The Summer Hideaway Read online

  People’s end-of-life experiences often involved a journey, and it was usually to a place they were intimately connected with. Sometimes it was where their story began, or where a turning point in life occurred. It might be a search for comfort and safety. Other times it was just the opposite; a place where there was unfinished business to be dealt with. What this sleepy town by Willow Lake was to George Bellamy remained to be seen.

  The road followed the contours of a burbling tree-shaded stream marked the Schuyler River, its old Dutch spelling as quaint as the covered bridge she could see in the distance. “I can’t believe there’s a covered bridge. I’ve never seen one before, except in pictures.”

  “It’s been there for as long as I can remember,” George said, leaning slightly forward.

  Claire studied the structure, simple and nostalgic as an old song, with its barn-red paint and wood-shingled roof. She accelerated, curious about the town that seemed to mean so much to her client. This might turn out to be a good assignment for her. It might even be a place that actually felt safe for once.

  No sooner had the thought occurred to her than a blue-white flash of light battered the van’s rearview mirror. A split second later came the warning blip of a siren.

  Claire felt a sudden frost come over her. The tips of her fingernails chilled and all the color drained from her face; she could feel the old terror coming on with sudden swiftness. She battled a mad impulse to floor the accelerator and race away in the cumbersome van.

  George must have read her mind—or her body language. “A car chase is not on my list,” he said.

  “What?” Flushed and sweating, she eased her foot off the accelerator.

  “A car chase,” he said, enunciating clearly. “Not on my list. I can die happy without the car chase.”

  “I’m totally pulling over,” she said. “Do you see me pulling over?” She hoped he couldn’t detect the tremor in her voice.

  “There’s a tremor in your voice,” he said.

  “Getting pulled over makes me nervous,” she said. Understatement. Her throat and chest felt tight; her heart was racing. She knew the clinical term for her condition, but it was the layman’s expression she offered George. “Kind of freaks me out.” She stopped on the gravel verge and put the van in Park.

  “I can see that.” George calmly drew a monogrammed gold money clip from his pocket. It was filled with neatly folded bills.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, momentarily forgetting her anxiety.

  “I suspect he’ll be looking for a bribe. Common practice in third world countries.”

  “We’re not in a third world country. I know it might not seem like it, but we’re still in New York.”

  The patrol car, black and shiny as a jelly bean, kept its lights running, signaling to all passersby that a criminal was being apprehended.

  “Put that away,” she ordered George.

  He did so with a shrug. “I could call my lawyer,” he suggested.

  “I’d say that’s premature.” She studied the police car through the van’s side mirror. “What is taking so long?”

  “He—or she—is looking up the vehicle records to see if there’s been an alert on it.”

  “And why would there be an alert?” she asked. The van had been leased in George’s name with Claire listed as an authorized driver.

  Yet something about his expression put her on edge. She glanced from the mirror to her passenger. “George,” she said in a warning voice.

  “Let’s just hear the officer out,” he said. “Then you can yell at me.”

  The approaching cop, even viewed through the side mirror, stirred a peculiar dread in Claire. The crisp uniform and silvered sunglass lenses, the clean-shaven square jaw and polished boots all made her want to cringe.

  “License and registration,” he said. It was not a barked order but a calm imperative.

  Her fingers felt bloodless as she handed over her driver’s license. Although it was entirely legitimate, even down to the reflective watermark and the organ donor information on the back, she held her breath as the cop scrutinized it. He wore a badge identifying him as Rayburn Tolley, Avalon PD. George passed her the folder containing the van’s rental documents, and she handed that over, too.

  Claire bit the inside of her lip and wished she hadn’t come here. This was a mistake.

  “What’s the trouble?” she asked Officer Tolley, dismayed by the nervousness in her voice. No matter how much time had passed, no matter how often she exposed herself to cops, she could never get past her fear of them. Sometimes even a school crossing guard struck terror in her.

  He scowled pointedly at her hand, which was trembling. “You tell me.”

