Дональд Джеймс - The House of Eros

The impact was terrific. Like a two-ton battering ram moving at ten miles an hour, the Mercedes hit the side of the Chevrolet, sweeping it across the gravel apron, carrying the Sand and Gravel Company sign with it, as it bludgeoned Nan’s car over the quarry edge.

The Chevrolet fell ten feet, bounced and rolled across a gravel ledge and dropped again. Hurled across the cramped interior of the car, buffeted like a rag doll, Nan Luc’s last sensation was a fierce rush of air in her face. Cy Stevenson, leaning from his halted Mercedes, was too late to see Nan thrown from the driver’s door. Craning his neck he saw only the mad patterns of the single Chevrolet headlight beam as the car fell through the darkness into the sump of the gravel pit below.

‘Listen,’ the voice said in the darkness that seemed to engulf her, ‘whatever you do, don’t move.’

Under her hands she could feel a sandpaper roughness. If she pressed with one hand then the other, the world seemed to rock gently. If she pressed with both hands at the same time her body seemed to move forward in space. Only the insistent voice of the man in the darkness above her kept her from experiment. ‘Just lie still,’ he said; ‘if you’re conscious, if you can hear me, just lie still. I’m coming down to get you.’

A light shone on her. Consciousness came with a rush of fear. The yellow and black plywood board beneath her teetered on the gravel ledge.

Spreadeagled on the board, she dare not risk turning her head to look up towards the voice. She lay, frozen immobile, as every faint gust of wind tugged at the board, rocking her bodyweight gently backward and forward.

A woman spoke above her and the light shifted position. A moment later a rush of sand and small stones scattered across the board. The man was on the gravel ledge now, a yard or two from her. ‘Take the end of this rope,’ he said calmly, ‘and whatever happens, hang on in there.’

Sitting in the pick-up between the driver and the girl, Nan Luc tried her best to answer their questions.

‘Until the road petered out into a gravel track,’ Nan said, ‘I thought I was still on the main road into Meyerick. Then the car ahead of me braked. You saw the rest.’

‘And you’ve no ideas who it could be?’ the girl said.

‘I only came into the area today.’

‘Some crazy kid in a stolen car, I guess,’ the driver, Sam Forester, said. ‘I’ve heard of this game ramming patrol cars in New York, but I never expected to see it in Meyerick.’ He grinned. ‘You’re lucky Diane’s room-mate needed the place to herself for the evening. We were just killing time up there.’

‘I’m lucky,’ Nan Luc said.

Ahead the lights of old clapboard houses glittered through the snowfall. On whitened lawns dark cedars and pines extended arms draped with snow. They passed a few stores and diners and saw there were more people on the street now, more cars, a brightly lit yellow bus.

‘You’ll find the police just to the left of Dampner’s the department store,’ Sam said. ‘Be sure you report it right away, OK?’

Nan thanked them both again and climbed down from the pick-up. Standing on the sidewalk she waved as Sam pulled out into traffic.

Before her, a blaze of coloured lights shaped like a Christmas tree rose forty or fifty feet from the centre of a small square, and across a public building an illuminated banner spelt out the glittering message: A Merry Christmas from Meyerick City.

She was aware of music now as she walked on past Dampner’s, melodies in the last few days she had begun to associate with Christmas: ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Silent Night’.

She thought of Max and her stomach lurched unhappily. She could feel tears start in her eyes as the clear voice of a child carried ‘Silent Night’ across the square. Along the sidewalk families were shopping, snow was drifting through lamp-light, a red-robed Father Christmas gave children gifts from a sack. Store windows glittered with goods; on a street corner people rattled boxes for a Christmas charity.

She was walking down to the old river front now. At the end of the steep slope she stopped at the stone embankment. High brick warehouses rose steeply on her left. From each one a timber framework projected above her head, the housing for the pulley which lifted the bales and sacks from the wharf. A more widely travelled visitor than Nan Luc might have been reminded of Amsterdam or the canalside warehouses of small English manufacturing towns. But to her nothing was familiar, neither the narrow dark-eyed buildings, the iron-bracket street lamps nor the incredible, ubiquitous snow.

Further along the riverside a canal ran across her front and joined the river. She stopped before the humped wooden bridge, standing in close to the line of buildings. From where she stood she could see that the warehouse in front of her formed the corner of the canal and the continuation of the wharf. Two or three lights shone on one of the upper floors.

She walked on across the canal bridge. The snow settled on her shoulders and in her hair. Distantly, from the main square, she could hear the strains of Christmas carols. She was no longer close to crying.

On the far side of the bridge she stopped. To her left the side of the warehouse rose steeply from the canal, the black water washing at the lower courses of sodden brickwork. In front of her a dark blue Mercedes was parked on the timber wharf between the warehouse and the river. Front and rear of the car were dented and scarred.

A few steps forward. She could see now that this was the last of the renovated warehouses. Beyond it there were vacant lots and the lights of an elevated roadway crossing the river. On a new glass portico she read a list of companies using the building: a firm of attorneys, realtors, a software house, two or three designers. On the fourth-floor plaque she read: Meyerick Fund, President Cyrus M. Stevenson. Treasurer Oliver J. Digweed.

The door was huge, a carriage entrance designed for horse-drawn waggons. Set into it was a smaller opening, a few inches ajar. She pushed it and entered, stepping over the wooden sill. She was now standing in a cobbled loading bay, dimly lit by a single Victorian bracket lamp above her head. Timber beams braced the white-painted bare brick walls; carved timber struts held the wooden staircase; planking, sanded deep yellow in colour and smelling sweetly of wax, formed the floors.

Moving to the staircase she started upwards.

From the safe he took the thirty-five hundred dollars’ cash always held for a donation emergency. With his private key he opened the rear section of the metal barrel. Taking out the pictures of Mary and the gun he had kept there since the first day he had taken over the fund, he glanced at the security monitor. In a grey halation, like a ghost, Nan Luc was ascending the main stairway.

The blood pounded in Nan Luc’s head. The pains in every muscle of her arms and legs barely registered. Adrenalin surged through her as raw energy. Vividly, it seemed to her, she could sense his presence in the building.

Reaching the top floor she walked quietly along the gallery to the lighted offices at the end. She could hear no movement inside but the outer door was open. In a wide main office black Italian desks carried hooded computers; a small bronze sculpture hung between two sloping loft windows; a runner carpet led towards the far door standing part ajar.

Beyond the inner door she heard a sound, a footstep perhaps. She paused. On the other side of that door stood the man whose name was on her birth certificate.

She had covered the twenty or so steps towards the inner door. She stopped, her hand flat on the brass fingerplate. Very gently she pushed. As she did so her free hand reached into the waistband of her skirt.