Page 3 of No Safe Place

“I, um, have to take this,” she said, quickly lifting up her phone and heading for the door.

Take that, Kimberly Peckerhead, Olivia thought, smiling to herself in the cold of the empty parking lot outside. While you’re busy being a jerk to my friend, I’m just going to have to go ahead and, uh, flirt with your hottie boyfriend a little, okay? Yeah. Thanks.

Guess who I’m talking to? she texted Naomi.

Waiting for a reply, she turned as she actually heard the soft click of the traffic light on Route 4 a couple of hundred feet to her left. She smiled at the red light as she thought about what Professor Riboni had said that very day about writing skills being so much about being a good observer.

She turned and looked off in the dark. The first structure her eyes hit on was a closed gas station down the street. The one light of its rain shed revealed a small, squared off, lonely building with a glass door. With the dark slabs of its pumps and its worn strip of concrete, it looked...boring.

The next business down the road on the right was a coffee shop and in the parking lot light, you could see flowers along the path in front of it. They were black-eyed Susans that had died in the autumn night cold, she noticed.

In the cold of the autumn night, the dead black-eyed Susans looked... Olivia thought.

Like a swarm of spiders? she thought squinting. Or no...flying spiders? No, shit, that really sucked.

“Needs work,” she mumbled.

It happened as she was still standing there waiting to hear back from Naomi. When Olivia glanced over at the traffic light again, she saw there was a car stopped underneath it. Not a car actually. An SUV. A huge one. Was it a Cadillac Escalade?

Then her mouth dropped open when she saw the shining silver hood ornament and looked down and saw the New York plates.

Watching the huge Rolls-Royce make the left turn into the college onto Lawton Road where all the top faculty lived, Olivia suddenly remembered something with a click, like the click of the traffic light.

“Wait,” she said as she watched the lights of the SUV disappear up Lawton.

“Wait just one tiny little second,” she said.

4

It was 11:24 on the dashboard clock of the armored Rolls-Royce Cullinan when it made the final turn into the college.

Burrowed down deep in the handsewn Italian Saffiano leather of the second row of the $350,000 SUV, Frank Stone sat stiffly, staring at nothing as he slowly tapped the edge of his iPhone against his knee with a metronome regularity.

A soft jolt in the upslope of the road made him glance forward at his two bodyguards in the front seat. They were very large men and they were sitting as stiffly as he was. Completely silent in their dark suits, they could have been pallbearers driving a coffin to a graveyard.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, Frank thought as he crossed his spit-shined Prada Derbys on the Rolls’ jewel-box velvet floor mat. Everything had been going great.

He’d been with his new wife at the Flatiron Building in Manhattan attending a UNICEF charity gala event she’d been going nuts about for a month. It was a fashion thing with so many celebrities he’d lost count. That Cajun “bam” chef guy was actually catering it, and the Savannah lady from morning TV was the MC.

And there they were in their element, he and his knockout of a bride among all the beautiful New York people, schmoozing to beat the band. He had little interest in the sub-billionaire-level fashion or celebrities, but his wife was on cloud nine, and the champagne was incredible and most of the women were like his wife, young and hot and hardly wearing anything at all.

Of course, that was when the word had to come down. They had to bail immediately, and his wife was so pissed she couldn’t speak. Not a word on the hour-and-a-half-hour ride back to Pound Ridge in Westchester County where he’d just dropped her off back at the estate. Not one.

Her sparkling Cinderella night had been squashed like a rotting pumpkin and they both knew who was getting all the blame. And it wasn’t her Chihuahua, Brad.

She wouldn’t be talking to him for how long? Frank wondered. A week? Two?

“Victoria’s Secret models,” he mumbled to himself as he shook his head.

“We’re coming up on it here on the right now, sir,” said Shaw from the seat in front of him.

Frank sat up as the Cullinan crested the hill. Beckford College’s elaborate sports fields began to pass by on the left, and on the right were small neat houses. It really was a catalog picture-perfect-looking school, wasn’t it? No wonder so many of the überwealthy sent their kids here. Well, the dumber ones, anyway, he thought.

Ahead at the end of the lane of houses, he could see a pair of wrought iron gates already swinging inward.

“Where do you want us after we drop you off, sir?” Shaw said from behind the wheel as they swung in. “Out here on the street?”

Frank wiped his sweating palms on the legs of his Dolce & Gabbana tuxedo slacks as he glanced at the intense eyes staring back at him in the rearview mirror.

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