Elizabeth Bloom - See Isabelle Run, page 9
Men, she thought. And they think we’re difficult. So far this summer, one guy has ditched me at the altar, and another has me so confused I don’t know which way is up.
Isabelle let out some water and turned on the hot tap. She poured in more jasmine bubbles and lay back, knowing she needed to shave her legs but feeling too tired to bother. At least she ought to fix her toenail polish, which was getting so old it’d left hot-pink flakes inside her shoes.
Later, Isabelle wasn’t sure which subject distracted her enough so she didn’t hear him. Was it Mac, her legs, the toenail polish? Or was the man so adept at breaking into apartments, even those in fancy Upper East Side doorman buildings like hers, that it wouldn’t have made any difference?
Whatever the answer, the net result was that Isabelle Leonard was lying blissfully in the bathtub, soaking in the hot water and the bubbles that smelled like jasmine, when she suddenly realized she was going to die.
chapter 18
the man was dressed like a parody of a cat burglar—all in black, even gloves and a ski mask. It was such a stereotype, in fact, that for a split second, Isabelle thought she was dreaming. She’d been dozing off when something alerted her. She opened her eyes and there he was, a ninja-clad stranger invading her bathroom. She had time to open her mouth to scream, but not enough for any sound to come out. The man took two steps toward her, but just when Isabelle thought he was going to put his hands on her, he grabbed the antiquated boom box instead. She watched it travel toward the tub with what seemed like exaggerated slowness, as though it knew what would happen when it hit the water and was in no hurry to get there.
When it finally did, Isabelle got a shock and then a shock.
The first came amid a shower of sparks and an acrid smell, and it made her jump out of the water like an extremely graceless porpoise.
The second was metaphorical: it was the illogical, unexpected understanding that she wasn’t dead.
For a second, the intruder seemed as confused as she was. Time stalled as they stood there staring at each other, Isabelle dripping wet and utterly disoriented. Then, just as she was starting to gird herself for his next attack, he turned and ran. She heard him pause in the living room—why she didn’t know—then take off out the door and down the hall.
The sound of the heavy door slamming snapped Isabelle back to full consciousness, though not quite to her senses. Fueled by instinct and adrenaline, she flew out of the apartment and into the hall as the black-clad man was turning the corner toward the fire stairs. He never looked back at her, just kept up a greyhound’s pace down the steps, unencumbered by whatever it was he had tucked under his arm. He kept widening his lead as Isabelle raced down the five flights after him, so by the time she made it to the lobby, he’d already gone out the front entrance and disappeared. She stood in front of her building looking frantically left and right, but there was no sign of him, not even any clue which direction he’d gone. Goddammit.
“Miss Leonard?”
It was Patrick, one of the building’s squadron of well-mannered Irish doormen. He was looking at her with an expression that in her state of half-delirium struck her as quite complicated—a mixture of confusion, concern, and … appreciation.
It was at that point, and not a moment earlier, that Isabelle realized she was stark naked.
She made a comical effort to cover herself, and he wrapped her in the epauletted navy-blue jacket that Isabelle had always thought made him look like he was crewing the Love Boat. She mumbled something about how her apartment had been broken into, how a man had tried to kill her and she’d chased him downstairs, and once she was back in her apartment and wearing a bathrobe, he called 911.
The two uniformed cops who came to Isabelle’s apartment weren’t mean or especially incompetent, but they didn’t inspire confidence. This was a major disappointment to Isabelle, who in addition to being a recent crime victim was a longtime fan of police dramas in which the good guys invariably got their man in sixty minutes, including commercials.
But the officers who occupied Isabelle’s living room that Wednesday night didn’t hold out much hope that her attacker would be caught. One of them—a redhead whose hair was so severely French-braided Isabelle thought she looked like she’d had Botox—seemed irritated that Isabelle had given them so little to go on. There were no fingerprints, not even a description beyond the fact that Isabelle thought he was about five foot ten and had a wiry build.
The officers spent a great deal of time telling her that this was probably just the latest in a string of burglaries on the Upper East Side. The perp, as they called him, no doubt thought there was no one home; when he found her in the tub, he’d panicked and thrown the radio at her. It was lucky for her that the apartment had been rewired with safety switches, so all she got was a nasty shock.
“But why would a burglar even go into the bathroom?” Isabelle asked. “It’s not like there’s anything valuable in there.”
“In this city,” the male cop said, “people put things in places you wouldn’t believe.”
“But there was something about him … ,” Isabelle began, then stopped. The cops looked at her like she was keeping them from their dinner. “It was like … there was something familiar about him.”
The policeman summoned up something resembling interest. “You think you know him?”
“I don’t know. There was just something familiar, that’s all.”
“Do you think you could ID him?”
“I … No.”
They asked her if anything had been stolen, and Isabelle told them that although she thought the man had had something under his arm, she didn’t know what it was. It wasn’t until they were about to leave that she realized what was missing: her laptop computer. That clinched it for the cops, who said they’d let her know if the Apple PowerBook was recovered, and walked out as though they were positive they’d never see her again. Then, in what was clearly the mother of all afterthoughts, one of them handed her a card for a victims’ counseling hotline, which Isabelle promptly tossed in the trash.
