Christmas Bliss (12 page)

My stomach growled. I’d had no dinner and no breakfast, only a cup of weak, lukewarm coffee on the early-morning flight.

“Get you something?” the woman asked, her pen poised over an order blank of some kind.

“Could I please have a large coffee—and a muffin?”

She nodded, got to her feet, and poured me a cardboard cup of coffee. While I poured two pods of artificial creamer and two packets of sugar into my cup, she took a waxed paper envelope and wrapped it around a muffin and handed it to me. “Six dollars,” she said.

I cradled the steaming cup of coffee between both hands, held it up to my nose and inhaled, letting the rich warmth wash over me. I sipped, and was rewarded with a scalded tongue.

The clerk went back to her order forms, glancing up at me occasionally as I stood and nibbled at my breakfast. The muffin was sawdust dry, with no discernible flavor, and the coffee was strong enough to strip paint, but I didn’t care. For the moment, I was warm and semi-dry and safe.

“Anything else?” the woman asked after ten minutes had passed.

“Uh, maybe a newspaper?” I spied a stack of tabloid newspapers on a wire rack near the door and grabbed the top one.

SERIAL SLASHER STALKS CITY
, screamed a boldfaced black headline on the front page of the
New York Post
.

I was handing her the money when Daniel rushed in and I threw myself into his arms.

*   *   *

After he’d wrapped me in his old navy pea coat and his own suede gloves and hustled me into the cab he’d left waiting at the curb outside, Daniel hugged me close to his chest.

“You’re crazy, you know that?” He stroked my damp hair. “Flying all this way without even telling me?”

I pulled away and looked into his eyes, which were red-rimmed and set with dark circles. “I had to come. You sounded so bad last night, and lonely. And I missed you so much. I couldn’t stand the thought of you sick and alone up here. I wanted to surprise you. Are you mad at me?”

He laughed hoarsely, which set off a short fit of coughing. “At you? Never. I just hate what you’ve been through. When I think what could have happened to you…”

I shuddered and tucked myself under his arm. “But nothing did. I’m fine. Just cold and wet.”

He looked down at my red sweater and my jeans and frowned. “I know you said the driver took off with your coat, but what about your luggage? Don’t tell me he took that too…”

“Thank God, no. The airline seems to have misplaced my suitcase. I filled out a form, and they said it was probably on the next flight, and they promised to deliver it to me this afternoon.”

“Let’s hope they find it,” Daniel said. He gestured out the cab window. “We’re supposed to get maybe six inches of snow by tonight. We’ll have to get you a coat before you freeze to death.”

He gave me a wolfish smile. “Unless you plan to stay holed up in the apartment with me, night and day.”

I gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek. “You’re sick, remember? I came up here to make sure you’re taking good care of yourself.”

He kissed me back, not so chastely. “I’m feeling better already, now that you’re here. And I’ve got a great idea of how you can take care of me.”

We settled back into our seats, and Daniel pointed out the neighborhoods we were passing through—all of which were a huge improvement over the one he’d rescued me from.

“How far away is Rockefeller Center?” I asked. “The big Christmas tree—that’s the first thing I want to see. And ice skating. Can you take me ice skating there? I know it’s corny, but I’d love to see the Rockettes. Also, Cookie says we’ve got to walk down Fifth Avenue so I can see all the Christmas windows. And I’ve got to see a Broadway show. A musical, I don’t care which one. And I want to eat roasted chestnuts…”

“Slow down,” Daniel said. “That’s a lot of stuff. How many days are you going to stay?”

“Just till Friday,” I said. “I know I shouldn’t have come, not with everything else going on, but this might be the only chance I get to see New York at Christmas.”

“I’m glad you came. I just wish I had the whole week to do all that stuff with you.”

“Never mind,” I said, sighing. “You’re sick. I can’t drag you around doing all my silly touristy stuff. We’re going to go back to your place and put you right to bed.”

He raised one eyebrow. “Now you’re talking.”

Chapter 13

BeBe

Monday morning, Harry astonished me by emerging from our bedroom in a pair of sharply pressed gray slacks, a pale blue dress shirt, a red-and-blue-striped rep tie—and yes—wait for it—a navy blazer.

