deputy sheriff, exploring the back passages, opened a wall panel that unexpectedly led onto the grand stairway and nearly knocked her down the steps. Fortunately, Miss Dembecki was nimble enough to escape unscathed.
She scurried back downstairs, locked herself in her rooms, and refused to answer all inquiries through the door as to her health.
“What the hell was she doing climbing up here anyway?” Nick asked.
“I think she was trying to get in my rooms again,” Perry said unhappily. “I’m telling you, she thinks the jewels are in this house somewhere.”
“I think you’re giving her too much credit,” Nick said. “I think she’s batty.”
That seemed to be the consensus of the house. But the only person with a suggestion on what to do about it was Mr. Stein, who voiced the opinion that Mrs. Mac should phone the loony bin posthaste.
By dinnertime the cops had cleared out again, and the rest of the household seemed comfortably locked up behind their doors for the night. Nick made pot roast and commented that he would need to go grocery shopping soon -- and then fell awkwardly silent.
Nick would not need to replenish his cupboards. He was going to be leaving very soon and was supposed to be packing even now. Of course, he could always stock up on groceries in the hope that Perry might occasionally remember to eat something.
Perry was not eating much even now, but he was chatting animatedly about an art exhibition he wanted to see in Burlington, and to his astonishment Nick heard himself say,
“If I’m still here, I’ll go with you.”
Perry checked, and then gave Nick one of those dazzling smiles. “It’s next month. But yeah, it would have been fun.”
Neither of them spoke for a time, and the kitchen was silent but for the scrape of forks on china. Nick said suddenly, roughly, “Why don’t you call your parents?”
Perry blinked. “Why?”
“Because you can’t --” Nick stopped himself. What was he doing? But he couldn’t help himself. “Because it’s a good time to call. It’s almost Christmas. They probably want to hear from you.”
They’d have to be pretty fucking cold to shut Perry out of their hearts for good -- and Perry was not the product of fucking cold. He’d been sheltered, protected, adored all his life.
Mom and Pop Foster were probably sick with worry about him. And lonely. He grew on you, that was for sure.
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But Perry said coolly, “They know where to find me. If they wanted to talk to me, they’d get in touch. It’s for them to make the first move. I’m not going to apologize for being gay.”
You can’t make it on your own.
For one horrified second, Nick thought he’d said the traitorous words aloud. It wasn’t even true. Perry was surviving. He was relatively healthy, he had a job, a place to stay. He was painting; he was going to make it. It wouldn’t be easy, and it would knock a lot of the sweetness and innocence and optimism out of him, but he wasn’t a coward.
Nick was the one who was afraid. And what the hell sense did that make? He gritted his jaw against a lot of things he knew he would regret saying, settling for a curt nod and finishing his meal while Perry -- not unexpectedly sensitive to his mood -- chatted lightly about art and painting and a local artist named Anna Vreman. Anything but murder and sapphires and crazy people.
* * * * *
And it was safe in the dark to be tender -- to be gentle with each other in the dulcet silence. To ask nothing but give everything, caress and kiss, touch and taste until the wanting, longing, needing overswept them again, and they moved in frantic union, breath harsh, the tiny grunts and sighs, the whisper of skin until it rose to a crescendo -- the catch in Perry’s throat turning to a sob, Nick shouting out once in the keenest of knife-edged pleasure.
“I never really got a chance to see California,” Perry said when they were lying quietly, comfortably. “What’s it like?”
Nick shrugged. “Warm. Sunny.” He almost opened his mouth and made the fatal
mistake of saying, “It would be good for you.” He caught himself in time, but the thought remained. Instead he said, “Expensive.”
Perry nodded. “Do you think you’ll ever come back here?”
“To this house?” He was stalling and surprised to find himself doing so. Since when did he pull his punches? He wasn’t coming back. Not ever. He couldn’t wait to put this place behind him. At least…that had been true until a few days ago. Now…
Now it was harder.
