Looking for Laura, page 12
“I miss my daddy sometimes,” Rosie told Todd. She walked flanked by the two adults, a tiny slice of filler sandwiched between two slabs of grown-up. “Do you miss him?”
“Sure I do,” Todd said, then caught Sally’s eye again. He wasn’t smiling this time. He was looking for help.
She had no help to offer. If Todd missed Paul, he missed him. Sometimes even she missed him, although she no longer missed him late at night when her bed seemed huge and her body empty, or on lazy Sunday mornings when they used to unfold the Sunday Boston Globe and grab different sections—he liked the front page, the Focus and the Business sections, while she preferred the Arts, the magazine and whichever section carried Ann Landers. They’d sit basking in the tinted sunlight streaming through her stained-glass ornaments, sipping coffee as strong and well brewed as anything she served at the New Day Café, and they’d flip the pages and munch on fresh fruit and leftover turnovers from the café, which she’d bring home and warm in the oven so they tasted just-baked.
She used to miss Paul on Sundays. But now she mostly missed him when it was time to drag the garbage pail down to the curb on trash-collection day, or when she didn’t understand one of the insurance reports or documents she’d been sent since his death. Of course, if he hadn’t died, she wouldn’t have been getting all those reports and documents—but she sometimes wished he would come back from the dead and translate them into plain English for her.
That was about it. She no longer missed his smell, the sound of his voice, the growl of his stupid Alfa Romeo as he coasted up the driveway at the end of the day. She no longer missed his meticulousness, the order he brought to their bathroom, the critical inspections he gave to the backyard after Jimmy Stephens from down the street had mowed it. She no longer missed his pontificating about the relative quality of a wine he’d just opened. She no longer cared whether the wine had breathed or not before she drank it. Actually, she didn’t like the idea of wine breathing at all. It made the wine sound alive, a beast in liquid form, still respiring while people consumed it.
But Rosie was allowed to miss her father. And for Rosie’s sake, Sally sometimes pretended she missed him, too.
“Does this friend of Daddy’s miss him?” Rosie asked Todd.
Sally sent him a sympathetic look. She didn’t know why Rosie was questioning Todd, except that she had probably grown tired of Sally’s answers.
Todd looked miffed by Sally’s refusal to bail him out and take over the discussion. He shrugged and said, “I guess she might miss him. I don’t know. Maybe we can ask her when we see her.”
Oh, great. What a fun conversation that would be: “Hi. I’m the widow of your dead lover. He gave you my knife and I want it back. This is the daughter of your dead lover. If you happen to have a shred of morality lurking inside you somewhere, you might want to feel guilty about the fact that you were screwing around with the father of this adorable, innocent child. And this guy here is your lover’s best friend, who is really ticked off that he was never informed of your illicit affair. By the way, your writing style stinks. And just one more thing—do you miss him?”
For the first time since she’d gotten into Todd’s car three-plus hours ago, Sally wondered whether tracking Laura Hawkes down was such a good idea. She shot a look Todd’s way, but he was staring ahead as if calculating the distance to the next streetlight.
Did Sally really want to say all those things to Laura when she saw the woman? Did she really want to look into Laura’s eyes and think, Paul sacrificed his wedding vows for her. He chose her over me…. Did she really want to meet a woman who could have sex with Paul and think of Sartre?
No. But she wanted her knife back. It was important to her. It had sentimental value. She’d given it to Paul with a heart full of love, and he’d squandered this precious gift, passing it along to a woman who’d ridiculed its very vulgarity. They’d probably both laughed at it—and at her.
She wanted the knife back, damn it.
“Trevor is my best friend,” Rosie was informing Todd. “He’s kind of a wuss, but that’s okay. Maybe I should have gotten a necklace for him.” She fingered her rice pendant thoughtfully. “Mommy, can we go back to that man and get a necklace for Trevor?”
“I don’t think so.” The odds of the guy having a Trevor necklace already made were slim, and Sally wasn’t about to get ripped off for an additional eight bucks while another rice grain was customized.
