Keepsake (20 page)

She grabbed her side and bent over. Swallowing huge quantities of air.

“You okay?”

She nodded, gasping.

“What d’you run for?”

“You came out of nowhere. You frightened me!”

“You deserved it, strolling through Central Park at night. What the hell did you think you were doing?”

“I’m going home. I always walk home this way.” She was breathing easier now. She stretched and then ran her fingers through
her hair, which was wildly strewn on her shoulders.

“It’s nine o’clock at night. You can’t be that ignorant about New York.”

“Okay, then what are you doing here?”

“I’m following you, obviously. And it’s a good thing, too, if you’re going to be so cavalier about your safety. Although I
certainly didn’t set out with the intention of playing bodyguard.”

April leaned back against the trunk of the oak tree. Her blouse had pulled out of her waistband and was creeping up her midriff.
She tried, unobtrusively, to pull it down.

He looked at the spot and grinned. “Nice.”

Damn him, she thought. I will not let him humiliate me. “What do you want?”

“I think it’s time you and I had a little talk.”

She looked around, wondering why he’d picked Central Park for a talk. “So talk. You’ve got five minutes.”

“Why, thank you, but it’s going to take somewhat longer than that. You want to go find a place to get a cup of coffee?”

Did he expect her to suggest a change of venue? Her apartment perhaps? “Right here is fine.”

He shrugged. “Okay.” He looked her over and she had the feeling he was mentally undressing her. But all he said was, “You
are, I take it, finding your job interesting?”

“Yes. Both interesting and challenging. More so than I expected it to be.”

“Rumor has it that you handled yourself very well during your first week. People are pleasantly surprised.”

She quickly decided not to take offense. “I’m pleasantly surprised myself.”

“Of course, the real question has not yet been addressed—even if you succeed in terms of your administrative skills, what
happens when it’s time for new books, new tapes, new inspirational seminars? Are you the guru your mother was, April? Are
you grooming yourself to go out there and make more converts, lead more suckers into the Promised Land?”

She shrugged. “I have considerable difficulty imagining myself in that role.”

“So do I,” he said. He moved closer. He leaned one hip against her oak tree. He was casually dressed in black chino trousers
and a short-sleeved white shirt. The jeans were tight, and emphasized the rather appealing curve of his buttocks and the long
muscles in his thighs.

He looked good for a man who must surely be approaching middle age. He had to-be at least forty, perhaps a couple of years
older. His eyes, she noticed, were very blue, with thick dark lashes.

“It would be a fascinating case study of the blind leading the blind. Or rather—” he smiled unpleasantly “—the blind leading
the dumb.”

“Oh, really?” She inched sideways. He was too close, and something about the tightly coiled energy in his body made her feel
vulnerable. “In what sense am I blind?”

“In the moral sense. At least by my definition. But who knows, it might not stop you. Most of the gurus of our time or any
other have been skilled at schemes and deceptions, so maybe you’ll just ease on in.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Come on. Spit it out, Blackthorn. It’s too late in the day for word games.”

“Ah, you’re very direct, aren’t you? I like that in a woman.”

She glared at him.

“Honest, direct, and straightforward. Except when you lie. Have you ever noticed that it’s the honest and direct folks who
have the greatest success at lying? Nobody expects them to lie.”

“In what manner have I lied to you?” she asked softly.

He moved closer. “In neglecting to tell me—or anybody—about your criminal record.”

She held his gaze for several seconds, then looked away. She felt the stress build in the pit of her belly. I was afraid of
this, she thought.

“I don’t have a criminal record.”

“Look, April.” His voice was low and confident. “I’m not bluffing and I’m not on a fishing expedition. I have copies of your
files. Would you like to see them?”

“Yes,” she said tightly.

He took several sheets of paper, folded lengthwise, from the back pocket of his jeans. April glanced through them quickly,
feeling sick.

“Well?” He raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Nothing to say, for once?”

“I was a juvenile. The records were sealed.”

“Yeah, well, this is the nineties. There are no secrets on the information highway. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.” He took
the sheets away from her and returned them to his pocket. “You were tried in the juvenile system in Washington, D.C., in 1969
for second-degree murder. Seems you stabbed a guy to death.”

