The House on Olive Street (11 page)

It was one-thirty when she crept to the door that adjoined her suite to Jeff’s room. She opened her portion and leaned her ear against his door. It wasn’t the first time she had done this much. Feelings of loneliness, despair and burnout had driven her to wonder what might be behind those kind eyes…or why that huge paw of his could feel so gentle on her arm as he escorted her. Most curious of all was that he would have those feelings and not push her one bit. Was this a man who actually
could
be trusted? Who would not hurt? Use?

Those other times that curiosity and temptation had pushed her to listen at his door she had caught herself in time, but Gabby’s death had left her lonelier than ever. The conference had burned her out, leaving her weary and frustrated. She was more needy and less strong—a volatile combination. And…it had been a very long time since she’d let a man get near.

She could hear the faint, distant sound of his television. Why would he be awake? He must have nodded off with the set on. God, this was nutty. She should forget it. She was acting insanely anyway. This was probably going to end up being a big mistake. She should not open this door, literally or figuratively.
Before, when she was much younger, sex had only numbed her to other pain in her life. She wasn’t sure if she was past that even yet. After all, it was one-thirty and she was in pain, and his eyes had always been reaching…. She did not want to go back in time in that way. Still, she did not want to go back to bed alone. She decided to tap lightly and if he didn’t come to answer her knock immediately—

He popped the door open and she jumped. He was wearing only his trousers, his chest and feet bare. He was so large and muscled. Almost frighteningly so.

“You weren’t asleep?” she asked.

“Not yet. Neither were you.” He looked into her eyes, not down at her negligee-clad body. That was what had tipped her off in the first place, the way he looked into her eyes rather than appreciatively studying her curves.

“Did I make a mistake…or do I see something when you look at me…something that I could have misinterpreted….”

He entered her suite. He pulled her into his arms in answer to the question. He put his hands on her waist and drew her toward him. As he looked down at her, his eyes partially closed, she thought she saw him smile slightly. He’d never once made any kind of physical move on her. But when she made one suggestive remark to him, he was there, ready, eager.

“This could be a big mistake,” she said.

He shrugged. “I doubt it. It’s not as though you rushed into it.”

She put a hand against his chest, laying it there lightly. “Have you felt this way from the very beginning?” she asked him.

He nodded. “It only got stronger as I got to know you. I knew you could tell. It’s the sort of thing you can’t
really hide. But that’s good, you see, because I wanted it to be up to you.”

I just don’t want to be alone,
she almost said. “Are you sure? This isn’t part of your job description.”

“Sable,
this
isn’t a job. This is an emotion.” He bent his head, lifted her chin and kissed her lips. Slowly. Tenderly. Then he embraced her, drew her against him and kissed her neck. “Why do I get the impression you’re not going to feel any of this?” he asked in a whisper.

She turned her face away. He knew too much. He saw through her.

But she stayed in his arms.

She felt. Everything.

That his hands and mouth brought perfect physical pleasure was her first surprise, while at the same time she had always expected that would be the case. That a man so strong and physical in appearance could be so gentle and sensitive in bed, forceful at just the perfect moment, was a fantasy of hers. She wrote about such men. He had promised as much with his eyes long ago. And Sable, who usually needed her space, slept peacefully within his arms, feeling natural there. She was forty-one, and it was the first time in her life she had felt safe and wonderful after sex, cradled in the protective embrace of a lover.

“What if this doesn’t work out?” she asked him.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he answered.

“I mean, can you still be my security consultant now that we’ve been…intimate?” His eyes narrowed and his brow furrowed in question. “Can you be as protective…as professional? Can you still take care of me in that way now that there’s a personal side to our relationship?”

“I’ll probably be even better at it,” he said.

“And what if, for some reason, I don’t feel it’s right for me to be intimately involved with you any longer?” she suggested.

“I guess you’ll tell me.”

“What will you do? Have someone else come to my house? Travel with me? Et cetera?”

“Sable,” he said, brushing his hand down the length of her body and sending quivers through her, “you don’t strike me as the kind of woman who has trouble making a decision. You’ve obviously thought about this for a long time. Years. Why are you second-guessing yourself now?”

“I’m not good with men,” she said matter-of-factly.

He laughed very seductively but grinned boyishly. “Nonsense.”

