Someone to Watch Over Me Read online

  “Not a thing. Enjoy your day off. Are you planning to stay in New Jersey at your sister’s tonight?”

  Hilda nodded. “My sister said she’s had very good luck at Harrah’s lately. I thought we might go there.”

  Leigh suppressed a grin because, as far as she’d been able to tell, Hilda had absolutely no human weaknesses—except one for the nickel slot machines in Atlantic City. “We won’t be back here until late tomorrow afternoon,” Leigh said as a thought occurred to her. “I’ll have to go straight to the theater, and Mr. Manning has a dinner meeting that will last until late in the evening. There’s really no need for you to be here tomorrow night. Why don’t you spend two days with your sister, and check out some of the slot machines at the other casinos?”

  The suggestion of two consecutive days off threw the housekeeper into a total state of inner conflict that reflected itself on Hilda’s plain face and made Leigh stifle another grin. In the War Against Dirt and Disorder, Hilda Brunner was a militant, tireless general who marched into daily battle armed with a vacuum cleaner and cleaning supplies, her foreboding expression warning of an impending assault on all foreign particles. To Hilda, taking two days off in a row was tantamount to a voluntary retreat, and that was virtually unthinkable. On the other hand, if she did as Leigh suggested, she would be able to spend two full days with her sister at the nickel slot machines. She cast a glance around the immaculate bedroom that was her personal battlefield, trying to assess in advance the extent of damage likely to occur if she were absent for two entire days. “I would like to think about it.”

  “Of course,” Leigh said, struggling to keep her face straight. “Hilda,” she called as the German woman bustled toward the door.

  Hilda turned in the act of belting her brown coat around her waist. “Yes, Mrs. Manning?”

  “You’re a treasure.”

  LEIGH HAD HOPED to leave the theater by four o’clock that afternoon, but the play’s director and the writer wanted to make some minor changes in two of her scenes after watching the matinee performance, and then they argued endlessly over which changes to make, trying out first one variation, then another. As a result, it was after six when she was finally on her way.

  Patchy fog mixed with light snow slowed her progress out of the city. Leigh tried to call Logan twice on his cellular phone to tell him she was going to be late, but either he’d left his phone somewhere out of hearing or the cabin was beyond range of his cellular service. She left voice mail messages for him instead.

  By the time she reached the mountains, the snow was falling hard and fast, and the wind had picked up dramatically. Leigh’s Mercedes sedan was heavy and handled well, but the driving was treacherous, the visibility so poor that she could only see fifteen feet in front of her car. At times it was impossible to see large road signs, let alone spot the little landmarks Logan had noted on his map. Roadside restaurants and gas stations that would normally have been open at ten P.M. were closed, their parking lots deserted. Twice, she doubled back, certain she’d missed a landmark or a road. With nowhere to stop or ask for directions, Leigh had little choice except to keep driving and searching.

  When she should have been within a few miles of the cabin, she turned into an unmarked driveway with a fence across it and switched on the car’s map light to study Logan’s directions again. She was almost positive she’d missed a turnoff two miles back, the one Logan had described as being “200 feet south of a sharp curve in the road, just beyond a little red barn.” With at least six inches of snow blanketing everything, what had seemed like a little barn to her could just as easily have been a large black shed, a short silo, or a pile of frozen cows, but Leigh decided she should go back and find out.

  She put the Mercedes into gear and made a cautious U-turn. As she rounded the sharp curve she was looking for, she slowed down even more, searching for a gravel drive, but the drop-off was much too steep, the terrain far too rugged, for anyone to have put a driveway there. She’d just taken her foot off the brake and started to accelerate when a pair of headlights on high beam leapt out of the darkness behind her, rounding the curve, closing the distance with terrifying speed. On the snow-covered roads, Leigh couldn’t speed up quickly and the other driver couldn’t seem to slow down. He swerved into the left lane to avoid plowing into her from the rear, lost control, and smashed into the Mercedes just behind Leigh’s door.

  The memory of What followed was horrifyingly vivid—the explosion of air bags, the scream of tortured metal and shattering glass as the Mercedes plowed through the guardrail and began cartwheeling down the steep embankment. The car slammed against several tree trunks, then hurtled into boulders in a long series of deafening crashes that ended in one, sudden, explosive jolt as five thousand pounds of mangled steel came to a bone-jarring stop.

  Suspended from her seat belt, Leigh hung there, upside down, like a dazed bat in a cave, while light began exploding around her. Bright light. Colorful light. Yellow and orange and red. Fire!

  Stark terror sharpened her senses. She found the seat belt release, landed hard on the roof of the overturned car and, whimpering, tried to crawl through the hole that had once been the passenger window. Blood, sticky and wet, spread down her arms and legs and dripped into her eyes. Her coat was too bulky for the opening, and she was yanking it off when whatever had stopped the car’s descent suddenly gave way. Leigh heard herself screaming as the burning car pitched forward, rolled, and then seemed to fly out over thin air, before it began a downward plunge that ended in a deafening splash and a freezing deluge of icy water.

  Lying in her hospital bed with her eyes closed, Leigh relived that plunge into the water, and her heart began to race. Moments after hitting the water, the car had begun a fast nosedive for the bottom, and in a frenzy of terror, she started pounding on everything she could reach. She located a hole above her, a large one, and with her lungs bursting, she pushed through it and fought with her remaining strength to reach the surface. It seemed an eternity before a blast of frigid wind hit her face and she gulped in air.

  She tried to swim, but pain knifed through her chest with every breath, and her strokes were too feeble and uncoordinated to propel her forward more than a little bit. Leigh kept thrashing about in the freezing water, but her body was going numb, and neither her panic nor her determination could give her enough strength and coordination to swim. Her head was sliding under the surface when her flailing hand struck something hard and rough—the limb of a partially submerged fallen tree. She grabbed at it with all her might, trying to use it as a raft, until she realized that the “raft” was stationary. She pulled herself along it, hand over hand, as the water receded to her shoulders, then her waist, and finally her knees.

  Shivering and weeping with relief, she peered through the dense curtain of blowing snow, searching for the path the Mercedes would have carved through the trees after it plunged off the ridge. There was no path in sight. There was no ridge in sight either. There was only bone-numbing cold, and sharp branches that slapped and scratched her as she clawed her way up a steep embankment she couldn’t see, toward a road she wasn’t sure was there.

  Leigh had a vague recollection of finally reaching the top of the ridge and curling her body into a ball on something flat and wet, but everything after that was a total blur. Everything, except a strange, blinding light and a man—an angry man who cursed at her.

  LEIGH WAS ABRUPTLY JOLTED into the present by an insistent male voice originating from the side of her hospital bed. “Miss Kendall? Miss Kendall, I’m sorry to wake you, but we’ve been waiting to talk to you.”

  Leigh opened her eyes and gazed blankly at a man and woman who were holding thick winter jackets over their arms. The man was in his early forties, short and heavyset, with black hair and a swarthy complexion. The woman was considerably younger, slightly taller, and very pretty, with long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “I’m Detective Shrader with the New York City Police Department,” the ma