Son of a bitch. Of all the things in her apartment—which, Isabelle had to admit, was basically nothing—the bastard had taken her laptop, her ticket out of wage slavery. Okay, so Princess Astra and the Attack of the Fire Robots wasn’t going so well, but at least she’d written something that she hadn’t immediately erased.
Isabelle realized her hands were shaking, and it wasn’t just out of fury. She felt cold even with the heavy robe on, and she wondered whether she might be in mild shock. The cops had asked her if there was someone they could call to come keep her company, or better yet, someplace else she could spend the night, but she told them she was okay. Once they’d gone, though, she instantly felt a hundred times more vulnerable. The idea of going to sleep seemed preposterous, even with a hefty dose of Tylenol PM.
She checked the clock. It was one-thirty in the morning. Against her better judgment, and with hands shaking even more than before, she picked up the phone and dialed.
chapter 19
“somebody tried to kill me tonight,” she said.
The voice at the other end of the line was groggy, out of focus. “Is that the name of a song?”
“No, you idiot. Somebody broke into my apartment and threw the radio into the bathtub and almost killed me. So could you please—”
“Were you, like, in the bathtub at the time?”
“Of course, I was in it. What the hell do you think?”
That seemed to wake him up. “Oh my God.” He cleared his throat. “You home still?”
“Yeah. The cops just left.”
“You want to come down here and stay?”
“Hell no.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour.”
Trevor was true to his word, showing up in under thirty minutes with a bouquet of daisies and a dime bag of something Isabelle wouldn’t have smoked if she hadn’t been so shaken up. His first act after sitting on her futon was rolling her a joint roughly the size of her pinkie.
“What if my neighbors smell this?”
“Then we might have to share.”
“And what if the cops come back to look for clues?”
“The NYPD? You must be joking.”
She took a long drag, held the smoke in too long, and coughed. Isabelle, like many of her friends in Burlington, had indulged in her fair share of marijuana. But Laurence hadn’t approved, and after swearing it off, she hadn’t missed it. Now, though, she was glad for the way it was making her feel—like the whole world was a big joke and she was in on it.
Once he’d fashioned his own joint, Trevor wanted to know everything that’d happened. She recounted it in as much detail as she could remember. He seemed disappointed that the male cop hadn’t been better looking, which struck Isabelle as a stupid thing to be fixated on at this particular moment. Finally, when the giant doobie was burned down to a stump and the bedroom chandelier was doing laps over her head, she asked him the question that had been weighing on her ever since the cops left.
“Trev,” she said, dry mouth slurring her words, “why the hell do you think somebody wants me dead?”
He squinted at her, then his eyes popped comically wide. At least she thought they did; at the moment, she wasn’t sure she could trust her senses, sight above all.
“Izzy, sweetheart, no.” Trevor shifted over to her side of the futon and put a clumsy arm around her. “Nobody wants to kill you, princess. I promise. You’re safe as a … safe as a … safe.”
She shot up to a sitting position. “For chrissake, some guy broke into my apartment and tried to electrocute me. What the hell do you think he wanted?”
“It’s like the cops said. He just wanted to rob the place, and when—”
“Bullshit.”
“Listen, sweet pea, I know you’re upset. Why don’t you just—”
“What the hell is going on with this company?”
Isabelle shouted the words even louder than she’d meant to—and she’d meant to shout them pretty loud in the first place. Trevor’s mouth fell open, but he didn’t say anything.
The silence deflated her. She flopped back onto the futon, eyes filling with tears. Suddenly, Isabelle remembered why she’d never smoked dope all that often: she was the queen of the crying jag.
She lay there for a while—the drug, paradoxically, making the seconds seem engorged and the minutes truncated. When she finally spoke again, she wasn’t even sure if Trevor was awake to hear her.
“Just listen to me, okay? Maybe I’m just a stupid hick who doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing, which is probably true. But just look at the facts. Look at the people who’ve died at BBM over the past six months. There’s Marcia and Lisa and your friend and somebody else, and I think somebody after that, too, and then there’s that guy who disappeared and they put his picture up all over the lobby. And now”—the tears popped out of her eyes and ran down her cheeks in fat, distinct rivulets—“now some son of a bitch wants to kill me, too. And I told you something was going on. I told you. But you didn’t believe me. I told you about the boxes and the storeroom and those guys in there in the middle of the night, and you said I was a drama queen. But I’m not. Lisa’s dead and Marcia’s dead and what are the odds that both people who work in the same little department would end up dead? And now me!”
She was crying so hysterically she could barely breathe. Trevor made soothing shushing sounds as he patted her head and told her that it was okay, she was safe, nobody was out to get her.
“Don’t worry, princess,” he was saying in a voice only moderately more coherent than her own. “It’s like I said before. It’s a big company. Lots of things happen at a big company, because there’s lots and lots of people for them to happen to. I know you’re upset, but there’s no big bad wolf out there trying to eat Little Red Riding Hood. I promise.”
She opened one eye. “Really?”
