Looking for Laura (11 page)

He took the first exit he saw, only because the bumper-to-bumper stuff was making him itch. Someone honked at him. He honked back. The light ahead was red, and three cars ignored it, speeding through the intersection. By the time he reached the corner, the light had turned green. He wondered if he ought to stop.

“There's a garage sign.” Sally extended an arm across the front of his face, missing his nose by a millimeter. “See?”

He saw. He also saw that the road he was on was one-way the wrong way. He searched for a turnaround and followed a car coasting through a red light. Someone honked at him as he coasted through the red light, too.

He didn't care. He and his Saab were going to reach that garage. They were going to get a spot, even if there was only one spot left in the entire six-story structure and he had to duel another driver to the death for it. He was going to triumph over the eternal damnation of Boston's roadways and
park
.

Actually, the garage contained a fair number of empty spaces—probably because the obscene parking fees scared away anyone lacking a six-figure income or a sizable trust fund. Before he could turn off the engine, Rosie had unstrapped herself from her booster seat and swung open the door, nearly banging it against the Mercedes parked in the adjacent space.

“Watch it!” he warned her—too late. She was already out of the car, scampering across the concrete, endangering herself even more than the metallic silver finish of his Saab's door.

Sally shot out of the car after her, moving with surprising swiftness. No doubt she'd had lots of practice snagging her runaway daughter—but he was still awed by the speed with which she ringed an arm around Rosie's waist and swooped her off her feet. Like a calf roper at a rodeo, she restrained her wild daughter. And she didn't even need a lasso.

Sighing, he climbed out, flexed his knees to uncrick them and rolled his head from side to side to loosen the muscles in his neck. Sally and Rosie trooped back to his car, laughing as if Rosie's having bolted out into the potential path of cars had been a game. He would have cursed, but he'd resolved to keep his language clean around the kid.

Sally reached into the car for her tote bag and her wide-brimmed hat. Straightening, she met Todd's gaze. She was smiling, a broad, breezy smile that he suspected was left over from her romp with Rosie. “Let's go get some lunch,” she said brightly.

And then they would locate Laura Hawkes, and they would torture her until she confessed her affair with Paul and explained why Paul had neglected to tell Todd about the relationship. “He was afraid it would place you in
a moral quandary, and he wanted to spare you that,” she would say, or, “He'd intended to tell you, Todd, because you were his very best friend, but I begged him not to. I didn't want anyone to know. Please, blame me not him.”

After which he and Sally would go home and live happily ever after. At least he would. Sally could decide for herself what state of mind she wanted to live ever after in.

They walked through the echoing garage to the door leading out to the street. “I know where we are!” Sally boasted. “That open-air place with the jugglers and musicians. What's it called?”

All Todd knew was that it wasn't called Mount Vernon Street.

Rosie seemed enraptured, not just by the noise and bustle of the city, the density of the traffic, the neck-craning heights of the buildings and the masses of pedestrians clogging the sidewalks, but by her mother's words. “Jugglers and musicians? I wanna see!” She nearly broke free of her mother and darted into the street, but Sally was apparently ready for this breakaway. She locked her hand around the girl's wrist and held her on the sidewalk.

“Quincy Market,” she remembered. “When I was at Winfield College, I once spent a few days in Boston with a classmate. Her parents lived in Brookline, and we stayed at their house and took the T into the city every day. Spring break.”

Todd recalled the spring break he and Paul had spent in the Bahamas. Paul's parents had rented a villa for the boys on Cable Beach. All Todd had had to pay for was his airfare.

Spending a week on Nassau was little different from
spending a couple of days in Boston. It was one thing to think of Sally as a hick from the sticks, and another to think of himself as a pampered member of the bourgeoisie. Oddly enough, she seemed to have more vivid memories of her big vacation in Beantown than he had of his in the Bahamas. He recalled getting a nice tan, visiting a casino, picking up some bikini-clad babes from Duke University on the beach and having a good time. But he didn't glow in reminiscence.

