Close to You, page 23
As she pulled the station wagon out of the crowded parking lot, Eliza noticed that the gas gauge was near empty. Mrs. Garcia had forgotten to fill the tank. Eliza steered the car toward the gas station.
“What the hell are you wearing?” Augie demanded as a preening Helene swaggered into the station office.
“You were holding out on me, Sugar.” Helene wrapped her arms around her husband’s wide girth. “I found this in the bottom of your drawer. This, and those other things. They’re beautiful, Augie. Were you going to surprise me?”
Sex or no sex, Augie verbally let loose on her.
Eliza half listened to Janie and James discuss how they were going to carve their pumpkins, but mostly she thought about Samuel as the high-test poured into the Volvo’s tank. She was staring at the doorway to the station’s office when a tall, thin blonde wearing a heavy turtleneck sweater and tight-fitting black leather pants walked out.
That’s not a happy camper, Eliza thought, looking at the sour expression on the woman’s face.
The woman passed by the car and the autumn sunlight reflected off a pin on the neck of her sweater.
Eliza went slack-jawed as she recognized the sapphire-and-diamond pin that John had bought before he died. The gift to commemorate Janie’s birth.
She grabbed a pencil and an old gas receipt from the glove compartment and scribbled down the license-plate number of the car as the woman tore out of the lot.
She handed Janie the New York Times.
“Here. You and James spread this out on the kitchen table. Then go get your markers and draw the faces you want on the pumpkins. I have to go upstairs for a minute. When I get back, we’ll carve the pumpkins. Don’t you dare go into the drawer and get the knife until I come back. Understand?”
The children nodded solemnly.
Eliza ran up to her bedroom and called the HoHoKus police.
Chapter 129
Eliza came down from tucking in Janie for the night to find the jewelry box waiting at her place at the dining-room table.
“What’s this?”
“Open it and see. Even if the police do get your jewelry back, I hope this will be something that you’ll cherish as I cherish you, Eliza.” Samuel smiled contentedly.
Eliza felt like a louse. “Samuel. I can’t. I have to talk to you.”
“Open it first,” he urged. “Then we’ll talk.”
Uncomfortably, Eliza lifted the lid of the blue box. Inside was the companion necklace to the starfish earrings.
“It’s beautiful, Samuel. Absolutely beautiful. But I can’t . . .”
“Here, let me put it on you,” he interrupted. He stood behind her and fastened the gold clasp and then turned Eliza by the shoulders to face him.
“It looks wonderful on you.”
“I can’t accept it, Samuel.”
“Of course you can,” he insisted. “I want you to have it. It’s as if it was made for you.”
“Oh, Samuel. You dear, sweet man. You’ve been through so much. I wouldn’t want to hurt you for anything in the world.”
The happy expression on Samuel’s face changed as he began to get the picture.
That idiot Helene!
He’d been enraged when Helene had showed up with that pin at the station today. Now the cops were at his door with a search warrant.
Augie thought fast. Most everything he had stolen was gone. Fenced. Just the few things of Eliza’s he hadn’t gotten rid of yet Now he was glad that Larson’s strongbox had only had some papers in it.
All they could pin on him was the Blake burglary.
Augie demanded to call an attorney. A good lawyer might be able to get the charges dropped in exchange for information about a double murder.
“I’m so sorry, Samuel. But I hope, when you think about it, you’ll realize that I’m right. This isn’t the time for us, but I do hope we can still be friends.”
Friends. Even to Eliza it sounded so lame.
Samuel tried valiantly, but couldn’t conceal the hurt on his face. Stricken, he walked slowly to the door.
“Here. You must take this with you.” Eliza handed the jewelry box to him.
“No,” he shook his head. “Please. Keep it. For all you did for Sarah and for me.”
Chapter 130
The hallways of Memorial Sloan-Kettering brought it all back.
How many times had she walked the polished floors of the mammoth hospital complex, unable to distinguish if she was nauseous because of the early stages of pregnancy or because her young husband lay in fevered pain in his hospital room dying?
But Eliza had never been to pediatrics.
The hospital staff tried to make the surroundings as happy as they could. But it was what it was. The afflicted children, many in wheelchairs, soldiered through their treatments. Their hairless heads made them look older than their years. Little, old, bald boys and girls, fighting for their young lives.
The camera recorded Dr. Lieber as he escorted Eliza through the hallways.
“The problem, as you know, is that children grow so quickly. So do their cancer cells.”
“When you finally know that nothing is going to help a child, how do you help the parents?” Eliza asked.
“We have counselors on staff. But despite the best efforts, I really don’t know how much counseling helps. How can you make something like this better? The only thing is, sometimes the child has been through so much, that the parents just want it to be over for them. Over for the child, I mean. The parents almost never want to give up.”
Eliza thought of Samuel. “I have a friend who just lost his daughter to cancer. In fact, she came here for treatment.”
“What was her name?”
“Sarah Morton.”