My eyes goggled. The piece of buttered toast I’d been about to nibble on fell onto my plate.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Harry said. He went to the coffeepot and filled his chrome travel mug. “You’ve seen me in a coat and tie before.”

“What are you up to?”

“I told you last night, I’m getting a real job.”

“Yes, some time in the future, in an abstract sense,” I said. “After the baby comes, you meant.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t want to say anything before, just in case it didn’t work out, but I’m starting today.”

I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the sight of Harry dressed like a banker, right down to a pair of polished black loafers. “Starting what today?”

“My job. I’m a seafood broker,” he said patiently. “For Joey Catalano.”

J. Catalano and Sons Seafood is the oldest seafood wholesale market in Savannah. It had been around so long that my great-grandmother had bought seafood from Joe Catalano Senior’s grandfather. I could remember accompanying my mother as a little girl to the Catalano Market, downtown on Bull Street, with its huge neon sign of a cat pawing at a fish suspended from a fishing pole. My strongest memory was of a six-year-old me, staring with a mixture of horror and fascination at the displays of whole fish mounded on piles of crushed ice behind the glass display cases.

“I wish you wouldn’t do this,” I said with a sigh.

He bent down and dropped a kiss on the top of my head, and I could smell an unfamiliar aftershave. “What? Wear a tie? I thought all you Country Day girls liked preppy dudes in coats and ties.”

I reached up and grabbed the end of said tie, and tugged until his cheek was right next to mine. “Not this girl,” I said sharply. “I’ve had preppy, remember? I like you just the way I found you—unshaven, grungy, in a ball cap and beat-up jeans and T-shirt.”

Harry eased down onto the chair next to mine. “And smelling like a bait bucket—like you said I did last night?”

“Last night I might have been emotionally overwrought,” I admitted. “But I never, ever meant that you should give up fishing just because we’re having this baby. Fishing isn’t just what you do, Harry, it’s who you are.”

“Was,” he said, helping himself to the piece of toast I’d abandoned. He chewed slowly. “Starting today, I’m a seafood broker. Steady paycheck, Monday to Friday, nine to five.”

“Next thing I know, you’ll be driving a Mercedes and taking up golf,” I said glumly. “You’ll probably have an affair with your secretary too.”

He grinned and headed for the door. “Never happen. And you know why? My truck is paid for, I suck at golf, and you’ll be happy to know we don’t
have
secretaries at J. Catalano and Sons. What we do have is Joey’s mom, Antoinette—who lends new meaning to the term ‘fishwife.’”

“And?” I lifted one eyebrow.

“And I’m hopelessly in love with the mother of my child, and just a little bit afraid of what she might do if she ever thought I was messing around on the side, not that I would.”

“Good answer,” I said. “What would you like for dinner tonight?”

He stuck his head back around the kitchen door. “Anything at all. As long as it’s not fish.”

*   *   *

As soon as Harry was gone, I headed into town to see Weezie’s uncle.

James Foley listened carefully to the tale of my crazy mixed-up marriage mess, his hands folded on his desk, his kind blue eyes twinkling out at me from behind his thick-rimmed glasses, and I knew somehow he would make things right.

James had that effect on people. Maybe it was because he’d been a priest for so many years before resigning from his order and returning home, to Savannah, to practice law. He’d probably heard much worse stories than mine from his side of the confession booth.

He took some notes in that kind of careful handwriting the nuns instilled in parochial school children, then looked up at me.

“The first thing we’ll do is check with the clerk’s office to see if your divorce decree was ever issued. Maybe you’re right, maybe Richard Hodges did hire another lawyer. Or maybe the decree just never got mailed out. Stranger things have happened.”

He half stood from his desk. “Janet?”

A moment later, his longtime secretary popped her head in the door.

“Feel like taking a walk?”

She shook her head. “Still haven’t finished your Christmas shopping?”

James laughed. “Don’t start. No, I haven’t finished yet. Could you go over to the courthouse and check in the clerk’s office for a divorce decree under these names?”

“Certified copy of the decree if I find it?” she asked.

