“Maybe.” He nodded. Karen seemed impatient with the conversation and he could see that she wasn’t the one to discuss Helen with. “Yes, you may be right.” He smiled and turned the discussion to the coming trip. It took Karen a few minutes but she seemed to forget about Helen, and after a few minutes the twinkle in her eye returned.
Or so Jan thought, until he stood to leave for the night.
“Jan.”
He turned back. “Yes?”
She stood and put her hand on his arm. “I think you were right about Helen. Okay? It’s easy to lose sight of what love means these days, but I didn’t mean to discourage you.”
“No, and you didn’t. But thank you, Karen. Thank you.”
“So then, New York tomorrow?”
He lifted her hand and kissed it gently. “New York tomorrow.”
GLENN LUTZ was back in his game. He conducted business over lunch—a shipment of hash from Jamaica—and by his rough count, the deal would put over five hundred thousand dollars in his bank over the next month. He would have to shove that morsel up Beatrice’s nose.
The limousine took him back to the Twin Towers where he took the elevator up to his perch atop the East Tower. Memories of his reunion with Helen brought a smirk to his face. They were made for each other, he thought. Carved from the same stone as children and presented to each other only now, when they were old enough to play properly. Helen had gone sky-high last night and he’d joined her there. He had left her at two in the morning, curled semicomatose on the bed, gone to the house, showered, and regained his desire for her.
It had been a good morning, he thought. Everything was back in its place. He’d even seen the wife and kids, although he hadn’t spoken to the kids—they were off to school by the time he emerged from the shower. His wife on the other hand had sulked about the kitchen, asking every question except the one he knew blared in her mind:
Where have you been for the past three days, Glenn?
Never mind where I’ve been, meat brains. I own this house, don’t I? Mind your own business or you’ll be out on the street before you have the time to blink. And your kids with you.
She was really no longer much of a wife anyway. A live-in mother, taken care of nicely enough, and they both knew it.
He spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on phone calls, slowly building an appetite for the woman. It wasn’t the same kind of desire as when she left him—no, nothing could be so strong. It was a desire that came and went with the day’s passing and now it was coming.
Glenn left his empty, mirrored office at six o’clock and entered the enclosed walkway that spanned the eighty-foot gap to the West Tower. Only he used the private passage. It was one of the Tower’s features that had attracted him in the first place. He did not own the entire building, but he did own a twenty-year lease on the stories that mattered, including the walkway that conveniently separated his two lives.
He entered the Palace. “Helen?” The room lay in the dim late-day light. “Helen?” She was here, of course. He had called just an hour ago, received no answer, and sent Beatrice in to check. She had come back to the phone and informed him that she was still sprawled on the bed, dead to the world.
“Helen!” He strode for her door and shoved it open.
At first he thought she was in the shower because the bed sat empty; a tangle of sheets half torn from the mattress. He grinned and tiptoed across to the bathroom. It too was empty. Steamy from a recent shower, but vacant. The kitchen, maybe.
Unless . . . The thought that she might have fled again first crossed his mind then. A flash of panic ripped up his spine. He grunted, whirled from the bathroom and lumbered across the floor to the third room in the small apartment. He grabbed the corner and spun onto the kitchen floor. It was empty!
Impossible! The witch had just checked!
Glenn turned back to the main room and fixed his gaze on the wastebasket where he’d thrown her pink dress, muttering obscenities. But the basket gaped empty. The dress was gone. He knew it then with certainty; Helen had fled.
Unless she really hadn’t fled but was hiding somewhere, to play. “Helen!” He ran back to the main room, screaming her name. “Helen! Listen you dope, this is
not
funny! You get yourself out here right now or I swear I’m gonna tan you good, you hear?”
The room’s silence seemed to thicken around him; he wheezed, pulling at the air as if it would run out at any minute. “Helen!” He ran to the double doors and yanked on the handles, only to discover they were locked as he’d instructed. Then how? He bounded for the drawer under the bar, pulled it open and grabbed at the contents.
But the key was missing! The wench had taken the key and fled!
