A Stranger on the Beach(57)

The thought of my daughter with a boy worried me. But I took a deep breath and told myself to relax. On the list of things I had to fear right now, Hannah dating barely cracked the top ten.





37


That night, the rain finally started.

It was past seven, and I was alone in the apartment. I heard a thunderclap and went over to the living room window. Looking straight down, I could see drops beginning to hit the pavement, and people walking below opening their umbrellas. Our apartment was on the tenth floor, with a view south of the tops of surrounding buildings and open sky above. Lurid purple clouds hung low and thick in the sky, reflecting the lights of the buildings back at me. It felt claustrophobic, like the clouds might strangle me.

Jason’s secretary had left for the day, and he wasn’t picking up in the office or on his cell. It felt like the days right after the Russian woman had come to the party. He’d promised that was over for good. Was he lying? I’d tried to track his phone, with no success. Maybe he was onto me, and my clever little trick, and he’d somehow disabled my ability to track. Or maybe I was being paranoid, and his cell reception was poor simply because of the storm. I left him a pathetic voicemail, begging him to come home for dinner tonight. I wanted to sit him down and figure out what was really going on, and whether this reconciliation was a masquerade. But he remained stubbornly out of reach.

It was hours since I’d interrupted Hannah with that boy and begged her to call me back soon. But so far, nothing. Could she possibly still be with him? Was she avoiding me because she didn’t want to talk about her sex life with her mother? Or was he a psycho, and had he done something to her? I had to stop myself from imagining the worst. The point was, I had too much on my mind to worry about the weather.

An hour later, the rain pounded against the living room windows so loudly that I looked out again. On the street below, people were running for shelter, their umbrellas turned inside out in the wind. Only then did I take seriously what Lynn had said, and bother turning on the television.

The networks were predicting catastrophe. The reporters, in matching jackets, standing in front of swaying trees in the driving rain, in Virginia, along the Chesapeake, at the Jersey shore, talked in urgent voices. Eighty million people in harm’s way. Category Four and strengthening. Landfall projected in mid-Atlantic region by midnight. Mandatory evacuation orders as far north as Cape May. But they always did that, to pump up the ratings. They’d cried wolf so many times that I couldn’t take it seriously.

Then my next-door neighbor from out at the beach called.

Francine was a complainer, but I always took her calls. I had no choice. She was the sort of person who had no problem calling the zoning board on you, or even the cops, if she felt you weren’t taking her concerns seriously.

“Hello?”

“Caroline, this is your neighbor, Francine Eberhardt.”

“Hello, Francine. Are you okay out there in this awful weather?”

“I am not okay. Your burglar alarm has been going off for the past fifteen minutes, and it’s driving me nuts.”

The alarm going off? But I’d never gotten an alert, and I’d paid the bill in full as soon as Jason put money back into the account.

“It can’t be mine. The security company didn’t call me,” I said.

“It’s yours, all right. I should know. I’m right next door, and it’s shrieking.”

“If it is my house, I apologize. The wind must have set it off,” I said.

“It wasn’t the wind. Someone broke in. The front door is wide open.”

The front door had a dead bolt. Unless I’d left the door unlocked, it couldn’t blow open.

“The lights are on, too,” Francine said.

A cold fear rippled through me.

It couldn’t be the housekeeper. She didn’t have a key. Was it possible that, in my frazzled state of mind, I’d left the house without bolting the door or turning off the lights? I wanted very much to believe that, because the alternative was terrifying. The alternative was, somebody broke in. And that somebody was probably Aidan.

“Is there any way you could check on it for me?”

“I’m not going in there. They might still be inside. Besides, the wind is so strong it would knock me down.”

“I’m sure there’s no one in there. I’d give you my alarm code, so you could turn the alarm off and stop the noise.”

“I said no. I’m battening down the hatches, not stepping outside my door till the storm’s over. If you’re smart you’ll get out here yourself and take care of your property before it’s destroyed. But if you can’t be bothered, at least call the alarm company and have them shut off that awful noise.”

She hung up.

I called the burglar alarm company and sat on hold for ten minutes. When I got through, I was told they hadn’t received any alert but that it was possible the phone lines had been damaged by the storm and weren’t transmitting.

“My neighbor says my front door is open. Can’t you send someone to check?” I demanded.

“I’m sorry, ma’am. We are not dispatching technicians at the moment because of the severity of the storm.”

“Then call the police.”

“Our policy is to relay alarms that we receive to local authorities. We have not received an alarm in this case.”