Looking for Laura (15 page)

“A mixed marriage,” Todd said. “Why not?”

“We're not getting a dog,” Sally announced sternly. “What time is it? Maybe we should go back and see if Laura Hawkes came home.”

“Does she have a pet?” Rosie asked, bobbing along between Sally and Todd, bouncing on the balls of her feet with each step. Todd decided the kid wasn't so bad after all. Given how effectively she was irritating her mother, Todd wouldn't begrudge her the boat trip or the necklace.

“We're not getting a dog,” Sally repeated through clenched teeth.

Maybe that was why Paul had cheated on her—because she wouldn't get a dog.

She was so earthy and artsy, though, Todd would have expected her to be a dog person. Or a cat person. Or a menagerie person, lots of animals, a row of bowls by the back door, half of them filled with water and the other half filled with kibble. He would have expected her to live in a house filled with that musty kitty-litter scent, and a parrot would sit on a roost in her kitchen, commenting on what she was cooking for dinner. “Bwaak! More tarragon! Bwaak! Down with tofu!”

They reached the town house on Mount Vernon Street, and Todd's leadership juices once again began to flow. Rosie might rule the itinerary, but when it came time for action, Todd was the man.

He started up the front steps, but to his great annoyance Sally and Rosie accompanied him. No more ador
ing gazes from below. They crammed themselves onto the top step with him.

“I'll do the talking,” he whispered as he rang the doorbell.

“Says who?” Sally whispered back.

“I don't want to intimidate the woman.”

“I do.”

He wished he could intimidate Sally. “I really think it'll be better if you let me do the talking.”

“Can I talk?” Rosie asked.

“No,” Sally and Todd said simultaneously.

The door opened as far as a safety chain would allow. The safety chain was brass, as shiny and yellow as the knocker on the door. The woman behind the chain was shadowy. Todd could see one suspicious eye; the door hid the rest of her face.

He rearranged his expression, losing the scowl he'd worn for Sally and attempting a benign smile. “Hi. I'm looking for Laura Hawkes.” He paused, tension creeping along his nerve endings as he waited to see if Sally was going to keep her mouth shut.

She did.

“Who are you?” the woman behind the door asked.

“I'm Todd Sloane. I'm a friend of Paul Driver's. This is Paul Driver's daughter, Rosie—” he gestured toward her “—and his wife, Sally.”

“His widow,” Sally muttered.

“His widow,” Todd corrected himself.

“Paul who?”

Surely the woman had to know the name. She'd sent a couple of dozen sentimental letters to him, after all. “Paul Driver,” he enunciated.

“He was a lawyer with Wittig, Mott, Driver and As
sociates, in Winfield, Massachusetts,” Sally supplied. “He did legal work for you.”

“Winfield? Oh my God. Paul!” The door slammed shut, then opened again, this time unfettered by the safety chain. The woman who filled the doorway was skinny, with streaked blond hair cut into an odd geometric shape. Her face was an assemblage of straight lines and sharp angles. She wore a tunic and gray stretch pants that emphasized her thinness. “Is Paul dead? How awful!”

She seemed genuinely upset. But not distraught. Not wrenched, not wretched, not mangled by the gears of tragedy. Of course, if she was Todd's Laura, she would have known about Paul's death for months and gotten past that stage of acute grief. His soul-mate lover would have wondered why she hadn't heard from him, and she would have made some inquiries and learned her lover's fate.

He just wasn't…sure. He studied the woman standing in the marble-tiled foyer of her elegant town house, as slim and sleek as a model in a cigarette ad. Her breasts would barely fill a training bra, Todd noted. Why would Paul, a man who'd lost his mind over a buxom waitress, knocked her up and felt obliged to marry her, have an affair with a woman who had no bosom at all?

For contrast, maybe.

“You are Laura Hawkes, aren't you?” he confirmed.

“Yes.”