Harder than it should have been.
Perry said dispassionately, “To Vermont, I mean. Some place I could see you again.”
He opened his mouth, and Perry said still very calmly, “I mean casually, of course. Just friends. I know how it is.”
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And that steady acceptance made Nick’s chest ache as though he’d fallen wrong on ice.
It was hard to get his breath, and he felt cold all the way to his heart.
He said huskily, “I don’t know.”
A few minutes later he could tell by Perry’s breathing that he was asleep. Nick kissed his forehead, and Perry murmured pleasurably. Nick kissed his eyes and his ears and found his mouth, and before long, Perry was awake again, and they were moving against each other.
He yanked down the pajama bottoms with the uncomfortable feeling of robbing the cradle, but Perry wasn’t a baby, and he wanted this as much as Nick did -- and sooner or later he had to realize that happy endings were for movies. Real life didn’t end that tidily.
There was a price for everything, and the price for this was that it would be harder for both of them when Nick left -- but at the moment, the price seemed worth it.
* * * * *
This was how it would feel every day after Nick left.
He got up, pulled on jeans, and went into the front room. There was no sign of Nick.
No note. He sighed. No use expecting Nick to change.
Deciding to go across the hall to his place and get a change of clothes, he jotted a note for Nick in case he came in while Perry was out.
The house was still. It had a strange, empty feel. He peered over the banister. Not a creature was stirring. Not even Miss Dembecki.
On impulse, he headed downstairs to the basement to grab some boxes. Nick had suggested he start moving his things into Nick’s apartment because Nick would be packing for California.
The feeling of being the only person alive in the house persisted. It had never felt like this before. Abandoned.
Wondering if the deputy sheriffs were still parked on the other side of the bridge, he opened the front door. There was no sign of the sheriff’s car. No sign of the news van, either.
A gust of wind tasting of approaching snow whipped the lace drapery on the door and sent the chandelier overhead jangling; it sounded like falling icicles. He contemplated the old-fashioned globes and the dangling colored prisms.
An idea slowly dawned.
Looking around, he spotted, still leaning against the staircase, the ladder Tiny had used to fix the leaking windows in the main hall.
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He set the ladder up and climbed it. The chandelier was from the 1920s. It was a complicated affair of upturned amber glass shades and individual crystal prisms of blue and gold and red crystal all around an exquisitely painted down-facing glass centerpiece.
Perry studied the centerpiece. Beneath the grime of decades and hand-painted designs of art nouveau flowers appeared to be more colored bits of glass and crystal. His heart began to pound hard with excitement.
It was possible.
Like a lot of the original fixtures in the house, the chandelier no longer worked.
Instead of rewiring the old, beautiful lamps and chandeliers, cheap utilitarian lights had been placed at various intervals in the hallways and rooms.
Perry reached up to see if there was a way to dismantle the centerpiece without taking down the whole chandelier. If what he suspected was true, there had to be.
The ladder suddenly jerked out from under him. The thought flashed that he had over-balanced, but as he looked down he saw someone standing beneath him, hands on the ladder.
He grabbed for what support there was -- which happened to be the wildly swinging chandelier. It tore out of the ceiling with a horrendous crack of doom.
Then he was falling. The parquet floor rushed up to meet him.
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The broken chandelier was not a good sign.
Neither was the fact that no one seemed to have noticed it.
Nick hammered on Mrs. Mac’s door. There was no sound from inside. No television, no dogs…just an eerie silence.
Down the hallway he could hear sounds of frantic activity. Nick followed the sounds to the kitchen.
“Where is everybody?” he asked.
Miss Dembecki, who was engaged in pulling stuff out of the built-in cupboard drawers of the walk-in kitchen pantry, jumped like a scalded cat.
Like something feral, she stood there facing him down, her gray hair tumbled over the shoulders of her pink bathrobe, her eyes wild. There was a pile of much-yellowed linens around her feet. Embroidered place mats and lace tablecloths, linen napkins. She was clutching a handful of mother-of-pearl napkin rings as though they were her share of a pirate’s treasure.
