Looking for Laura (33 page)

Granted, it was a terrific spell, one he was in no rush to break. He'd never before met a woman he had so much fun arguing with. When he'd been the editor of his high-school newspaper, he used to run a column called “Pro & Con,” in which two writers—usually one other writer and himself—would consider an issue from opposite sides. “Pro & Con: Should the President be Impeached?” “Pro & Con: Is Bill Gates a Handmaiden of Satan?” “Pro & Con: Should Winfield Have a Leash Law?”

He'd loved arguing, as long as his opponent was worthy. A good sword-clashing debate pumped him up and turned him on. And Sally was the worthiest opponent he'd ever had—or at least, the worthiest opponent who looked better naked than dressed.

He could get attached to her. Deeply committed. And maybe in time…well, maybe. But he was too old to lose his head over a woman. He'd done that once and he'd survived, but divorce wasn't one of those activities that got better with practice, and he had no intention of rushing into something that might not work.

Besides, she was Paul's widow. She'd married his best friend—that lying bastard.

Determined not to think about her tonight, he thumbed through his most recent model-kit catalog while he ate. It was time to order a new kit, something to keep him occupied on those evenings he wasn't at Sally's house, waiting with forced patience until Rosie went to sleep so he and Sally could move their arguments to the bedroom. On page seventeen he discovered a kit for a classic Dusenberry. Not his usual kind of model, but all those details—the running boards, the elaborate grille, the movable windshield wipers—would offer a reasonable distraction.

He wondered if Rosie would enjoy building a model car. He wouldn't trust her with a tube of epoxy, but he could buy her a beginner kit, with simple pieces that snapped together without glue. He and Rosie could work side by side, right here in the kitchen. They'd put on some Jimi Hendrix, crank up the volume and build cars together. She might enjoy it.

And there he was, indirectly thinking about Sally again. Thinking about himself as some kind of surrogate father for Rosie, for Christ's sake. He didn't want to be Rosie's father, although God knew she deserved a more honest father than the one she'd started out with.

The phone rang. He scooped a forkful of omelette into his mouth, then tilted back on the rear legs of his chair until he could reach the phone on the wall behind him. He lifted the hand unit, swallowed, straightened his chair and said, “Yeah?”

“Todd? It's Sally.”

A burst of warmth flowered open in his chest at the sound of her voice. When he'd been married to Denise, hearing her voice hadn't given him that strange sensa
tion, a combination of joy and panic, protectiveness and susceptibility.

He tried to keep his voice free of complicated emotions. “Hey, Sally. What's up?”

She didn't say anything for a minute. His smile waned and he reached for his beer. The sweaty brown glass felt too cold against his palm, but he took a quick slug of the stuff—which tasted too cold. The spot in his chest that had been burning cooled off, too.

“Sally?”

“I have to tell you something,” she said.

Oh, God. She couldn't be pregnant. He'd been really careful about that. Even if she hadn't learned from her past mistake—which wasn't to imply Rosie was a mistake, but she sure hadn't been part of anyone's life plan—Todd had learned from it.

If Sally wasn't pregnant, she was calling to tell him something else. Something worse. “What?”

“I know who Laura is.”

He took another slug of beer, buying time to consider his response. He and Sally hadn't talked about Laura since their trip to Mondaga Lake. It was a tacit agreement between them, nothing they'd worked out, just something they both seemed to understand: that while Paul used to be the only link between them, they now had other things bringing them together, other bridges connecting them. They weren't joined by shared rage or indignation or pain.

Once he'd stopped beating himself up about what a shitty friend Paul had been, he'd started feeling a lot better. So he'd let it lie.

But now she was reintroducing the subject, and he had to adjust his perspective accordingly. “You know who she is?”

“Yes.”

“When did you find out?”

“Three weeks ago.”

