Looking for Laura (22 page)

She gave Tina one more hug, then left her munching on a cookie and headed down the hall to the stairs. Her mind was churning with thoughts she wasn't really pleased with, thoughts about whether her life had been stupid and whether she'd ever really loved Paul, and whether Paul's height hadn't bothered her until after she'd kissed Todd, which of course had been a complete aberration and, arguably, stupider than getting knocked up by Paul.

Emerging into the dorm's entry, she paused by the bulletin board. There it was, the index card advertising a ride to Dartmouth, surrounded by all those other notices—the pro-choice demonstration, the list of campus movies sponsored by the Winfield Student Organization, the poetry reading—which, Sally noticed, had taken place last week.

Which, she also noticed, had been given by Winfield College's visiting artist, Laura Ryershank.

Laura
Ryershank.

Of course not. Paul had never taken an interest in poetry. And how would he have even met the school's visiting artist? The woman had visited last week, a good three months after Paul had skidded his car into a tree.

Shaking her head, Sally turned from the bulletin board.

And turned back.

Laura Ryershank
.

Absolutely not.

With a nod at the fuzzy-scalped boy behind the desk, she shoved open the door and stepped outside the dormitory. The sky had lost a few degrees of light in the time it had taken her to talk sense to Tina, and the air had lost a few degrees of heat. She dug a cardigan out of her tote bag, slid her arms through the sleeves and started down the path that led out of the quad and back to the campus. Students swarmed through the door of the language building, milled near the main entrance to the library, bicycled past her, shouted to one another. Girls bowed their heads together and whispered. Boys engaged in shoving matches. Sally felt aeons older than all of them.

She wasn't the only older person strolling the walkways of the campus. A few professorial types wove among the students. She spotted a campus security officer on one of the paths, and a silver-haired woman smoking a pipe and wearing a tweed blazer stretched out at the elbows, and descending the steps of the main administration building a tall man with tousled black curls.

What the hell was Todd doing at Winfield College?

He must have spotted her, because he froze on the second step and stared straight at her. He was a little too far away for her to tell whether he was frowning, but it was a lot easier to imagine him frowning than smiling
at the sight of her. She herself was frowning; she could feel the muscles contract in her forehead.

He stood between her and the college gate. There were other ways to exit the campus, but it would look pretty strange if she U-turned and hustled off in the direction she'd just come from. She wasn't afraid of him, after all. She didn't have to rearrange her life to avoid him. She could walk right past him, or even say hello to him if she had to. He still had the Laura letters in his possession, and he was the executor of her husband's will, so she was going to have to deal with him. If she'd managed to deal with him when she'd hated him, she supposed she could deal with him now.

But it had been easier to deal with him when she'd hated him—which she still did, she reminded herself, maybe hated him even more because he stirred up so many conflicting emotions inside her. She hated him because if he hadn't kissed her, she might have been able to go on hating him the way she used to. But now she had to hate him because kissing him had felt too good.

Trying to define the kind of hate she felt for him made her head ache. She relaxed her face into a bland smile and continued along the path she was on, knowing it was going to bring her right to the foot of the administration building steps.

He remained where he was, as if waiting for her, too arrogant to meet her halfway. Her forehead muscles cramped even more from resisting a frown than they had from frowning.

She told herself that in between hating Todd, she'd had some pleasant moments with him on Saturday. He'd been charming at dinner, telling Sally he'd learned to cook as a teenager because both his parents often worked at the newspaper until six or seven at night, and he'd
have been forced to live on peanut butter sandwiches if he hadn't figured out how to roast a chicken or grill a steak. He'd recited the first verse of Longfellow's poem about Paul Revere for Rosie. He'd bought her that necklace, and he'd carried her up to bed so tenderly, careful not to wake her.

She could picture the way he'd looked settling Rosie on her bed, stepping back and smiling shyly. He wasn't a father, used to lugging sleeping children around. Carrying Rosie had been so sweet, so manly…

And then he'd kissed Sally, and
manly
had developed an entirely new definition for her.

As she drew near, his dark eyes narrowed on her and he pressed his lips into a grim line.

“Hi,” she said, her smile expanding. If her friendliness bothered him, so much the better. “What brings you to campus?”

“I had to see some people.”

“What people?”

He didn't speak for a minute. A light breeze danced past the building, shaking the baby leaves that budded along the branches of a nearby oak and ruffling his hair. “People named Laura,” he finally said.

H
e didn't want to include her in this latest phase of the Laura search. But how could he keep her out of it? Whether or not he liked it, they seemed to be in it together.

Besides, he had some questions for her. For instance, what had she done to his mother? Helen hadn't returned to the newsroom until well past noon, and her ebullient spirits couldn't be attributed to caffeine consumption alone. She'd been chipper, she'd thanked him for recommending the New Day Café and she'd made a cryptic remark about how sometimes the road not taken was the road a person had to take. Then she'd shut herself inside her office and Todd heard not another word from her. At one point, when he'd left his own office to return Gloria's college directories, he'd glanced through the glass wall of his mother's office and caught her playing solitaire on her computer, her mouse in her right hand and a placid smile curving her lips.