Dr. Lieber shook his head. “I can’t place the name. But I’m not surprised. There are so many kids. How is your friend doing now?”
“Not well,” Eliza answered, thinking of Samuel’s face as he left her house Saturday night.
“It takes a long time.”
The crew took pictures in the pediatric lounge, careful to shoot from the back of the bald heads or from an angle so that the youthful identities would not be recognizable. No faces could be shown in the piece unless the parents signed release forms.
There was one little girl whose face could be taped. Her parents had agreed to be interviewed for the story. The mother was stoic as she told the story of what they had been going through over the past two years. The father asked that the camera be turned off when he started to break down.
Dr. Lieber met up with them again when they were finished shooting. He handed Eliza his card.
“Call me if I can be of any other help. I was thinking about your friend, Ms. Blake. If you’d like, have him call me and I will be happy to arrange counseling for him if he wants.”
After the broadcast that evening, Eliza called Samuel. When she heard the initial hope in his voice she wondered if she had done the right thing.
“I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Oh,” he said dully. “I’m fine. Please, don’t worry about me, Eliza. That would make it worse.”
“I am worried, Samuel. You’ve been through too much. I wanted to tell you that I interviewed a doctor at Sloan-Kettering today and he said that he would set up some grief counseling for you if you wanted it.”
“No, thanks. This is something I have to work through on my own.”
“A little professional help wouldn’t hurt.”
“What is a therapist going to tell me that I don’t know already? Sarah’s dead.” His voice was morose. “Thank you for thinking of me.”
The phone clicked in her ear.
She thought about Samuel as the car crawled up the West Side Highway. At the George Washington Bridge, Eliza pulled Dr. Lieber’s card from her wallet and tapped in the number on her cellular phone pad. She got his answering machine and left a message.
“Dr. Lieber, this is Eliza Blake. I am very worried about that friend of mine I was telling you about today. Would you please give me a call when you can?”
She left both her office and home phone numbers.
Chapter 131
It was amazing. One minute you thought you had the worst problems imaginable. The next, those problems paled by comparison to new ones. Larson’s financial worries were far from his mind when he got the call.
The police wanted him to come in and talk.
Chapter 132
“I’m sorry, Ms. Blake. I didn’t get your message until this morning.”
Eliza realized that most people did not get apologies from doctors who hadn’t returned non-emergency phone calls made after office hours only the night before. That was the power of KEY News. Phone calls were returned. Promptly.
She described her phone call with Samuel to Dr. Lieber.
“I’m not a psychiatrist, Ms. Blake, but it sounds like your friend definitely needs some help. Would you like me to have someone here call him?”
Eliza weighed the offer. Was she doing this out of guilt? Would Samuel be angry with her? That shouldn’t matter to her if his well-being hung in the balance. But he might shut down totally, feeling alienated that she had broken his trust. She wasn’t sure what to do. She wanted to do something to help him.
“Yes, Dr. Lieber,” Eliza decided. “I think that might be a good thing. I can’t get through to him.”
Samuel’s phone call came that afternoon.
“I know what you’re trying to do, Eliza. I know that you mean well. But please, forget about me. We can’t be friends—not now, anyway. I have to move forward alone for a while.”
Chapter 133
Mischief Night or Cabbage Night. Whatever it was called, the night before Halloween brought out adolescents eager to have what they considered harmless fun decorating their neighborhoods with bars of soap, smashed eggs and toilet tissue.
A group of teenagers made its way along Larson Richards’s street, soaping up the windows of cars stupidly left in driveways. If the owners weren’t smart enough to put their cars away tonight, they deserved to come out in the morning to find their windshields a mess.
There was no car in Larson Richards’s driveway and the house was completely dark. The kids snickered as they ran up to the sprawling ranch. It was easy to soap every single window when they were all on one floor.
They proceeded sneakily on to the next house, unaware that a Mercedes-Benz was idling in Larson’s closed garage, carbon monoxide filling the passenger cab.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Chapter 134
Janie hopped out of bed on Halloween morning, eager to go to school in her Olive Oyl costume. Susan and Mrs. Garcia would take the kids around trick-or-treating in the afternoon. Eliza promised her daughter that she would get home as quickly as she possibly could after work so they could give out the candy together to the nighttime trick-or-treaters.
Doris had outdone herself again this year. She had spent hours painstakingly taping long, thin adhesive strips to a black tunic and skirt. Then she had carefully measured and marked boxes along the tape, numbering the corners of some of the boxes with a fine-tipped pen. She had bought a pair of inexpensive black sunglasses and painted sporadic squares on them with Wite-Out. She used her expert skills, coating her face with white pancake and drawing, with the help of a ruler, horizontal and vertical lines. She donned a pair of black opaque tights and pulled her flowing mane of hair up into a ponytail, tying it with a man’s tie—a tie printed in the design of a crossword puzzle. The inspiration for her costume.
She left her apartment early, bound for the ABC studio. The Regis producers loved her costume and wanted her to come inside and be on the show. But she couldn’t win a prize, they warned her, since she had won last year.