“We were in town,” Sally explained smoothly. “We thought it would be a courtesy to meet personally with Paul's clients here in Boston to let them know.”

“That's so kind of you. Please—come in. I'm so sorry.” She turned to Sally and clasped her hand. She wore several rings, including a textured silver band
around her thumb, and her nails were polished the color of scabs. “What a terrible loss. He seemed so young.”

“He was thirty-three,” Sally told her, removing her sunglasses with her free hand and doing a creditable job of appearing sad. “He was in a car accident.”

“I'm so sorry! Oh, I just—I'm shocked. Can I get you something to drink?”

Todd decided he was glad Sally had taken over the social obligations. It gave him a chance to size Laura up. Was she Paul's sweetheart? She could be. Or she could be the world's greatest actress, slicker than an oil spill. But if she was faking it, why would she have invited them in for a drink?

His ruminations were interrupted by the sound of scrabbling claws against marble, accompanied by a staccato yipping. A small furry creature bounded into the foyer and skidded across the polished floor. “A dog!” Rosie cheered.

Actually, it looked more like a large, hairy guinea pig. Laura Hawkes reached down and scooped the animal up. Its legs continued to churn for a minute, as if it thought it was still on the floor. “Calm down, Butch,” she murmured, stroking the beast's scruff. It yipped some more.

“Mommy says I can't have a dog,” Rosie complained.

Laura and Sally exchanged a look. Understanding? Hostility? Todd couldn't interpret it from either direction.

“Would you like some juice, or tea?” she offered, still stroking the furball. “Or something hard, maybe. Jesus. Paul's dead? We could all use something hard.”

“I want something hard,” Rosie remarked. Sally rummaged in her tote bag and produced a handful of animal crackers. Todd doubted that was what she'd had in mind.
She might be only five years old, but he suspected she knew exactly what a hard drink was.

Laura pivoted on the cube-shaped heel of a pair of dangerously fashionable black shoes and started down the hall, beckoning with a jerk of her razor-sharp chin that they should follow. Todd tried to catch Sally's eye, to see if she was as baffled as he was. She might have already figured Laura Hawkes out. She might have already deciphered the dimensions of the woman's relationship with Paul. If she had, she didn't share her insights with him. She didn't even share a glance with him.

Lacking a better choice, he followed Sally and Rosie as they followed Laura. The hall was short, decorated with abstract paintings that looked vaguely obscene, and it led to a sun-filled kitchen at the rear of the town house. Laura lowered her pet to the counter, where he hovered anxiously, as if afraid to jump down to the floor from such a towering height.

The kitchen was a gourmet chef's dream: granite counters, a six-burner gas range, a refrigerator as big as the closet in the spare bedroom of his condo. Laura Hawkes was most definitely rich.

So why had she hired a small-time attorney from western Massachusetts to handle her legal business? If she could live at one of the priciest addresses in Boston, if she could get her hair coiffed by someone who clearly used the most elite drugs, why would she have used Paul as her legal representative?

Not that he was a bad lawyer. But no downtown billionaire would travel all the way to Winfield to get her will written.

“Would you like some milk?” she was asking Rosie.

“No, thanks. I'd like something hard.”

“She'll have milk,” Sally interjected.

The poor dear
, Laura mouthed, her eyes brimming with enough pity to fill an ocean. Sally pressed her lips together sternly, whether because she didn't trust Laura or because she didn't appreciate her condescending sympathy, Todd couldn't tell.

Laura filled a glass with milk for Rosie, who was distracted by the dog. She had to look up slightly to see it; it had to look down. They assessed each other. “He's so tiny,” Rosie finally said. The dog was probably thinking the same thing about her.

“You can have a pastry too, if you'd like,” Laura offered. “Do you know what a pastry is?”

“She knows what pastries are,” Sally assured her. “She's actually an expert when it comes to pastries.”

“I like blueberry scones best,” Rosie added.

