Jericho's Fall, page 25
Beck had the sense that movement was dangerous. Besides, her limbs were frozen. A desperate, panicky part of her was ready to shriek with laughter, because Jericho, back when she was his student, had been the scourge of what he called the neologisms of nihilism—such words as “ongoing,” and “tolerance,” and “impact” as a verb. But the rest of her had never been more alert.
“This is what I read,” Pamela continued, quite implacable. “You and my dad broke up at the end of 1995. You and your asshole lawyer got married in 1998. Asshole lawyer went back to wife number one in 2000. You were divorced in 2001. Nina arrived in 2002. That means, unless you and asshole lawyer had another affair behind his wife’s back—”
“Get to the point,” Beck hissed, or maybe pleaded, because the world was disintegrating again, and at a very high speed.
“It means that the man you’re telling the world is the father isn’t the father. I wonder why you’d tell a lie about something like that, a pillar of integrity like yourself. And then, I’m still in this file, and what do I find? A letter, Rebecca. From you to my father. Dated late 2001. Just after Christmas, as a matter of fact. You know. All saccharine and submissive. Dear Jer-Bear. All that bullshit. Thank you for the choker, it was so sweet, and it was wonderful seeing you last month in New York, et cetera, et cetera.” Neither woman had budged, but Pamela seemed to be towering over her. “The choker cost ten thousand dollars, Rebecca. The receipt’s in there, too, along with a fawning note from some Tiffany’s flunky about their years of service to both the Ainsleys and the Hillimans. There’s some other receipts, too. I don’t think the choker was the only thing Dad has sent you since you left him. I think he sent you some other jewelry, too. I count about seven different items, Rebecca, and none of them were cheap.”
“I gave them away—”
“To charity. I know. It’s in the file. But not the choker. You kept the choker, didn’t you? I was wondering why.”
Beck’s mouth moved. No words emerged. She saw herself on that wintry Christmas morning, at her mother’s house in New Jersey, bitter and tired and ready to die, when the package arrived, delivered by a messenger in the blue Tiffany’s box—
“And then Nina came along,” said Pamela, implacably. “Nina Anne DeForde-Vayner, born July 2002, daughter of Rebecca DeForde-Vayner, as you were calling yourself back then, no father listed on the birth certificate. For some reason there’s a copy in Dad’s file. So. Nina is born in July, therefore conceived in November or December. And November is exactly when you saw my father in New York. Two nights at the Four Seasons, receipts in the folder.”
“I didn’t stay with him, we just had dinner—”
Pamela was relentless. “A month later, he sends you the ten-thousand-dollar choker, and this one, mysteriously, you don’t give to charity. I don’t think your little girl’s father is the asshole lawyer, Rebecca. I don’t think you think so, either. I think the reason you’re here is to make sure that, whether you’re provided for or not, my baby sister gets her share of the—”
Beck was gone. She had to turn her back, because the alternative was a fistfight. Things had reached that point. Gleeful Pamela at last had a justification for her years of animosity, and Beck, after being manipulated by Jericho and threatened by Jack Notting, needed somebody to hit. She marched up the stairs and, reaching the guest suite, had a good cry, then stood up and took it out on the pillow, just the way Dr. Eisenstadt had suggested. First she tried hammering the pillow right on the bed, but the results were unsatisfactory, the pillow was unscathed. So she tossed the pillow into the air and caught it with a straight punch on the way down, then did it again, and again, releasing all the anger of all those years in the wilderness of her tangled emotions and tangled existence. The one she really wanted to hit was Jack Notting, but he was surrounded by bodyguards, and, besides, Beck had no idea where he was. Then there was the great Jericho Ainsley, author of the horror show she called a life, but he was out of her league, and sick besides. Pamela, who possessed all her father’s talent for derision and none of his charm, would have been a perfect standin. But she was bigger than Rebecca, and probably stronger. The idea was to achieve catharsis, not to earn a bed in that awful clinic down in Bethel, behind the elementary school.
