Looking for Laura (2 page)

She pulled that sweater out and held it up in front of her. Then she crossed to the mirror and studied herself. The smoky-gray wool made her skin appear pale and pink, her eyes icy blue. She no longer resembled the haggard, miserable woman she'd been three months ago when she'd worn it to bed. She looked like someone in control, someone who knew what she was doing.

“Ha,” she said out loud. She never knew what she was doing until she did it, and even then she often wasn't sure.

She tossed the sweater on the bed and pulled out another sweater, and another. The fisherman's sweater came out, the burgundy V-neck, the brown crew neck. As she pulled that one out, it fell loose, releasing a manila envelope that had been tucked into its folds.

Puzzled, she tossed the sweater onto the bed and lifted the envelope from the floor where it had fallen. She flipped it over—no writing on either side, but its contents made it thick enough to strain the wire clip that held the flap shut. She unbent the tabs and lifted the flap. Inside was a stack of folded papers.

She sank onto the bed, not caring that she was sitting on Paul's favorite Nordic sweater, the one with little deer knit into a white-on-black pattern. Carefully, she shook
out the papers. They were stationery, she realized. Letters. A secret piece of him. She felt almost as if she were trespassing, as if she should stuff them back into the envelope and toss them back into the drawer out of respect for his past.

But Paul's entire life was past. All he was was his past.

Besides, she was too curious not to read them.

She lifted the top letter from the pile, smoothed it out and read:

A love letter. Paul had saved love letters from an old flame. As his most recent and final flame, Sally knew she didn't have any grounds for jealousy, but still, the fact that he'd saved the letter, saved
all
these letters, irked her.

Just a little, she assured herself. Just because she was his wife, and wives deserved to be irked by saved letters from old flames.

She reread the new year's greeting, with its etches and touches. “Isn't she the poet,” she muttered, finding the prose cloying. Paul had never been one for sweet talk.

She tried to remember the last time he'd worn the brown sweater. Certainly not during the past winter, or the winter before. He'd been protesting the color brown, she'd recalled. Too many people were wearing brown, and he'd been determined to stick to grays and blues,
just to spite the fashion trend. She wondered if he'd forgotten the letters were even there.

She read on:

A sharp chill skimmed down Sally's spine, causing her to shiver so violently the letter dropped from her hands. It sat in her lap, something so toxic she didn't want to touch it, yet she had to remove it, had to remove the entire pile of letters from her knees before they ate through the denim of her overalls and started in on her flesh.

She stared down at the letter. She didn't want to keep reading, but she couldn't stop.

“Go ahead, Trevor—use your cutlass!” Rosie shrieked outside in the yard. “That's that stick in your hand, it's a cutlass. Run it through! Ahoy!”

I miss you. I want you. Laura.

Sally clutched the letter. Her stomach clenched. Her throat burned. Her lungs ached.
If there's no love for you at home, leave home.

But there had been plenty of love for him at home. And he hadn't left home, Sally realized. He'd never left,
except to take his stupid little sports car for a drive on a January morning when the roads were icy.

What was she getting so keyed up about? This woman had to have been writing to him more than six years ago, before he and Sally had made a life together.

Before he'd met Sally, though, he'd lived alone. So he really didn't have a home, with or without love.

Her heart picked up a jogging rhythm, loud, regular thumps. She felt the pulse in her brain, echoing through her skull. If she read the other letters, she was going to wind up in a bad place emotionally. She ought to just stick the whole mess in the trash and forget about it. Whoever she was, this Laura person had written to Paul before he'd met Sally, and he'd saved her letters because Sally was so pathetically unliterary, and that was all there was to it. She didn't want to think he'd saved them because he still carried a torch for Laura all these years later. Sentimentality, that was all it was. Nostalgia. A little macho pride.

Reassured, she unfolded the next letter:

“Jesus,” Sally muttered. He'd been a small-town lawyer, not Einstein. His mind had been better than average, but “resonating wisdom” was overstating it by a bit.

“Christ,” Sally elaborated. Who was this woman? And why couldn't she have dated her letters with the
year as well as the month and day? This one was dated October 4. A great day for sharing thoughts on Sartre, apparently.

In the six years Sally had known Paul, he had never once mentioned Sartre, not even in his sleep. These letters had to predate his marriage to her. Laura had probably been a college sweetheart, one of those earnest New York City types, flat chested and partial to Peruvian woven vests, the kind of woman who smoked imported cigarettes and took herself very seriously. Paul had saved her correspondence to remind him of his foolish youth, before he'd moved to Winfield and discovered the far healthier romance of life in a small city with a college and a couple of mills for ambience, and clean air and friendly folks and coffee shops like the New Day Café.