Sally was glowing. “I remember seeing a fabulous one-man band here,” she told Rosie, who obediently clung to her mother's hand and gazed up at her as they waited for the light at the corner to change. “He played a banjo with his hands and wore a harmonica on a brace around his neck. And he created a contraption out of two guitars, with foot pedals that worked another pick so it strummed across the guitars. The pedals also controlled a bunch of percussion. You know what percussion is, Rosie, don't you?”

“Banging on stuff. Will he be there today?”

“I don't know, honey. It was a long time ago. But I bet there'll be musicians.”

“What about the jugglers?”

“I hope so.” Swept across the street in a throng of pedestrians, Sally and her daughter surged ahead of Todd. He hurried to catch up, wondering why he felt envious of Sally's enthusiasm over a street musician she'd heard years ago.

As they entered the sprawling outdoor plaza of Quincy Market, he recalled his own visits to this place. The last time had been about a year ago, when he'd been in town for a journalism conference and everyone had escaped the hotel for lunch in the open-air arcade. His memory was of cheap food at posh prices, pigeons grub
bing for scraps around the outdoor tables, shoppers racing in and out of high-end boutiques and a bizarre life-size sculpture of an erstwhile Boston Celtics coach seated on a park bench.

“We'll get some food here,” Sally was telling Rosie when Todd caught up to them. “There's a food court here somewhere. In that building, I think. This is all very historical, Rosie. All these buildings are very historical.”

Todd didn't think the Warner Brothers boutique was especially historical, with its bronze castings of Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny guarding the door. The Starbucks didn't look too historical, either. And he couldn't recall Crate and Barrel having much to do with the American Revolution—unless maybe they'd supplied the crates and barrels that had held the tea tossed overboard during the Boston Tea Party.

Sally and Rosie surfed a wavelike swarm of people into the building Sally had identified as the very historical food court. Todd was tempted to let them vanish from his sight. He didn't like the edgy emotion he was feeling in her presence—not just that inexplicable envy but something else, something beyond his usual irritation with her. Something about her silly hat and her exuberance. It pinched him, stung, made him want to turn around, head back to the overpriced garage and drive away.

But while he had access to the car, Sally had access to Laura Hawkes's address. And if he abandoned Sally and the kid in Quincy Market—even if he swore it wasn't his fault, they'd simply been pulled away from him by the crowd's undertow—Sally would never share information with him again.

Hell, she'd never even talk to him again. He weighed
the pluses and the minuses and decided to follow her into the food court.

Aromas of world cuisine clashed in the air as he worked his way through the crowds mobbing the food stands that lined the building's central walkway. Fried dough. Souvlaki. Pizza. Bagels. Dim sum and doughnuts, chicken soup and chop suey. If the U.N. were crossed with a coronary victim's stomach contents, this food court would be the likely result.

“Rosie wants tempura!” Sally hollered to him above the din of reverberating voices. “I think there's a tempura place at the other end!”

“I want pizza,” he said, mostly because the pizza place was at this end.

“Let's meet by the door!” she shouted, gesturing toward the door where they'd entered and then spinning away, her flamboyant hat all he could see of her.

He waited in line to buy two rubbery slices of pizza and a large Coke. There was a better pizza place in Winfield. There was probably a better pizza place in Calcutta—which this place filled with hungry, grasping hordes reminded him of. He grabbed a stack of napkins and a straw and retreated to the doorway, scanning the crowds for Sally's bobbing hat. If only Rosie had wanted pizza like a normal five-year-old, they could have been devouring their food by now and figuring out the quickest route to Mount Vernon Street.

But no, she had to have tempura.

The door opened behind him. “Here we are,” Sally announced from the steps outside. “It was easier to walk around the building than to try to plow through all those people. There's an empty bench here. It's so beautiful out. Let's enjoy the sun.”