The most wonderful thing about Jeff was his apparent ability to accept things the way they were without over-thinking. During the next two weeks he dropped in on her twice, in the evenings. He called from his car and asked if it was all right. He brought wine and chocolates once, flowers the next time. He had no expectations, he said, except that she know he was sincere. He was unrehearsed and spontaneous; they talked about subjects that did not threaten her. He covered his childhood, she discussed her writing career and travels. He rose to leave when she yawned and it seemed he would be content with a kiss good-night. There was something about him, some dichotomy in his personality, that drew her even closer. He was innocent and boyish, yet he ran a company that pandered to the needs of people who were harassed by the worst of real world fears. He was proper, treating her like a virgin, when she’d yanked him into her bed on a whim.

Sable had had her share of come-ons. She was attrac
tive enough to turn a head and a few men had given her the rush. But Jeff was in no hurry. He had no cagey lines. There seemed not a manipulative or malicious bone in his body. He was genuine and old-fashioned. He courted her. She had never been courted in her life.

Those times he called on her in the evenings with his candy and flowers and wine, and charmed her by his genuine interest in conversation, she asked him to stay over. And not because she was afraid to be alone.

June

E
leanor had begun reading through one of Gabby’s manuscripts. By the time she’d read eighty pages, she had to stop and create a chronology of the events of Gabby’s life that she’d been told so that she could place the work. Before she could tell the others what she’d found, she had to be sure. The manuscript was typed in three styles plus longhand on yellow-pad pages. A consultation with the computer index showed that some chapters were so old, they weren’t even on the new computer. The novel, which appeared to be autobiographical fiction, had been in progress for at least ten years. Even in the first eighty pages, Elly could see gaps and holes, but the scenes that were fully developed were stunning.

She re-created Gabby’s life in a time line on a steno pad.

Gabby was twenty-three, a recent college graduate, when she met and married Don Marshall. He was finishing up his residency in OB-GYN in Virginia, with
plans to return to California to open his own practice. Gabby did what so many young doctors’ wives do: she became her husband’s business partner immediately. She left Ceola and the Magnolia blossoms of the South and followed Don. She shopped for his office space, hired his staff, managed the books and held down a job to pay the rent while he was setting up.

The children came along much sooner than they’d planned, but Gabby persevered. She worked until she felt the contractions start and was back to work before the babies were weaned. And Don’s practice grew. Don spent very little time at home with his family; the business of doctoring was time-consuming. But Gabby managed; she was young, had energy, had faith, had love. She slowly began to notice that the only thing she didn’t really have was Don.

After seven years of marriage, Don’s income was good. They had a nice house, new cars, good clothes and even investments. But Don couldn’t relax long enough to enjoy family life. He was too busy for school projects, birthday parties, family vacations and trips to the zoo. For all practical purposes, Gabby found herself a single parent on a good income. And then she found out about the nurse. All the excuses Don made and promises that he’d change were so quick, well-rehearsed and articulate, Gabby suspected that this had not been his first affair.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll give it all up that easily,” she had told Elly. Gabby went back to school for a master’s degree, held Don to a strict budget, monitored all his promises to be good, and was determined to save her marriage, her family life and her future.

But she got terribly sick. Meningitis. And almost died. Her recovery from that was tedious and difficult. In all the quiet hours that followed, Gabby realized that
she was not cut out to compromise. She emerged from the darkness of her illness as a phoenix. On fire. She was going to make every single day worth living fully and she was going to raise her children well. And she was
not
going to share her life with a man who was not as committed as she.

Don, as it turned out, could face down almost anyone but Gabby. Gabby appeared facile, but was something else. He never seemed to know if she was manipulating him, having a showdown with him, nurturing him or disciplining him. (Elly had always believed that Gabby inherited this ability to deal with men from Ceola.) Maybe it was just that he really loved her—although he couldn’t seem to stop himself from carousing. It was obvious he had some kind of deeply imbedded guilt, as though his affairs almost killed her. In any event, she managed to get what she wanted out of him. She divorced him and got herself a writing job.

So began Gabby’s trips—to India, Thailand, Iraq, Israel. She’d take six to ten weeks to prepare the groundwork and settle Don in his old house to care for the children for a two-to three-week stay. She approved of the housekeeper who came along as part of the deal and gave Don strict orders that he not have overnight guests.