“Anyway,” Rosie continued blithely, turning back to Todd, “Trevor lives next door to me. He’s a boy.”
“I figured, with a name like Trevor.” Todd didn’t sound entirely comfortable with the conversation, but he was giving it his best. Sally appreciated his effort.
“What do you do?” Rosie asked him.
“Do? You mean, my job?”
“Yeah.”
“I edit the Valley News. You know what that is?”
Rosie nodded. “Mrs. Varney tore it up for paper mashy. She’s my teacher.”
“Papier-mâché,” Sally corrected her.
“We made piñatas in school. Do you know what they are?”
“Something made out of my newspaper,” Todd guessed.
“Well, silly—first you tear the newspaper up and you dip the pieces in this slimy paste. Then you put the slimy pieces on the donkey.”
“The donkey.” Todd sounded a bit uncertain but mostly resigned.
“Because it’s a piñata. That’s a donkey made out of paper mashy. So you put these slimy pieces of newspaper on it until it looks like a donkey, and then you let it dry, and then you paint it, and then you hit it with a stick until it breaks.”
“That sounds like a worthwhile activity,” Todd said wryly. “You take my newspaper, tear it, dip it in slime, mold an ass out of it and then hit the ass until it breaks. What ever happened to Red Rover?”
“We play that, too,” Rosie assured him. “But the piñata is filled with candy.”
“Ah. That explains it. You put candy inside the slimy tatters of my newspaper.”
“I don’t know how the candy gets inside,” Rosie told him. “I don’t put it in there. It just gets in there somehow. And then, when we break it open with a stick, all the candy comes spilling out. It’s cool.”
“I bet it is.” The look he sent Sally over Rosie’s head had crossed the line from wry to downright sardonic.
“It’s an old Mexican folk custom,” Sally explained. As a newspaperman, he ought to be more enlightened about foreign cultures. Of course, she’d learned about piñatas through Rosie. Maybe you had to have a young child to know about them—or you had to be Mexican.
“I don’t know about the candy,” Todd commented. “But I like the part about breaking the thing apart with a stick. It sounds like a great way to let off steam.”
“Do you enjoy hitting things with sticks?” Sally goaded him.
“Only when I’m looking for a cathartic experience. Is that the State House up ahead, or am I hallucinating?”
If he was hallucinating, she was, too. She saw the stretch of verdant open space that marked the eastern edge of Boston Common, and looming to her right the majestic dome of the State House. Her heart fluttered with excitement, and she pointed toward the dome. “Look, Rosie. Can you see it?”
“See what?” Short as she was, Rosie couldn’t see past the buildings rising beside them along the sidewalk.
“Just up ahead. See the park?” Sally redirected her index finger straight ahead, to the looming expanse of green, an oasis in this urban environment. They could all have been nomads in the desert, stumbling upon grass and trees after their long trek.
Except it hadn’t really been a long trek at all. Certainly not ten miles. Not even one mile.
At last they broke around the corner and into the open space. Rosie saw the State House now, massive and austere, lording over one corner of the Common. “Is that it?” she asked.
“That’s it. That’s where the governor works, and all the state assemblymen and representatives. Do you know what they are?”
“Politicians, right?” Rosie seemed almost as excited by the State House as she’d been by the juggling clown. Then again, Sally supposed there wasn’t much difference between juggling clowns and politicians. “It looks like a castle.”
Sally didn’t agree, but she wouldn’t argue. She supposed the pillared building, with its lengthy flight of entry steps and massive doors, could pass for a colonial, democratic castle of sorts. It was far too public for that, though, not a place where lords and ladies might dance the minuet together, but rather a place where wealthy descendants of people who sailed to America on the Mayflower would gather to come up with ways to patronize the masses. It definitely had a Dead White Males aura about it.
“I wonder if we have time for a tour of the building,” she said.
“No,” Todd said almost instantly.
“Why not?”
His glare hinted that he lacked a good answer. “It’s Saturday,” he finally said. “They don’t give tours on Saturdays.”