He wanted to ask Sally about the miracle she'd wrought. He also wanted to ask her why she'd worn that silly straw hat on Saturday, because she looked so much better today without it. The sun played through her hair, stirring up all the red highlights. He wanted to ask her whether he was just imagining a spark of silver in her blue eyes. He wanted to ask her whether she'd lost
weight, because he'd always thought of her as bulky, chubby even, but he didn't think of her that way anymore.

He had a question for himself, too: What the hell was wrong with him? He'd recovered from their kiss. He'd regained his mental equilibrium. Seeing her shouldn't put him into brain melt again.

She didn't laugh when he told her he'd just spent the past ten minutes tracking down Laura Ellroy, the assistant dean of financial aid. “She's married,” he reported.

“So what? Paul was married, too.”

Todd shook his head. “This wasn't the right Laura. She wasn't his type.”

“Oh? What's Paul's type?”

Todd was no longer sure. There was a time he would have sworn Sally wasn't Paul's type. There was a time he would have sworn she wasn't
his
type—and that time included right now, he adamantly assured himself. “All I'm saying is, Laura Ellroy gave off happily-married vibes. I also checked out Laura Titwell from the chemistry department. She was my height and had me by a good sixty pounds.”

“Maybe Paul found her heft attractive,” Sally suggested.

“She would have crushed him,” Todd said, then cringed. Offering her a graphic picture of what her late husband had been doing with Laura wasn't particularly tactful. He quickly continued, “And I dropped in on Laura Stratton in the math department. She reminded me of you a little. Young, flaky—”

“I'm not flaky!”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don't.” She pursed her lips and glowered at him. “Does she have children?”

“I didn't ask. Five minutes with her and I knew she couldn't have written all that purple prose in the letters. And anyway…”

“Anyway, what?”

“Why would he have an affair with a woman like you when he had you?”

“I was his wife,” Sally answered. “It's not the same thing.”

She had a point. Maybe Sally
was
Paul's type, and when he wanted an illicit thrill he found the same type, only in an adulterous version.

“Well, it doesn't matter. I don't think his Laura is on campus.”

“What about Laura Ryershank?”

“Who?”

Gripping his forearm, she led him toward a pillar papered with campus notices. She studied the announcements and he studied her hand on the sleeve of his jacket. A casual touch, utterly meaningless, yet…it distracted him. The way the sun in her hair distracted him. The way his unraveling certainty about her distracted him.

“No, it isn't here. It's posted in other places, though,” she said. Her hand tightened on him, her fingers surprising him with their strength as she pulled him down the path, past the library to another pillar covered with flyers. “Laura Ryershank was a visiting artist. She did a poetry reading on campus last week.”

“What would that have to do with Paul? Last week he was dead.”

“But she was a visiting artist. Which means she might have visited before. Here!” She found the flyer she was looking for and tore it free. The tape that had fastened the sheet to the pole took a bite out of the top edge.

He studied the announcement. Laura Ryershank, visiting artist, had indeed given a poetry reading in the library's Boylston Room last week.

“She's a poet. Think about those letters, Todd. The writing is poetic, right? The letters reek with poetry.”

“Yeah, but…How would Paul ever have hooked up with her?”

“Visiting artist,” Sally explained. “The way they used to do that when I was a student here was, someone would be the visiting artist for the year. She'd come and visit the campus once a month, give a couple of master classes or senior seminars, do some public thing—like a poetry reading, or a screening of a short film, or an exhibit at the campus museum—and then go off to be creative again. Laura Ryershank could have been visiting all year.”

He shook his head. “Okay, so she was the visiting artist this year. That means the earliest Paul would have met her would have been when she started visiting Winfield College, in, what? September? I can't believe their affair lasted all of four months before he died. Nobody could have written that many letters in four months, right?”

“Why not? If she loved him she could have.”

“Even if he wasn't writing back? You know Paul. He wouldn't have written that many letters in four months.”

“She could have written anyway.”

“He would have thought she was a pest.”

“Not if he loved her.” A shadow flickered across her face. The idea obviously hurt her, despite her belief that her husband was an ass.

He suffered a fresh flare of anger at Paul for having cheated on her—but it vanished almost as quickly as it struck. He wasn't under any obligation to feel Sally's
pain. He'd gotten into this thing because he'd been feeling his own pain. That was enough pain for him.

She seemed to shrug off her momentary sorrow. Looking more resolute than before, she said, “It's possible they met somewhere else and started their affair. And then, to make things easier, she decided to apply for the visiting artist position at Winfield College so she'd have an excuse to come to town every month.”

A little contrived, but not very. “Okay. For the sake of argument, let's say you're right. How do we find out more about Laura Ryershank?”

Sally thought for a moment. “I could ask Tina. You know, the young woman who works mornings at the New Day Café with me? She's a student here.”

“I remember her.” She'd had a bunch of earrings and a dopey-eyed gaze. She hadn't impressed him as being an exemplar of genius.

Exemplar?
Stupid word.

The girl didn't have to be a genius to tell him and Sally whether this year's visiting artist had paramour potential. All she had to do was describe Laura Ryershank and let them know when Laura had first become connected to the college and how often she visited Winfield.