Todd didn't want to enjoy the sun. He wanted to hear
Laura Hawkes explain why Paul hadn't told him the truth, and then he wanted to go home.

Rosie clearly didn't want to go home. She scampered ahead of her mother, who was balancing a cardboard tray of goodies, and searched the plaza for a one-man band. “Where did he stand, Mommy? Was he over there?”

“He was sitting,” Sally informed her, settling onto a bench, balancing the tray beside her and unslinging her tote from her arm. “Come eat your tempura, Rosie.” She slid along the bench to make room for Todd. “What did you get?”

“Pizza.” He slumped onto the bench, as far from her as he could sit, and scowled at the limp slices on his paper plate.

“How could you buy pizza? They had so many exotic foods.” She carefully pried off the lid of a cylindrical container. “I got chowder. The guy who served me called it ‘chowdah.' Chowdah,” she repeated, obviously savoring the sound.

“Look!” Rosie shrieked, prancing in front of the bench and pointing across the plaza, where a crowd had formed. Above the crowd a woman in a clown's baggy, colorful satin costume perched on a towering unicycle, juggling a bowling pin. Actually, Todd wasn't sure it could be called juggling when only one bowling pin was involved. She threw it up, caught it, wiggled to and fro on the unicycle and tossed the bowling pin into the air again, watching it spin end over end and then drop into her hand.

“Eat your tempura,” Sally urged her.

“I wanna watch the juggler!”

“Eat your tempura while you watch the juggler.”

“I wanna go over there.” She pointed at the crowd.

“Eat first.”

“I'm not hungry,” Rosie declared.

To her credit, Sally refused to indulge her. “Eat first,” she repeated, handing Rosie a cardboard plate that held several deep-fried slabs of something and a small cup of black liquid.

Poking out her lower lip, Rosie accepted the plate. She took a reluctant bite of tempura.

“I can't believe how beautiful it is,” Sally remarked, beaming at the cloudless sky above them, the pricey shops, the throngs of people who'd escaped the neighboring buildings for their lunch hour and were sucking on ice-cream cones, slurping gourmet coffee and wrapping themselves in the mild spring air. If Todd lived in Boston, he'd probably want to get outside during his lunch hour, too. Except that outside in Boston was about as refreshing as inside in Winfield.

Sally sipped her chowder, scooping the milky fluid with a plastic spoon. “I think we'll be able to walk to Mount Vernon Street from here,” she predicted.

“How far is it?”

“Rosie, stop bouncing around while you eat.” She turned to Todd. “On the map it was only a couple of inches.”

He'd seen maps on which an inch represented ten miles. “I didn't plan on this trip being an all-day excursion,” he reminded her. “I want to find this woman, talk to her and go home.”

“We're here and we might as well make the most of it. Okay,” she addressed Rosie with a nod. “You can watch the juggler now. But don't wander off.”

Rosie dropped her plate onto the bench between Sally and Todd and raced across the plaza, her shoelaces glittering as the sun struck them. They must have had metallic threads in them.

Todd eyed Sally warily. Her hat threw a semicircular shadow over the upper half of her face, but he could see her eyes. She'd hung her sunglasses over the neckline of her dress again, and their weight tugged it down, revealing a swatch of honey-colored skin, smooth above the curve of her breasts.

She wasn't beautiful. Not even pretty. Not his type, anyway. But he could see why, in a moment of brainlessness, Paul might have been attracted to her.

“I don't want to walk ten miles to see this woman.”

“I'm sure it isn't ten miles.” She swallowed some more soup and smiled. “Mmm. This is so good. I've been talking to Greta about whether we ought to serve soup at the New Day Café during lunchtime. We sell sandwiches, but soup…I don't know. What do you think?”

Why was she asking his advice about her coffee shop? Before last week, he'd never even been inside the place. He had no idea who Greta was, let alone whether soup would sell well.