“How do you know that?”
“The government doesn’t do business on Saturdays. The place is closed.”
“What if they’re debating a bill? Maybe they’re going to debate it all weekend long. Some vital bill about worker safety or protecting the pink-toed butterfly—”
“The pink-toed butterfly?” Todd snorted. “Since when do butterflies have toes?”
“They do in one of my books,” Rosie told him. “Mommy, are there pink-toed butterflies in that castle?”
“Try green-butted caterpillars,” Todd muttered, but Sally heard him. Rosie probably did, too. For the next two weeks, Rosie was going to be questioning her about green-butted caterpillars.
Before Rosie could ask anything, Sally navigated them across the manicured lawn of the Common, passing the State House and emerging from the park a couple of blocks beyond. “Mount Vernon Street is in this direction,” she told them.
“Does Daddy’s Friend have toys?” Rosie wanted to know.
“I guess we’ll find out,” Sally answered.
“You had toys,” Rosie reminded Todd. “Toy cars. You said they weren’t toys, but they were. I could tell.”
“Yeah?” He glanced down at her. “How could you tell?”
“They were little. And they had silly colors.”
“Silly?” He looked indignant.
“Turquoise blue? That’s a silly color for a car. And anyway, they were much too little to be real cars.”
“They’re called model cars,” Todd told her. “I made them.”
“You made them?” Yet another thing to impress Rosie today—the juggling clown, the rice writer and now this: Todd had made his toy cars. In another minute, she might start hyperventilating from all the excitement. “How did you make them?”
“There are kits. Model kits. You paint the pieces, fit them together and glue them.”
“Why?”
“Because…” He frowned, as if hoping to squeeze an answer out of his forehead. “Because it’s fun.”
“It would be a lot more fun to play with them. I don’t see why you bother to make them if you aren’t going to play with them after. When I make things with my Legos, I always play with them after.”
“This is different.”
“Why?”
Again he frowned. “Because I’m a grown-up,” he finally said.
Fortunately for him, Sally was able to change the subject. “Look—there’s Mount Vernon Street.”
It was, like the rest of the Beacon Hill neighborhood, a charming road lined with redbrick town houses. Sally suspected each town house was a single dwelling, which would mean each resident was a gazillionaire. Had Paul fallen for Laura Hawkes because she was rich? That would hardly make sense. He had family wealth, and he’d earned a good living with Wittig, Mott, and really, what did anyone need all that money for? The cost of living in Winfield was not the same as on Beacon Hill in Boston.
Even more peculiar, Laura Hawkes had been a client of Paul’s. Sally had gotten the woman’s name and address from Patty Pleckart by asking about his clients named Laura. Why would a gazillionaire Bostonite hire a lawyer from Winfield?
If she was sleeping with him, hiring him might have made their assignations simpler. Maybe Laura Hawkes was married, too. Maybe she’d hired Paul so she would have an excuse to slip away from her husband and meet Paul somewhere. “I’ve got to go see my lawyer,” she would tell her husband. “I’ll be home tomorrow. Try not to be nothingness without me.”
“Swank territory,” Todd murmured, his gaze sweeping over the freshly painted, paneled front doors, with their brass knockers and mail slots, the wrought-iron railings along the front steps, the neat, quaint shutters framing each window. If affluence had an odor, Sally would have keeled over from the stench.
“This is it,” she said, halting in front of one of the houses and gazing up the stone steps to the front door.
“This is where Daddy’s Friend lives?”
“That’s right.” She hesitated at the foot of the stairs, trying to gather the courage that suddenly seemed to have fled from her. She recalled the collection of letters she’d found, and all they had implied. She remembered her missing pocketknife. She thought about Paul, her husband, the father of her daughter, the man she’d vowed to love, honor and cherish till death did them part. She’d been wronged, conned, bamboozled, cheated…
But actually facing the woman who’d helped Paul to wrong, con, bamboozle and cheat was a whole different thing.
Yet she didn’t hate Laura Hawkes. She’d never even met her.