So, she thought. It was going to come out, after alL

“I was acquitted,” April said. “Innocent until proven guilty, Mr. Blackthorn.”

“Yeah, I know. You got off. Is that why you weren’t worried about paperwork? Did you think acquittals simply vanish without
a trace?”

April turned away from him. There was a grassy slope just a few feet away. Unceremoniously, she sat down.

Blackthorn joined her. “Spare me the state-of-shock act, okay? You must have known there was a good chance I’d find out about
this. I can’t believe Anaheim or the feds didn’t turn it up at the beginning of their investigation. It was buried pretty
deep, I must admit. But my computer guy is terrific.” He paused. “You want to tell me about it?”

She raised her head. “Do I have a choice?”

“No.”

She wasn’t afraid, she realized. She was relieved, in a way. She was sick of worrying about this. She met his
eyes steadily. “I stabbed him, yes, with a letter opener.” She paused. “Do you want to know why?”

“I think I can guess why,” Blackthorn said slowly.

“No, I don’t think you can.” Her hands were clenched in her lap. “My attorney—who was very good—defended me by claiming that
the man—his name was Miquel— was trying to rape me. That was his interpretation, not mine. Mine was that Miquel was trying
to kill me. I believed it then and I still believe it now.”

He looked at her. His blue eyes seemed to bore into hers. “Talk to me,” he said.

Her memory of the top-floor apartment with the view of the Washington Monument was still vivid. She’d loved to sit in the
open window with the humid evening breezes ruffling through her long, unruly hair, imagining herself at the top of the Monument
with the world stretching out in all directions. On several occasions she had climbed to the top, so she knew how broad the
world looked from up there. It was a world in which she could do anything, be anything. Nothing was impossible to dream.

“When I was sixteen, I ran away from the boarding school in Connecticut where my mother had left me,” she told Blackthorn.
“The mother superior was a bitter woman who believed that God had assigned her a mission to beat all willful young girls into
shape. I hated her.

“I kept waiting for my mother to come and take me away from there. But a year went by, and then another. Rina didn’t come.

“I think I’d have gone crazy if it hadn’t been for the books I found in the school library. I read voraciously, everything
I could get my hands on. There were a lot of nineteenth-century romances and adventures in the library, along with the complete
work of Alexandre Dumas, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens.”

It was Dickens, she remembered, who’d started her thinking about running away. His characters seemed to lead lives that were
even crueler and more appalling than her own, yet they were clever, and they survived. If David Copperfield could do it, she’d
told herself, so can I.

“I waited until the spring of my fourth year. I was tall for my age. I sneaked out of the convent school early one morning,
bought myself some hair coloring in a drugstore and dyed my red hair black, a trick I remembered from Rina’s instructions
about evading bill collectors. Then I got out of town.

“It was 1969, and there were live-ins and street people and potheads everywhere. I hitchhiked south to Washington, D.C.—I
don’t know why—maybe because it was the home of the president of the United States, and JFK had briefly been my mother’s lover.

“I hung out with a variety of college dropouts, war protesters, and flower children. I made posters, held up picket signs,
cooked beans and rice for the long-haired males who were the self-appointed leaders of the movement, and marched my feet off
on behalf of the cause. It wasn’t the cause I really cared about, though. What the peace movement gave me, I think, was something
I’d yearned for all my life—the feeling that I belonged.”

Gently, Blackthorn touched her hand. April glanced up at him. He was listening intently, his expression serious, his eyes
compassionate.

“Life wasn’t easy, though,” she went on. “I shared a small apartment with four other girls. My clothes were old and ragged.
Sometimes it was a problem getting enough to eat. But none of that mattered towards the end of the summer of 1969 because
I was in love—” she smiled wryly “—and love makes everything okay.

“It was a hot, sticky August day, and I was the only one
of the five roommates who was home. I was waiting for my boyfriend. I’d met him two weeks ago at an antiwar demonstration.
He was twenty-one, and I’d told him I was eighteen.

