Carla Neggers - Night’s Landing

Her interview with Joe Collins had been short and to the point. Sarah had made it clear that President Poe had checked on her simply as a friend. It wasn’t that big a deal. She didn’t know whether Collins was convinced or not. She spent the afternoon with her brother for five or ten minutes at a time. He was still out of it from his surgery and medications, but when he was awake enough to talk, he told her to go back to Tennessee.

Sarah had finally told everyone she needed to get out on her own for a while. By herself. No marshals, no FBI, no doctors. No seriously injured brother she was upsetting with her presence.

What if Rob got into trouble for being the president’s friend? Had he intentionally kept it a secret from his bosses, and now his twin sister had opened her big mouth? In hindsight, Sarah wished she’d taken the phone into the bathroom of her hotel room instead of talking to Wes right there in front of a deputy U.S. marshal. Let Rob be the one to tell his colleagues about their friendship with the president.

She stopped hard at the Fifty-ninth Street entrance into Central Park, the same one her brother and Nate Winter had used yesterday. Across from her, the Grand Army Plaza split Fifth Avenue. She noticed the bright gold statue of William Tecumseh Sherman on his horse. The “Grand Army” was the Union Army of the Potomac, the plaza named in its honor after the Battle of Gettysburg.

She’d read about it in a New York guidebook Juliet had thrust at her during a long wait at the hospital while doctors were in with her brother.

The new leaves on the trees were a fresh spring-green, not as thick as the leaves in Night’s Landing, and when Sarah started down the stone steps, she saw the stretches of lush grass and the thousands of tulips that had been shown repeatedly on the television coverage of the shooting.

The crime scene tape was gone. Sarah didn’t notice any FBI agents or reporters, but she did see two uniformed NYPD officers on foot.

Her breathing was shallow, her stomach tight with tension.

Ducks floated along the pond’s edge. An elderly woman with a cane settled onto a bench as if nothing had happened there, and three animated women in sneakers fast-walked north into the park.

Normalcy.

People must have accepted that the sniper had specifically targeted the two marshals, and yesterday’s shooting wasn’t a random act likely to be repeated, at least not with regular New Yorkers in the crosshairs. Maybe with another deputy.

Maybe with a deputy’s sister.

Sarah pushed the ridiculous thought out of her mind and continued gingerly down the steps.

There’d been no warning-no man seen running with a gun, no shouted demands from the bushes. Just Rob jerking with the impact of the first shot, Nate Winter seeing the blood and getting them both to cover.

She spotted the rock outcropping and realized for the first time that the park was well below street level here at its southeast corner.

Was the shooter hiding somewhere in the bush now, watching, waiting?

She warned herself not to succumb to her family penchant for drama and instead tried to absorb some of the get-on-with-life spirit of the tourists and New Yorkers around her.

But her hands were clammy, and her vision seemed constricted, as if her mind was resisting taking in the details of her surroundings, mixing them with those of what she’d seen on television on the shooting, what she’d been told and had heard in the hospital corridors.

According to news reports, witnesses hadn’t heard shots fired or noticed anything out of the ordinary, certainly no one crouched in the bushes with an assault rifle. They’d only seen the two men falling, the tall one helping the more seriously injured one to cover behind the rocks, his gun drawn as he shouted instructions to onlookers, then the New York City police officer arriving on his horse, and finally dozens of paramedics and federal, state and city law enforcement officers descending.

The undergrowth along the pond and on the hillside below Central Park South conceivably could hide a shooter, but how could he get away with a near-instantaneous dragnet dropping on the surrounding area? How could he have avoided being seen crawling under the brush, setting up his weapon? The Pond-that was its name, just The Pond-was a wildlife sanctuary in the heart of the city.

Sarah reminded herself she wasn’t an investigator or firearms expert. She ran her fingertips along the smooth granite face of the rock outcropping.

As she forced herself to take a deep breath she noticed a man standing at the stone fence above her on Central Park South. He seemed to be watching her. He wore a black turtleneck and black leather jacket that were a little too warm for the conditions.

She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.

The clothes. The dark hair that was long in the front.

She squinted-yes, the angular features.

She’d seen him before.

Not in New York. He wasn’t a reporter, a doctor, a marshal.

Where?

Amsterdam.

Sarah expelled the air from her lungs and tried to gulp in more, but her head was spinning. How could it have been Amsterdam?

The Rijksmuseum.

Now she remembered. She’d flown to Amsterdam from Scotland three weeks ago to visit her parents while Rob was there on vacation.

They’d all gone to the Rijksmuseum together.

You’re being dramatic again.

What difference did it make if it was the same man she’d seen at the museum?

The man above her on Central Park South made eye contact with her briefly, then turned and disappeared across the street.

Sarah started for a bench, but her knees buckled under her. She felt herself sinking. Damn. I can’t faint.

“Hold your breath.” Nate Winter walked up behind her, speaking firmly, even sternly. “You’re hyperventilating.”

“I’m not-I can’t breathe.”

“It just feels that way.”

She nodded, doing as he said. He slipped an arm around her middle and stood motionless, silent, for the minute or so it took for her to get her breathing back to normal.

Feeling foolish, she stepped back out of his arm. “I’m okay now. Thanks.” She was too far away to have made a credible, positive identification of the man-of anyone-up on Central Park South. Thinking she recognized him had to have been a trick of her imagination. A product of the stress of the past two days. “I hope you didn’t hurt your arm.”

Winter seemed even taller than he had at the hospital. “I didn’t grab you with my injured arm, although I could have. It’s doing fine.”

“I wouldn’t have fainted.”

He half smiled. “Of course not.”

Sarah had no intention of telling him that she may have recognized someone up on the street. New York had a population of eight million-it had to be a common experience for people to think they saw someone they knew and have it turn out to be a perfect stranger. She didn’t even know why she remembered the man from Amsterdam. Because he’d stopped to look at a Dutch painting with her while she waited for her mother?

Not entirely, she thought. She also had wondered if he might be with the silver-haired man who’d stopped to say hello to her mother in front of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

But that happened all the time. Her parents knew many people that Sarah had never met.

“I didn’t expect to have that reaction,” she said, covering for her embarrassment. “I’ve never fainted. I thought-I guess I didn’t think. I just ended up here, and I assumed I was prepared.” She directed her gaze at Nate, met his blue eyes with an incisive look of her own. “Did you follow me from the hospital or are you here for your own reasons?”

“Both.”

“Shouldn’t you be resting?”