Todd touched her shoulder and she turned to him, expecting to see sympathy in his face. What she saw was what she wanted to feel: hard anger. He’d touched her, not to comfort her but to nudge her aside so he could scale the steps, lift that shiny brass knocker and let it smack against the door. No hesitancy in him. No doubt. No worry about what to say.
He was bitter, he was righteous and he was prepared to take on Laura Hawkes.
Sally resented him for possessing all the boldness she lacked. But she was kind of glad he was there to be bold for the both of them.
Eight
After three unanswered knocks on the door, Todd discovered a doorbell, which was attached to the side of the vertical molding in such a way that it wasn’t immediately visible. The only reason he could think of for someone to camouflage her doorbell was that she wanted people to use the fancy knocker.
All right. He’d used the fancy knocker. He’d admired its graceful curves and polished veneer, its oh-so-colonial attitude. But it wasn’t getting the job done.
He pressed the doorbell, pressed it again, heard a series of variably pitched gongs each time he pressed it. It was as effective as the knocker had been. No response.
Turning, he gazed down the front steps at the two females who stood below, watching him. Two hatted females, one with eyes as round and penetrating as bullets and the other with eyes hidden behind her chichi sunglasses. The way the Driver women peered up at him gave him an elevated sense of himself. He was above, taking charge, taking care of business.
Or not, as it happened. Either Laura Hawkes wasn’t home or she’d peeked out through an upstairs window, spotted a lady in a straw hat that resembled a flying saucer from a fifties sci-fi flick, accompanied by a kid in a purple hat the shape of which defied description altogether, and she’d decided not to answer her door.
Todd didn’t care. Well, he did care—he was frustrated that he couldn’t simply meet Paul’s mystery lover and get the story he’d come for, like the trained journalist he was. But he was glad he’d been the one to scale the stairs, manipulate the knocker, locate the doorbell and hear the gongs resounding on the other side of the six-panel door.
So far, the day had gone all Sally’s way. She’d played her god-awful CD during the drive, they’d eaten a hodgepodge picnic lunch at Quincy Market, Rosie had gotten her goofy rice necklace—but now it was his show. He was the one leading the charge. Sally had obtained Laura Hawkes’s name and address, but Todd had rung the bell.
He realized Sally and Rosie were waiting to be debriefed. “No one’s home,” he told them, lingering for one more moment on the top step just because he liked the altitude.
They continued to peer up at him. He strode down the stairs like a modern-day Zeus descending from Mount Olympus. Once he reached the sidewalk, he was able to see Sally’s face under the brim of her hat. He could even, if he stared really hard, see her eyes, ghostlike behind the dark lenses of her sunglasses. Her lips were pursed in a way that made her cheeks look hollow. “What are we going to do?” she asked.
He hadn’t thought that far ahead—but when he did, he saw only one option. “I guess we’ll have to go home.” An excellent option it was, too. They could drive back to Winfield, and he could return to Boston on his own, perhaps tomorrow, and visit Laura Hawkes without Sally and her kid tagging along. He could cruise down the Mass Pike—listening to rock and roll the entire way—and skip the Quincy Market detour. Now that he knew the destination, he could park right in the neighborhood, knock on Laura Hawkes’s knocker, ring her chime and find out why she and Paul had gone sneaking around behind Todd’s back.
“We’re not going home,” Sally said definitively. “We can wait.”
“Wait?” Like hell. He didn’t want to spend another hour or two in downtown Boston, struggling through awkward chats with the kid, spending money on crap for her and having heart attacks whenever he lost sight of her. “What if Laura’s out of town for the weekend?”
“What if she’s on her way home right now?” Sally countered. “It would be such a waste if we drove back to Winfield without seeing her and then it turned out that if we’d waited ten minutes we would have seen her.”
“What if it turned out we waited four hours and she never showed up?”
“Well, I wasn’t thinking we’d just sit here on her steps and do nothing for four hours. We could take a walk and then come back in a while and try again.”