Sally laughed, then felt guilty. Laughing made more sense than taking the letters seriously. Or maybe it didn't make more sense. Maybe it just offered a degree of protection, like whistling past a graveyard. Something awful was in these letters, something profoundly threatening. But she was allowed to laugh, because what little she recalled of Sartre from her interrupted schooling was so unerotic she couldn't imagine associating his philosophy with sex.

Sex. With Paul. This woman was writing about sex with Sally's husband. Sally had never felt like being and nothingness after she and Paul had gone at it. She'd usu
ally felt like eating. Sex with Paul used to make her hungry.

Okay. So it was a college fling, from his days at Columbia, where hormonally hyped scholars rationalized their lust by overlaying it with a shimmer of intellectualism. Sally began to feel better about the whole thing.

Smiling, she picked up the third letter:

The only vulgar knife Sally had ever seen was the pocketknife that had belonged to her father, with the topless hula dancer painted onto the faux-pearl handle. Paul had given her a beautiful gold band when they'd gotten married, but she'd lacked the funds to buy a wedding band for him. So she'd given him the most precious thing she'd owned—the hula knife.

“Very vulgarity” would certainly describe it. And the hula dancer would imply Hawaii.

Where had that knife gone? After he'd died, the police had given her a packet containing what they'd called his effects—his watch, his wallet, his nail clipper, his keys, the fountain pen he'd had clipped to his shirt pocket. No pocketknife. She didn't think he'd carried it with him—if someone at his stuffy law firm had ever seen him
slitting open an envelope with it, they might have taken his partnership away.

She was pretty sure he'd kept the knife in his top drawer with his handkerchiefs and cuff links. Setting aside the letters, she stood and crossed back to the dresser. The top drawer contained exactly what it had contained a few minutes ago: Cuff links. Hankies. His Columbia school ring. A cigar trimmer from that pretentious period when he'd thought cigars were cool.

No hula knife.

Where could it be? Why hadn't she seen it since his death? A knife like that didn't just disappear.

Apprehension gnawed at her. She slammed the drawer shut and returned to the bed. The letters had gotten scattered, but she had no idea if they'd been in any sort of order, and she didn't care. She plucked the top one from the pile and lifted it to read:

“Stop with the yets already,” Sally snapped. “And yet
what?
”

Sally suddenly had trouble making out the words. They jumped all over the page—and then she realized that the page itself was jumping, because her hands were trembling as they held it. Her heart stopped its loping beat—in fact, it seemed to have stopped altogether. Maybe she was dead, even though she could still see the page, feel the lump of Paul's Norwegian sweater under her thigh, hear the giddy children's voices wafting in through the window. Maybe she was alive and dead at the same time. Maybe this was being and nothingness.

“Trevor!” Rosie scolded. “
We're
the pirates. We get to pillage.
Pillage
. That's a little town in Bounding. Don't you know anything?”

Maybe Paul was a pirate, Sally thought, letting the letter slip from her fingers and drift to the floor. Maybe the best way to pillage was armed with a vulgar hula-dancer knife. Maybe Sally was the one who didn't know anything.

Or maybe she just wished she didn't know anything. She knew very little, but it already seemed like way too much.

T
odd Sloane's mother was calling him. Not by phone, the way normal people communicated with each other, but by holler. Her voice trumpeted across the newsroom that separated their offices, a booming honk: “Todd! Where's that editorial you ran last Friday about the sewer expansion?”

Todd took a deep breath and let it out slowly. If he were still a smoker, he would have exhaled jets of smoke from his nostrils, but he'd given up the nasty habit four years ago, not long after Denise had left him. Somehow, once she was gone he'd no longer felt a craving for nicotine. The divorce had forced him to acknowledge that he wasn't cut out for self-destruction after all.

So he exhaled only air, no smoke. The exercise of his lungs soothed him.

He picked up his phone, punched Helen Sloane's extension and listened to her phone ring through her open door and his. “What?” she bellowed into his ear.

His office was walled in glass to provide a view into the newsroom. His mother's office was also walled in glass. He could see her standing beside her desk, all five foot two robust inches of her, with her hair shaped like a helmet and dyed a peculiar shade of red. There was an undertone of purple to it, although he doubted she
was aware of the way it looked when light hit it from above.

She was a good woman. She also happened to be a pain in the ass, and Todd didn't want to deal with her or her obsession over the bonds the city of Winfield wanted to issue to cover the cost of the sewer expansion.

“Mom,” he said calmly into the phone. “I taught you how to use the computer to call up previous issues of the paper. Everything's online, so you can log on and type www-dot-valleynews-dot-com.”

“I hate that Internet stuff,” she complained. “I don't see why you can't just bring me over a copy of the editorial. A real copy. On paper.”

“I don't have one handy,” he said gently. “If you don't want to read the editorial online, you can call up the file. You type ‘editorials' and then last Friday's date—”

“You know what? You know what it is, Todd? It's this computer. I hate it. I really hate it.”

