?”
“Oh, please! You’re in the wine cellar of our own house.”
She glared at him but kept her distance, retreating a step until she backed into one of the floor-to-ceiling racks full of wine bottles. He could see that she was already beginning to feel the chill of the wine cellar. The two- ton temperature-control unit her decorators had insisted on kept the room at a constant fifty-five to fifty-seven degrees.
Forrest stepped out of the room, closed the door, and turned the key, but left it in the lock as usual. He heard her pounding on the door as he went to the long wooden table in the center of the tasting room and picked up the silver bucket Caroline had provided for people to spit their wine into at the ridiculous tasting she’d held down here last month. When she heard him turn the key to unlock the door, she stopped pounding.
He opened the door and saw her standing her customary six feet away, a smug expression on her face. He set the bucket inside. “I thought you might need this at some point.”
“You son of a bitch.”
He closed the door and locked her in. He walked upstairs and then along the hall to the suite where Maria, the chief housekeeper, lived. He knocked on her door, then knocked again. “Maria? It’s Mr. Forrest.” There was no answer, so he opened the door and looked inside. He walked through the small sitting room where she had her television set and the coffee table that held her sewing and a few magazines in Spanish. He went into her bedroom and looked at the perfectly made bed, the dresser with its top bereft of the usual cosmetics and hairbrushes, then stepped to the closet and opened the sliding door. The suitcase she always used when she took time off to visit her family in Ventura was gone. He looked at the clothes hanging along the pole, and saw that some of the outfits he was used to seeing on her were gone, too.
Caroline had told the truth.
27
Emily squinted in the morning sunshine outside the front door of the green stucco apartment building and rang the bell. It sounded terribly loud to her, and made her glance behind her to be sure nobody was close. The three-story buildings were identical, each with the same thick, heavy entrance door protected from above by a small curved overhang like half a barrel, and square windows beside it, two above it, and two above those. She knew she must have imagined that someone was watching her. How could he be watching? If he could see her, she could have seen him.
For most of her life, she thought of a stalker as a spectral presence, maybe a murderer who had been hiding in the back seat of her car when she had driven off, or sitting in the bushes near her house when she fumbled to get the key in the lock. She would feel a chill on the back of her neck, almost as if someone were breathing on it, and whirl quickly to protect herself. The stalker was never there, and so she had never given the enemy a specific shape. Until now.
It was not as though the man in the ski mask had accidentally stepped into place and merged with the stranger she had always feared. It felt as though he had always been there, and she had finally made the mistake of turning too fast, before he could vanish. Once she had opened her eyes that night and seen him standing over her bed, she had made him real.
There was a click from the speaker in the wall, and she heard April’s voice: “Yes?”
Emily leaned close to the grating over the microphone. “April? It’s me, Emily. I’m sorry to come so early, but it’s important.”
There was a moment of silence, as though April were trying to find a way not to have answered the ring. Then she said, “Emily, I’m sorry, but I really don’t want this. I don’t want to talk.”
“Please, April, I’m in terrible danger. My house and the office were both burned down last night. I need your
