Chapter 6 - Shadows on the Perimeter
The elevator did not stop between the fifty-second floor and the subterranean garage three levels below the street.
Marcus Hayes stood at the front of the cab, his right hand resting inside his charcoal jacket where the Glock 19 sat in its horsehide holster. Julian stood behind him.
Between them was Nora Vance.
She had refused the designer clothes Julian had ordered from Bergdorf Goodman at seven that morning. She had refused the cashmere coat, the Italian leather boots, and the silk blouse that smelled of cedar chips. She wore her own clothes: a clean pair of dark blue jeans she had made Marcus retrieve from her Sunnyside walk-up, her scuffed leather work boots, and an oversized dark green wool sweater that had belonged to her brother Donald, its sleeves rolled twice to clear her wrists.
Ivy sat on Julian’s hip.
She had refused to let Julian carry her until he produced a small, silver mechanical bird—a nineteenth-century Swiss automaton from the collection in the library—that flapped its enameled wings and whistled three bars of a Mozart rondo when a key was turned in its base.
She was currently holding the bird against her chest with both hands, her small fingers smudge-marking the lapis lazuli feathers.
“It doesn't bite,” Ivy informed the back of Marcus’s head. “It has gold toes.”
“Yes, ma'am,” Marcus said without turning around.
The doors slid open with a soft hiss of pneumatic grease.
The sub-basement smelled of damp concrete, premium unleaded fuel, and the sweet, hot oil of the building’s primary air scrubbers. Four vehicles were parked in the private bay: two black Cadillac Escalades with government-spec armor plating, Julian’s silver Bentley Continental (which had not moved sixty feet since the anniversary of the crash), and an unmarked dark blue Chevrolet Suburban with tinted windows and dual communication whips on the roof.
Beside the Suburban stood two men Nora had never seen before.
They did not look like Marcus. Marcus looked like an accountant who had spent five years in the infantry; these two looked like men who lived in commercial gyms and spent their weekends doing low-altitude parachute jumps over the New Jersey pine barrens. They wore black tactical windbreakers and carried short canvas bags slung across their chests.
“Perimeter?” Julian asked as they stepped off the concrete apron.
The taller of the two men—a man with a shaved head and a pale scar that bisected his left eyebrow—stepped forward. “Two teams on the street, Mr. Cross. One in a plumber’s van by the corner of Fifty-sixth, the second on foot outside the subway kiosk. They’re Montgomery’s people. The White Plains firm.”
Julian did not break his stride. “Did they identify the child?”
“No,” the scarred man said. “Marcus’s decoy run through the freight bay pulled their primary surveillance car three blocks south before they realized the van was empty. But they know something happened on fifty-two yesterday. Arthur Montgomery’s legal team filed an emergency motion for accelerated certification at eight-thirty this morning.”
“Judge Vance?”
“Judge Vance recused himself ten minutes ago,” the man said. “He cited a conflict. It’s been reassigned to Judge Holtzman in Part 4.”
Julian’s mouth hardened into a straight, white seam. “Holtzman was Arthur’s roommate at Choate. Get in the car.”
Nora hesitated at the door of the Suburban. The glass was three-quarters of an inch thick, with a dark, greenish tint that made the concrete garage look like the bottom of an empty swimming pool.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
Julian turned. Ivy was still resting on his arm, her small face tucked into the crook of his neck, her dark curls tangling with the collar of his charcoal overcoat. He looked down at Nora with that strange, terrifying intensity that was no longer madness, but the cold, pure purpose of an artillery officer setting coordinates.
“To church,” Julian said.
“It’s Friday,” Nora said.
“Not that church,” Julian said. “The church where Elena is buried.”
***
The cemetery was sixty miles north of the city, perched on a limestone ridge above the Croton Reservoir where the gray water looked like lead poured into a notch between the hills.
The oak trees had begun to drop their leaves, rust-colored and stiff with frost, littering the gravel road that wound between the Victorian family plots. The Cross mausoleum was not stone; it was a simple rectangle of dark Norwegian granite set flush into the turf beneath an enormous weeping beech whose branches touched the grass like the ribs of a cage.
Beside the granite marker were two graves.
The first was covered with a slab of white Vermont marble, carved with three lines:
**ELENA MONTGOMERY CROSS**
**JUNE 14, 1992 – SEPTEMBER 14, 2021**
*The water is wide, and I cannot get o’er.*
The second grave had no stone. It was an oblong mound of turf, four feet long, surrounded by a border of dark iron chains supported by four low granite posts. Inside the border was only grass and a stone urn that had remained empty since the frost arrived.
The two Suburbans stopped at the foot of the hill.
The scarred man and his partner remained fifty yards down the slope, their backs to the graves, their hands tucked inside their tactical jackets, scanning the gray line of the parkway two hundred feet below.
Julian walked up the turf alone, carrying Ivy. Nora walked three paces behind him, her boots crunching on the frost-bitten clover.
The child looked at the white marble slab. “Is this the door to the bird room?”
“No,” Julian said.
He did not set her down. He stood at the edge of the empty chain border, looking down at the four feet of grass where he had knelt every Sunday morning for thirty-two months, speaking to thirty-six inches of cold loam that contained nothing except an empty cedar box lined with white silk.
“Her mother is here,” Julian said to Nora without looking back.
Nora stopped beside him. She looked at the white marble, at Elena’s name, at the dates that made the dead woman three years younger than Nora was right now.
“She was pretty,” Nora said softly.
“She was terrified of the dark,” Julian whispered. “When we were in the country, she kept the hall light on because she thought the shadows from the red oaks looked like people with ropes.”
Ivy reached out with her free hand and touched the top of the iron chain. The metal was cold; a thin skin of frost came off against her thumb.
“Mama,” Ivy said, looking up at Nora. “I want to put the bird on the stone.”
“No, baby,” Nora said. “The bird is for you.”
“The stone is cold,” the child said with the simple, devastating logic of three years. “It has no sweater.”
Julian’s breath hitched. He set the child down on the grass between them, his large, scarred hand remaining firmly closed around her small wrist, his fingers never leaving the pulse point where her blood beat against his skin.
A black Mercedes-Maybach pulled off the parkway at the lower gate.
It moved with the slow, oily grace of a private hearse, its tires throwing small gray fans of crushed limestone against the trimmed boxwoods. It did not stop at the visitor’s turnabout; it climbed the narrow maintenance lane until its silver grill was twenty feet from the front bumper of Julian’s blue Suburban.
The rear door opened.
A man got out. He was seventy-eight years old, tall, with the brittle, hollow-boned posture of an old heron standing in shallow water. He wore a heavy black cashmere overcoat with a collar of dark otter fur, and he leaned with both hands on an English walking stick made of malacca wood with an ivory handle carved into the head of a fox.
Arthur Montgomery did not look at the grass. He did not look at his daughter’s white marble slab.
He looked at Julian Cross, and then his pale blue eyes, watery behind thick, rimless lenses, slid down to the small girl standing in the frosted clover in her orange cotton dress and her scuffed white sneakers.
The ivory fox head clicked twice against the malacca shaft.
May you like
“Julian,” Arthur Montgomery said. His voice was high, thin, reedy—the voice of an instrument that had been left in a damp cellar until the soundboard split. “I see you have found an actress.”
***
