Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

They were back on Route 7 a short while after that, headed south, but Helen wasn’t frustrated by the pace of the traffic this time; she was in no hurry to get where she was going. This is crazy, she said to herself soothingly. We will figure out what happened. The girl is fine. She is somewhere telling the story of her weekend sex romp with a movie star. Hamilton is no judge of what’s inside him.

“We were on the Northway,” Hamilton said suddenly, softly, “and we saw the ferry sign. We were so high. It must have been me driving. ‘We have to ride it,’ she kept saying. ‘We have to see what’s on the other side.’ It’s the kind of thing that sounds really important when you’re that high. We’d stopped in Beacon because she knew a dealer there, which should have been a red flag, obviously. She knows a dealer in Beacon? Anyway, I gave in and turned around, partly just because I knew I needed to stop driving for a while. And the ferry: you’re in the car, and the car is moving, but you’re not driving it, so that’s pretty great. I remember she wouldn’t stay in the car, though, once we were out on the water, even though it was freezing. She sat on the roof, over my head. I was so sure she was this once-in-a-lifetime woman. She was so fragile, so hurtful, so wounded and vicious, it just made you want to cry for her. She started yelling at the ferry pilot to cut the engine. Which he obviously wasn’t going to do, but he did blow the horn for her. Why would she have been yelling at him to do that, though? She knew. She knew where we were going, that it would be horrible, but it felt so great getting there. Then she climbed down and got in the car again and I turned the heater up all the way and we smoked another rock, and I don’t remember anything at all after that.” He started crying. Helen kept her eyes on the road.

Half an hour later he was asleep again, but she had no such luxury. She hadn’t done this much driving in one stretch since college. Her eyes ached in the sunlight. When they crossed the border into Connecticut, the dashboard clock said ten minutes to five, and that gave her an idea. She called the main switchboard at Malloy and asked to be put through to Shelley.

“Girl, where are you?” Shelley said excitedly. “Arturo has been in here three times asking if I’ve seen you today. He is ripshit about something. I told him your daughter is sick. I’m wrong, right?”

“Everyone’s fine,” Helen said and asked if Shelley knew anyone in Personnel, or in the promotions department, who would maybe be kind and patient enough to do her a favor. Shelley connected her to someone she knew from yoga named Courtney, who worked in their events division. “Courtney,” Helen said, “I am so sorry to trouble you, but I need to contact someone who was working the Code of Conduct premiere last week, and here’s the thing: I don’t even know this person’s name. I don’t even know if she works for us.”

“Shoot,” Courtney said, “ask me something hard,” and Helen wished she were powerful enough to do something astounding for this Courtney, to change her life.

“At least she was kind of striking-looking, if that makes it any easier,” Helen said. “Short, like about five two, with short red hair and a short black skirt and just a beautiful face. And one of those arm tattoos, a sleeve or whatever they’re called. She was working the VIP seating inside the Ziegfeld. Tiny, like a little doll, but superintimidating.”

“Give me five minutes,” Courtney said, and in five minutes she called back with the information that the woman whom Hamilton knew as Bettina was named Lauren Schmidt. She worked for a company Malloy sometimes used called Event Horizon. They were L.A.-based, but they had a New York office, to which Courtney was able to put Helen through. Even though this brought her abruptly closer to her goal, Helen felt a shiver of fright. Hamilton slept on, his forehead against the window.

“Hello?”

Helen’s heart pounded; someone behind her honked as she inadvertently took her foot off the gas. “Lauren Schmidt?” she asked.

“No, this is Katie,” the voice said. “Can I help you?”

“Is Lauren in today?”

“No, she isn’t.”

“Gone home for the day?”

“Lauren works as a temp for events. She doesn’t have an office here. Can I help you with something?”

“Oh. Well, do you happen to know how to get ahold of her? This is a friend of hers.”

“I can’t give that information out,” the voice said, losing interest now.

Asking more questions would probably only generate suspicion, Helen thought, so she said she would try back later and hung up. This was the problem with the situation they were in: it took an ever-increasing measure of belief to distinguish no news from bad news. She looked over at Hamilton, who was drooling slightly onto his collar. Please don’t let anybody see him, she thought.

She’d known for at least a couple of hours what her only practical option was, but she’d been putting it off. Now, with time and space running out and with Hamilton sound asleep, she told herself the moment had come. She told herself the same thing four more times before she finally took out her phone again. She hated making calls while driving. Maybe someone would arrest her for it, she thought, and take this whole mess out of her hands.

“Are you all right?” Ben answered. “Where are you?”

“Not even a hello?”

“I saw the number, and we’ve been—”

“Yes, I’m fine,” she said. It was a real effort not to hate him, now that she needed something from him. “Is Sara okay?”

“Of course she’s okay. I have to warn you, she’s a little pissed off at you.”

“Really!” Helen said. “How unprecedented!”

“How are you, though?” Ben said. “I don’t want to be nosy or anything, but is everything okay? I’m a little worried about you.”

The hell you are, she thought. “Listen, I know you’re probably really asking me how long you’ll have to have Sara there—”

“Sara can stay here for as long—”

“But the news is I’m on my way there right now to get her. I’m in, I don’t know, I think Cornwall right now, or whatever is south of Cornwall, so it’ll be maybe another forty-five minutes. I don’t want to get on 84, so it’ll take me a little longer. But tell her to have her stuff packed — actually, I don’t even know why I said that, she can just leave her stuff there if she wants. And there’s something else you have to do for me, Ben.”

“What are you doing in Cornwall? What’s there?”

“Nothing. Just driving through it. Listen to me. I will be picking up Sara, but I will also be dropping somebody else off. A friend of mine is in trouble and needs a place to stay. It has to be a secret. I know that the house is now legally all yours or whatever, but it is still my home too, Ben, in some sense, and on top of that it would be a huge, huge understatement to say that you owe me one—”

“Okay,” Ben said.

“Okay?”

“Okay. I do owe you one. It’s fine. We’re a little short on beds, though. Sara and I just ordered a new one today, obviously it won’t get here in time—”

“Just give him yours,” Helen said.

“Of course. I’ll give him mine. That makes more sense. So who is this friend of yours who’s in trouble, if I’m allowed to ask?”

Helen sighed. “Well, better I should tell you now, probably, than have you make a big deal when you see him. It’s Hamilton Barth.”

There was a silence. “The actor guy?”

“Yes.”

“He’s in trouble?”

“Well, probably not. I can’t really go into the whole — It’s not what you should be focusing on, anyway.”

“I thought you said it was about a friend of yours.”