22. Heath
— ? —
Heath
The sound of breaking glass pulled me from the deepest sleep I had experienced in months.
The sound was unmistakable. Glass breaking, loud and violent, somewhere on the first floor. The east wing, if I had to guess. The library or the conservatory, where the windows were original to the house and the locks were more decorative than functional.
My mind was already racing through possibilities. Burglars. Random break-in. Someone who had seen the Fairchild name in the paper and decided to try their luck.
Or none of those things. A darker possibility entirely.
I made Del promise to lock the door behind me and call the police, and I watched her decide whether to fight me on it.
This woman who had broken a nose at a Christmas gala.
This woman who had taken apart a society bully with nothing but words just hours ago.
She wanted to fight. She always wanted to fight.
But she was also carrying our child. Our baby, fifteen weeks along, still so small and fragile. She promised.
Six hours earlier she had been on top of me in a car under an overpass telling me to look at her. Six hours. I had gone up those stairs with her mouth on my throat and my hands full of my wife and I had thought, in the stupid animal way you think things at eleven at night, that I had got her back.
What I feel for my wife is a debt with interest on it. I’ve known that for eleven years. I was about to find out the number.
I couldn’t let her anywhere near whatever was happening downstairs. I grabbed the first thing I could find, a heavy crystal lamp from the dresser that had belonged to my grandmother. It was solid and heavy in my hand, good for swinging. Not ideal, but better than bare hands.
I slipped through the door and pulled it closed behind me.
I waited for the click of the lock.
It didn’t come. I stood there in the dark hallway with my hand flat on the wood and counted three seconds, and it didn’t come, and I told myself she was still on the phone with the dispatcher and she would do it in a moment.
She was a woman who locked doors. She was the most sensible person I had ever met.
I went down the stairs.
I’ve gone back to that hallway every night since. I go back and I stand there and I wait for the click, and it never comes, and I never once turn around.
The hallway was pitch black. I pressed myself against the wall and waited for my eyes to adjust, listening with every fiber of my being.
The old house was full of sounds on a normal night.
Creaking floorboards, settling foundations, the wind through ancient window frames.
I had learned to tune them out over a lifetime of living here.
These sounds were different.
There. Footsteps in the foyer. More than one set. Two at least, maybe more, moving through my home with a confidence that made my blood run cold.
These were not simple burglars. Simple burglars would be grabbing what they could and running. They would be in and out in minutes, taking silver and electronics, anything easy to fence. These people were taking their time. Moving slowly. Searching.
Or hunting for someone.
I thought of Del in our bedroom. I thought of her hand pressed protectively over her stomach. I thought of everything I had to lose if I failed tonight.
I would not fail.
Two of them in the living room. Both men, both big, probably both stronger than me.
They were dressed in dark clothing, their faces hidden behind black masks.
One was going through drawers in the sideboard, tossing items aside with no regard for value.
The other was standing by the door to the foyer, keeping watch.
Two. I counted them twice and I made myself believe it, because two was a number I could act on.
I did not think about the fact that the glass had broken in the east wing and that the east wing has its own door, the old service entrance by the pantry that my grandmother’s staff used and that nobody has locked properly since 1962.
I did not think about it at all. I was a man with a lamp doing arithmetic in the dark, and I got the arithmetic wrong, and my wife paid for it.
The lookout was the more dangerous of the two. I would need to take him out first.
The lookout had his back to me. He was watching the front door, probably expecting any threat to come from outside. He never even heard me approach.
I brought the lamp down on the back of his head with every ounce of strength I had.
He went down hard, crumpling to the floor with a grunt that cut off into silence. The lamp’s base shattered on impact, cutting my palm, but I barely felt the pain. I was already spinning toward the second intruder, who had turned at the sound.
“What the-”
I didn’t give him a chance to finish. I charged him, driving my shoulder into his chest, knocking him backward into the sideboard.
Crystal decanters fell and shattered. A painting crashed to the floor.
He recovered faster than I expected, throwing a punch that caught me on the jaw and sent stars dancing across my vision.