“His name was Miquel. I loved the way the syllables seemed to roll off the tongue. He was from Mexico and spoke bad English,
but of course that didn’t matter at all.

“He had the sexiest eyes. Dark brown and very soulful. Sometimes they looked a little hard, which made me wonder what his
past life had been like. He hadn’t told me much, except that he was poor, but proud.

“We were planning to visit the Smithsonian together that day. He’d never been, and he wanted to see the aviation display.
He had a dream of someday learning to fly…”

April shifted uneasily on the grass. Telling the story had already brought some very vivid images into her head. She wished
she didn’t have to continue… and yet she knew she did. Not just because of Rob Blackthorn, but because this was a piece of
her past that she had been avoiding.

“Miquel came by the apartment to pick me up. I invited him in and offered him a Coke. He was wearing jeans and a ragged T-shirt.
His skin was tan, and his hair was long and dark and curly. His body was incredible.

“I showed him around, I remember feeling shy about it, and very conscious that we were alone. We weren’t lovers. I was a virgin,
in fact. He’d kissed me a couple of times, but that was all.

“I didn’t take him into my bedroom—I just pointed it out from the threshold. He gazed at the two narrow beds in the tiny room
and sipped his Coke.

“I had to go to the bathroom, so I left him alone in the hallway. When I came out, Miquel was waiting for me.
He grabbed me in the hallway and turned me to him and began kissing me passionately.

“Next thing I knew, he’d lifted me in his arms and was carrying me into the bedroom. I knew I ought to protest, but it was
all so exciting, and, I foolishly thought, so very romantic.”

Blackthorn pressed her hand, but April hardly noticed. “He carried me to the bed, choosing my roommate Julie’s instead of
mine, but I didn’t bother to correct him. He laid me down and fell on top and continued kissing me. He was heavy and strong,
and when I tried to shift to a more comfortable position, I couldn’t.

“I was never entirely sure, afterwards, when my arousal turned to fear. It was something to do with the way he didn’t
say
anything. He unbuttoned my blouse and pushed it aside to caress my breasts, but his hands were cold and impersonal. He was
kissing me, but it didn’t feel right. It felt more as if he was trying to distract me and keep me occupied.

“And then suddenly he put his hands around my throat and started to squeeze. At first I thought he was just fooling around,
but his grip turned painful and I couldn’t breathe.” April’s heart fluttered as she remembered how it had felt to gasp for
breath. “I struggled, but he was on his knees now, straddling my chest, and I looked up into his eyes and saw something there
that chilled my soul. I didn’t know this man. He wasn’t cute, sweet, mysterious Miquel. He was a killer.

“I tried to thrust him away. I tore at his fingers around my throat, at his face, at his hair. I could feel the rapid pulse
pounding in my ears, and my lungs were screaming for air. But the pain around my throat got worse and worse, and I was so
dizzy that I couldn’t think or breathe. I knew I was going to die…”

“Jesus, April,” Blackthorn said. He pulled her into his arms, and she held on to him as if he were anchoring her to the earth.
She didn’t resist, but she didn’t really look at him, either. She was looking into the past.

One of her wildly thrashing hands swiped at the bedside table that Julie had littered with paperback books, her water glass,
some letters from her boyfriend in New York, and
…
something sharp. April dimly remembered that Julie always used a silver letter opener. Her grandmother had given it to her,
saying that “ladies never tear open their mail “

With her last surge of consciousness, April groped for the handle, found it, gripped it, then lunged upwards and slashed her
arm down at the same moment, sinking the point of the letter opener into the middle of Miquel’s back.

He groaned and his grip on her throat loosened. April smashed him in the face with her other hand. He rolled off her and fell
onto the floor.

She stumbled from the bed, sobbing. Without looking to see what condition he was in, she ran from the apartment.

“I remember banging on the building superintendent’s door, and shivering in the hallway while the woman went upstairs to investigate.
And all I could imagine was the police coming and interrogating me and finding out who I was and where I’d come from. They
would send me back to that horrible boarding school in Connecticut. Worse, they would notify my mother and tell her the story
of how I’d let a man into my bedroom and how he’d tried to rape me and kill me.