Читать книгу Sidney Sheldon’s The Tides of Memory - Сидни Шелдон, Sidney Sheldon - Страница 18

PRISON LIFE SUITED BILLY HAMLIN.

It was a bizarre thing to say, but it was true. The regularity, the routine, the camaraderie with the other inmates all suited Billy’s easygoing, follow-along character to a T once he got used to it.

The first year was the toughest. Having been transferred to a facility closer to his father, Billy was devastated when Jeff Hamlin died suddenly of a heart attack just three months into his sentence. Billy tried to tell himself that it wasn’t the stress of his arrest and trial that had destroyed his father’s health, but deep down he knew the truth. Guilt gnawed at him like a dog with a bone.

Meanwhile, Leslie Lose, Billy’s lawyer, would leave messages from time to time about an appeal. But as the weeks passed, then the months, and finally the years, with no date set, Billy resigned himself to the fact that he would serve his full sentence.

Twenty years was too painful to contemplate. Even fifteen with good behavior was a bitter pill. Billy Hamlin decided to focus on the one positive he had left in his life: Toni Gilletti.

When I get out, Toni will be waiting for me.

It was a sweet, addictive fantasy, and Billy Hamlin clung to it like a life raft.

When I get out of here, Billy told himself in his cold, lonely bunk each night, I’m gonna make love to Toni every night, five times a night. I’m gonna make up for lost time.

He fell asleep dreaming of Toni’s soft, sensual teenage body and woke up with the smell of her skin in his nostrils, the soft caress of her silken blond hair on his chest. As the years rolled by and he heard nothing from Toni whatsoever—no letters, no visits, no calls—he made up a series of stories to explain her absence.

Her father was keeping her from him.

She was traveling, somewhere remote—trekking in the Andes maybe—trying to put him out of her mind until they could be together again.

She was working, quietly saving money for the house they were going to buy together when Billy got out.

As the fantasies grew more ludicrous, even to himself, Billy stopped talking about Toni with his fellow inmates. Instead he compartmentalized her, packing her away in a mental box to be opened joyously in secret, once the lights were out and he was alone. Sustained by these romantic dreams, by day Billy determined to get the most out of prison life, enrolling in science and mechanics classes and working long hours on the prison farm, which he enjoyed. In normal circumstances child killers were considered the lowest of the low in jail, ostracized and often physically assaulted by fellow inmates. But there was something about Billy’s kind, relentlessly cheerful nature that the other men all warmed to.

The bottom line was that no one believed Billy Hamlin had murdered Nicholas Handemeyer. His trial had been a travesty.

The day Billy walked out of East Jersey State Prison, after fifteen years inside, nobody was waiting to greet him. His father was dead and he had no other close family. There were a few people he knew from back home, acquaintances he could call. But he realized with a pang of fear that all of his real friends were behind him, on the other side of the penitentiary’s huge, locked steel gates. Billy Hamlin wasn’t ready to face the outside world, not on his own.

So he did the only thing he could.

He went looking for Toni Gilletti.

Billy’s first stop was Toni’s parents’ mansion in New Jersey. He’d never been there before, but he’d long since memorized the address, and he’d seen pictures of the place in a fancy Dream Homes magazine.

The maid who opened the door was kind. Her brother Tyrone had spent eight years in jail for petty theft, and she knew what a long stretch inside could do to a man’s soul. But she told Billy he had a wasted journey.

“Old Man Gilletti sold this place eight years ago. My people, the Carters, been here since then.”

Billy bit back his disappointment.

“Do you know where the Gillettis moved to?”

“I don’t. Back to New York City, I think. But Walter Gilletti lost a lotta money when his business went broke. There were debts, to partners, to the bank. That’s why he sold up here. They was in real trouble.”

Billy remembered Walter Gilletti as the arrogant, bullying, cock-of-the-walk figure who’d been so dismissive toward his father at the trial. Toni’s dad was not a man who would have coped well with such a huge reversal of fortune.

With a little research and a few calls to some of Walter’s ex-employees, Billy found the Gillettis’ new home, a clean but modest apartment in a midrent part of Brooklyn. When he got there it looked as if he’d had another wasted journey. An ancient, wizened crone in a dirty velour leisure suit answered the door.

“What the hell do you want?”

It was only when her mean eyes narrowed and she rasped, “Billy Hamlin? Are you out already?” that Billy placed her as Toni’s mother.