Three weeks ago? Right after Mondaga Lake, right after they'd become lovers? Suddenly he felt a whole new version of rage and indignation and pain. “You knew and you didn't tell me? You've been keeping this a secret from me?” What was with the Drivers? Had they made a pact, before Paul died, that they'd both keep secrets from Todd?

Damn it, this hurt. His chest was burning again, this time with fury.

“I'm sorry, Todd—I can't be sure, actually, and I just sort of wanted to forget about it. I didn't even want to think about it anymore, you know?”

He knew. He hadn't wanted to think about it anymore, either.

“But…I just…You're right. I didn't want to keep it a secret from you. I just wanted to pretend it didn't matter.”

“Okay.” He'd forgive her. Unlike her may-he-rot-in-hell late husband, Sally came up with the truth eventually. Of course, Paul might have come up with the truth eventually, too, if his car hadn't skated into a tree at sixty miles per hour.

“Anyway, I was sitting here this evening, and Trevor's sleeping over, and he and Rosie—”

“Trevor? That kid next door?” Todd had heard Rosie mention her neighbor.

“Yes.”

“He's a boy, Sally. You're letting a boy sleep over with Rosie?”

She laughed. “They made a tent out of a sheet and a
couple of chairs in the den. They're using sleeping bags.” She paused. “They're five years old.”

“Right.” He shouldn't assume that just because he'd never be able to crawl under a sheet in the den with Sally and not tear her clothes off, Rosie and Trevor couldn't behave with decorum.

“Anyway, they were talking about baby-sitters, and I just…well, I had to call you.”

“Baby-sitters.”

“When Paul was a little boy, he had a baby-sitter named Laura.”

“A baby-sitter.” This was beginning to sound like a typical Sally story: amusing but irrational.

“He loved her.”

“I loved my grandma. What's your point?”

“Your mother told me Paul once told her that this baby-sitter, Laura, was his first true love. He had a terminal crush on her. She was only a few years older than him. Well, seven years older. We're not talking Laura Ryershank.”

“Okay.” He forked another bite of omelette into his mouth and tucked it into his cheek so Sally wouldn't be able to tell he was chewing while he spoke. “He had this baby-sitter who was seven years older than him, and he thought she was the sun and the moon rolled into one. This would have happened a long time ago, Sally. More than twenty-five years ago.”

“Yes, but…Well, it was niggling at me. So I called my in-laws.”

Todd almost choked on his food. Paul's parents had been so aloof, so chilly and distant, that Paul had naturally gravitated to Todd's parents the instant he met them. The Drivers were very, very wealthy, with homes in Greenwich, Connecticut, Vail and Barbados. They'd
sent Paul to boarding school. When would he have even needed a baby-sitter?

“You know, his parents and I were never close—”

Understatement of the decade, Todd thought.

“But I told his mother that while I was going through some of Paul's things, I found some old poems he must have written to a baby-sitter named Laura when he was a little boy, and I thought the baby-sitter might like to see them. And his mother told me his baby-sitter was named either Laura Rose or Laura D'Orsini—with an apostrophe in it. She married someone named D'Orsini, some minor prince or a cousin of a count or something, but they got a divorce a few years ago, so Paul's mother wasn't sure if she'd kept her married name or reverted to her maiden name. Either way, she lives in Southport, Connecticut.”

“Okay.” Todd sipped some beer, slowly this time, holding it on his tongue as if it were wine. It tasted better than wine, though. A little less complex, a little more bubbly, sour and satisfyingly gulpable.

“Laura
Rose
,” Sally emphasized. “Did you know Paul was the one who came up with the name Rose for our daughter?”

“No, I hadn't known that.” And it was, admittedly, a suspicious bit of evidence. “What had you wanted to name her?”

“Blossom.”

“She's a lucky girl.” He rotated the bottle slowly in his hand, trying to decide what he wanted to do about Laura Rose D'Orsini.

“He loved her, Todd. And then she got a divorce, and she's a couple of hours away by car, just the right distance—and, you know, with that royalty connection, she'd probably write all that flowery junk.”

