Looking for Laura, page 7
“If I was going to fall apart over all of this, I would have fallen apart when I found the letters.”
“I don’t want you snapping in my house,” he explained. “I don’t want you blubbering and wailing and acting like a ninny.”
“Oh, is that all?” So kind of him to care about her emotional well-being. “I promise I won’t act like a ninny.”
He opened his mouth and then shut it. He was tactful enough not to say what he was thinking.
At least he hadn’t ordered her to leave. She crossed to the kitchen. “Rosie, honey, Daddy’s friend and I are going to go look at something on his computer. We’ll be—” She glanced questioningly at Todd.
Resigned, he turned toward the kitchen. “Upstairs, first door on the right,” he called in to Rosie, then headed for the stairs without waiting for Sally.
She easily caught up to him on the narrow stairway. At the top was a hall with several doors opening off it. One must lead to his bedroom, she guessed, and another to a bathroom. The first door on the right opened into a study that could double as an extra bedroom. It contained a boring beige futon, another wall unit of shelves filled with disheveled rows of books and an L-shaped desk with computer equipment set up on its bland white surface. A small stack of black squares rested next to the computer. The monitor featured a screen saver that depicted a cartoon dog gnawing on the corner of the screen, swinging its head and growling ferociously while the screen image seemed to peel away from itself and into his teeth.
Rosie would have loved it.
Not bothering to offer Sally a seat, Todd dropped onto the wheeled swivel chair in front of the desk. He loaded the first diskette from the pile into the machine and booted up its contents.
A director’s chair stood in one corner of the room, and Sally dragged it over to the desk and sat beside Todd. In the bright light of his desk lamp, she could see the fatigue that creased the skin around his eyes, the stubble of beard that darkened his jaw, the twitch at the corner of his mouth, a sign of annoyance or tension or both.
“What is it?” she asked, angling her head to view the screen. A column of names and numbers appeared.
“Looks like phone numbers,” Todd said, scrolling down the monitor as he scanned the names. “No one named Laura on the list.”
“Maybe Laura was her nickname. Or the pet name he used for her.”
Todd snorted. “Did Paul ever use pet names?”
“Never.” He even called Rosie Rose most of the time. He’d complained more than once that Sally sounded more like a nickname than a real name. He’d asked why her mother couldn’t have named her Sarah, and Sally had suggested that he ask her mother himself. She knew he never would. He considered her mother several castes below him—which she was, but he hadn’t had to be so snooty about it. He’d spoken a few words to her at their wedding, but otherwise he’d pretended the woman didn’t exist.
At least her mother wasn’t a hypocrite. At least she didn’t collect florid letters from a lover and hide them inside a brown sweater.
Todd opened another file on the disk. More phone numbers. “Who are all these people?” he wondered aloud.
“Clients?”
“Doubtful. He would have kept his clients’ phone numbers with their files, not in a separate list.”
Sally skimmed the list. “There aren’t any female names on there at all,” she observed. “I’ll bet that’s his alumni list from his old prep school. He was class something-or-other.”
“Something-or-other?” Todd twisted in his chair to look at her.
“Vice president or secretary. I know he wasn’t president. It really steamed him that he wasn’t.”
“All right.” Todd pulled the diskette out of the computer and inserted another. When he loaded it, the screen filled with a blaze of color, and thumping music—drums followed by a noodly melody—emerged tinnily from the speakers flanking the monitor. “What the hell—?”
“It’s a game,” Sally guessed. “Arch-Enemies.”
“You’re kidding.” Todd gaped at the monitor as the colors exploded with kaleidoscopic effect. “What was he doing with a computer game at work?”
Sally shrugged.
Through the speakers came the sound of a man howling in the final throes of some fatal agony. Todd removed that disk and inserted another. More pounding drums and a squeaky, whiny melody.
“Mommy?” Rosie hollered up the stairs. Her footsteps merged with the drumbeats. “Mommy, are you playing DragonKeeper?”
“Is that what this is?” Todd muttered.