A knock on the door.
Audrey poked her head in.
“Is everything okay? I thought I heard— Oh.” She saw the pillow and, everywhere, the feathers.
“Sorry,” said Beck, breathing hard, but feeling better, and desperate to be with her child.
“I hope that was my sister, not me,” said the nun, and, grinning, departed.
But Rebecca had her measure by now. It was like dealing with a superhero from the comic books. Saint Audrey of the cloister was the public identity; the secret identity was Professor Audrey, the interrogator.
And even if Audrey herself was no longer doing what she used to, she had left a catalogue of instructions.
—slowly breaking down the world your subject knows, and replacing it with a world of your own devising—
Say, a house in the Rockies, where one has limited ability to reach the outside world, and a succession of threats, ratcheting up your subject’s fears—
You keep him guessing, keep him off balance, keep changing the rules, until, after a while, he doesn’t know what’s real and what isn’t. That’s when he’ll cling to any anchor. And you give him a new reality. A better one.
Exactly. Somebody was using Audrey’s methods to break down Beck’s resistance, to rewrite her world, hoping she would be desperate enough to—
Well, to do what she was doing.
Maybe it was Jack Notting, maybe it was Dak, maybe it was Maggie and Sean, maybe it was one of the other nameless countries worried about Jericho’s threats. Whoever it was, Beck realized, had nearly won. They had driven her into a corner where she saw no option but to figure out what Jericho had hidden, and where.
The difference was, she had no intention of turning it over.
To anybody.
Beck picked up the pillow again. “It was all of you,” she said, punching hard.
THURSDAY–FRIDAY:
THE WEE HOURS
CHAPTER 30
The Manager
(i)
Beck crawled into bed around half past two, the folders and printouts forming a mountain on her desk. Fear about Nina’s safety bucked and kicked like a live thing within her, but Beck still saw no salvation other than finding what Jericho had hidden. And so she had puzzled through the documents, seeking the elusive clue. Even the knowledge that she was being manipulated into doing exactly what she was doing did not divert Rebecca from her search.
As she drifted toward sleep, her daughter’s trusting face swam into focus. Beck’s eyes snapped open. She whispered a sleepy, disjointed prayer, and hoped that Jacqueline had indeed taken her granddaughter to Brad’s.
Beck rolled onto her side and gazed out the window at the filtering snow. Tomorrow, around ten, she would leave for Denver. She had between now and then to follow Jericho’s clues, find what he had hidden, and thereby protect her daughter. She had hoped to work all night, but her energy had run out. She set the alarm for four-thirty. Two hours of sleep was all she could afford. She closed her eyes and dropped off at once, to dream about lifting a rubbery, resistant weight that seemed to grow as she hefted it, dragging her down no matter how she struggled. It was cold outside, and that was where she was, outside in the snow, and Pamela was there and Audrey was there and they were yelling about Jericho—
—about how Jericho was—
—dying—
She bolted upright. In the hallway, the sisters were screaming at each other.
(ii)
Beck cinched her robe and rushed out onto the landing. Pamela was ordering Audrey to calm down, and Audrey was telling Pamela to do the same.
Their father, she gathered, had taken a turn for the worse.
“He can’t breathe,” Audrey kept saying. “He’s not breathing.”
“He’s breathing fine,” Pamela insisted. She alone was dressed, in her usual uniform of jeans and sweater and pearls. She did not look sleepy. “Rebecca, wait.” She had a hand on Audrey’s large shoulder, and now took Beck by the hand. “Wait. Listen. I’m sorry about before, but we have to work together now, okay?”
“What’s the matter?”
“He can’t breathe,” said Audrey again.
“He can breathe, but he’s coughing hard, and he can’t stop. He’s weak. He can’t stand up. I think it’s pneumonia. He should never have left the house.”
“Is there a doctor he uses?”
“Yes, but I think he needs the hospital.”
“Do something!” Jericho hollered from the bedroom. “Do something, you stupid bitches, or I’m fucking writing you out of my will!” A fit of coughing like an artillery barrage cut off the rest.