  “I’m nervous,” she admitted. She had learned over the years to tell the truth whenever possible. It made the lies easier. “Call me crazy, but it makes me nervous when I get pulled over.”

  “Ma’am, you were speeding.”

  “Was I? Sorry, Officer. I didn’t notice.”

  “Where are you headed?” he demanded.

  “To a place called Camp Kioga, on Willow Lake,” said George, “and if she was speeding, the fault is mine. I’m impatient, not to mention a distraction.”

  Officer Tolley bent slightly and peered across the front seat to the passenger side. “And you are…?”

  “Beginning to feel harassed by you.” George sounded righteously indignant.

  “You wouldn’t happen to be George Bellamy, would you?” asked Tolley.

  “Indeed I am,” George said, “but how did you—”

  “In that case, ma’am,” the cop said, returning his attention to Claire, “I need to ask you to step out of the vehicle. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Her heart seized up. It was a moment she had dreaded since the day she’d realized she was a hunted woman. The beginning of the end. Her mind raced, although she moved like a mechanical wooden doll. Should she submit to him? Make a break for it?

  “See here now,” George said. “I would like to know why you’re so preoccupied with us.”

  “George, the man’s doing his job,” said Claire, hoping that would mollify the cop. She motioned for him to sit tight and did as she was told, stepping down awkwardly, using the door handle to steady herself.

  Tolley didn’t seem put off by George’s question. “There was a call to the station about you and Miss…” He consulted the license, which was still clipped to his board. “Turner. The call was from a family member.” He glanced at a printout the size of a cash register receipt on the clipboard. “Alice Bellamy,” he said.

  Claire looked over her shoulder at George, a question in her eyes.

  “One of my daughters-in-law,” he said, a note of apology in his voice.

  “Sir, your family is extremely worried about you,” said the cop. He stared at Claire. She couldn’t discern his eyes behind the lenses, but could see her own reflection clearly, in twin, convex detail. Medium-length dark hair. Large dark eyes. A plain, she hoped, ordinary, nondescript face. That was always the goal. To blend in. To be forgettable. Forgotten.

  She forced herself to keep her chin up, to pretend everything was fine. “Is that a crime around here?” she asked. “To have a worried family?”

  “It’s more than worry.” Officer Tolley rested his right hand atop the holster carrying his service revolver. She could see that he’d released the safety strap. “Mr. Bellamy’s family has some serious concerns about you.”

  She swallowed hard. The Bellamys were made of money. Maybe the daughter-in-law had ordered a deep and thorough background check. Maybe that check had uncovered some irregularity, something about Claire’s past that didn’t quite add up.

  “What kind of concerns?” she asked, dry-mouthed, consumed by terror now.

  “Oh, let me guess,” George suggested with a blast of laughter. “My family thinks I’ve been kidnapped.”

  Two

  KAIA (Kabul Afghanistan International Airport)


  “She did what?” Ross practically shouted into the borrowed mobile phone.

  “Sorry, we have a terrible connection,” said his cousin Ivy, speaking to him from her home in Santa Barbara, where it was eleven and a half hours earlier. “She kidnapped Granddad.”

  Ross rotated his shoulders, which felt curiously light. For the past two years, he’d been burdened by twenty pounds of individual body armor plates, a Kevlar helmet and vest. Now that he was headed home, the weight was gone. He’d turned in the IBA plates, shedding them like a molting beetle.

  Yet according to his cousin, the civilian life had its own kind of perils.

  “Kidnapped?” The loaded word snagged the attention of the others in the waiting room. He waved his hand, a nonverbal signal that all was well, and turned away from the prying eyes.

  “You heard me,” Ivy said. “According to my mother, he hired some sketchy home health care worker off of Craigslist, and she kidnapped him and took him to some remote mountain hideaway up in Ulster County.”

  “That’s nuts,” he said. “That’s completely nuts.” Or was it? In this part of the world, kidnappings were common. And they rarely had a good outcome.

  “What can I say?” Ivy sounded almost apologetic. “It’s my mom at her most dramatic.”

