Looking for Laura (10 page)

Even without Laura added into the mix, Paul hadn't been a faithful, respectful husband to Sally. A faithful, respectful husband would have taken his wife to Kendrick Ford-Porsche-Toyota or Route-9 Buick-Audi-Mitsubishi and bought her a new car.

Todd suffered a twinge of sympathy for Sally—and disloyalty toward his friend. Fortunately, it passed before he could analyze it.

“Mommy, I'm hungry,” Rosie shouted from the back seat, between verses about a cute newt in a camouflage suit.

“We're not stopping,” he warned Sally.

“Of course not.” Sally rummaged through her bag and removed a box of animal crackers. Amazing, he thought: the beasts Rosie didn't butcher with her ghastly singing she could butcher with her teeth. If she misbehaved during this outing, he'd report her to some fanatical animal-rights group. They'd know what to do with her.

“So what exactly is our plan once we get into the city?” he asked, trying to sift the emotion from his voice. He didn't want to be experiencing exasperation, pity or anything else in relation to the Driver women. Like the well-trained journalist he was, he preferred to remain dispassionate.

“Let's worry about getting there first.”

“I'm not worried about getting there. I'm worried about what we'll do once we're there.”

“Find a parking space, I suppose. The last time I was in Boston, that took over an hour.”

“Why didn't you park in a garage?”

“I couldn't find any. We weren't in the downtown area. We were in a part of town called Brighton. Remember, Rosie?” she called over her shoulder.

Rosie was too busy singing along to hear her.

“Why were you in Brighton?” he asked Sally. He wasn't sure where Brighton was, except that it wasn't a neighborhood he'd ever bothered to visit while he was in Boston.

“I needed to buy some Chinese herbs. There's a fabulous shop in Brighton, Ying's Emporium.”

Of course. Didn't everybody drive two hours to Boston so they could buy herbs at Ying's Emporium? “What were you going to do with those Chinese herbs?” he asked.

She opened her mouth and then shut it. From the corner of his eye he noticed a flush tinge her cheeks. “None of your business,” she mumbled.

Curiosity rose like lava inside him, hot and thick. “Were you going to poison him?” he guessed, keeping his voice down in case the cute-newt ditty ended and Rosie heard them in the silence between songs.

“Of course not!” Sally whispered. “Why would I want to poison him?”

“Because he was seeing Laura behind your back.”

“I didn't know about Laura until it was too late to poison him.”

True. “So what did you need the herbs for?”

“A recipe.”

“For what? Moo goo gai pan?”

Again her mouth flapped open and shut. Again her cheeks darkened. “A brew that was supposed to have…aphrodisiac qualities.”

“Ah.” He passed a sluggish eighteen-wheeler, then stole a look at her while he was checking his side mirror. She'd driven all the way to Boston to purchase ingredients for an aphrodisiac. She really must have wanted to turn Paul on. Maybe she'd sensed Paul withdrawing from her—saving his best stuff for Laura—and she'd hoped the aphrodisiac would help her win him back. Or maybe she'd wanted it for herself. Maybe her sex drive had evaporated, and that was why Paul had turned to another woman. Todd liked that explanation; it let Paul off the hook.

Only so much, though. It might justify Paul's having the affair, but not his refusal to tell his best friend about it. The guy was still a shit for locking Todd out of his life that way.

Besides, Todd wasn't a big fan of infidelity. He couldn't justify it, even if Sally had been frigid or aloof—which he couldn't imagine, given that she seemed to boast an overabundance of passion. Anger, indignation, aggressive self-certainty, maternal righteousness…passion.