Bummer.
Doris headed for the Broadcast Center, eagerly anticipating the reaction she would get there.
Florence Anderson awoke before dawn and lay alone in her bed. It was the day she dreaded all year long.
The first year after Linda’s death, she hadn’t even been able to open her door to the children who came begging. The next year, she had managed to give out packages of M&Ms. Without nuts. Those had been Linda’s favorites.
Now, and every year since, a big bowlful of the chocolate candy packages sat ready on the table in the foyer. Life had to go on.
And maybe, just maybe, Florence allowed herself to hope, the piece that was scheduled to air on tonight’s KEY Evening Headlines might jog someone’s memory and lead to some closure to the pain she had been living with for the past five years.
Chapter 135
Keith called from the editing booth.
“It’s done. Do you want to come down and see it?”
“Sure. I’ll be right there,” answered Eliza.
She took the stairs down two floors to the hard-news editing center, passing half a dozen small rooms with sliding glass doors until she reached Joe Leiding’s booth. Keith got up and offered her his chair.
“Are you happy with it?” she asked as she took the seat.
“Yeah. I think it’s pretty good. See what you think,” Keith said. He stood at the back of the booth and began gnawing at his thumbnail as Leiding hit the PLAY button. The piece opened with a clip of Linda Anderson wrapping up the last news broadcast she ever anchored. Then Eliza’s narration began.
“Linda Anderson did not know, as she signed off from the Garden State Network on the night before Halloween five years ago, that it would be her last time reporting from the anchor chair. She thought she had everything to look forward to.”
Mrs. Anderson’s careworn faced appeared on the screen. “People said that when you met Linda, you felt you knew her. That came across on TV as well.”
“Indeed, the audience responded to Linda Anderson,” Eliza’s track continued. “She had a loyal following in New Jersey and there was interest on the other side of the Hudson River as well.”
Sound-bite Florence Anderson: “An agent had approached her and submitted her audition tape and there was actually an interview set up. Linda was so excited about the possibility of going to work for one of the big networks.”
Eliza’s voice picked up the story. “But Linda Anderson never went for that network interview. After she finished her late broadcast, she left the studio and was never seen again.”
Florence Anderson: “In the beginning, the police went all-out. They searched everywhere, interviewed people who knew her, questioned old boyfriends, spoke to her coworkers.” Mrs. Anderson’s voice was still heard, but file tape of pictures was edited over to illustrate her next words. “The story was on the Garden State Network every night. People tied yellow ribbons around trees. There was a reward offered for information, but nobody came forward with anything. But if you ask me, as time went on, the police gave up.”
“That’s a charge the police deny,” narrated Eliza.
“Linda Anderson’s file is still open here and will be until this case is solved,” said a detective Keith had interviewed at the police station. “There’s a national preoccupation with celebrity in this country, and though we’ve searched and investigated every possible lead, the fact is that anyone with a television set could have targeted Linda. That’s a pretty broad range of suspects.”
That was the end of the edited package. Keith handed Eliza the script she was to read on camera, coming out of the piece.
“Before she disappeared, Linda Anderson told her family and friends that she thought she was being followed. Stalking is illegal in all fifty states and while it is the celebrity stalkings that receive media coverage, the most common victims are not news reporters or movie stars. The largest number of stalking victims are ordinary people on whom another person, for whatever reason, becomes fixated. The advice from law enforcement professionals? If you meet someone who makes you feel uncomfortable, act on your feelings. Get away from that person and break off any future contact.”
“What do you think?” asked Keith.
“It’s good, Keith. I just wish we had a little more time to tell the story in greater depth.”
“Believe it or not, Range wanted us to edit out ten or fifteen seconds. I told him there was nothing left to cut.”
Eliza nodded. She well understood the executive producer’s preoccupation with time. “Nice job, Joe,” she complimented the editor as she rose to leave. Eliza noticed the box that contained Linda Anderson’s audition tape lying on the console table. She picked it up.
“Can I take this with me?” she asked. “I’d like to take a look at it.”
It was eerie how much Linda reminded Eliza of herself.
Chapter 136
The door to the makeup room was open, but no one was inside.
Doris was probably strutting around the halls in that crossword-puzzle costume, Abigail thought as she walked in and inspected the contents of the giant makeup case on the counter. Shelves of foundations, creams, eyeshadows and lipsticks. Abigail glanced at the wall clock. Eliza would be coming down any minute to be made up for the broadcast. Abigail wanted to avoid a potentially uncomfortable meeting.
She picked up one of several containers of dark pancake makeup. It was exactly what she needed. If Doris were there to ask, Abigail was sure she wouldn’t refuse her. Abigail would bring it back tomorrow.
She stuffed the plastic container into her pocket.
Eliza was sitting in the Fishbowl, reading through scripts, when Keith arrived out of breath.
“Cindy’s water broke! I’ve got to go.”
“Good luck, buddy,” called Range, barely looking up from his computer screen.
