A Place of Hiding (7 page)

The next day, neither Cherokee nor his sister was surprised when no one was up and about. They made their way to the kitchen around eight-thirty and browsed until they found the cereal, the coffee, and the milk. They assumed it was okay to make their own breakfast while the Brouards slept off the previous night's drunk. They ate, phoned for a taxi, and left for the airport. They never saw anyone from the estate again.

They flew to Paris and spent two days seeing the sights they'd only gazed upon in pictures. They were set to do the same in Rome, but as they went through customs at Da Vinci airport, Interpol stopped them.

The police packed them back to Guernsey, where they were wanted, they were told, for questioning. When they asked, Questioning about what? all they were told was that “a serious incident requires your presence on the island at once.”

Their presence, it turned out, was required at the police station in St. Peter Port. They were held alone in separate cells: Cherokee for twenty-four pretty bad hours and China for three nightmarish days that turned into an appearance in front of the magistrate and a trip to the remand section of the prison, where she was now being held.

“For what?” Deborah reached across the table for Cherokee's hand. “Cherokee, what are they charging her with?”

“Murder,” he replied hollowly. “It's completely insane. They're charging China with killing Guy Brouard.”

Chapter 2

D
EBORAH TURNED BACK THE
covers on the bed and fluffed up the pillows. She realised that she'd seldom felt quite so useless. There was China sitting in a prison cell on Guernsey and here was she bustling round the spare room, drawing curtains and fluffing up
pillows—
for God's sake—because she didn't know what else to do. Part of her wanted to take the next plane to the Channel Islands. Part of her wanted to dive into Cherokee's heart and do something to calm his anxiety. Part of her wanted to draw up lists, devise plans, give instructions, and take an immediate action that would allow both Rivers to know they were not alone in the world. And part of her wanted someone
else
to do all of this because she didn't feel equal to any of it. So she uselessly fluffed pillows and turned down the bed.

Then, because she wanted to say something to China's brother, she turned to him where he stood awkwardly by the chest of drawers. “If you need anything in the night, we're just on the floor below.”

Cherokee nodded. He looked dismal and very alone. “She didn't do it,” he said. “Can you see China hurting a fly?”

“Absolutely not.”

“We're talking about someone who used to get me to carry spiders from her bedroom when we were kids. She'd be up on the bed yelling because she'd seen one on the wall and I'd come in to get rid of it and
then
she'd start yelling, ‘Don't hurt him! Don't hurt him!' ”

“She was like that with me, as well.”

“God, if I'd only let it be, not asked her to come. I've got to do something and I don't know what.”

His fingers twisted the tie of Simon's dressing gown. Deborah was reminded of how China had always seemed like the older sibling of the two. Cherokee, what am I going to do with you, she'd ask him. When are you
ever
growing up?

Right now, Deborah thought. With circumstances demanding a kind of adulthood that she wasn't sure Cherokee even possessed.

She said to him because it was the only thing she could say, “You sleep now. We'll know better what to do in the morning,” and she left him.

She was heavy at heart. China River had been the closest of friends to her during the most difficult moments of her life. She owed her much but had repaid her little. That China would now be in trouble and that she would be in that trouble alone . . . Deborah only too well understood Cherokee's anxiety about his sister.

She found Simon in their bedroom, sitting on the straight-backed chair that he used when he removed his leg brace at night. He was in the midst of tearing back the brace's Velcro strips, his trousers puddling down round his ankles and his crutches on the floor next to his chair.

He looked childlike, as he generally looked in this vulnerable posture, and it had always taken all the discipline she could muster for Deborah not to go to his assistance when she came upon her husband like this. His disability was, for her, the great leveling force between them. She hated it for his sake because she knew he hated it, but she'd long ago accepted the fact that the accident that had crippled him in his twenties had also made him available to her. Had it not occurred, he'd have married while she was a mere adolescent, leaving her far behind. His time in hospital and then convalescing and then the black years of depression that followed had put paid to that.

He didn't like to be seen in his awkwardness, though. So she went straight to the chest of drawers, where she made a pretence of removing what few pieces of jewellery she wore while she waited for the sound of the leg brace clunking to the floor. When she heard it, followed by the grunt he gave as he rose, she turned. He had his crutches snapped round his wrists, and he was watching her fondly.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Sorry. Have I always been so obvious?”