“Where’s Perry?” he asked.
She stared at him in that tense but vacant way.
After a pause, Nick said neutrally, “Perry’s missing. Mrs. Mac isn’t answering her door.
Bridger seems to have cleared out.”
Miss Dembecki still didn’t answer. Nick had the impression that she had not
understood him, but then she said, “Miss Bridger has eloped.”
“What do you mean she’s eloped?”
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Her eyes flickered at his tone. “She’s eloped with Mr. Center. They left during the night.” She brightened. “I saw them go. They were carrying suitcases, and they left through the back garden.”
“You’re sure it was Center she left with?”
Dembecki nodded. “They took Mr. Fluffy too. The men in the black van were waiting for them.” She was still watching him with those wide, wary eyes.
“What are you doing?” Nick asked.
To his amazement, she dropped the napkin rings and launched herself at him like a mad thing, hands curved, clawlike, teeth bared. Nick grabbed her wrists and held her away from him as she writhed and snarled.
“Don’t think I don’t know!” she cried. “I know what you’re doing. I know what you’re up to. You have his eyes! You can’t have mine.”
It was like holding onto an animated bundle of rags and bones. Nick held her away from himself while she hissed and screeched at him.
“Lady, I do not have time for this,” he said crisply. He pushed her back. She fell against the cupboard, glaring at him. Nick picked up the ring of keys lying on the counter, stepped out of the pantry and locked the door behind him. He heard her hit the door a moment later, shrieking.
“Settle down in there,” he ordered, but he didn’t care if she tore the entire room apart.
He couldn’t deal with her now. There had been no sign of Perry in his apartment or the tower room or anywhere that Nick could find, and he had a very bad feeling.
He took the stairs fast, went back into his room, and phoned the cops. As he was dialing, he spotted Perry’s note about going to the basement for boxes. His guts seemed to crumble away to nothing.
Something had happened to Perry. Something bad.
He could be anywhere in this mausoleum. He could already be dead.
Nick’s temples throbbed. He had to take a moment to think.
Okay, odds were good no one was going to try and stash a body -- he had to believe a still-live body -- in the house. Not with the way the deputies were still prowling through the back. That left the grounds. The gazebo and the icehouse were his two best bets.
Nick raced down the stairway and cut across the garden. He could hear the rush of the river through the trees, but he refused to consider whether Perry’s attacker had simply dumped him into the water.
The gazebo was closer than the icehouse, and he checked it first. He found it empty.
He headed for the icehouse, moving fast and alertly through the wet, frost-etched garden. When he saw the faded building, he became convinced he was right. The icehouse was far enough from the main building to make it ideal for holding someone prisoner.
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There would be no point in killing Perry. No need. Just his disappearance was going to have the sheriff combing the place.
No need to kill him. No need to hurt him at all, you fucker.
Frost was melting off the roof of the icehouse in steady, glistening drips. Nick drew his weapon, put his back to the wall, listened.
Silence.
He kicked open the door, ducking back against the wall of the building. The hinges shrieked fit to wake the dead. There was no other sound.
Nick darted a look around the door frame.
It took his eyes an instant to adjust to the lack of light, and then he saw Perry’s body at the edge of the pond.
Nick ducked around the doorway. His eyes raked the corners of the cavernous room.
All clear.
He holstered his weapon and squelched into the mud, dragging Perry out of the muck onto solid ground. He rolled him onto his back and knelt, wiping the mud from his nose and mouth. He put his face to his and felt very faint puff of breath against his ear.
Nick rocked back on his heels and wiped his arm across his eyes. “Thank you,” he muttered.
He ran careful hands over long, motionless limbs, taking stock of the damage. Broken left arm, a knot the size of a goose egg on the side of his head, shocky -- but his pulse seemed strong enough.
Perry coughed and opened his eyes. He blinked up at Nick.