“So, you were a client of Paul's?” Todd was growing bored with the chatter about scones and dogs. Someone had to take charge of things, and once again, that someone was Todd.

“We bought a retreat up in Lenox,” Laura explained, swinging open her oversize refrigerator. “Paul was recommended to us as someone who could handle the purchase.”

“A retreat?” Sally asked at exactly the instant Todd asked,
“We?”

“My husband and I.” She pulled out a bakery box and shut the refrigerator door with her nonexistent hip. “My husband is Vigo Hawkes,” she said, as if that was supposed to mean something.

It meant something to Sally. “Vigo Hawkes?
The
Vigo Hawkes?”

Who the hell was Vigo Hawkes? What the hell kind of name was Vigo, anyway?

“The,”
Laura confirmed, retrieving a plate from one
cabinet and three glasses from another. She plucked ice cubes out of a silver bucket with silver tongs and dropped them into the glasses, which tinkled in the frequency of fine crystal. “We found this nice little spread for sale in Lenox. Two hundred acres. Just what we needed. The architect has ideas you wouldn't believe. And of course, with Vigo overseeing things…well, I don't have to tell you.”

You do have to tell me
, Todd thought.

“So Paul handled the purchase?” Sally asked.

“Yes. He did an excellent job. No complaints. God. I can't believe he's dead.”

She lifted a cut-crystal decanter filled with amber liquid and splashed a copious amount in each of the three glasses. Todd didn't know what it was, but he figured it was hard.

“He had that cute little office—I swear, the first time I saw it, I almost laughed out loud. That building was so prepostmodern. But you know, everything's kind of cute once you get west of the Connecticut River. Lenox is very cute. The Berkshires are incredibly cute for mountains.”

“So, other than this land you purchased, did Paul do…anything else for you?” Todd asked, trying not to sound as impatient as he felt.

“Well, he walked us through the legal details. He was a very nice man. Very nice. I'll miss him. I'm sure Vigo will, too.”

Todd wasn't sure Vigo would miss Paul, but he was pretty sure Laura wasn't the Laura who had written the schmaltzy love letters. The sooner they could take their leave of her, the sooner they could drive back to Winfield and put this entire pointless day behind them.

But Sally had helped herself to one of the other
glasses and was taking a sip. Shit. Now she and Laura Hawkes were going to get drunk together. “Ooh, this is good,” Sally said. “Have some, Todd.”

“I'm driving,” Todd reminded her.

“It's apple juice.”

“Not just apple juice,” Laura corrected her. “It's fresh-pressed Granny Smith apple juice. I have my own press. The juice is quite tart,” she warned Todd, handing him a glass.

He couldn't drink booze with a long drive ahead of him, but he really didn't want to drink apple juice. Even Rosie's milk would be preferable. Water would be fine. Water, and a nice cold beer once he got home. Two beers. Possibly three.

Laura lifted a cannoli from the bakery box and set it on the plate for Rosie. Then she and Sally dived into a discussion about juice presses and how they differed from cider presses, and whether a fruit press could be used to make carrot juice, which Sally had heard prevented cancer. “But supposedly, it turns your palms orange,” she said, holding her hands palm up as if to demonstrate that her palms weren't orange.

“I hadn't heard that,” Laura murmured. “The cancer part. I've heard about the orange-palms part….”

Listening to the two of them bond through conversation was almost hypnotic. Men didn't talk that way. If they had to talk to a stranger, they talked about basic stuff—the Celtics, the Red Sox, the Bruins—and they expressed themselves in single-syllable words interspersed with grunts. No long, mellifluous sentences about the nuances that differentiated Cortlands from Macouns and the intricacies of cutting-edge kitchen gadgets. In the same situation, two men would be saying, “So, how about the Celts?”
Grunt
.

Maybe Sally and Laura talked with an easy intimacy not because they were women but because they both knew who Vigo Hawkes was. Maybe that was the secret connection.