Sally nodded and turned in time to see Rosie enter the room. “We’re not playing it, Rosie. Daddy’s friend just wanted to see what was on this diskette.”
“I know how to play DragonKeeper.” She darted to the desk, her eyes round and glowing rapturously as an animated dragon filled the screen, exhaling flames through its nostrils. “Press control and an arrow key,” she instructed Todd. “It’ll get you to the setup.”
“I don’t want to get to the setup,” he told her.
“But it’s a cool game. Set it up, Daddy’s Friend. I’ll show you.” She didn’t wait for Todd to follow her orders, but instead scrambled onto his lap and hit the control and arrow keys herself. The dragon disappeared, replaced by a screen of writing.
Todd peered helplessly at Sally. “Get her off my lap,” he mouthed.
“She wants to play,” Sally whispered.
“I don’t want to play.”
Sighing, she reached around Rosie’s taut little tummy and hauled her onto her own lap. “No playing DragonKeeper. Daddy’s friend needs to look at some more disks.”
“But that’s a great game,” Rosie insisted. “It really is, Daddy’s Friend.”
“My name isn’t Daddy’s Friend,” Todd growled at her. “It’s Todd. Mr. Sloane.”
“Todd Mr. Sloane? That’s a silly name. You should just get rid of the mister part.” Rosie arranged herself more comfortably on Sally’s lap. Sally remembered when the little girl weighed only twenty pounds, or thirty. She weighed forty knee-crushing pounds now, but Sally still loved holding her on her lap.
Rosie handed Todd another diskette. “Try this one. I bet it’s Dark Thunder.”
He looked quizzically at her, then inserted the disk into the drive. Within three seconds, the title “Dark Thunder” filled the monitor. “How did you know that?” Todd asked, awe tempering his obvious irritation.
“These are Daddy’s games,” Rosie said. “He kept them in a little wooden box at work.”
“He did?” Sally asked.
“How did you know that?” Todd asked simultaneously.
“He tol’ me,” Rosie answered with forced patience, as if she believed she was addressing two morons. “He tol’ me he kept them hidden there. If you’re not gonna play, I’ll go back downstairs and draw some more. But it’s really not fun without colors, Mommy. You didn’t bring any crayons with you, did you?”
“I’m afraid not.” She let Rosie slide down her legs to the floor.
Todd stared after her as she scampered out of the room, then turned back to Sally. “Maybe she knows about Laura.”
“No,” Sally said sharply. She’d already imagined that possibility, and it made bile rise in her throat. As venal as Paul had been, she refused to think he would have risked letting Rosie find out about Laura. “She knows about computer games because they’re designed for immature children. Like Paul,” she added spitefully.
“I think we should ask her about Laura.”
“Absolutely not.” Sally shook her head. “I don’t want her being questioned about this disgusting situation.”
“What makes you think it’s disgusting? Maybe Laura was a classy lady.”
“Sneaking around with another woman’s husband? Real classy.”
He leaned back, and his chair went with him, hinging backward until he was nearly reclining. “Maybe I can sneak back into his office and look around some more,” he said.
“Why the hell should you care?” Sally asked, still fuming. “It’s my problem. It’s my pocketknife he gave her. It was my marriage that was a sham.”
“Maybe my friendship with him was a sham, too,” Todd said, seeming to struggle with the words. “Paul was like a brother to me, you know? We told each other everything. And he never told me this.” He swiveled in the chair and straightened. The chair back straightened with him. “He had a good reason not to tell you about Laura. He had no reason not to tell me.”
“Perhaps he didn’t trust you,” she said, knowing it was a mean thing to say but not caring. “Perhaps he thought it was none of your business.”
“Well, you found those letters, and that made it my business.”
“Mine,” she asserted. “My business. I found the letters.”
“And I’ll figure this thing out.” He pondered for a minute, then frowned. “It bugs me. I think maybe there’s a mistake, or—or maybe it was some fantasy thing. Maybe Laura doesn’t even exist.”
