Maybe This Time (29 page)

“Then why are you asking me about some Emperor?”

“You're a lawyer. You don't have to believe in something to argue about it.” She looked up at him, still frowning. “Somebody passionate and powerful. Somebody moving all the pieces in the game. Who else would that be besides you?”

“You've got a houseful of wingnuts here,” North said. “Plus ghosts. Pick one.”

Flo's eyebrows went up. “The ghosts. Isolde said one of them is a man who thinks he owns the house.”

“Isolde is a font of information,” North said, not happy about that.

“But of course, that's it.” Flo folded her arms, as if she were chilled. “That's so much worse. You'd never hurt Andie on purpose, but some awful spirit—”

“I'll keep Andie close and safe.”

Flo looked up at him, scowling again. “Sea goat.”

“What?”

“Sex. That's all you think about.”

North looked down at her, exasperated.

Flo looked back, defiant. “Tell me you haven't been thinking about it ever since you saw Andie.”

“I saw Andie for about five minutes before Alice started to scream.”

“Not tonight. Since she came to your office a month ago.”

She had him there. “This is the first I've seen her since then.”

“You've been thinking about it,” Flo said, an edge to her voice. “You're going to break her heart again. It's not fair, North, you have everything, can't you just let her go?”

“No,” he said, surprising himself but not Flo, who nodded.

“It's in your stars,” she said.

“I thought it was in the cards.”

“There, too.”

Lydia came down the stairs and into the hall. “Now what's going on?”

“Your son's going to try to seduce my daughter,” Flo said. “He's a Capricorn. They do that.”

“Don't you think their private lives should be private?” Lydia said, sounding virtuous.

Flo looked at her for a moment and then laughed.

“I'm going upstairs now,” North said to both of them. “
Not
to seduce my ex-wife but to get some sleep. Tomorrow a private detective will be here to find out what the hell is going on, and then we'll establish that there are no ghosts, throw Kelly O'Keefe out into the storm, and take everybody back to Columbus where the two of you can continue your feud.”

“We're not feuding,” Flo said, glaring at Lydia.

“It's not like you to be dramatic,” Lydia said to him, ignoring Flo.

“Good night,” North said, and went back into the sitting room to get what he needed to seduce his ex-wife.

 

Andie was sitting beside Alice's bed almost asleep when North came back upstairs, carrying an ice bucket and two glasses. He put it all down on the floor next to Andie, took off his suit coat and threw it
on the rocker, loosened his tie, opened his overnight bag, took out a bottle of Glenlivet, and opened it.

“Oh, good.” Andie straightened to rub her back. “
My
present.”

“No, I got you something else, but I'll share.” North poured two generous slugs into the glasses, handed one to her. “Here's to going home to Columbus with everybody. Soon.”

“I'll drink to that,” Andie said and did, the smooth liquor going down like silk. “God, I needed that.”

“Plenty more here.” North put the bottle down beside her and sat down beside it, his back against Alice's bed, too. “Should we go into another room? Will we wake her up talking?”

“No, when she finally goes out, she's out,” Andie said. “So what's my present?”

North reached over and dug into his overnight bag again. He pulled out a CD and handed it to her.

“
Clapton Unplugged
,” she read with delight. “Thank you!”

“It's been out since August. I took a chance you didn't have it yet.”

“No, I didn't even realize they'd recorded it. I saw it on TV . . .” She'd seen it on TV and thought of North all the way through. She smiled up at him. “Thank you. You give good gifts.”

“I try. I have something else, too. Not a gifts.”

He dug in the bag and pulled out a box, and she recognized her old shell box from junior high, the one she'd made from a cigar box she'd found that her mother told her had been her father's. She was pretty sure that had been a lie, but still, it was her shell box.

“Wow,” she said, taking it from him. “Thank you for keeping it.”

“You left some other stuff behind.” He leaned back against the bed, too. “It's all in there.”

“Anything important?”

“I don't know,” North said. “I don't know what's important to you now. You've changed.”

“In ten years? Hell, yes, I've changed.” She opened the box and saw old photos and ticket stubs and, in the middle, the velvet
jeweler's box from the diamond earrings he'd given her. She opened it, looked at the classic, tasteful earrings, hated them, and snapped it shut again. Of course he'd saved the damn earrings. “You haven't changed.”

“You'd be surprised.”

He drank again, and she felt him watching her. He was sitting close, not too close but right there on the other side of the bottle, and he looked like he always had when he'd come up to the attic after work at the beginning of their marriage, tired but alive and focused on her.

“It's been good talking to you this past month,” he said. “Once we stopped fighting.”

She put the box on the floor and picked up her drink, trying to ditch the memories. “Southie says we haven't been fighting, we've been bitching at each other.”

“He's probably right.”

“He thinks if we have one big blowup, that would clear the air.”

North laughed. “And then we'd have makeup sex.”

Andie grinned. “How'd you know he said that?”

“It's Southie. If it's a plan, it has a naked woman in it.” He stopped smiling. “You want to have a fight? Clear the air?”

“No.” Andie cradled her drink. “That was a million years ago.”

“But you're still mad.” North shook his head and drank again.

“I'm over it,” Andie lied.

“So am I,” North said.

Andie pulled back to look at him, annoyed. “What did you have to get over? I never did anything to you.”

He looked at her. “You left me.”

“You left me first.” Andie leaned back against the bed and took another drink.

“I was right there,” North said, his patience obvious.

“No you weren't, you were down in that damn office behind that damn desk.”

“What did that desk ever do to you? Except support you well during sex.”

“It wasn't the desk,” Andie said. “It was what it stood for.”

“Fine furniture?”

“The Family,”
Andie said dramatically and drained her glass. “Of which I was not part.”