“Royalty and existentialism don't mix.”

“Maybe that's why she got a divorce.”

Todd took a deep breath. He'd been satisfied to stop looking for Laura. Maybe it would have been better if Sally had continued to keep this secret from him after all.

As if she could read his mind, she said, “I just couldn't keep it in anymore. I kept waiting for the thought to leave me alone, but it didn't. So I'm telling you. What do you think we should do?”

He ruminated.

“Should we track her down?” Sally pressed. “Or should we just forget about the whole thing?”

“I guess it depends on whether you want your pocketknife back,” he said.

“A
re you sure you want to do this?” Todd asked for at least the seventeenth time.

“I want my knife.” Sally leaned back in the contoured leather seat of his Saab, her sunglasses shielding her eyes from the glare of a brilliant Saturday afternoon on Connecticut's Gold Coast. She knew her roots were buried in rocky soil miles from Beacon Hill, a culture away from the rarefied air of the Mondaga Colony, far enough from the world of Winfield College that during her two years as a student she'd sometimes felt she ought to be carrying a passport. But Gold Coast Connecticut was the worst, probably because Gold Coast Connecticut was where Paul's parents lived, and Paul's parents had never bothered to disguise their belief that she was a bottom-of-the-barrel slut who'd seduced their son and tricked him into marrying her.

She and Todd weren't going to be visiting the Drivers. Todd had indicated quite clearly that he didn't think much of Paul's parents, either, which only made her love him more.

Southport clung with proprietary arrogance to the coastline of Long Island Sound. From the charming village center, roads radiated out into mansion territory. The closer to the water they drove, the grander the houses.

According to the directions they'd received at the gas station on Route 1, Laura Rose D'Orsini's address put her home right on the water.

The Saab's windows and sunroof were open, letting in the balmy May sunshine. Sally had worn a flowered cotton dress that tied at the waist in back. She focused on the comfort of the dress, the sweet, grassy scent of the breeze and the calm demeanor of the man beside her. She and Todd had gotten through Laura encounters before, and they'd survived. Now, when they were likely to face the real Laura, they were lovers, a united front. They'd get the knife and move on with their lives, just the way Sally had intended for them to move on with their lives before Helen had mentioned that Paul's childhood baby-sitter had been the object of his undying love.

“I think you're supposed to turn here,” she said, glancing at the directions she'd jotted on a scrap of paper as the gas station attendant had dictated them.

Nodding, Todd steered around the corner. The road was narrow, bordered by emerald lawns and canopied with maples and sycamores. Sally caught a faint whiff of salt water.

Laura Rose D'Orsini is going to be rich
, she reminded herself.
She's going to be charismatic. She's going to be sophisticated, elegant, glamorous. But she writes gushy letters. And she's got my knife
.

“That's it,” she said, pointing to a pair of white gates that stood open on either side of a blacktop driveway.

“What would we have done if the gates were closed?” Todd asked wryly.

“Battered them down with the car.”

“Not my car.”

“Do you mean to say you care more about your Snob than about finding Laura?”

“You bet I do.”

The driveway wasn't too long, and the house at its end wasn't too big. White clapboard surrounded by slate patios, it sat on a promontory overlooking the sound. The land alone must have cost a king's ransom—which, if Laura's former husband was royalty, shouldn't have put too much of a dent in her bank account.

“Who would have thought,” she muttered, “that a girl who grew up in a trailer could end up consorting with the ex-wives of princes?”

“Yeah, and cruising around in my cool car,” Todd teased.

Ignoring him, she shoved open the door and filled her lungs with the dense, sour fragrance of the sea.

“I wonder if they've got Swan Boats here,” Todd said as he climbed out of the car and met her by the front bumper. “The water looks a little choppy for paddleboats.”

“Let's just hope she's home so we don't need to pass the time on a boat.” Sally hoisted the straps of her tote bag onto her shoulder and started toward the broad veranda that faced the water.