“The letters exist. And my knife is gone.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I’ve searched everywhere it could be—and some places it never would be. It’s nowhere.”
“Maybe he gave it to Rosie.”
“He gave a knife to his five-year-old daughter? Uh-huh.”
Todd conceded with a nod. “Okay. Maybe he lost it.”
“And maybe I’m the reincarnation of Catherine the Great.” She snorted. “It was in a letter. She wrote about the knife. She described its very vulgarity. That’s got to be the same knife I gave him. It’s got to be.”
“Okay.” His eyes met Sally’s, and for a flickering instant she thought, Tina’s right—he is cute. That notion evaporated as soon as it formed. He was just a guy, as selfish as his supposed best friend, believing he’d been wronged more than she had. There was nothing cute about him, nothing at all.
“I want the letters back,” she said.
“You’ll get them back,” he promised, pushing himself to stand. “As soon as I’m done with them, they’re all yours.”
“Whatever you find out I want to know. Because they are mine, even now. I want to know who Laura is. I want to know why Paul jeopardized our little girl’s happiness because of her.”
Again Todd opened his mouth and then shut it. He had thin, wide lips, she noticed. The kind of lips designed for slow, lazy smiles.
“Whatever you find out, I promise I won’t blame you,” she swore.
He looked dubious. “All right. Stay out of my way, though, okay? Let me handle this.”
“Of course.” Not a chance, she thought. No way was she going to stand idly by while Todd prowled through Paul’s office, discovering information already well known to Sally’s five-year-old daughter. No way was she going to let Todd steal her anguish, her quest for the truth…or her letters.
This was her disaster, not his.
Five
Officer Bronowski entered the New Day Café at his usual time, gaunt and towering in his crisp uniform. Sally shot a glance toward Tina, who was listlessly rinsing one of the stainless-steel coffee decanters. Circles rimmed her eyes, and her hair strayed from her barrettes and stuck out in weird tufts around her face. She must not have slept much last night. Either she’d been studying into the wee hours, or she’d been doing the horizontal two-step all night with Howard.
She made no move to get Officer Bronowski his daily coffee and pastry, so Sally sidled past her and faced the cop above the counter. Smiling, she said, “Good morning. What can I get you today?” as if this day were different from every other day and she had no idea what he might want.
“A cup of coffee, Mrs. Driver,” Bronowski said in his dull, guttural voice. “And I think I’ll try—is that an apple turnover?”
“Peach,” Sally told him. “They’re wonderful.”
“All right. A peach turnover.”
Still smiling, she plucked a tissue of wax paper from the box and lifted a turnover onto a plate for him. Then she filled a cup with the breakfast blend and poured in exactly the amount of cream Bronowski liked. He paid and nodded, and she nodded back, her smile refusing to quit as he crossed the room to a table near the window.
Paul had been wrong about him. He wasn’t light in the trousers. He was reserved and maybe a little awkward, but she bet he had more horsepower in his engine than anyone named Howard.
Why was she thinking about men and horsepower? she wondered.
During the first weeks after Paul’s death, she’d thought about sex constantly, about how she wasn’t getting any, how she might not get any ever again—or at least for a while—because mourning came with its own set of rules, and one of them, she was reasonably sure, was that the bereaved widow wasn’t supposed to think about sex, let alone pursue it in a productive way. But by the time a month had passed, her craving for sex had faded, and she’d recognized that it had been based more on having lost Paul than on being horny. Gradually, she’d grown accustomed to sleeping alone, waking alone, sharing her days with Rosie and then retiring to the bedroom she shared with no one.
She’d assumed that eventually, sex might seem like a reasonable option for her. Not right now, but in time, when the pain faded. Once she’d found the letters from Laura, however, she’d decided she hated men so much that doing without sex for the rest of her life seemed like a good idea.
So why was she thinking about it now? Why was she thinking about it in the context of Officer Bronowski, of all people? He was tall and gawky, with buzz-cut hair and a glum smile. Not her type.