“Really. This is all just an awful coincidence.” Trevor smiled at her, an oversize grin obviously calculated to make her stop bawling. “BBM’s just having a run of bad luck.”
By the time she woke up sometime in the afternoon, Isabelle had no idea what she believed. She knew her mouth and throat felt like they’d been stuffed with Brillo pads, and she was absolutely starving. Beyond that, though, she was lost.
Trevor had left around nine that morning, promising to tell her boss on The Becky Belden Show that she was sick. He said he’d come by after work, and although Isabelle wasn’t really in the mood to be alone, she wasn’t much in the mood for company, either.
She dug through her cupboards in search of something to eat, coming up with Marshmallow Fluff, some old Triscuits, and what must’ve been Laurence’s jar of martini olives. She leaned against the wall in the living room and slathered Fluff on the stale crackers, wishing she had some peanut butter to go with it.
Why had she called Trevor last night instead of Mac? She wasn’t sure, but she thought it had something to do with her not wanting Mac to see her so vulnerable. But there was something else, she had to admit. Even though her relationship with Mac was starting to turn romantic, for some reason she trusted Trevor more. Maybe it was because of what she’d heard in the storeroom. Or because she and Trevor were equals, while Mac was an executive whose job she didn’t begin to understand. And he wasn’t just an executive at any company, but one where, as she herself had put it, the employees were dropping dead left and right.
Or were they? Was there really something sinister going on—what, Isabelle couldn’t imagine—or was it just a coincidence, like Trevor said? What would the actuarial tables say about a half dozen people dying at a company of several thousand?
She’d once read an article about how the human mind naturally seeks out order amid chaos, imagining “cancer clusters” and celebrities dying in threes, when it was really just nature taking its course. Nature, as Tennyson put it, red in tooth and claw.
So what was going on? Was last night’s break-in really a burglary gone awry? And who was the intruder? Why had he seemed familiar?
If the man had wanted to kill her, then why hadn’t he? Isabelle had been entirely defenseless; he could have grabbed her, held her under the bathwater until she drowned. But he’d just taken her only valuable possession and run off—which, in the sensible light of day, made it seem like the cops knew what they were doing, after all.
And even if the cops didn’t, she reflected, the burglar sure as hell did. He’d somehow picked the lock without leaving so much as a scratch, and he’d zeroed in on the only thing in the apartment that was worth anything. His only mistake had been entering the bathroom; if he hadn’t, he could’ve made a clean getaway.
Which brought Isabelle back to her original conundrum. If the guy was such a pro, then why would he have made such a stupid mistake? Unless—Isabelle didn’t want to let her mind go back there, but she couldn’t help it—unless electrocuting her in the bathtub was his mission in the first place.
The buzz of the intercom nearly made her jump out of her pajamas. Her nerves were shot, no question about it; she felt the sweat soak the armpits of her T-shirt as she went to the speaker to answer. She also felt like an idiot: would her attacker really ring to ask if he could come up and have another go at frying her?
As it turned out, it was only the doorman—mercifully, not the same one who’d seen her running naked through the lobby—letting her know there was a package for her downstairs. Did she want him to bring it up? She said she did.
But once the box was sitting in her foyer, the events of the night before made her worry that maybe, just maybe, it might blow up in her face.
chapter 20
it wasn’t ticking. That seemed a good sign.
Isabelle gave the box a tentative poke with her big toe. Not being blown to smithereens, she was emboldened to lean over and read the label. It had come via a courier service Isabelle had never heard of; the return address, to her utter confusion, was an electronics emporium downtown.
Can you mail-order a bomb from a regular store? Isabelle doubted it.
Curiosity trumping paranoia, she got a knife from the kitchen and sliced the sealing tape. Underneath the cardboard was a plethora of packing peanuts. Under those was yet another box, containing the newest, fastest, sexiest Apple laptop computer. Isabelle recognized it because she’d drooled on the picture in the MacMall catalog.
She dug through the box looking for a card or some other explanation, but all she found was a receipt that said the computer had been paid for in cash. It had cost more than Isabelle made in a month.
What was going on? Only a handful of people knew she’d lost her laptop the night before. The two cops sure hadn’t bought her a new one, and Trevor couldn’t afford it. That left the guy who stole it—and what were the odds that he’d decided that sending her a new computer was, in fact, preferable to killing her?
The receipt had the store’s phone number on it; Isabelle called, but once she got through the touch-tone gauntlet, the voice at the other end said there was no way to trace a cash transaction. So much for her stab at detection.
Isabelle ran her hand across the top of the new laptop, sleek and metallic and pristine. She knew she ought to return it, but for the moment, she couldn’t bring herself to pack it up. Feeling distinctly guilty, she uncoiled the power cord, plugged it in, and pushed the On button.
It was only then that it occurred to her that she’d just done something intensely stupid—that if there really were a bomb in there, maybe it was set to go off when she turned the computer on. Whether this was rational or the product of last night’s terror was an open question; either way, it took her half a heartbeat to leap across the room and hide in the kitchen. She waited there for five minutes, crouched behind the counter, feeling increasingly idiotic.