It was the computer—and it was much, much more. His mother wanted the
Valley News
to be run the way she and his father had run it when they'd taken it over from Todd's grandfather forty years ago. All the reporters had worked on manual typewriters then. They'd smoked heavily and drunk even more heavily, and they'd run on brains and balls. His mother had run harder than anyone else, because she'd had more balls than the rest of the staff combined.

But that was then and this was now. Todd's father had had the good sense to retire as copublisher, but his mother was hanging on, insisting that she was essential to the functioning of the newspaper, when all she did was interfere, meddle, disagree with him and holler
across the newsroom like Heidi calling for the straying sheep to return to her Alp.

“Listen, Mom—why don't you take the rest of the day off,” Todd suggested. “You can catch up with Dad. He's probably at the fifth or sixth hole by now. You can golf the rest of the course with him. It's a beautiful day. You shouldn't be stuck in the office.”

“I don't want to golf. I hate golf. The only reason your father is golfing instead of working is that he's losing his marbles. I know you're in denial about this, Todd, but it's true. The man has Alzheimer's.”

“He doesn't.”

“See what I mean? You're in denial. This morning he forgot what to call a doorknob.”

“He never knew what to call a doorknob,” Todd argued. It was true. His father had always been noun challenged. “His doctor doesn't think there's anything wrong with him.”

“His doctor doesn't live with him. Neither do you. I'm telling you, he's losing his marbles. He's lost at least three marbles so far, and given that he only started with maybe a dozen, that's a lot of marbles.”

“Mom—”

“I heard that you came out in favor of the bonds. Todd, I hate when you run editorials without checking with me first. I'm the publisher, don't forget.”

Emeritus, he thought, but didn't say so. When he'd taken over the paper as publisher and editor in chief, he'd given his parents the grand-sounding title of copublishers emeritus, which he figured would be enough to send them merrily on their way into happy retirement. His father loved to golf. His mother loved to travel. He had envisioned them traveling from golf resort to golf resort for at least nine months of the year, leaving him
to yank the
Valley News
into the twenty-first century without any flak from them.

“Winfield's growing,” he said patiently. “We need more sewer capacity.”

“Winfield has gotten big enough. It ought to stop growing. That's the editorial stand you need to take.”

Todd might have pointed out that she considered Winfield's growth just swell when it contributed to the increased circulation of the daily paper. More readers meant more sewers, though. People read the newspaper and went to the bathroom, frequently at the same time. Todd sensed a direct connection between ingesting news and egesting waste, and he would have been glad to explain that to her.

But he had long ago stopped explaining anything to his mother. She believed what she chose to believe, and she believed it with all her heart. She believed his father had Alzheimer's disease; she believed computers were evil; she believed Winfield had enough sewers.

He didn't want to deal with her. If Paul had been available, Todd would have phoned him and said, “Meet me at Grover's after work and help me plot the murder of my mother.” Paul would have understood.

Damn. He missed Paul. The stupid bastard. Why had he gone and wrapped his car around a tree? Who was Todd going to fantasize about murdering his mother with now?

Eddie Lesher, maybe? The kid loomed in Todd's office, blocking Todd's view of his mother—a definite plus. But he was barely twenty four, skinny and whiny—three minuses. The last thing Todd needed when he felt the urge to whine was someone even whinier than he was.

Eddie had joined the staff of the
Valley News
as a
general reporter last fall, after the
Boston Globe
had “restructured,” as he'd euphemistically phrased it. Todd knew the kid had been fired, and he'd had little trouble finding out why: Eddie had spent a full week developing a human-interest piece about a woman who ran a body-piercing establishment, and the only reason was that he'd had a crush on the woman. There had been no story there, his editor had told him to drop it, but Eddie hadn't dropped it. So the
Globe
had dropped him. They weren't going to miss him. They had dozens of dewy-eyed twenty-somethings spilling out of journalism schools, begging for a chance to work for peanuts at a reputable paper.

The
Valley News
was reputable, but it didn't have dozens of budding journalism school graduates begging to join its staff, so it sometimes wound up hiring people like Eddie. Under Todd's management, it had increased daily circulation above forty thousand, and he was exploring the possibility of issuing a Sunday edition, an idea that gave his mother apoplexy—which added to its appeal. The paper supplied news not just to Winfield but to the surrounding hamlets and farming communities. It had a staff of twenty reporters. Sure, it was respectable. It wasn't the
Globe
, but it didn't have to be.

“Hey, Todd, I was thinking?” Eddie began in his nasal voice. “There's this homeless guy living under the railroad bridge on the east end of town. He just suddenly appeared, maybe because the weather got warmer. I was thinking I could do a story about him.”