“No. You've always been so kind. But I don't think I've ever thanked you properly. That's what comes from a marriage too happy for its own good: taking the beloved for granted.”

“Do you take me for granted, then?”

“Not intentionally.” He cocked his head to one side and observed her. “Frankly, you don't give me the chance.” He made his way across the room to her, and she put her arms round his waist. He kissed her gently and then kissed her long, one arm holding her to him, till she felt the wanting that stirred in them both.

She looked up at him then. “I'm glad you can still do that to me. But I'm gladder I can do it to you.”

He touched her cheek. “Hmm. Yes. Yet all things considered, it's probably not the time . . .”

“For what?”

“For exploring some interesting variations of this ‘it' you were speaking of.”

“Ah.” She smiled. “That. Well, perhaps it is the time, Simon. Perhaps what we learn every day is how quickly life changes. Everything that's important can be gone in an instant. So it is the time.”

“To explore . . . ?”

“Only if we're exploring together.”

Which was what they did in the glow of a single lamp that burnished their bodies gold, darkened Simon's grey-blue eyes, and turned to crimson the otherwise hidden pale places where their blood beat hot. Afterwards, they lay in the tangle of the counterpane, which they hadn't bothered to remove from the bed. Deborah's clothes were scattered wherever her husband had tossed them and Simon's shirt draped from one of his arms like an indolent tart.

“I'm glad you hadn't gone to bed,” she said against his chest, where she rested her cheek. “I thought you might have done. It didn't seem right to just deposit him in the spare room without staying for a moment. But you were looking so tired in the kitchen that I thought you might've decided to sleep. I'm glad you didn't, though. Thank you, Simon.”

He caressed her hair as was his habit, moving his hand into the heavy mass of it till his fingers came into contact with her head. He played them warmly against her scalp, and she felt her body relax in response. “He's all right?” Simon asked. “Is there anyone we can phone, just in case?”

“Just in case what?”

“Just in case he doesn't get what he wants from the embassy tomorrow. I expect they've already been in contact with the police on Guernsey. If they've not sent someone over there . . .” Deborah felt her husband shrug. “Chances are good there's nothing else they intend to do.”

Deborah rose from his chest. “You aren't thinking China actually committed this murder, are you?”

“Not at all.” He brought her back to his arms. “I'm only pointing out that she's in the hands of a foreign police force. There'll be protocols and procedures to be followed and that might be the extent of what the embassy is going to involve itself with. Cherokee needs to be prepared for that. He might also need someone to lean on if that turns out to be the case. That might be why he's come, in fact.”

Simon said this last more quietly than the rest. Deborah raised her head to look at him again. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“There's more, Simon. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Just this. Are you the only person he knows in London?”

“Probably.”

“I see.”

“I see?”

“He might well need you, then, Deborah.”

“And does that bother you if he does?”

“Not bother. No. But are there other family members?”

“Just their mum.”

“The tree-sitter. Yes. Well, it might be wise to phone her. What about the father? You said China has a different father to Cherokee's?”

Deborah winced. “Hers is in prison, my love. At least he was when we lived together.” And when she saw the concern on Simon's face—expressing nothing so much as
like father, like daughter?—
she went on to say, “It was nothing serious. I mean, he didn't
kill
anyone. China never talked about him much, but I know it had something to do with drugs. An illegal lab somewhere? I think that was it. It's not like he pushed heroin on the street, though.”

“Well, that's comforting.”

“She's
not
like him, Simon.”

He made a grumbling sound, which she took for his hesitant agreement. They lay in silence then, content with each other, her head back on his chest and his fingers once again in her hair.

Deborah loved her husband differently in moments like this. She felt more his equal. The sensation came not only from their quiet conversation but also—and perhaps more important for her—from what had preceded their conversation. For the fact that her body could give him such pleasure always seemed to balance the scales between them and that she could be a witness to that pleasure allowed her to feel even momentarily her husband's superior. Because of this, her own pleasure had long been secondary to his, a fact that Deborah knew would horrify the liberated women of her world. But that's just how it was.

“I reacted badly,” she finally murmured. “Tonight. I'm sorry, my love. I do put you through it.”

Simon had no trouble following the line of her thinking. “Expectations destroy our peace of mind, don't they? They're future disappointments, planned out in advance.”