He glanced at the slow truck he'd passed, now receding in his rearview mirror. He glanced at the buildup of traffic where the main feeder from Hartford and New York City merged with the Mass Pike, the blur of grass and trees lining the roadway, the signs warning of tolls, exits and rest stops—anywhere but at Sally. Surely she'd need more than a few Chinese herbs to turn herself into a love goddess. He tried to envision her in something slinky, but she wasn't a slinky woman. She had too
many curves. A big bosom, a rounded ass, wide shoulders. All that voluptuous hair spilling down her back. He couldn't visualize her in a teddy, a garter belt, anything from the Victoria's Secret catalog. Maybe a satin robe, wine red, held shut by a sash around her waist. Nothing on underneath. Maybe first she'd take a hot, steamy bath in a tub full of scented oils—or Chinese herbs from Ying's Emporium. And then she'd sprawl out on a bed in that satin robe, and sip a cup of Chinese-herb tea, and shift her long legs…

She did have long legs. A less observant man might not have noticed, since she was always wearing shapeless below-the-knees dresses that did nothing to flaunt whatever assets she had. But judging by her stride and the sway of her hips, Todd could tell her legs were long. Long legs on a woman were his idea of an aphrodisiac.

Not that Sally had ever made him feel anything other than loathing. And pity, since she'd been shafted by her dead husband. And maybe a little kinship, since
he'd
been shafted by her dead husband, too.

And curiosity about the Chinese herbs. Okay. He'd cop to curiosity.

“How much longer till we get there?” Rosie asked. “I'm bored.”

“You know, this music is really boring,” he pointed out, aiming his comments at Rosie even though he couldn't look at her. “How about if we listen to some rock and roll? You like rock and roll?”

“I like Nirvana,” she said.

There was hope for the kid. “Open the glove compartment,” he ordered Sally. “There's a Nirvana CD in there.”

“I don't like Nirvana,” she muttered.

“You've been outvoted,” Todd informed her, won
dering if the music they'd been listening to had been her choice and not Rosie's all along.

By the time they passed the I-495 exit, Todd and Rosie were singing along to “Polly Want a Cracker.” Rosie faked most of the words, which was probably just as well.

Sally excavated in her tote bag until she found a pair of sunglasses, and slid them on. They were elliptical and nearly opaque, and they lent her an unexpected glamour. The next song came on, and when he kept silent he could hear that Rosie was definitely faking the lyrics—but that was all right. Let her fake it while he contemplated the woman at his side, a woman who brewed X-rated potions and wore chichi sunglasses. A woman who refused to relinquish her dignity, such as it was, even after her husband had betrayed her.

A woman who didn't like Nirvana, he reminded himself.

They passed through the final tollgate. Boston's skyline loomed, a silhouette of dark gray towers that, from a distance, offered little to distinguish it from most other midsize cities. He knew once they got into downtown Boston that perception would change. The bland, boxy skyscrapers camouflaged a world of redbrick and brownstone, arching trees and street lights that resembled gas lamps, convoluted roadways designed three hundred fifty years ago as cow paths, mass-transit trains that borrowed the public streets and stopped at the red lights, then vanished into underground tunnels. Boston was a quirky city, and he appreciated its quirks.

He didn't like getting lost in it, however. “Where are we going?” he asked, hoping that now that they were breathing city air, Sally would clue him in on their destination.

She reached back into the maw of her tote bag, rattled some chains and hubcaps inside it, and produced a small notepad, which she flipped open. “Mount Vernon Street,” she said.

“You wouldn't happen to know where that is, would you?”

“Boston,” she told him. When he shot her an impatient look, she shrugged innocently. “Well, what could I do? Telephone the woman and ask for directions? She'd want to know why we were coming to see her.”

“You could have concocted a lie.”

“Paul was the liar in our family, not me,” she muttered too softly for Rosie to hear.

“Of course,” Todd scoffed. “You never lie, and ‘Animal Sweet' is better than The Beach Boys. How did you get the scoop on this Laura person from Patty Pleckart, anyway?”

Sally pursed her lips and turned to stare out the windshield.

“Lied through your teeth,” he guessed. She'd lied better than he had, too. His lie about wanting to surround himself with Paul's aura hadn't bought him more than a few computer games and that mysterious list of names and phone numbers. He wondered if Laura Hawkes's number was on the list, if her life intersected with Paul's computer diskettes in any way.