Pamela colored. “He’s also delusional.”
“I’m calling 911,” said Audrey, reaching for the phone.
“I’ll go sit with him,” said Beck.
“I’ll do it,” said Pamela, brushing her aside. “You stay here.”
“The phone doesn’t work,” said Audrey, putting the receiver down with a snap.
(iii)
Pamela took charge. Nobody elected her. Nobody had to. Crisis was her element. Taking charge was what she did best. “Take your cell phones to opposite corners of the house. See if you can get a signal, even a faint one. If it doesn’t work, switch corners. I’ll stay with him. Rebecca, take mine.” She lifted the house line and confirmed what Audrey had told them. No dial tone. No busy signal. No nothing.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Audrey.
“The storm,” Pamela said, although the storm had been over for hours.
Three minutes later, they all met on the landing. No signal. Through the open door, Jericho continued to rage.
“The computer,” said Pamela. “We can message somebody.”
Leaving Audrey with the patient, Pamela and Beck trooped to Jericho’s office, because the computer was connected to the cable modem.
Which was out.
The power was on, but the DATA and SEND lights were off.
“No connection,” said Pamela, unnecessarily. The wind shook the house. Outside the long windows, shadows chased shadows in the spilling floodlights. “We reboot the modem.”
“How?”
“Easiest way is to unplug it, plug it back in, and wait. If it’s a software problem, rebooting will fix it.”
But it wasn’t.
“There’s a satellite phone,” said Audrey, when they met once more on the landing. “It’s in the safe.”
The safe was in the wall behind the desk. Nobody had the combination, although Pamela’s glare said she thought somebody might be lying about that. Audrey reported that Jericho was unable to recall the numbers. “He said to leave him alone,” she added, flushing, and Beck wondered how colorfully he had said it.
“The panic button,” Pamela said.
Beck looked at her in puzzlement. Audrey explained.
“It’s part of the alarm system. There are three portable panic buttons. You press one, the alarm sounds—not here, but at—I don’t know—in Bangladesh or someplace. They call you, and if you can’t come up with the security code or you don’t answer the phone they call the police to check—”
“I get the idea,” said Beck. “Where are the buttons?”
Again the sisters looked at each other. Neither seemed to know. Audrey held out her hand. “A little plastic rectangle, about half the size of my palm.”
Beck said, “Jericho would have one in his room.”
Audrey went to check, while Beck and Pamela hunted through the study and the kitchen. The nun was back a moment later, carrying the device in her hand. The back was open. “No battery,” she said.
“There must be spares in the house,” said Beck, looking out at the grounds. The precipitation had ended. Wind swirled light eddies of snow across the lawn.
“It needs a special kind, like a watch.”
“There must be a master,” said Pamela. “Attached to the system itself.”
The panel was in the security room downstairs, beside the monitors. Multicolored buttons mocked them. Metal labels had been removed, presumably by the madman upstairs. There were no instructions. When Beck and Audrey hesitated, Pamela reached in and began punching buttons at random. Lights blinked on and off, but there was no way to tell whether anything else was happening.
“Maybe they got a signal,” she said, but doubted her own words.
Audrey had an idea. They set the alarm—that much they knew how to do—then went to the kitchen and pulled the back door ajar. This should have set off the alarm, but they did not hear the expected clanging, or even the reassuring double tone to tell them a door was open.
“You must have turned it off,” said Beck.
Pamela shook her head. “We just reset it. It should work.”
“Close the security mesh,” said Beck. “We know that sets off an alarm, right?”
Pamela pushed the button. The gates rattled down, but no klaxon sounded.
“Maybe it’s set on SILENT,” said Audrey, with tired optimism. “Maybe they’re on the way.”
Her sister’s gaze withered her. “Maybe pigs have wings,” she said.
“Leave her alone,” said Beck, when the nun’s mouth dropped open.
“We drive him,” said Pamela, relentless.
“Drive him where?”