Todd touched the small of her back. “You sure you're okay?”

She
had
to love him. How could she not, when he showed such concern for her?

“Of course I'm okay.” She spoke with enough resolve to convince herself. Why shouldn't she be okay? She'd faced two other Lauras, both times assuming she'd found the right one. It was always possible that this Laura would turn out to be a wrong one, too. Just because there were a whole bunch of clues pointing to the prince's American ex didn't mean Sally and Todd might
once again discover that this wasn't the Laura they were searching for.

Together they climbed the porch steps and approached the door, an artist's fantasy of carved and polished wood and beveled glass. For the first time in all their Laura travels, the doorbell was easy to find. That could be a sign, although Sally wasn't sure what it was a sign of.

She pressed the button, waited, and then saw motion through the glass, a shadow sweeping across the door before it opened.

She swallowed.
Of course I'm okay
, she repeated to herself, but the conviction was no longer there. Not when she stood toe to toe with a woman whose very appearance seemed to define the concepts of charisma, sophistication, elegance and glamour. She was tall and slender, with a neck so long it reminded Sally a little of an illustration in Rosie's copy of
Alice in Wonderland
, on the page where Alice had taken a bite of the cake that said “Eat me.” This woman's neck was much more graceful than Alice's, of course. Her hair was ebony, her complexion alabaster, her eyes onyx. Her head belonged in a sculpture garden.

The woman had on an outfit of white silk, the slim-fitting slacks flattering her fat-free legs and the top a swirl of fluttering sleeves and sleek draping. Pearls the size of small onions adorned her ears, and an even larger pearl framed in diamonds dangled on a chain around her neck.

“You're not the piano tuner, are you?” she asked, gazing at Todd and Sally.

Sally swallowed again. She was not going to let this splendid woman intimidate her. She was not.

“I'm Sally Driver,” she said.

The woman paused for a long time. She didn't say,
Sally who?
She didn't look confused.

This was their Laura. They'd found her.

Far from feeling victorious, Sally suffered a throb of dread so profound her entire body trembled from it.

This Laura was magnetic, majestic, magnificent. She was sleek and fashionable, poised and polished, a woman who would never walk around with a box of animal crackers in her tote bag. Sally's gaze drifted to the pearl earrings again. She imagined South Sea oysters competing to see who could make the prettiest pearls for Laura Rose.

She wished Todd would touch the small of her back again. That was his signal to her, a light infusion of strength combined with an assurance that he had faith in her. He didn't touch her now, however. He was too busy scrutinizing the woman standing in the foyer of the stately waterfront house.

“Sally Driver,” she said evenly, her eyes flashing, her manicured red nails fluttering as she wavered between offering her hand to her guest and reaching for the door to close it. “Ah.” Another long pause, and she turned to Todd. “And you're…?”

“Todd Sloane.”

“Oh, yes! Todd Sloane. The newspaperman.”

Todd seemed to stand a little taller at that remark. Clearly, Paul had mentioned him to Laura, and he seemed rather pleased about it. Paul must have mentioned Sally, too—in her letters she'd bemoaned the existence of his wife—but Sally didn't feel pleased at all.

“Well,” Laura said, studying them as if trying to guess their heights. “Why don't you come in.”

She was going to be
civilized
, Sally thought ruefully. If Laura was civilized, Sally would have to be civilized,
too, and she wasn't sure she wanted to be. She might want to scream or throw things, but she wouldn't be able to if they were all acting mature and diplomatic.

Reluctantly, she removed her sunglasses, hooked them over the neckline of her dress and stepped into the Palazzo D'Orsini.

Laura Hawkes's Beacon Hill town house was a hovel compared with the ex-princess's seaside abode, which turned out to be a lot larger than it had appeared from the driveway. Vast, airy rooms opened in all directions, one of them containing nothing but a concert grand—the instrument in need of tuning, Sally presumed. Did Laura play? Musical talent would only be gilding the lily. She didn't need to
do
anything. She didn't need skills or gifts. Her appearance alone was enough to justify her existence.

