“Let’s not worry about that,” he said with a smile. “Can I get you another drink?”
“No. No, thanks. Just please tell them to come soon. Someone’s life could be in danger.”
I let my head rest, heavy on my hand, my eyelids almost closing as he went back to the front desk, and I heard the sound of a phone receiver being lifted, and the beep-beep-beep-beep . . . beep-beep-beep of a number being dialed. It sounded like a long one. Maybe the Norwegian number for 999 was different? Or perhaps he was calling the local station.
It rang. Someone at the other end picked up and there was a brief exchange. Through the haze of exhaustion I heard Erik saying something in Norwegian out of which I could only pick the word hotel . . . then a pause and then another burst of Norwegian. Then I heard my own name, given twice, and then Anne’s.
“Ja, din kone, Anne,” Erik said, as if the person on the other end had not heard correctly, or had not believed what he’d heard. Then more in Norwegian, and then a laugh, and finally. “Takk, farvel, Richard.”
My head jerked up from my supporting hand, and every part of me went suddenly cold and still.
I looked out to the ships in the bay, to the Aurora, its lights disappearing in the far, far distance. And . . . was it my imagination? It looked as if the ship had stopped.
I sat for a moment longer, watching its lights, trying to measure them against the landmarks of the bay, and at last I was almost sure. The Aurora was no longer moving west up the fjord. It was turning around. It was coming back.
Erik had hung up, and was dialing another number now.
“Politiet, takk,” he said as someone answered.
For a moment I couldn’t move, frozen with the realization of what I’d done. I hadn’t believed Carrie’s assertions about Richard’s web of influence, not really. I’d dismissed them as the paranoia of a woman too beaten down to believe in the possibility of escape. But now . . . now those fears seemed all too real.
I set the coffee cup gently down on the table, let the red blanket fall to the floor, and, very quietly, I opened the terrace door and slipped outside, into the night.
- CHAPTER 34 -
I ran, up through the winding streets of the little town, my breath tearing in my chest, stones cutting into my bare feet and making me wince with pain. The streets petered out, and the streetlights began to disappear, but I ran on in the dark and the cold, stumbling through invisible puddles and over wet grass and graveled paths, until my feet grew too numb for me to even feel the cuts and the stones.
Even then I kept going—desperate to put as many miles as possible between myself and Richard Bullmer. I knew that I could not keep this up, that at some point I was going to have to give in—but my only hope was to keep going as long as possible, until I found myself some kind of shelter.
Finally, I could not run anymore. I let myself drop back to a kind of gasping, limping jog, and then as the lights of the village grew smaller in the distance, I slowed to a walk, a painful, stumbling walk, along a winding dark road that twisted into the darkness, climbing up the side of the fjord. Every few hundred yards I looked back over my shoulder, down into the valley, to the shrinking speckle of lights of the little portside town, and to the dark slick of the fjord waters, where the lights of the Aurora were coming closer. They were unmistakable now. I could see the ship clearly, and I could see, too, light beginning to tinge the sky above me.
Dawn must be coming already—God, what day did that make it? Monday?
But something seemed wrong, and after a few minutes I realized what it was. The lights were not to the east but to the north. What I could see was not dawn but the eerie green and gold streaks of the northern lights.
The realization made me laugh—a bitter, mirthless choke that sounded shockingly loud in the still night air. What was it Richard had said? Everyone should see the northern lights before they died. Well, now I had. But it just didn’t seem that important anymore.
I had stopped for a moment, watching the shifting glory of the aurora borealis, but now at the thought of Richard I began walking again. With each step, I remembered Carrie’s frantic exhortations to get running and get out—her hysterical assertions about the reach of Richard’s influence.
It didn’t seem so hysterical now.