“Sandra?”

“Mrs. Gilletti to you, boy.”

Jesus Christ, thought Billy. She’s aged thirty years. More.

“I—I was looking for Toni,” he stammered. For some reason, the old woman made him nervous.

“You and the rest of the world.” Sandra Gilletti cackled grotesquely. Billy recognized the rattle of emphysema in her chest. He hoped the old adage wasn’t true, about all girls eventually turning into their mothers. “Toni’s gone, kiddo. And she ain’t coming back.”

For a hideous moment Billy thought she meant that Toni was dead. In fact, Sandra Gilletti explained, her daughter had taken off shortly after the trial, informing both her parents coolly that she wanted nothing more to do with them and that she was starting a new life.

“Just like that,” the old woman wheezed. “After twenty years of love and affection, she just ups and leaves, and Walter and I never hear a peep from her again.”

Billy cast his mind back to his one, magical summer with Toni and the long conversations they had had about her parents. Love and affection had not been words he had ever associated with the Gillettis. He remembered feeling sorry for Toni, and grateful for his own, warm relationship with his father.

Mrs. Gilletti went on. “Of course, Walter lost everything. You probably know that. Died of a stroke just months after we moved in here. Left me without a penny, the tightfisted son of a bitch.”

Billy looked past her into the clean, comfortable apartment. It wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton, but he would have killed to have a place like that to come home to.

“You seem to be doing all right to me, Mrs. Gilletti.”

Sandra Gilletti’s upper lip curled. “That’s because you have low standards. Probably why you fell for our Toni in the first place. She never came back for the funeral, you know. Never even sent flowers. Heartless bitch.”

Billy left the apartment feeling deeply depressed. In prison, at least he’d had his fantasy, his little box of dreams to keep him going. Now even that was disintegrating, rained on and destroyed like everything else in his life.

And not just his life. The Gillettis had clearly lost everything too. It was as if everyone connected with that awful summer in Kennebunkport had been cursed. Billy might have been the one sent to jail, but everyone had been punished. Everyone had suffered in their own way. Billy tried not to think of the Handemeyer family, and their never-ending grief. Had they been torn apart by this too? He wondered what had happened to them after the trial. Had his imprisonment given Senator Handemeyer the closure he craved? Somehow Billy doubted it.

For the next few months Billy searched tirelessly for Toni Gilletti, but it was like trying to catch a ghost with a butterfly net. He even spent a thousand dollars of the small amount of money his father had left him on a private detective, but it was to no avail. Toni’s poisonous old witch of a mother was right.

She was gone. And she was never coming back.

It wasn’t until a few months later that Billy Hamlin recognized the emotion building up inside him for what it was: relief. He had let go of the dream, let go of his parachute, and discovered to his astonishment that he hadn’t plummeted to his doom after all. In fact, he felt as if a huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

Walking out of jail had not made Billy Hamlin a free man. But giving up on Toni Gilletti had. At last he could begin to build himself a life.

He’d qualified as mechanic in jail, and spent the last of Jeff Hamlin’s money buying a stake in a run-down body shop in Queens, in partnership with an old buddy from high school, Milo Bates. Milo had followed Billy’s trial on TV and had always felt bad about what had happened to him. Still living in the Hamlins’ old neighborhood, Milo was now married to a sweet local girl named Betsy and the two of them had three kids. The Bates family took Billy Hamlin under their wing, and it was their friendship more than anything that helped turn Billy’s life around.

It was Betsy Bates who introduced Billy to Sally Duffield, the woman who was to become his wife. Billy and Sally hit it off immediately. Sally was a redhead with incredible ice-blue eyes and skin like an old-fashioned porcelain doll. She had a small waist, large breasts, and a full-throated, infectious laugh that could fill a room. She was kind and maternal and had a steady job as a legal secretary. Billy wasn’t in love with her but he liked her a lot, and he wanted children. So did she. There didn’t seem any reason to wait.

For the first five years the marriage was happy. Both Billy and Sally were busy, Billy with the car-repair business and Sally with their baby daughter, Jennifer. Jenny Hamlin was the apple of both her parents’ eyes, as round and fat as a dumpling, permanently covered in floury talcum powder and cooing adorably at anyone who cared to smile at her. Billy’s only sadness was that his father, Jeff, hadn’t lived long enough to meet his granddaughter and to see his son so happy and settled. As Jenny Hamlin grew, strong and pretty and funny as all hell—no one was faster on the draw with the one-liners than Jenny—so her parents’ love for her grew as well.