  Growing up, first cousins Ross and Ivy had bonded over their drama-queen mothers. A few years younger than Ross, Ivy lived in Santa Barbara, where she created avant garde sculpture and wrote long, angsty e-mails to her cousin overseas.

  “And you’re certain Aunt Alice’s overreacting? There’s no chance she might be on to something?”

  “There’s always a chance. That’s how my mom operates—within the realm of possibility. She thinks Granddad is losing it. Everybody knows brain tumors make people do crazy things. When can you get to New York?” asked Ivy. “We really need you, Ross. Granddad needs you. You’re the only one he listens to. Where the hell are you, anyway?”

  Ross looked around the foreign airport, jammed with soldiers in desert fatigues, trading stories of firefights, suicide bombers, roadside ambushes. Transport here had been his last movement on the ground. He remembered thinking, please don’t let anything happen now. He didn’t want to be one of those depressing items you read about in hometown newspapers—On his last day of deployment, he died in a convoy attack….

  He pictured Ivy in her bohemian guest house on the bluffs above Hendry’s Beach. He could hear a Cream album playing in the background. She was probably making coffee in her French press and watching the surfers paddle to the beach-break for an early morning ride.

  “I’m on my way,” he said. The homeward-bound soldiers had all been sitting at KAIA for hours. Time dragged at the pace of a glacier. Originally their flight was supposed to leave at 1400, but that had been delayed to 2145. They’d been ordered back to the departure tent and subjected to mandatory lockdown, which meant sitting in an airless tent with nothing to do until it was time to board: 2145 had come and gone, the delay surprising no one.

  “Ross?” His cousin’s voice prodded him. “How much longer before you’re home?”

  “Working on it,” he said to her. At the moment, he might as well be on a different planet; he felt that far away. “What’s going on with Granddad?”

  “Here’s what I know. He’s been in treatment at the Mayo Clinic. I guess they told him then…” She paused, and a sob pulsed through the phone. “They told him it was the worst possible news.”

  “Ivy—”

  “It’s inoperable. I don’t think even my mother would exaggerate that. He’s going to die, Ross.”

  Ross felt sucker-punched by the words. For a few seconds, he couldn’t breathe or see straight. There had to be some mistake. A month ago, Ross had received the usual communiqué from his grandfather. George Bellamy had a curiously old-fashioned style of writing, even with e-mail, starting each message with a proper heading and salutation. He had mentioned the Mayo Clinic—“nothing to worry about.” Ross had failed to read between the lines. He hadn’t let himself go there, even though he knew damn well a guy didn’t go to the Mayo Clinic for a hangnail. He hadn’t let himself think about…sweet Jesus…a terminal prognosis.

  Granddad’s sign-off was always the same: Keep Calm and Carry On.

  And that, in essence, was the way George Bellamy lived. Apparently it was the way he was going to die.

  “He finally told my dad,” Ivy was saying. There was still a catch in her voice. “He said he wasn’t going to pursue further treatment.”

  “Is he scared?” Ross asked. “Is he in pain?”

  “He’s just…Granddad. He claimed he had to go to some little town in the Catskills to see his brother. That was the first I’d heard of any brother. Did you know anything about that?”

  “Wait a minute, what? Granddad has a brother?”

  The connection crackled ominously, and he missed the first part of her reply. “…anyway, when my mother heard what he was planning, she went, like, totally ballistic.”

  Fighting the poor connection and the ambient din of the airport, Ross listened as his cousin filled him in further. Their grandfather had called each of his three sons—Trevor, Gerard and Louis—and he’d calmly informed them of the diagnosis. Then, like a follow-up punch, George had announced his intention to leave his Manhattan penthouse and head for a backwater town upstate to see his brother, some guy named Charles Bellamy. Like Ivy and Ross, most people in the family didn’t even know he had a long-lost brother. How could he have a brother nobody knew about? Was he some guy hidden away in an asylum somewhere, like in the movie Rain Man? Or was he a figment of Granddad’s increasingly unreliable imagination?

  “So you are telling me he’s headed upstate with some sketchy woman who is…who, again?” he asked.