A red cloud filled Glenn’s vision. He would kill her! The next time he laid hands on that puke he would skin her alive! Nobody . . .
nobody
did this and survived. His limbs were shaking and he grabbed the bar to steady himself.
Easy, boy, you’re gonna pop your cork here.
As if it had heard, his heart seemed to stutter. A small shaft of pain spiked across his chest and he clutched at his left breast.
Easy, boy.
He breathed steadily and tried to calm himself. The pain did not repeat.
Glenn staggered over to the wall phone, wiping the sweat from his brow. He punched the witch’s number. She picked up the interoffice line on the tenth ring.
“Mr. Lutz has gone home for the day. Please call back—”
“Beatrice, it’s me, you idiot! And what were you doing while our little pigeon was busy flying the coop?”
“She . . . she’s gone?” she stammered in response.
“Now you listen to me, you fat witch. You get me Buck now. Not in five minutes, not in three minutes, but now! You hear? And tell me you ran that reverse trace I told you to yesterday.”
“I have the address.”
“You’d better hope she shows up there. Now get over here and unlock this cursed door!” He slammed the phone into its cradle. This time he’d make sure things got done right, if he had to do them himself.
Glenn lifted his hands and covered his face.
Helen, Helen. What have you done?
The ungrateful dope would learn her lesson this time. He would not bear this nonsense any longer.
Could
not.
THE STRANGE vine in Ivena’s greenhouse had grown wild, adding a foot to its length in each of the last two days. She’d continued thinking it might be a weed of some kind, overtaking the rosebush in Amazonian fashion. But today she knew that something had changed.
It was the smell that greeted her when she first cracked the door to the greenhouse. The poignant aroma of rose blossoms, but sweeter than any of her flowers had ever offered.
She pushed the door open and looked in. To the right, the tall orchids glistened yellow after their misting. Three rows of pink roses lined the opposite wall. The red tulips were nearing full maturity along the kitchen wall. But these all registered with the vagueness of a gray backdrop.
It was the bush at the center of the left wall that captured Ivena’s attention. Nadia’s rosebush, which was hardly a rosebush at all now. A single flower perched above the green vines. A flower the size of a grapefruit and Ivena knew that the sweet scent came from this one bloom.
She stepped into the greenhouse and walked halfway to the plant before stopping. “My, my.” The sight before her was an impossibility. She swallowed and searched her memory for a flower that resembled this one. A white flower with each petal edged in red, round like a rose but large like a trumpet lily.
“My, my.”
Dear God, what have we here?
The aroma was strong enough to have been distilled from flowers, as in a perfume. Too strong to be natural. Ivena stepped lightly forward and bent over to view the vines beneath the flower. They hadn’t grown so much since yesterday, but they had yielded this stunning flower.
Ivena turned and hurried from the room, retrieved a thick book of horticulture from her living room and returned, flipping through the same pages she’d scanned three times already in as many days. She simply had to identify this fast-growing plant. And now that it had flowered it should not be so difficult. A flower was a plant’s most striking signature.
She’d run through the pages of roses without a match. She turned the last page of roses without finding any similar. So, then, a lily. Perhaps even an orchid, or a tulip, somehow cross-pollinated from her own, which was impossible. Nevertheless, she was out of her realm of knowledge.
It took her three quarters of an hour to exhaust the reference book. In the end she could find nothing that even remotely resembled the strange flower.
She closed the book and leaned on the frame that housed the plant. “What are you, my dear flower?” she whispered. She would have to bring Joey in for a look. He would offer an explanation. You didn’t become a master of botanical gardens without knowing your flowers.
Ivena lowered her nose to the petals. The aroma drew right into her lungs; she thought she could actually feel it. It was more than a scent—it was as if an aura was being emitted by the petals, something so sweet and delightful that she found herself not wanting to leave the room.
“My, my!”
She lingered for another ten minutes, mesmerized by the unlikely invasion into her world.
HELEN APPROACHED Ivena’s house from the north, sprinting down the sidewalk in the dress, oblivious to her appearance. She had to get in that house; it was all that mattered now. Ivena and Jan would know what to do; she had spent the last few hours convincing herself so.