Unfortunately their love for each other, never really more than a friendship to begin with, began to fade. When Sally went back to work and fell for one of her colleagues, it wasn’t so much the affair that upset Billy as the fact that he didn’t care about it. At all. When another man sleeping with your wife is a matter of complete indifference to you, something is probably wrong. And so quietly, amicably, and without an iota of drama, the Hamlins divorced.

Years later, when Billy asked his daughter earnestly whether the split had affected her, the twelve-year-old Jenny Hamlin looked her father in the eye and said, deadpan: “Dad. I’ve seen eggs separate with more emotion.”

When her mom asked her the same question, Jenny stood up and gasped melodramatically, clapping a hand over her mouth.

“What? You mean you guys are divorced?!”

The truth was that Jenny Hamlin was a happy, secure, resourceful kid. Her mother was blissfully remarried, and although Billy remained single, he was perfectly content with his business, his buddy Milo, and his season ticket to Yankee Stadium.

Then the voices started.

It began as mild depression. Billy and Milo’s business started to struggle, then fail. The debts piled up, and Billy no longer had Sally’s income to cushion the blow. When Milo and Betsy Bates’s marriage also fell apart, Billy took it hard. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it felt as if the whole world were coming unglued. He started to drink, a little at first, then a lot. Somewhere along the line, the boundary between reality and Billy’s increasingly doom-ridden imagination began to blur. Eventually it disintegrated altogether.

Milo Bates left town, abandoning Billy to face their debts alone. Billy convinced himself that Milo had been abducted and murdered.

He told the police, “He wouldn’t leave me. Not Milo. He’s my best friend. They’ve taken him. They’ve taken him away and killed him.”

When asked who “they” were, Billy Hamlin could only reply “the voice.” An evil voice had apparently told Billy Hamlin that “they” had kidnapped Milo Bates. Billy described vivid, nightmarish fantasies of Bates being tortured and killed by this anonymous individual, and demanded that the police investigate.

Desperately worried, Bill’s ex-wife, Sally, called in the social workers. Billy was diagnosed as schizophrenic and prescribed medication. When he took it, things got better. When he didn’t, they got worse. Much, much worse.

He would disappear for months on end on mysterious “trips,” not telling anyone where he was going and refusing to discuss where he’d been once he returned. “The voice” would tell him where to go, and Billy would follow its instructions, clearly terrified. Nobody knew where he got the money for these trips, and Billy himself seemed vague about it, insisting that funds had mysteriously appeared in his bank account. Sally and Jenny begged him to get help but Billy refused, convinced that if he didn’t do what “the voice” asked, if he allowed the voice to be silenced by doctors or psychiatrists, something quite terrible would happen.

Occasionally he got fixated on specific people. Some were locals, people he knew from the neighborhood whom he believed to be in danger. Others were public figures. Baseball players. Politicians. Actors.

Most recently, and most bizarrely, Billy Hamlin had become obsessed with the new British home secretary, Alexia De Vere. Time magazine had run a picture of Mrs. De Vere as part of its profile on women in power, and Billy had fixated on it, spending hours and hours on his computer “researching” the British politician’s background.

“I have to warn her,” Billy told his daughter, Jenny.

Not again, thought Jenny. He seemed so much better lately.

“Warn her about what, Dad?” She sighed. “You don’t know this woman.”

“That’s not the point.”

“But, Dad …”

“She’s in grave danger. The voice said so. I have to warn her. I have to go to England.”

No one, not even Jenny Hamlin, thought that her father was actually going to go.

TEDDY DE VERE CAME INTO THE kitchen at Kingsmere looking upset.

“What’s the matter, Daddy?” Roxie asked. “As Granny used to say, you look like you’ve lost a shilling and found sixpence.”

Teddy didn’t laugh. “Have you seen Danny?”

Danny was the ancient family dog, a wire-haired dachshund with the IQ of a cabbage to whom all the De Veres were devoted. Especially Teddy.

“I called him this morning for his walk and he never came. Can’t find him anywhere.”

“He’s probably asleep somewhere,” said Roxie. “Or waddled off to the gamekeeper’s cottage for some free sausages. Do you want me to look for him with you?”

“Would you mind? Silly, I know, but I’m worried about him.”