“What kind of story?” Todd asked. He believed the idea had possibilities, but it was up to Eddie to figure out what they might be.

“Well, like, about where he came from.” Eddie
slouched in the doorway, looking in dire need of food. His physique reminded Todd of a wire coat hanger.

“Give it one day,” Todd warned. “Not two. Show me what you've got by tomorrow at noon, and if it's any good, we'll see.”

“It'll be good,” Eddie insisted, running a hand through hair that was already thinning. “I see this is as a really important story, Todd. A story about the people society left behind.”

Spare me
, Todd thought. Earnest sentiment was not an asset in the news business. “You know what his story is going to be?” he asked, softening his tone so Eddie wouldn't be too demoralized by the truth. “The guy's a drug addict. He got kicked out of his apartment for spending all his rent money on crack. He lived in a shelter until the temperature rose above freezing, then decided he'd rather be outdoors. Okay? We're not talking about a noble savage, Eddie. We're talking about a loser. Every city's got a million of them.”

“Winfield isn't a city,” Eddie pointed out.

“Which is why we've only got a few.” Through the panes of glass he could see his mother hunched over her computer, her lips moving and her hand convulsively squeezing the mouse. If forgetting the name of a doorknob was a symptom of Alzheimer's, then surely talking to yourself because the three-click process of calling up a file, which had been explained to you a hundred times, was too challenging was also a sign of Alzheimer's. Both his parents were loony. Maybe he could get a two-for-one discount when it came time to lodge them at the local nursing home.

“I really think I can tug some heartstrings with this story,” Eddie persisted.

“Don't get carried away,” Todd warned him. “We're
not exactly venturing into Pulitzer territory here. You have until tomorrow. Make it count.”

Eddie lingered in the doorway, giving Todd a hopeful gaze. Big mistake. Todd could stare down anyone, especially when he was pissed off. And through no fault of Eddie's, Todd was seriously pissed off.

After a moment, Eddie conceded, turning and slinking out the door. His trousers were too big. On a high-school kid they might look stylish, but on a cub reporter they looked like poorly sized hand-me-downs.

At least he was gone. But that meant Todd once again had an unobstructed view of his mother. Her lips were still moving as she squinted at her computer monitor, her brow furrowed, her shoulders bunched. She seemed to be trying to twirl a strand of her hair, but it was lacquered into place and her fingers kept slipping behind her ear.

She was a good woman, he reminded himself again. His parents were good people. He came from a good family.

And right now, he felt like shit. Before Paul died, he used to find his parents tolerable, even amusing. But since the accident, everything rubbed him wrong. A guy needed a best friend to vent to. Paul had always been so calm, so steady. He used to listen to Todd, commiserate, offer good advice. He never made mistakes.

Correction: he'd made one mistake. It was a whopper, and in rectifying that mistake and doing the right thing, he'd put his future on a leash. Had he known that his future would last only six more years?

Of course not. He'd just been the most decent man in the universe, that was all. A scrupulous attorney, a solid husband, a stylish dresser, a stalwart friend. Someone
who could talk Todd down when the trivial irritations of daily living threatened to beat him to a bloody pulp.

And now Paul was dead, leaving Todd to cope with his parents, his newspaper, his staff and the sewers of Winfield all by himself.

“Todd?” his mother howled. “This computer doesn't work! Everything I tell it to do, it ignores me!”

Smart computer. He swiveled his chair so he wouldn't have to see her. Gazing out at the newsroom, he saw a few reporters tapping away at their computers, which apparently worked well enough. Several desks were empty; those reporters were out chasing exciting stories about the mayor's weakness for bad puns, the zoning board's weakness for kickbacks, the police chief's weakness for driving way above the speed limit and insisting he was doing so only to keep his reflexes sharp in case he ever had to engage in a high-speed chase. Winfield was a city with enough weak souls to fill eighty pages a day, augmented by national and international news lifted off the wires and lots of advertising. God bless those weaknesses for keeping the
Valley News
in the black.

The door at the opposite end of the newsroom swung open, and the irritation quotient of Todd's day doubled. In walked Sally Driver. The dizzy waitress. The queen of flake. The grieving widow.

He would have considered Sally in more kindly terms if he'd believed for a minute that she and Paul had been made for each other. They hadn't been. She'd trapped the guy using the oldest trick known to womankind, and being the moral man that he was, Paul had done what he'd had to do. But she hadn't trapped Todd, and he was under no obligation to be nice to her.

Everything about her annoyed him, from her long
frizzy hair to her innocent smile to her too-big body. She wasn't fat, but she was bulky, broad shouldered and round hipped, and she emphasized her fleshiness by wearing swirling, gauzy dresses that looked like castoffs from a third-rate summer-stock production of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. Whatever the opposite of delicate was, that was Sally.