“I did have it all planned out. Scores of people with champagne glasses in their hands, standing awestruck in front of my pictures. ‘My God, she's a genius,' they declare to each other. ‘The very idea of taking a
Polaroid . . . Did
you
know they could be black and white? And the
size
of them . . . Heavens, I must own one at once. No. Wait. I must have at least ten.' ”

“‘The new flat in Canary Wharf demands them,' ” Simon added.

“‘Not to mention the cottage in the Cotswolds.' ”

“‘And the house near Bath.' ”

They laughed together. Then they were silent. Deborah shifted her position to look at her husband.

“It still stings,” she admitted. “Not as much. Not nearly. But a bit. It's still there.”

“Yes,” he said. “There's no quick panacea for being thwarted. We all want what we want. And not getting it doesn't mean we cease to want it. I do know that. Believe me. I know.”

She looked away from him quickly, realising that what he was acknowledging traveled a much greater distance than comprised the brief journey to this night's disappointment. She was grateful that he understood, that he'd always understood no matter how supremely rational logical cool and incisive were his comments on her life. Her eyes ached with tears, but she wouldn't allow him to see them. She wanted to give him the momentary gift of her tranquil acceptance of inequity. When she'd managed to displace sorrow with what she hoped would sound like determination, she turned back to him.

“I'm going to sort myself out properly,” she said. “I may strike out in a whole new direction.”

He observed her in his usual manner, an unblinking gaze that generally unnerved lawyers when he was testifying in court and always reduced his university students to hopeless stammers. But for her the gaze was softened by his lips, which curved in a smile, and by his hands, which reached for her again.

“Wonderful,” he said as he pulled her to him. “I'd like to make a few suggestions right now.”

 

Deborah was up before dawn. She'd lain awake for hours before falling asleep, and when she'd finally nodded off, she'd tossed and turned through a series of incomprehensible dreams. In them she was back in Santa Barbara, not as she'd been—a young student at Brooks Institute of Photography—but rather as someone else entirely: a sort of ambulance driver whose apparent responsibility it was not only to fetch a recently harvested human heart for transplant but also to fetch it from a hospital she could not find. Without her delivery, the patient—lying for some reason not in an operating theatre but in the car repair bay at the petrol station behind which she and China had once lived—would die within an hour, especially since his heart had already been removed, with a gaping hole left in his chest. Or it might have been
her
heart instead of his. Deborah couldn't tell from the partially shrouded form that was raised in the repair bay on a hydaulic lift.

In her dream, she drove desperately through the palm-lined streets to no avail. She couldn't remember a single thing about Santa Barbara and no one would help her with directions. When she woke up, she found that she'd thrown off the covers and was so damp with sweat that she was actually shivering. She looked at the clock and eased out of bed, padding over to the bathroom, where she bathed the worst of the nightmare away. When she returned to the bedroom, she found Simon awake. He said her name in the darkness and then, “What time is it? What are you doing?”

She said, “Terrible dreams.”

“Not art collectors waving their chequebooks at you?”

“No, sad to say. Art collectors waving their Annie Leibovitzes at me.”

“Ah. Well. It could have been worse.”

“Really? How?”

“It could have been Karsch.”

She laughed and told him to go back to sleep. It was early yet, too early for her dad to be up and about, and she herself certainly wasn't going to trip up and down the stairs with Simon's morning tea as her father did. “Dad spoils you, by the way,” she informed her husband.

“I consider it only a minor payment for having taken you off his hands.”

She heard the rustle of the bedclothes as he changed his position. He sighed deeply, welcoming back sleep. She left him to it.

Downstairs, she brewed herself a cup of tea in the kitchen, where Peach looked up from her basket by the cooker and Alaska emerged from the larder, where, from the snow-tipped look of him, he doubtless had spent the night on top of a leaking flour bag. Both animals came across the red tiles to Deborah, who stood at the draining board beneath the basement window while her water heated in the electric kettle. She listened to the rain continue to fall on the flagstones of the area just outside the back door. There had been only a brief respite from it during the night, sometime after three, as she lay awake listening not only to the wind and the waves of rainfall hitting the window but also to the committee in her head that was shrilly advising her what to do: with her day, with her life, with her career, and above all with and for Cherokee River.