Half Past Mourning (7 page)

A woman with wounds that pierced her soul, Nina pushed herself out of the car and into the house. Not thinking, she closed the drapes without turning on the lights.

Mechanically she found the torn sheet of paper in the coffee table drawer and carried it to the telephone shelf. By the glow of the nightlight she read the number. The rotary turned under her shaking fingers.

She waited, counting the rings. One, two, three—on the fourth one he answered.

Nina could barely muster voice enough to speak in a flat monotone. “Peter, there’s no point in looking for Danny Wilson. I don’t know where he is, but I know what happened. Better to let it alone. Thanks for trying.”

The receiver dropped from her trembling hands, and the room, black and silent, closed around her.

Chapter 5

Her mind still fogged by Tinker’s revelations, Nina turned from the telephone. Numb, as if she’d taken a physical blow, guarding against the pain that would soon break through, she wrapped her arms around herself and crept across the room. Each step was an effort. Her legs weighed more than she could lift, and every move drained her. She might have been wading against an icy current as she made her way in slow motion to the armchair beside the coffee table. Sapped from the effort, she crumpled in the chair, drawing her knees to her chest and huddling in misery. Her focus narrowed, the room fading into a mass of formless shadows, till the glimmer of the nightlight was all she saw.

Random cobweb thoughts too vague and undirected to make sense drifted through her head and vanished into nothing. How long she sat, hunched in the chair, unable to feel anything, she didn’t know. A dim realization reached her at last. A fierce pounding rattled the door. A voice, a man’s voice, called her name.

“Nina! Nina, are you in there? Nina, open the door!”

As though sleepwalking, she pulled herself out of the chair. Too dazed to speak, she stumbled to the door and opened it.

“Nina, for God’s sake, what happened? Why are you sitting in the dark?” Peter fumbled for the switch by the door and turned on the lights. “What’s going on, Nina? What did you find out?”

She couldn’t reply but turned away, heading for the sanctuary of her chair. Strong arms caught her, held her, and in a second she was drawn against the rough fibers of Peter’s sweater. Wrapped in his arms, reality sinking in, she couldn’t block the pain any longer. The absence of feeling that had protected her was swept away by his touch, and Nina stood trembling in Peter’s embrace.

The ugly thing she’d refused to acknowledge welled up. She couldn’t hide from Tinker’s words any longer. Feeling, pain, anguish came in a tumultuous landslide. Hard, dry sobs wrenched her until she thought something inside would tear apart.
Deceit
, her mind screamed.
Treachery
, her heart answered. But she couldn’t say the words. She could only shudder with waves of agony as her world crashed before a flood of grief and despair.

“Nina, tell me.” Peter’s insistent words penetrated. His solid grasp held her to him, a warm, secure barrier against the storm that overwhelmed her. “Nina, you’ve got to tell me what happened. Was it Danny? Did you hear from him? Talk to me, sweetheart.”

Nina drew a shaky breath. “Peter...” She felt the first tears flow down her cheeks. “Peter, I’ve been wrong, all along. I’ve been living in a dream.” She pulled herself from his arms and turned away. “I’ve been the biggest fool…the biggest fool that ever was.” The tears wouldn’t stop. They coursed down her cheeks, and she buried her face in her hands, too humiliated to look at Peter.

His hand was gentle on her shoulder. “I doubt that, sweetheart.” His grasp was firm but caring as he raised her face, and she found herself looking into his steady grey eyes. “Can you tell me what’s happened?”

She shook her head. “There’s no reason to look for Danny. He doesn’t want to be found. And”—pain made her voice unsteady—“and I don’t think I could face him if I did find him.”

Peter didn’t move away. He continued to regard her with an unwavering look, head tilted, tone unconvinced. “How do you know, Nina? He talked to you? Called? Wrote a letter after all this time?”

She tried to turn away again, but something in Peter’s stance, his immovable form, made her reach out to him. “Do I really have to talk about it? Can’t we just let it go?”

“If two years of hopes have crashed down around you, don’t you think you need to talk to somebody, Nina? I’m here and at least a little involved, but if you’d rather have someone else, I understand. Want to call your uncle? A girlfriend, maybe?”