The plan, if she could call it a plan, had proceeded like clockwork. Of course the plan was only an hour old and it would end in less than thirty seconds when she knocked on Ivena’s door. Beyond that she had no idea what to do. What she did know was that she had woken from her night of indulgence at 1:00 P.M. with the absolute knowledge that she had to leave Glenn’s pigsty.
She had felt the same way before, of course, and she’d left. But this time . . . maybe this time it was for good. Images of Jan and Ivena wandered about her mind, calling to her. It had been good, hadn’t it? Sitting like a real lady, eating sausage and kraut and discussing issues with such a real man. Such a sophisticated, kind man. And when had she ever spent a day with someone so wise as Ivena? Despite her ancient tastes, the woman had a mind books were written from.
Helen had spent four hours lying on the bed feeling sick and lonely and impossibly useless. She’d climbed out twice to throw up, once after allowing her mind to recall the way Glenn had slobbered over her during the night, and once from the drugs. She was in bed when the witch came to check her at five, and she decided to play dead. It was then, when Beatrice left, that she conceived of her plan. The trick was to throw herself together, get out using his key, and put as much distance as possible between herself and the Palace before the pig came back. She figured she would have an hour; Glenn wouldn’t have sent Beatrice if he was on the way.
Helen had hit the street and boarded a bus before the possibility that Ivena might not welcome her with open arms even crossed her mind. Ivena did not strike her as the kind who would extend a second chance so easily. On the other hand, she and Jan were the kind who would forgive and forget. Or at least forgive.
She cast a quick look back down the street one last time, saw no cars, and ran up to the door. Breathing as steadily as possible, she lifted a trembling hand to the doorbell and pushed it. The bell’s faint chime sounded beyond the door. She smoothed her dress—the dress Ivena had insisted she buy—and waited, wanting very badly to step into the warm safety of this house.
The door swung in and Ivena stood there, wearing a light blue dress. “Hello, Helen,” she said as though nothing at all was strange about her reappearance. She might have continued with a question, like,
Did you get the milk I asked for?
Instead she stepped aside. “Come in, dear.”
Helen moved past Ivena.
“Come into the kitchen; I’m making supper.” Ivena strolled ahead. “You can help me, if you like.”
“Ivena. I’m sorry. I just—”
“Nonsense, Helen. We can speak of it later. You’re not hurt?”
Helen shook her head. “No. I’m fine.”
“Well you do have a nasty bruise on your cheek. From this Glenn character, yes?”
“Yes.”
“We should put some cream on it.”
Helen looked at the older lady and felt a pleasure she had rarely known, an unconditional acceptance of sorts. It swept through her chest and clamped down on her heart for a moment. She couldn’t help the dumb drop of her jaw. “So then, you aren’t angry?”
“I was, child. But I released it last night. You were hoping for anger?”
“No! Of course not! I just . . . I’m not used to being . . .” She let her voice trail off, at a loss for words.
“You’re not used to being loved? Yes, I know. Now, why don’t you see how the stew is doing while I make a quick phone call.”
“Sure.” Ivena simply welcomed her back as if she
had
just run down to the corner for some milk. “You like?” Helen asked, curtseying in the dress.
Ivena grinned. “You wore the best for your little trip, I see. Yes, I like.”
Helen let Ivena make her phone call while she peeked under the pot of simmering stew. The smell brought a rumble to her belly; she had not eaten since leaving yesterday. Ivena was speaking in excited tones now. To Jan! Meaning what? Meaning they were celebrating the return of their little project? Or meaning that Jan disapproved of Ivena’s— “Helen?” Ivena called.
“Yes.”
“Did you use the phone yesterday?”
To call Glenn; she’d forgotten. “Yes,” she said.
There was another moment of conversation before Ivena hung up and bustled into the kitchen, turning off the burner and placing the warm pot in the refrigerator. “Come along, dear. We must leave,” Ivena said.
“Leave? Why?”
“Jan says that it’s too risky. If Glenn is as powerful as you say, he may have traced your call. Do you know, would he do such a thing?”