Half an hour later, so was Roxie. They’d searched the entire house, twice, and all the likely places in the grounds. No doubt about it, the dog was gone.

“Might Mummy have let him out by mistake when she left for London this morning?” Roxie asked. “Should we call and check?”

“Done it already. She said she didn’t check his basket but she doesn’t remember seeing him, and he definitely didn’t get out.”

“Your lordship.”

Alfred Jennings hovered in the kitchen doorway. Teddy De Vere had given up his title decades ago, when Alexia first stood for Parliament, but Alfred was congenitally incapable of addressing a De Vere in any other way.

“Have you found him?” Teddy’s round face lit up with hope.

The old gatekeeper stared at his shoes. “Yes, your lordship. I’m afraid we have.”

ALEXIA DE VERE PEELED BACK THE Frette sheets on her London bed and slipped inside. It had been a long day—since her appointment as home secretary, all the days were long—and the soft touch of Egyptian cotton against her bare legs felt wonderful. Alexia usually wore silk Turnbull & Asser pajamas to bed, but London was enjoying a three-day heat wave, and the one luxury that the De Veres’ Cheyne Walk house lacked was air-conditioning.

“I’m buggered if I’m paying for that nonsense when we’re away all summer,” Teddy insisted. “If it’s hot, we can open the bloody window.”

He can be so English sometimes, Alexia thought affectionately.

Teddy had called her earlier from Kingsmere. Sir Edward Manning had passed on three messages, but Alexia literally hadn’t had a single free moment to return his calls. The phone rang just as she was reaching for it.

“Darling. I’m so sorry. You wouldn’t believe how hectic things have been here, I’ve had two select committees, my first full cabinet meeting, I’ve—”

“Alexia. Something’s happened.”

Teddy’s tone stopped her instantly. Horrors flashed through her mind. An accident. Michael. Roxie.

“Somebody’s poisoned the dog.”

For an instant Alexia felt relief. It’s only Danny. Not the children. Then the full import of what Teddy was saying hit her.

“Poisoned him? Deliberately?”

“I’m not sure. But none of the gardeners are admitting to putting rat poison down and the vet says his stomach was full of it.”

“Was full of it? Is he dead?”

“Yes, he’s dead! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. All damn day.”

Alexia could hear Teddy’s voice quavering. He loved that dog. Suddenly she felt afraid. The mystery caller. Danny being found dead. There was probably no connection. But what if there was? What sort of psychopath would kill a sweet little dog?

After a few minutes comforting her husband, Alexia De Vere hung up. As soon as she did so, the phone rang again. She snatched it up, silently praying that it wasn’t her mother-in-law, who often called late at night. The Dowager Lady De Vere was ninety-six and profoundly deaf, a disability that had in no way reduced her enthusiasm for the telephone as a means of communication. She particularly enjoyed shouting recipes down the line at her daughter-in-law, conveniently ignoring the fact that Alexia had never cooked so much as a piece of toast in her six decades on this earth, and was probably even less likely to do so now that she had the small matter of a country to run. A typical call would begin, “Teddy’s very keen on eels in aspic. Have you got a pen and paper handy?”

But it wasn’t Teddy’s mother. The faint click on the line told Alexia immediately it was a long-distance call, but there was no voice on the other end.

“Hello?” Sometimes there was a delay on the line, especially with calls from the U.S. “Lucy, is that you?”

Lucy Meyer, Alexia’s summer neighbor from Martha’s Vineyard, was the only other person she could think of who might call her at home at this hour. With the holidays approaching, Lucy had been in closer touch, a welcome reminder of the peaceful life that existed outside of politics. If only Lucy lived in England, how much easier my life would be.

“If it’s you, Luce, I can’t hear you. Try again.”

But it wasn’t Lucy Meyer. It was a low, synthesized growl. “The day is coming. The day when the Lord’s anger will be poured out.”

The voice distorter was designed to frighten. It worked.

Alexia tightened her grip on the handset.

“Who is this?”

“Because you have sinned against the Lord, I will make you as helpless as a blind man searching for a path.”

“I said who is this?”

“Your blood will be poured out into the dust and your body will lie rotting on the ground. Murdering bitch.”

The line went dead. Alexia put the phone down, gasping for breath.

She closed her eyes and the view from her office window popped into her mind: the silver Thames and its deadly currents snaking their way around her, cutting her off like Rapunzel in her tower.

Somebody out there hates me.

The waters were rising.