I shook it off and swung again. My fist connected with his ribs, and I felt one of them crack. He doubled over, gasping. I grabbed the back of his head and slammed his face into my knee.
Blood sprayed across the floor. He staggered, but he did not go down.
“Who sent you?” I demanded, circling him, looking for an opening. “Who hired you to break into my house?”
He laughed, a wet, gurgling sound through his broken nose. “You think I’m going to tell you that?”
“I think you’re going to tell me everything.”
He lunged at me, faster than I expected, his fist catching me in the stomach. I bent double, all the air rushing out of my lungs. He grabbed my hair and yanked my head up, and I saw the glint of metal in his hand.
A knife. He had a knife.
I twisted away just as the blade slashed toward me, the edge biting deep into my side instead of my throat. The pain was sharp and hot, but I had been cut before. I had rowed through worse injuries. I grabbed his wrist and twisted hard, heard him cry out as the knife clattered to the floor.
We grappled in the darkness, crashing into furniture, knocking over lamps and chairs. He was strong, stronger than me, but I was fighting for more than my life. I was fighting for Del. For our baby. For everything we had finally rebuilt.
I got my hands around his throat and squeezed.
His eyes went wide. His hands clawed at my wrists. I watched him struggle, watched the panic set in, and I felt nothing but cold determination.
“Who sent you?” I asked again.
He couldn’t answer. My hands were too tight. I loosened my grip just enough to let him speak.
“Some woman,” he gasped. “Blonde. Rich. Crazy eyes.”
Kendall. It had to be Kendall.
Before I could ask more, I heard the one sound that could freeze my blood solid in my veins.
A scream. From upstairs. Del’s voice, high and terrified.
Upstairs. Both of them were down here. One on the floor by the front door with his skull ringing and one under my hands with my thumbs in his throat, and my wife was screaming upstairs, which meant I had counted wrong, which meant there had been a third man in my house the entire time and he had gone up the back stairs while I stood in the dark being clever.
I let go of the intruder and ran.
I made it to the stairs in three steps, taking them two at a time, my lungs burning, the wound in my side screaming. The hallway stretched before me, endless and dark, and the door to our bedroom was hanging open.
The door I had told her to lock.
The door that should have been closed.
“Del?” My voice came out as a ragged shout. “Delphine!”
I burst into the room and found it empty. The sheets were tangled. Her phone was on the floor, the screen cracked, still connected to the 911 call, the dispatcher’s voice still going, tinny and calm, saying ma’am into an empty room.
There were signs of a struggle. A lamp knocked over. The nightstand pushed askew. My dress shirt from the night before was gone from the floor where it had been, because I had watched her put it on twenty minutes earlier, and there was blood on the sheets.
The back stairs door at the end of the hall was standing open.
Cold air was coming up it. They had come in through the old service entrance in the east wing and they had gone out the same way, down the back stairs and through the pantry and across the kitchen garden to a car on the service lane, while I was in my own living room strangling a man for information.
She was gone.
My wife was gone.
I think I screamed. I know I fell to my knees. I know I stayed there, staring at that empty bed, my whole world collapsing around me, until the sound of sirens finally broke through the roaring in my ears.
***
The next hours were a blur of pain and chaos and desperate terror.
Paramedics tried to make me lie down. I shoved them away.
They had the lookout sitting on my front steps in handcuffs, blinking, coming back into himself, and a detective was crouched in front of him reciting rights.
I do not remember crossing the drive.
I remember my fist going into his face and the wet crunch it made.
I remember him going over sideways onto the flagstones with his hands cuffed behind him and no way at all to protect himself, and I remember that I knew that, and I remember hitting him again anyway.
I got a knee into his ribs and felt them give and I heard myself asking where is she, where is she, where is she, in a voice that did not belong to me, and every time he tried to answer I hit him again so he couldn’t.
That’s the part I cannot explain to anyone. I did not want him to answer. Some animal underneath me had stopped wanting information and had started wanting this.