“Please.” He hesitated. “As long as you’re out…”

“Jonathan has been hinting about wanting the new Nathaniel Philbrick book about Bunker Hill. I’ll stop by Shaver’s and get them to gift-wrap a copy. And I saw some really unusual estate jewelry in the window at Levy’s that might be nice for Weezie.”

“The courthouse is job one,” James said. “Call me and let me know what you find. After that?” He reached in the top drawer of his desk and rifled through some papers.

“I already have your Amex card if that’s what you’re looking for,” Janet told him.

*   *   *

The Chatham County courthouse was only a ten-minute walk from James Foley’s office. We sat and chatted for a while, discussing the efforts of his partner, Jonathan, to make him spruce up the house they shared on Washington Avenue.

He was still grousing about having to get rid of thirty-year-old curtains when the phone on his desk rang. He looked at the read-out screen. “That’s Janet.”

He punched a button to put the phone on speaker. “What’s the word?”

“I’m afraid it’s not good,” Janet said. “There’s no divorce decree on file. I did find the initial filing, but since it had gone five years without being processed, the case was dismissed.”

James winced. “I was afraid of that. Okay, thanks.”

I felt sick. I gripped the arms of the chair I was sitting in and willed myself not to throw up.

James, alarmed, jumped up and went into the other room, rushing back with a bottle of water and a wad of paper towels.

I took a small sip of water and waited.

“I’m all right,” I said when I could finally trust myself to speak again. “Now what?”

“We get you a divorce,” James said.

“And how do we do that? Like, yesterday?”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the power to practice retroactive law, BeBe. But it shouldn’t be too complicated. We file our own divorce decree. Do you have an address for Richard?”

“God, no! The last I heard, he was still locked up in prison.”

“You don’t happen to know which prison?”

“Not really.”

He made another note, then swiveled his chair and started typing on his computer. “I’m checking the Department of Corrections database. If he’s still a guest of the state, that’ll tell us exactly where he is.”

“Behind bars, I hope,” I muttered.

“Hmmm.” James looked over at me. “Paroled. Twenty-two months ago.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. Richard wasn’t violent. But the thought of him out of prison, living anywhere within a hundred miles of me, made me feel queasy all over again.

“Don’t panic,” James said gently. “We’ll track him down, and we’ll file for divorce ourselves.”

“What if we can’t find him?” I asked.

“We file an affidavit with the court stating that. We advertise for two consecutive months, and then your divorce is final.”

“Advertise?” I cried. “You mean, like, in the newspaper?”

“In the legal ads. In very tiny print. Nobody except lawyers reads that.”

“Are you kidding?
Everybody
I know reads the legal ads. Who’s getting divorced, who’s bankrupt or had their house foreclosed? It’s the best-read part of the Savannah paper.”

James had gone back to typing.

“We subscribe to a couple of databases. I’ll look to see if there’s a recent address for Richard Hodges. You don’t have his social security number, do you?”

“No,” I said dully.

“Date of birth?”

I closed my eyes and managed to conjure up a repressed memory. Richard, reading his horoscope aloud from the morning paper.

“He was a Scorpio,” I said, scowling. “His birthday was October 31. We actually met at a Halloween party. So his date of birth is October 31, 1970.”

“Makes sense. Scorpios are secret keepers. And there’s supposedly something sexual about that scorpion tail,” James said.

“You’re into astrology?” I asked.

James blushed slightly. “Silly, isn’t it?”

He went back to reading his computer screen. “Hodges is a pretty common name,” James said. “Does he have any family locally? Maybe they’ve heard from him.”

“His parents are both dead. He has a sister, but they weren’t very close.”

He looked over the top of the computer at me. “Her name?”

“Cindy. Cynthia. Patterson was her married name, but I heard she got divorced, so maybe she went back to calling herself Hodges.”

“This is all helpful,” James said. “Janet is a whiz with the computer. I’ll put her onto tracking Richard Hodges down when she gets back to the office.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I know I’ve already said it, but we have just got to get this settled. I can’t stand the idea that I’m still married to that vermin. It makes me physically ill.”

James nodded solemnly. He started to say something, then pressed his lips together.

“What?” I asked, leaning forward. “What were you going to say?”

“I was just wondering when the baby is due.”

“Not for another four weeks. Why do you ask?”