If Todd had gotten cozier with Laura Ellroy or any of the other Lauras he'd sought out that afternoon, he wouldn't even need to be pumping Sally's buddy for information. But he hadn't forged lasting friendships with the Lauras he'd met. He'd merely introduced himself and asked if they'd been acquainted with an attorney named Paul Driver.

Sally released his arm, which immediately felt lighter, as if a weight had been unstrapped from it. He wanted to swing it over his head, to celebrate its freedom—
except that it also felt cold, curiously bloodless. “Let me see if I can find a campus phone,” she said. “I just came from Tina's room, so she's probably still there. Unless she's off chugging Southern Comfort.”

“Why would she be doing that?” Todd asked.

Sally gave him a withering look. “Because she's in college,” she said, as if stating the obvious.

Todd shrugged. No one he'd been acquainted with during his years at Columbia would have chugged Southern Comfort. Beer had been the chug of choice among his pals, although he'd known a couple of guys who preferred vodka—guys who'd never come within a mile of making the dean's list. Todd assumed the two issues were related.

Sally was heading for the front entry to the library. She maneuvered her way through the stagnant clusters of students at the main entrance, a gaggle of people in baggy jeans, Teva sandals and brightly colored warm-up jackets, backpacks slung over their shoulders and hair scrupulously unkempt. The students didn't make way for him as they did for Sally. He tried not to resent this.

A turnstile gate stood just inside the glass front doors. Sally tried swiping a card through the slot, but the gate refused to let them through. “Damn,” she grumbled.

The foyer of the library smelled mossy, like damp socks or disintegrating books. Two female students swung through the turnstile coming out. They were both slim and blond and perky.

“Stop drooling,” Sally snapped, nudging past him and exiting the building behind the bouncy blondes. Todd hadn't been aware of drooling. He'd only been objectively appreciating them. “We'll have to find a campus phone somewhere else,” she continued as he
followed her out. “My student ID doesn't work anymore.”

“Why would it work? You're not a student.”

“It worked the last time I used this library.”

“Which was when? Six years ago?”

“Six months ago,” she told him. “Maybe the magnetic strip went kablooey. I let Rosie play with the card sometimes. She likes to pretend she's a college student.”

“She could sure pass for one,” he muttered, accompanying Sally down the steps and along the path toward the administration building. “Why did you use the campus library six months ago?”

“It's much better than the town library,” she said, sliding the handles of her tote up to her shoulder and shoving her hands into the pockets of her sweater. He felt safer with them there, away from him, posing no threat to his arm. “If you ever stopped writing editorials about the sewer system, you might consider writing an editorial about the lousy condition of the town library.”

“Is it lousy?” He rarely used the place. When he wanted a book, he bought it. It was easier than going to the library—especially since he could order most books on the Internet—and the expense was worth the convenience to him. Books he didn't want to keep he gave away, and those he did want to keep found space on the bookcases in his house. He no longer had to argue with Denise about what to put on their shelves.

She used to like to display figurines. Figurines that had cost a hell of a lot more than books, as he recalled. She'd developed an obsession with Lladros, anemic porcelain renderings of happy peasants, milkmaids and rustics. Once, when he'd been whining about the Lladros to Paul over drinks after work, Paul had pointed out that things could have been worse; she could have been ob
sessed with those obnoxious little Hummel characters, chubby and maliciously gleeful in their pinafores and lederhosen.

In any case, he and Denise had been in total agreement over the disposition of the Lladro figurines during the divorce negotiations. She got them all, to his great relief, and he got miles of shelf space for his books and model cars.

“Don't you use the town library?” Sally asked. “You should. You're an editor. A man of letters.” A scornful laugh escaped her.

“I
am
a man of letters.”

“Then write an editorial about the library.”

“If I feel like it,” he grumbled. He didn't let his mother dictate the contents of his editorials. He sure as hell wasn't going to let Sally.

Inside the administration building—which, inexplicably, also smelled like damp socks—she located a campus phone and dialed a few digits. She listened for a minute, then hung up. “Tina isn't answering. I'll try her later.” She swept past him down the hall to the door, her sandals clicking quietly against the linoleum floor.

He paused to gauge his mood. He felt irritated, and this should have pleased him. Irritated was what he was used to feeling around Sally. Not intrigued. Not amused. Not enticed by the voluptuous waves of her hair, the voluptuous curves of her body.

He had always considered her a pain in the ass, and right now his butt was twinging. But the twinge had a definite sexual component to it, which only irritated him more.

She strode out of the building, letting the massive door swing shut behind her instead of holding it for him. He caught it in midswing and heaved it open again. She
was already at the bottom of the steps by the time he was outside. He noted the way her skirt flowed around her hips and down her legs. Her thighs were inside that floral fabric. Sleek, strong thighs.

He sprinted down the steps, not bothering to wonder why he wanted to catch up to her. She continued to march at a brisk gait, but his legs were longer than hers and he easily closed the distance between them. “So, what are we going to do about this poet?” he asked, the torn flyer still clutched in his hand.