Uncle Eldon! I’ll have to tell him, let him know Tinker’s coming to see him. He loves Danny like a son; he’ll have to be prepared. But I can’t face him now.
Recognizing she couldn’t keep the new information to herself, Nina straightened her shoulders and looked up at Peter. “I’ll tell Uncle Eldon later. He’ll have to know about this, but not tonight.” She wiped at her teary eyes, pushed damp curls from her cheeks, and gestured at the large, leather chair. “Sit down and give me a minute, will you? I’m an awful mess. We’ll talk in a little while, but let me put myself back together first.”

A washcloth and hairbrush couldn’t remove all trace of the upheaval in her world, but after a few repairs Nina felt better prepared to bring Peter current with the situation. She took a moment to change from the pants and shirt she’d worn earlier to a warmer, less confining quilted robe. The red-and-white gingham gave color to her pale cheeks and dissipated some of the chill that clutched her.

She saw Peter had found the bottle of brandy left from her Christmas baking and poured two small glasses. He pressed one into her hand when she returned to the living room.

“I thought you could use this.” A slight smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “Strictly medicinal, of course.”

She sipped, let the fiery contents of the glass warm the ice that had formed around her heart, and nodded. “It helps.” She took refuge in her comforting chair and swallowed another sip of brandy.

He stayed near, patience and concern drawing his angular brows together. He turned the glass, warming the brandy between his hands, taking a swallow, waiting with unhurried ease. Nina tried to arrange her thoughts, struggled to find words, but gave up. The only way to tell it was to put the facts as she now knew them before Peter. Then he’d know as much as she did and realize the search for Danny was pointless.

“Danny left me. He planned it all along. He told a friend he wanted to get away from Marigold and her controlling ways, and he was using the wedding as a cover to do it.” She took another swallow of brandy to get her through the last part. “And he had other girls, lots of girls. The friend knew about them.” The admission cost her, pride and faith crumbling as she remembered Tinker’s guileless disclosure. “I wasn’t the one-and-only for him. Not the way he was for me.”

Peter put his glass on the table, then drew the larger chair closer to sit beside Nina and put his hand over hers. “All this came from a friend, someone who’s known all along and didn’t tell you? Why tell you now? Why not two years ago?”

“Tinker’s been away. He didn’t know Danny went through with the wedding.” Nina tucked her feet up under her and spread the skirt of her robe over them. “He was just a kid, a kid with a case of hero worship for Danny, and things were really hard for him.” She found it easy to tell Peter about the kid and his miserable home life, his determination to escape, and his sudden return, at least easier than talking about Danny and his deception. “So when he called tonight, I was excited to see him. Tinker was a great kid, and he did the best he could with a rotten situation. When he said Danny planned to run out, I had to believe him. He came in all innocence to see how I was doing, not realizing that Danny and I really had married.”

Peter nodded, but a skeptical gleam lingered in his eyes. “And then he told you that Danny had other girls, too?”

“After I went off to college, Tinker said. Then I came home and started teaching. Sometimes Danny went to car events when I couldn’t go because of school things. Girls hang around the drivers at those places, attracted to the guys and their cars, hoping for a ride. I can see how it would happen. Most of the time it would just be a one-night thing, but sometimes…sometimes not.”

“And you believe everything this boy, Tinker, said? Take it at face value?” Peter’s silence urged her to answer. Nina shut her eyes, tried not to believe, but the ugly facts wouldn’t go away.

“I think I have to,” she said at last. “I can’t see any other way. Too much of what Tinker said rings true. Danny did struggle against Marigold. He resented the strings she kept on him, though in fairness I have to say she’d come so close to losing him a couple of times that I couldn’t blame her. He was all she had, her only child, and Danny’s dad died while Danny was just a little boy. Marigold devoted herself to Danny, and keeping him well was the focus of her life. He lived with her restrictions because he had to, but he didn’t like doing so. No one would.”