Gabby met John Shelby on her third trip abroad. The manuscript Elly had found was so riveting in its detail of the year, the time. Mao launches a cultural revolution; Jacqueline Susann dies; OPEC oil embargo ends; Patty Hearst is kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army; Palestinian terrorists seize a school in Maalot, twenty-one children are killed…and Gabby is in Cypress, hiding in a baker’s dirty loft during an island-wide blackout with a cocky, impatient, irascible photographer when Turkey invades. John was born in America,
but had lived almost all his life in Australia and England, and just happened to have won two Pulitzers for his work. That was where and how they came together. A group of reporters and photographers not smart or lucky enough to get off the island and are holed up, mostly terrified, in small civilian enclaves around an impoverished village. Gabby was the only woman. She and John started out as mortal enemies and were lovers at the end of three days. She was thirty-two, he, forty-five.

From that point on Gabby found she could do her work ten times as well by following John to the floods in Bangladesh, the famines in Africa, the evacuation of Vietnam. She was covering the worldwide plight of women and children, and he, the human politics of war.

Elly remembered what this had done for Gabby. Despite jet lag and deprivation, her eyes sparkled, her cheeks glowed, her energy was high. Their love affair was an adventure, but so was Gabby’s work, which pealed with talent. Some digging turned up a box of photos, some of which were prize-winning in and of themselves. Gabby and John sitting on a tank, sharing a canteen. Gabby on the ground, flies swarming her, holding a malnourished African baby while the mother leaned over to gesture to her own mouth. John taking a picture of a photographer taking a picture of a smiling Ulster lad, while in the background, out of the first photographer’s range, was a demolished city street. It was breathtaking—like looking into a mirror of mirrors. It was the same setting as the first Pulitzer photo, probably snapped before or after. And the most poignant photo of all, a gathering of darkly clad mourners standing behind a casket in the rain, umbrellas over their heads, a spray of lilies on the casket, a preacher’s back to the camera, and far, far, behind them all and to the left, the slight
figure of a jeans-clad, pea-coated, curly-haired girl. She looked no more than eighteen in the grainy black and white. Gabby.

Yes, Elly quickly realized, this was what she had done. Novelized her affair with John Shelby. Gabby rarely talked about it. Oh, she’d mentioned it, but she never named him when she discussed the details. Elly and Sable knew a lot more than the others. They’d caught her on melancholy nights not long after it ended. She would describe their travels, their fights, their reunions, their passion. She had never breathed a word of trying to get it down on paper. What Elly had read so far was phenomenally good. But from the piles and stacks of papers she’d rounded up, Gabby had over five thousand pages of written and rewritten and scribbled-on manuscript pages. Original stuff, duplicated stuff, edited stuff, X-ed-out stuff.

Elly was stunned. This was a secret gem. But pulling together a novel from this much of one’s own writing was difficult enough; putting this extraordinary mess together into a cohesive, compelling story would take a literary genius.

Or four good heads, she thought.

Unfortunately, the group was in a bad place. Elly had been in Gabby’s house for a week now, and much had happened since Gabby’s death. Sable had confronted Beth about Jack. Beth refused to believe anything Sable accused, and the two of them were very distant, hardly talking. Even Elly, who had little interest in such domestic melodrama, had to admit that Beth was acting childish and something was awfully wrong in her life that she’d do well to look at. Sable’s detective had finally turned up information on that Slatterly fellow who’d snuck into her office the day of Gabby’s memorial, and
found him to be a gossipmonger who sold the dirtiest dirt he could find to the worst tabloids in print. Sable claimed she couldn’t imagine what he was up to, but the prospect that he was even interested in her had Sable more uptight than Elly had ever seen her. Barbara Ann had had a run of bad luck—a book she’d done extensive revisions on, re-creating it again and again, had ultimately been rejected, contract canceled, advance money owed back. Barbara Ann was devastated. The next proposal she submitted had been rejected as well, and her confidence was shattered. She was terrified that she’d suddenly lost it after twenty-six books.

As for Elly, she was getting to know Gabby anew, reading her letters, her notes, her manuscript and her calendars. The other women had been over several times, browsing through things, making their own small files at Elly’s direction, but each one was so terribly distracted by her own set of catastrophes, they were no help at all. She had told Ben to pretend she was out of the country doing research. She didn’t think it would be wise for him to come to Gabby’s to see her, since the women were in and out, David and Sarah and even Don dropped by, but she found herself calling him, missing him and wishing she could change her mind. It had only been a week of separation and she was already miserable about it.

