Gorodin dragged Vanik to his feet and, hefting the toolbox and the valuable package, led his battered colleague across the grounds.
Andrew couldn’t hear the sounds of the fight in his quarters above the stables. But the sharp gunshots penetrated the stone walls. He was sitting on the bed pulling off a boot when the first crack made him flinch. The second confirmed what he thought he had just heard. He slammed his foot back into the scuffed leather and ran for the door, pausing to take a rifle from a rack next to it.
Andrew came onto the landing at the top of the outside staircase. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and pick up the two figures running through the grove of aspen a distance across the grounds. He came down the steps, two, three at a time, ran past the stables, along the pasture fences in pursuit, and was cutting across the path that led from the mansion to the museum when his boot hit something slippery. His legs went out from under him. He fell to the ground, and slid through a patch of wet grass. The rifle flew out of his hand, vanishing in the darkness. He came to a stop, smeared head to toe with a viscous substance that tasted sweet on his lips. McKendrick was moaning nearby. Andrew scrambled to his feet, cleaning his face on his sleeve, and hurried toward the sound. McKendrick was lying facedown in the grass when he found him.
“Ed? Ed?” Andrew called out, shaking him a few times before accepting that he was unconscious.
McKendrick’s face was pale and battered. His right pants leg was soaked with blood. The crimson syrup poured out the cuff onto the ground in a steady stream, adding to a rapidly expanding pool.
To his horror, Andrew realized it was McKendrick’s blood seeping into the grass that had caused him to slip, and that now covered him. Shaken by the sheer volume of the spill, he grasped the bottom of McKendrick’s pants leg and ripped the seam to the hip.
Gorodin’s second shot had ricocheted off the thigh bone, nicked the femoral artery, and lodged in the mass of muscle and tissue directly behind it.
Andrew pressed his palm over the pulsing fountain that splattered him, temporarily stemming the flow. It was obvious McKendrick needed immediate paramedic attention. But, equally obvious, he would bleed to death while Andrew was summoning them. He quickly removed his belt, wrapped it around McKendrick’s thigh above the wound, and pulled it tight. The blood kept coming. He pulled tighter, and tighter still, and pushed the prong of the buckle through one of the holes in the leather to hold the pressure.
The flow subsided slightly. But the highly developed muscles of McKendrick’s thigh, which was the size of Andrew’s waist, were preventing the artery from compressing. It wasn’t nearly enough. At this rate, McKendrick would bleed to death in three minutes instead of two.
The thought of McKendrick dying with him right there, helpless to do anything, plunged Andrew into momentary panic. He fought off the sensation and forced himself to think. McKendrick’s left hand was underneath his torso. Andrew pulled it free, bent up the thumb, and jammed it into the bullet hole in his flesh like a cork.
The bleeding stopped.
But within seconds, Andrew could feel pressure building behind it. Lubricated with blood, McKendrick’s thumb would pop out soon after he left to seek help. Andrew forced it as far into the wound as it would go, held it there with his knee, and removed his belt from McKendrick’s thigh. He rebuckled it around both thigh and wrist, securing the makeshift plug.
Then, Andrew ran like hell to the stables where there was a phone.
Chapter Eighteen
After the funeral, Melanie had taken long walks through the New Hampshire countryside trying to sort things out, trying to cope with the knowledge that someone other than her father was her father — a man without a name, a name she sought desperately.
She spent hours in the cottage looking for it; she searched the attic, every room and closet, and she rummaged through boxes, trunks, suitcases, and drawers.
There had to be something, she thought — another letter, or a note, or a document — something that would provide a clue to the man’s identity and help her find him. Indeed, her mother’s death had made Melanie all the more aware of her own age. She was barely, but undeniably, on the wrong side of forty — bored with her work, afraid of emotional involvement, confused by her lack of direction, and she hoped that a relationship with her real father, getting to know what he was like, might give her a better understanding of herself and, perhaps, might also help explain her unstable relationships with men.
But Melanie’s obsessive search, and the various memorabilia it had unearthed, only drained and frustrated her. The name wasn’t there to be found.
The only other link to the past was in plain sight in her mother’s bedroom. Melanie was standing in the doorway looking at the desk by the window, imagining Sarah — young, vivacious, “glad to be alive”— sitting there writing the letter, when she saw the WWII photograph. She correctly assumed that the attractive man, possessively hugging her mother’s waist, was her real father, and she sat at the dresser studying his face. Her initial excitement gave way to a strange hesitancy. A few uneasy moments passed before she overcame it and stole a sideways glance at the mirror. Then, looking straight into it, she began comparing her face to his. Slowly, tentatively, she brought her hands to her forehead and ran the tips of her fingers over her expressively arched brows, across the bridge of her nose, down along the sides of it, then, tracing the upward cant of her eyes to the delicately emerging lines at the corners, moved out onto her pronounced cheekbones and into the hollows beyond, almost as if examining each feature to prove that what she saw in the picture, and in the mirror, was actually there. Indeed, the resemblance was strong and undeniable. The planes of her face were unquestionably his.
Though satisfying, the discovery only fueled her desire to know more, which made her angry. Angry at her mother. Angry that she hadn’t confided in her. Angry that she couldn’t! Angry at being denied the conversation that would have answered her questions. And finally, angry at herself on remembering the times her mother called wanting to chat, and she was too busy or uninterested and put her off; the times her mother urged her to come home for the weekend, and she had chosen to remain in the city. Maybe one of those times, she thought, maybe all of them, her mother had been searching for a way to utter that first sentence, after which the dam would have burst, and the rest would have come in a flood of unshared memories.
Melanie stared at her face in the stained mirror, watching her anger turn to regret. She removed the photograph from the frame and put it in her purse, along with the letter and envelope.
She spent the rest of the weekend in Dunbarton and, on Monday, took the afternoon train to Penn Station. It was 10:47 P.M. when she got out of a cab in front of her building on Gramercy Park in New York City. The glow of streetlights crept around the edges of the trees, and sent shadows from the cast-iron fence stretching across the pavement. A cold, blustery wind was blowing, as it was the morning she left, and she found the continuity reassuring. She put a hip into the taxi’s door to close it, and hurried toward her apartment, still coping with the emotional upheaval caused by her mother’s death and incredible letter.
She was physically and emotionally exhausted when she entered her loft. The air had a chill, and the windows were rattling in their frames. She flipped on the lights, dropped her suitcase to the floor, and locked the two deadbolts, affixing the safety chain automatically. The circular stair to the sleeping balcony seemed endless. She tossed her down-filled coat on the bed, kicked off her boots, and crossed toward the bathroom to shower.