“There are lies, and there are tactics.” Sally's voice was gritty. “Paul lived a lie. All I did was employ tactics to uncover the truth.”

He knew the difference between Paul's lying to his wife—and lying by omission to his best buddy—and Sally's lying to Patty Pleckart. But he felt like giving Sally a hard time, if only to honor Paul's memory.

He'd been listening to Paul give Sally a hard time
from the day they wed—or, more accurately, from the morning Sally had confronted Paul with the news that she was pregnant. During their regular get-togethers at Grover's for drinks after work, Paul would tell Todd about Sally's rattletrap car, her lack of common sense, her sprout-and-tofu recipes, her inability to grasp intellectual concepts more complicated than the daily horoscope published in the
Valley News
and her insistence on hanging some sort of yarn contraption on the wall above Rosie's bed because she thought it would influence the kid's dreams. Todd had had trouble following Paul the evening he'd described the yarn thing, but then, Todd had consumed more than his usual quota of beer that night. He would have had trouble following a supermodel into a bedroom.

None of which mattered right now. More important than truth, more vital than tactics, he needed to know where Mount Vernon Street was. “Maybe you should have just called Laura and come clean with her,” he said, thinking that would have been preferable to meandering aimlessly among the perversely twisting, weaving, shape-shifting streets of downtown Boston.

“If I'd come clean with her, she wouldn't have agreed to meet with me. I want to see her,” Sally said.

The city was dead ahead, rising around the turnpike. “There's a map of Boston in the door pocket,” he said, gesturing toward her door. “See if you can find Mount Vernon Street.”

She removed her sunglasses and hooked them over the curved neckline of her dress. Then she wrestled with the map, unfolding and refolding it, shaking it smooth, propping it against the dashboard, smoothing a crease and squinting at the mesh of lines marking the streets of the city. “Use the key,” he suggested.

“I know how to read a map.” Her squint pleated her forehead. She tilted the map, angled it to catch the sunlight blasting through her window, flipped it over and found the key. “Mount Vernon Street,” she murmured, running an unpolished fingernail down the column of teeny print. “Okay…Mount Vernon Street.” She flipped the map over again, a production of rattling and flopping, the unwieldy folds drooping against her knees, hitting the glove compartment, blocking half the windshield until she smoothed the paper and got it to lie reasonably flat. “Okay. It's right here. Near—” she squinted and rotated the map, hitting his hand with it. He shoved it back at her and checked his knuckles to make sure he hadn't suffered a paper cut “—the State House.”

“The State House.” He sort of had an idea where that was. He'd been there a few times, most recently a year ago at the invitation of the state assemblyman who represented Winfield, a bombastic, overweight fellow whose chief qualifications for office, as far as Todd could tell, were that he knew all four verses of “The Star Spangled Banner” and was on a first-name basis with everyone in the Rotary Club and the Winfield Chamber of Commerce.

“There must be a parking garage somewhere near the State House,” she said.

“There must be.” If only he knew where. “What's the nearest exit?”

She squinted at the map some more. “I think you have to go north on this road here.” She nudged the map toward him.

He wasn't going to read a map while navigating through the rapidly thickening traffic. “What road?”

“I–93.”

“I'm starving,” Rosie wailed from the back seat.

“We'll have some lunch as soon as we get there,” Sally assured her.

“Get where?”

“Boston.”

They were already there, in Boston, wedged into a tight mass of nearly motionless cars. The clogged traffic made Todd lose his appetite. But who cared whether he wanted lunch? This was Sally's show, Sally and Rosie's. He was just the chauffeur.

By choice, he reminded himself, nudging his car forward, feeling adrenaline singe his nerves as a fat black SUV dared to cut him off. He'd felt grateful when Sally had included him on this outing, and he'd volunteered to drive. If the ladies wanted to eat, eating was what they'd do.