“Hospital in Vail. Ninety minutes away. We’ll take Audrey’s van. He can lie down in the back.” Already on her feet, headed toward the door, because ideas were what gave her breath. “Let’s get moving.”
“Wait,” said Beck.
Pamela waited. Impatiently.
“All we have to do is go down the mountain eight or nine miles, and the cell phones should work.” Rebecca hesitated, uneasy about telling them her arrangement with Pete Mundy: that until she left town, he would be waiting within half an hour of the house. All she had to do was call. “We drive for ten minutes, we can call anybody we want.”
“That’s if you drive toward Bethel, not Vail.”
“Then let’s drive toward Bethel.”
“There’s no time. He needs a real hospital.”
“We can work it out on the road,” said Audrey. “Maybe we’ll pick up a signal along the way.”
“I’ll get the keys.”
Pamela opened the gates again, then suggested that Beck go for the van while Audrey prepped Jericho for travel. “I’ll go to the study and get the papers we might need. Health insurance or whatever.”
The nun smiled. “I’ll get the van. Beck can take care of Dad.”
“But—
“The van has so many problems, I don’t think anybody but me can drive it. And Dad’s prepped. I got him ready. All he needs is a coat and his shoes. Beck can do that.”
Rebecca spoke up. “I’m not sure anybody should go out there, Aud. Especially alone.”
Pamela ran an exhausted hand over her face. “Please don’t start that again.”
“We don’t have a choice,” said Audrey. “Either we get Dad to Vail, or he dies upstairs.”
“Then I’m going out there with you—”
“Thank you, but I travel with my own bodyguard.” Fingering the cross around her neck. “Now, please, honey. Let’s get him moving.”
Pamela, muttering to herself, was already heading for the stairs. Beck lingered, watching as Audrey crossed the foyer and slipped out of the house. Not a peep from the alarm system as she exited. Then she heard the reassuring beep-beep-buzz: Audrey had passed one of the proximity sensors. The system might not tell them if a door was opened, but at least they would have warning if anyone approached the house.
Rebecca shivered, hoping there was no danger, and hurried up to Jericho’s room.
(iv)
He was sitting in the chair, fully dressed, trying to put on his shoes.
“Let me help you,” said Beck, very surprised.
“About time you got here,” he said pleasantly. He stuck out a foot. He was wearing dark silk socks, and had selected a pair of alligator loafers. His slacks were a lovely fawn twill. He might have been preparing for dinner at the club. He did not look like a man who had taken a turn for the worse; or who, just a short while ago, had been screaming threats down the hall.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, manipulating his feet into the right position.
“Saint Audrey says I’m dying.”
“But how do you feel? What’s the big emergency?”
Jericho shrugged. His ear was cocked, but Beck could hear nothing. “I feel great. I kept telling Saint Audrey, but she seems to think I’m going to collapse at any moment—”
He broke off. His eyes widened and his cheeks grew splotchy. His hands went to his neck, and he began to make choking sounds. Beck was paralyzed. Did he need the Heimlich maneuver? The oxygen? Or was this a symptom of something else?
Unsure what else to do as he went on hacking, she grabbed the oxygen tank, wheeled it to the chair, pulled the mask over his face, opened the cock.
He calmed down.
“Well, maybe I am,” he said, voice now wet and creaky. He settled back in the chair. “Going to collapse at any moment.” Another coughing bout, evidently because he was trying to laugh. “She told me not to get up. Saint Audrey. She told me to wait. I wanted to help.”
“It’s okay, Jer-Bear.”
He coughed, and tugged at the tube. “I hate this thing.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll get your coat.”
“I don’t need a coat.”
“It’s cold out there.”
“Oh, I see. The coat’s so I won’t get sick. Good idea.”
Working his arms into the sleeves while he sat in a chair breathing through a mask was tricky, but she got it done. She decided to take a long chance. “Jericho?”
“Yes, dear?”
“I want to ask you something. About my conversation with Dak the other night.”