It was going to be a long summer.

Sable was toweling her hair dry when she heard a heart-stopping scream from downstairs. It was so shrill and went on for such a long time that she was nearly to the bottom of the stairs before it paused. And then it started again, this time in shorter spurts. When she got to the kitchen to find the source, Dorothy was backed
against the refrigerator with a stricken look on her face, staring at the kitchen window. There, on the other side of the pane, was a large camcorder, taping the screaming housekeeper. And Sable, who wore only a terry robe.

“Jesus,” Sable breathed, at first frightened, then immediately furious.

Dorothy was holding her broom up as protection. Sable whipped it out of her hands and flew out the kitchen door, holding the wooden end of the broom like a lance. She rounded the corner of the house and took after the photographer with menacing intent. “What the hell are you doing?! Who are you? What do you want here, scaring an old woman out of her wits? Art! Art!” she yelled.

The photographer, apparently accustomed to this sort of response, backed away from her, camera running the whole time.

“Turn that goddamn thing off! What are you
doing?
” But as she walked toward him, broom handle out, he simply filmed her rage. He had no intention of answering her. When he had enough, he’d probably run off.

Sable fixed him. She quit asking questions and began jabbing him with the broom handle. This is my property, she thought. Let him sue me. She jabbed and jabbed, poking his gut, and he backed away while filming. Finally she gave him one serious lunge and he went backward into the pool, camera and all, and in a second came up sputtering and talking. “Hey! What the hell was that for?”

She stood over him and looked down into the pool. “I wonder,” she replied with as much sarcasm as she could muster.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Art running out from the behind the garage with a hedge clipper in his
hand, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking down the driveway. She turned sharply. There were three men standing in her driveway. One had a camera and shot a couple of still pictures of her. Another one had a tape recorder hanging from his shoulder like a purse, a microphone in his hand. “Ms. Tennet?” he began.

“Art!” she yelled hotly. “Get the gun! Now!”

“Ms. Tennet, can you tell us a little bit about your marriage to William Parker?”

Art stood there, dumbfounded. Of course, there was no gun for Art to get. Sable, however, had a nice little midnight special that she kept in the bedside table. She was already telling herself that it would be a very undiplomatic way to end this interview. She could get in trouble.

“Art, goddamnit, get the gun! Shoot these bastards, or I will!”

“Ms. Tennet, what can you tell us about the death of your child seventeen years ago?”

She was already in trouble.

She whirled around to see the man with the videocam struggling out of the pool. With a foot to his shoulder, she shoved him back in. She whirled back toward the others. “I’m going to get my gun. You’d better run for your worthless lives.”

She stomped into the kitchen, threw the bolt on the door, took the stairs to her bedroom two at a time and grabbed the revolver out of the bedside table. She was down the stairs and opening the kitchen door again with incredible speed. In all her life, nothing could possibly have prepared her for the audacity of tabloid reporters. The still photographer flashed a picture of her pointing the gun at him. The very idea caused her to smile. But it was the wickedest smile she’d ever worn. She fired the
gun—always kept fully loaded and shot at a range at least twice a year—into the air over the lake.

At least they had the common sense to flinch.

“Put the camera down. And the tape recorder,” she instructed levelly.

“Let me give you the film,” the photographer, now nervous, pleaded. “The camera cost a lot of money.”

“And what do you think my private life costs, you lowlife son of a bitch? Put them down. Now. Very slowly and carefully. I’m all upset.”

They did so. The soaking camcorder photographer was edging his way slowly toward the driveway. He had to go past her to get away. “Don’t sweat it, babe,” he said. “Film’s ruined.”

“Put it down!” she snapped. “And don’t you
ever
call me
babe!
”

He wisely disengaged himself from the heavy piece of equipment, placing it on the ground.

“Now run,” she advised. “Run!” she restated when they hesitated.

One by one they took flight, their gear lying on the driveway behind them.

Sable was distraught and took leave of her senses for a moment. She aimed the gun quite carefully toward the far edges of the drive. She fired once, then again. They ran all the faster. She longed to empty the gun into their skinny butts, but she knew she was already in for it. The first shot she’d fired over the lake had probably fallen and hit a fish and she’d end up being fined by the Environmental Protection Agency.