  “Her name is Claire Turner. Claims to be some kind of nurse or home health worker. My mom—and yours, too, I’m sure—thinks she’s after his money.”

  That would always be the first concern of Aunt Alice and of his mother, Ross reflected. Though Bellamys only by marriage, they claimed to love George like a father. And maybe they did, but Ross suspected Alice’s tantrum was less about losing her father-in-law than it was about splitting her inheritance. He also had no doubt his mother felt the same way. But that was a whole other conversation.

  “And they called the police to stop her,” Ivy added.

  “The police?” Ross shoved a hand through his close-cropped hair. He realized he’d raised his voice again and turned away. “They called the police?” Holy crap. Apparently his mother and aunt had managed to persuade the local authorities that George was with a stranger who meant him harm.

  “They didn’t know what else to do,” said Ivy. “Listen, Ross. I’m so worried about Granddad. I’m scared. I don’t want him to suffer. I don’t want him to die. Please come home, Ross. Please—”

  “I requested an expedited discharge,” he assured her. So far, the promised outprocessing hadn’t given him much of a head start.

  His cousin acted as though his homecoming was going to bring about a miraculous cure for their grandfather. Ross already knew miracles weren’t reliable. “When are you flying to New York?” he asked, but by then he was speaking to empty air; the connection had been lost. He shut the mobile phone and brought it over to Manny Shiraz, a fellow chief warrant officer who had lent it to him when Ross’s phone had failed.

  “Trouble at home?” Manny asked. It was the kind of question that came up for guys on deployment, again and again.

  Ross nodded. “God forbid I should go home and find everything is fine.”

  “Welcome to the club, Chief.”

  The idyllic homefront was usually a myth, yet everybody in the waiting area was amped up about going back. There were men and women who hadn’t seen their families in a year, some even longer than that. Babies had been born, toddlers had taken their first steps, marriages had crumbled, holidays had passed, loved ones had died, birthdays had been celebrated. Everyone was eager to get
back to their lives.

  Ross was eager, too—but he didn’t have much of a life. No wife and kids counting the hours to his return. Just his mother, Winifred, a flighty and self-absorbed woman…and Granddad.

  George Bellamy had been the touchstone of Ross’s life since the moment a Casualty Assistance Calls Officer had knocked at the door, arriving in person to tell Winifred Bellamy and her son that Pierce Bellamy had been killed during Operation Desert Storm in 1994.

  Granddad had flown to New York from Paris on the Concorde, which was still operating in those days. He had traveled faster than the speed of sound to be with Ross. He’d pulled his grandson into his arms, and the two of them had cried together, and Granddad had made a promise that day: I will always be here for you.

  They had clung to each other like survivors of a tsunami. Ross’s mother all but disappeared into a whirlwind of panicked grief that culminated in a feverish round of dating. Winifred recovered from her loss quickly and decisively, sealing the deal by remarrying and adopting two stepkids, Donnie and Denise. Ross had been shipped off to school in Switzerland because he had difficulty “accepting” his stepfather and his charming stepbrother and stepsister. The American School in Switzerland offered a comprehensive residential educational program. His mother convinced herself that the venerable institution would do a better job raising her son than she herself ever could.

  Ross’s grief had been so raw and painful he couldn’t see straight. Sometimes he wanted to ask her, “In what world is it okay to look at a kid who’d just lost his father and say to him, ‘Boarding school! It’s just the thing for you!’?”

  Then again, maybe her instincts had been right. There were students at TASIS who thrived on the experience—a residential school as magical in its way as Hogwarts itself. He hadn’t known it back then, but maybe the long separations and periods of isolation had helped prepare him for deployment.

  Being sent an ocean away after losing his dad could have pushed him over the edge, but there was one saving grace in his situation—Granddad. He’d been living and working in Paris and he visited Ross at school in Lugano nearly every single weekend, a lifeline of compassion. Granddad probably didn’t realize it, but he’d saved Ross from drowning. He shut his eyes, picturing his grandfather—impressively tall, with abundant white hair. He’d never seemed old to Ross, though.