“Of course you were.” His annoyance was plain now.

“No. You and Southie and Lydia were family, the family law firm. I was the woman you slept with up in the attic.” Andie took the bottle and topped up her glass. “It was very Rochester of you.”

“Who?”

“
Jane Eyre.
He kept his insane wife in the attic.”

“Well, the insane part was right.” North finished his drink.

“You know that fight you were talking about?” Andie said, glaring at him. “It's coming right up.”

“Good. We can start by you telling me why the hell you left.”

Andie let her head fall back on Alice's bed. “A million times I've said this. You left me. You stopped paying attention, hell, you stopped
seeing me.
You'd sit behind that desk eighteen hours a day and then climb into bed at one
A.M
. and tap me on the shoulder for sex. That got old fast.”

“I thought you liked sex.”

“I did. I didn't like being treated as your live-in hooker.”

“Drama queen.”

“Fine.” Andie set her glass down so she could shift around and look him in the eye. “Tell me something we did after your uncle died that didn't involve the family business or sex.”

North didn't say anything.

“I rest my case. You had two speeds at the end, ‘I'm working' and ‘I want sex.' Neither of them had anything to do with me.”

“The sex definitely—”

“No it didn't,” Andie said. “I could have been anybody.”

“You were never anybody,” North said with conviction. “That's
why you stopped having sex with me? You thought I didn't know you were there? Because that is insane.”

Andie took a deep breath. “After your uncle died, if I wanted to see you, I had to go to your office. You were always busy, but if it was six o'clock, I'd shove the papers off the desk and say, ‘Remember me?', and most of the time we'd end up having sex on your desk.”

“I remember that,” North said over his drink.

“It was the only way I could get you to look at me,” Andie said. “You were always looking down at the desk, so I'd just slide right in there so you'd see me.”

“It was great. Why'd you stop doing that?”

“Because one night I came down and shoved the papers off your desk and you said, ‘Damn it, Andie, I'm
busy,
I'll be up later,' and picked up the papers without even looking at me, and I thought,
Don't hurry,
and went back upstairs and that was the last time I volunteered for anything. It was humiliating enough to have to go down and remind my husband I existed, and then to get rejected . . .” She looked at his face, at the frown there, and said, “What?”

“I remember that.”

“Well, I remember it, too, you jerk. I should have sued that fucking desk for alienation of affection.”

“No, I remember what I was doing.”

“What?”

He shook his head. “We had troubles.”

“Which you never told me about.”

“Family business,” he said, and began to take a drink and then stopped as he realized what he'd said.

“And I wasn't part of the family,” Andie said.

“
Damn
it,” North said to himself.

“It's okay.” Andie leaned back against the bed. “It's over.”

“We were in big trouble,” North said.

“It's okay, you don't—”

“Uncle Merrill took over the firm when my dad died, and he ran it for eighteen years.”

“Oh,” Andie said. “And he wasn't competent?”

“He was very competent,” North said. “He was just crooked as all hell. Three generations of Archers established the good name of the firm and Merrill risked it all. Never got caught, either.” He drank again.

“So you had to cover up for him?”

“The statute of limitations on a lot of that stuff had run out, but the big problem was that if any of it got out, the reputation of the firm was gone. My mother was grieving, Southie was too young . . .”

“So you had to do it all,” Andie said. “North, even when Merrill was running the place, you did it all.”

“I wasn't covering up felonies then,” North said, and his voice was bitter. “I'd just found out his latest screwup and it was about to break, and it was well within the statute of limitations, and I was scrambling to find a way out, and you showed up—”

“You know, if you'd
told me,
” Andie said.

“I didn't tell anybody except Southie. And I only told him when he asked.”

“You should have told Lydia. She had to have known what he was like.”

“She wouldn't have listened, and I didn't want to be the one to disillusion her.”

“He was her brother-in-law,” Andie said. “Why would she care?”

“He was her lover,” North said, “and she'd care a lot.”

“What?” Andie sat up straighter. “Lydia and Merrill?”

“I thought you knew.”

“
How?
By telepathy?”

“From Flo.” North looked genuinely surprised. “Flo never told you?”

“Flo's not one for gossip. She's a live-and-let-live kind of woman. Why would she have told me?”

“That's what started their feud.” North took another drink. “Christ, you did miss a lot.”

“Well, I was stuck up in that damn attic waiting for you,” Andie said. “What do you mean, that's what started their feud? Flo didn't like Lydia because she was so snotty to me.”

“That didn't help, but there was a catfight one day. Flo was coming down the stairs from visiting you, and I invited her to a cocktail party we were having, and Mother said, ‘Yes, Flo, and bring whoever you're with that night, too.' ”

“Bitch,” Andie said.

“Well, Flo was pretty open-minded about who she slept with,” North said.

“She still is,” Andie said. “Doesn't mean Lydia gets to take shots.”

“Then Flo said, ‘Well, you can be sure it won't be my brother-in-law.' After that it was pretty much open warfare.”

“Go, Flo,” Andie said. “Although Merrill wasn't Lydia's brother-in-law anymore, your dad was dead.”

North took another drink, discreetly silent.

“Oh. How far back did this affair go?”

“I think it started a year after I was born. Lydia had come through with the Archer heir, and my dad wasn't the faithful type.”

Andie tried to process this new side of Lydia. “Yeah, but with his brother?”

“Merrill was the exciting one. Black sheep of the family,” North said grimly.

“So they were lovers for almost thirty years.” Andie thought about it, Lydia sneaking into bedrooms, or across the backyard since Merrill had the house next door. Lydia, in the middle of the night, tiptoeing through the begonias. “Wow.”

“Yep,” North said.

Andie squinted at him. “What else? When you get this terse, there's something else.”