Of course, Paul hadn’t been her type, either. Before she’d met him, her taste had run to big, sloppy, teddy bear fellows who lacked the patience to make sure they were tidy and impeccable, men who believed that expertly tailored apparel and expensive hairstyles were a waste of money. She’d liked guys who weren’t polished to a high gloss, who might be less than a hundred percent tactful, who said what they were thinking and backed up their words with actions.
Men with sexy chests.
Paul had had a sexy chest, she reminded herself—but when she closed her eyes and tried to picture it, she couldn’t. All she could see was Todd with his shirt untucked and gaping. Todd, the tall, gruff jerk who thought he and he alone could track down his best friend’s favorite pen pal.
“Tina?” Sally moved close behind her so she could speak softly. “Can you watch things for a few minutes? I want to make a phone call.”
Tina sighed melodramatically and tossed down the damp cloth she’d been using on the decanter. “I suppose.”
“What’s wrong with you? You look like you didn’t get enough sleep.”
“I didn’t.” Her voice quivered with what sounded like sublime self-pity.
“Why not?”
She sighed again, a great, gusty puff of air that seemed to originate in the soles of her feet. “Howard told me he’s planning to transfer to Dartmouth.”
“Oh.” Dartmouth was only a couple of hours away by car. Surely this wouldn’t doom their relationship. “Any chance he’ll get in?”
“I don’t know. He’s so smart. I don’t know what I’ll do if he goes to Dartmouth.”
“You could date him long distance.”
“But there are girls there. He’s going to meet them and forget all about me.”
“How can you say that? He loves you.”
“If he loved me, he wouldn’t want to transfer to Dartmouth.” Tina fingered the cloth she’d been using to wipe the decanter. Her voice was still quivery, shimmering with wretchedness. “He says his father went to Dartmouth and always wanted him to go. But he rebelled against his father and wound up at Winfield College, instead. But now he says he’s tired of being rebellious and he thinks he ought to honor his father’s wishes.”
It sounded as if Howard was a wimp, knuckling under to his father when he ought to be knuckling under to Tina. Sally’s impulse was to tell Tina to forget about him, but forgetting him would be impossible. Every time she undressed, she’d have his name staring at her from her left boob.
“I’m sure you’ll work it out,” Sally said, although she was sure of no such thing. She would love to solve all Tina’s problems for her, but right now she had her own problems to deal with. “Could you watch things for just a couple of minutes?”
“Yeah, sure. Bronowski’s gonna want his refill in exactly 12.3 minutes. I’ll be ready.”
“I’ll be back by then,” Sally promised. “I’m just going to make a phone call.” She patted Tina’s shoulder, then hurried down the counter to the kitchen and through it to the closet-size office near the back door. Greta kept two file cabinets and a desk in there, everything clean to the point of sterility. Sally had been working at the café for three years before she learned that only one file cabinet contained business documents—billing records, tax records and the like. The other file cabinet contained nothing but recipes.
She entered the tiny office and bumped into the desk, which took up so much of the available space that it was nearly impossible not to bump into it. Hoisting herself up to sit on it, she reached around the computer for the phone and dialed the number of Paul’s old office. On the second ring, Patty Pleckart answered. “Patty,” she said, “this is Sally Driver.”
“Oh. Hello,” Patty said with all the enthusiasm of a corpse.
“I have a question for you.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did Paul have any clients named Laura?” Sally might not be able to snoop around in Paul’s office, but she thought Todd’s hunch that Paul had met Laura through work seemed plausible.
“Why do you ask?” Patty said, suspicion oiling her tone.
Sally had worked out a story last night, lying wide-eyed in her bed and trying to figure out how to get information Todd had been unable to dig up. Now she answered Patty’s question with well-rehearsed composure. “I just received a condolence card from someone named Laura. In her note she implied she’d known Paul in a professional capacity, and I wanted to send her a response. But the envelope got wet and her return address and last name were blurry so I can’t read them.” Did that sound as good to Patty as it had sounded to Sally at two in the morning?