“Lyman?” she murmured into the air. If her voice were a fabric, it would be burgundy velvet.

A man materialized in one of the doorways. Silver-haired and tidily paunchy, he wore tailored trousers, a white shirt and a white apron similar in style to the aprons Sally and the staff wore at the New Day Café. He waited attentively until more burgundy velvet emerged from Laura: “Would you please fix us some lemonade? I believe we'll retire to the back patio.” With a silent nod, Lyman departed.

A butler. The woman had a butler. Not a young, sexy one, either, although she could certainly afford any kind of butler she wanted. But then, she hadn't needed a young, sexy butler when she'd had Paul.

They reached the back patio through a maze of rooms the functions of which Sally couldn't begin to guess. Laura led the way, her gait so smooth it was almost as if she were gliding along on roller skates. Her shoulders
didn't rise and fall; her enviably slender hips didn't sway.

Sally glanced at Todd as they followed Laura through a French door and outside to an expanse of slate on the opposite side of the house. Todd didn't return her look. He seemed transfixed by his surroundings. Sally couldn't blame him.

The back patio overlooked the water, which indicated that the house was set on a spit of land protruding into the sound. A flight of stairs led down from the patio to an Olympic-size pool surrounded by more slate, with a cabana and a bathhouse positioned conveniently on either side of the pool. From that level, another flight of stairs descended to a private beach.

Sally had to exert herself not to hyperventilate.

Had Paul felt at home in such surroundings? Had the opulence appealed to him? Or had he not even noticed it? In the presence of a deity like Laura D'Orsini, he might have found the pool and the beach superfluous.

They sat on comfortable white sling chairs on the top patio. The rear wall of the house was white, the sand on the beach below was white and Laura's ensemble was white. Sally felt crude in her colorful dress.

She focused on her breathing: in, out, in, out. Laura D'Orsini breathed, too. Inside all that white silk, she had a pair of lungs no healthier than Sally's. She was flesh and blood and bone—although Sally wouldn't be surprised to learn that, as refined as she was, she never had to go to the bathroom.

Lyman emerged from the house carrying a silver tray on which was balanced a large crystal pitcher of lemonade and three crystal glasses. He filled the glasses, distributed them and receded into the house.

“I'm sorry about your loss,” Laura said to Sally.

Sally tried not to choke on her lemonade. Was she supposed to say she was sorry about Laura's loss, too?

The afternoon light lent Laura a shimmer she didn't need. “Paul was a special man.”

“I guess you'd know,” Sally muttered none too graciously. She was more than willing to concede first place in the graciousness competition to Laura.

Laura sipped daintily from her glass, then lowered it to a table at her elbow. “Sally, I want to assure you that if I'd known Paul was married, I wouldn't have become involved with him.”

“Yeah, right.”

“I'm not that kind of woman. I would never knowingly get involved with a married man.” Laura's lips were exactly the same color as her fingernails. “I would have insisted that he get a divorce first.”

Wonderful. Either way, she qualified as a home wrecker.

Evidently detecting the thunderbolts of animosity firing from Sally's eyes, she turned to Todd. “How did you find out about me?”

“Short answer?” Todd smiled. “He saved your letters.”

“Oh, he did? How romantic.” She shot Sally an apologetic look, then turned back to Todd. “He told me so much about you, Todd. You were an anchor in his life.” She swiveled again to Sally, her exquisite face arranged in a pose of sympathy. “I want you to understand, Sally, that none of this was your fault.”

“That's a relief,” Sally grumbled sarcastically. “I was feeling really guilty that my husband was having an affair with you.”

“What I mean is, it wasn't just some
thing
.”

“Oh,” Sally snapped. “I'd been sure it was a
thing
.”
Todd sent her a quelling look, a warning that she wasn't acting civilized enough. She didn't care.