Peter got up from his chair and began to pace the small living room. “Nina, I want to go on with the search for Danny Wilson. I think there’s more to this story than you’ve seen and more than one interpretation to Tinker’s hearsay. You said Tinker had a wretched life but Danny was his hero. He’d wanted to take off before, but Danny encouraged him to stick it out till the boy finished school. That’s an act of compassion and understanding. It’s a caring act, helping the boy to make the best of a bad deal. It doesn’t square with somebody who’d use a girl’s love as a distraction for his own vanishing act. Of course Danny would want his freedom, but at your expense?” He leaned over her chair with concern darkening his eyes. “Tinker says Danny had other girls. Did he
know
Danny had girls, or did he just hear somebody say it? Did stories get started because Danny bought a girl a soda or let her ride in the car? Nina, are you taking gossip for gospel? Did Danny engineer his own disappearance, or was it arranged for him? You still don’t know, sweetheart, and I think you’ll only be able to go on with your life when you’ve exhausted every means of finding answers to those questions.”

Trying to see things from an objective viewpoint, Nina weighed his words. “No, I think there were girls, Peter. I was away at school for long stretches when I could get home only for holidays, and Marigold was always hinting that Danny could do better than a country schoolteacher’s orphan daughter. She arranged for him to meet other girls, anyway. I know that he had to take some of her friends’ daughters out from time to time just to keep peace at home. Maybe those dates weren’t always at Marigold’s instigation.”

“But you don’t know that,” he reminded her. “And even if all Tinker said is straight, you still can’t account for the fact that you and Danny did get married. No pretense, no sham, no lie in that, is there? Do you want to know the status of that marriage or not?” Peter stepped back, his arms folded across his chest, waiting.

Nina didn’t answer directly. “My parents had such an incredible marriage,” she told him. “Losing them both at the same time was awful, but in a way it was only right. I can’t imagine either of them going on without the other. That’s the kind of marriage I dreamed of, the kind I thought I’d have with Danny. Where the commitment was total, and each one was living half the life of the other. Dad never left the house without kissing Mom. Every day he’d tell her she was the reason the sun came up, that she was beautiful, and his day only started when he got home to her. I thought all marriages were like that and that mine would be, too.” She reached across the table to the corner shelf and took down a picture. Her parents looked back at her from the silver frame. “Dad never looked at another woman. They had arguments, of course, and Mom had a pretty short fuse, sometimes, but nobody ever doubted they were married for life.” She wiped back a lingering tear. “Somehow I don’t think Danny and I would have had the same kind of marriage they did.” The doubts she’d never acknowledged surfaced. “I think he did see other girls, and I don’t think marriage would have changed him.”

Peter crossed the room and sat on the arm of her chair. His warm hand engulfed hers. “If that’s the kind of man Danny was, a man who couldn’t keep his commitment to you, he would have broken your heart.”

“He’s done that,” she answered, limp from the warring conflict inside her.

“So do we go forward with the search, Nina? Do we try to find Danny Wilson and resolve the question? Do you want to know if he planned to abandon you? And if you find that Danny did leave you at the church on purpose two years ago, what do you want to do about it?”

“What I want to do depends on what actually happened two years ago.” Empty of emotion, too worn from the events of the day to go on, Nina put her glass and the picture of her parents down and breathed a weary sigh. “You’re right, I still don’t know the truth. I don’t know what to do. Even with what Tinker told me tonight, the situation isn’t any clearer. I guess I go on searching.”

Peter’s grip on her shoulder tightened. “I think that’s the thing to do, Nina. Find out what really did happen to Danny. And I have a place to start in two or three weeks.”

Nina could think of only one thing that would give Peter a place to start—the car. “Something about the T-Bird? You found something else?”

“About the car, yes, but I didn’t find anything else. Not like the knife or Danny’s license. I got in touch with the woman I bought the car from in Barlow. Betty Andrews is a very nice lady who’s busy with her daughter’s wedding plans. She remembers her husband buying the car because they had some strong words about the practical aspects of buying a car she couldn’t drive. She says she has his letters from when he was in Saudi, as well. As soon as the bride and groom are safely on their way, Mrs. Andrews will get those letters out and see if they have information we can use. She can’t do it before that. She says the house is in enough turmoil with the wedding. So I can see her in about three weeks. It’s not much, but it’s some kind of starting place, Nina.”