Looking for Laura (24 page)

“Arthur Bronowski is a man of habit.” Helen glanced at the children, satisfied herself that they were peacefully engaged, and joined Sally at the door. “I know all the cops on the force. You've got to when you're running a newspaper. They're sources, every single one.”

“Really?” Sally couldn't imagine Officer Bronowski revealing anything worth printing in the
Valley News
.

“Not only are they sources, but they won't ticket your car if you're parked illegally while pursuing a story. Ask Todd. If he got a ticket for every time he parked illegally in pursuit of a story, he'd have to take a second mortgage.”

“He doesn't write stories, does he?”

“Rarely now. But he used to. Believe it or not,
I
used to—before they put me on the shelf.” She gazed out at the dining room. “So, you don't need me to pour coffee?”

“Do you really want to pour coffee? A woman who used to write stories for the
Valley News?
”

“I need to do something.” She sighed and patted her hair, as if she thought a strand might have broken free of its lacquer. “My husband has this ridiculous idea of
taking me to Hilton Head Island for a month. Golfing. Can you imagine anything more boring? For a whole month.”

“Some people enjoy golfing,” Sally argued.

“The ball is too small. Why can't they use a bigger ball? And a nice paddle instead of those silly golf clubs. Whoever invented golf just wasn't using his head.” She glanced over her shoulder at the children, hard at work under the broad aluminum table. “That Rosie of yours is something. I can see why Paul always said she was the light of his life. She's a charmer. She reminds me of me.”

Sally refrained from grinning. “She isn't always charming,” she said modestly, even though as far as she was concerned Rosie was close to perfect. “You really worked wonders with them, though. I didn't know you were so good with children.”

“I'm not so good with them. I just don't put up with crap from anyone smaller than me—which isn't too many people, but such is life when you're short. Anyway, I've had experience with my grandchildren.”

“Grandchildren?” Did Todd have children? Paul had never mentioned any. Todd himself had never mentioned any. Did his ex-wife have custody of them? Did he ignore them, spending his weekends searching for a mysterious Laura in Boston instead of taking his kids to the roller rink and McDonald's?

“My daughter's children. Aged seven and four. Cassandra and Henry. I keep them in line.”

So Todd had a niece and nephew. So he had a sister. The influx of information stunned Sally, even though there was nothing particularly astonishing about any of it. “Do they live around here?”

Helen shook her head. “Outside New Haven. I don't
see them often enough. Walter and Todd always say that if I retired I could see more of them. But Walter's retired and he doesn't see more of them. He just sees more of the golf course.”

Sally wasn't sure what to say. She couldn't solve Helen's problems for her. She wasn't even quite sure what Helen's problems were, other than that her husband and son wanted her to retire and she was resistant to the idea.

“So, yes, I was serious,” Helen said. “If you want to hire me to pour coffee, I'm interested.”

“But…you're a journalist.”

“Journalists get lots of experience pouring coffee, believe me.” She edged past Sally and strolled the length of the counter. “I could figure this out pretty quickly. What's this—real cream? Not that chemical stuff, right? And these? They look like honey buns.”

“We call them sticky buns.”

“Honey buns, sticky buns—what's the difference? This place has to be more interesting than sitting in my office trying to figure out the damn computer. It's like an oxbow, my office. The river flows right past me, and I'm this stagnant pool of water, drying up. Golf is making my husband lose his marbles. I don't want to lose my marbles.”

“Working here could make you a little crazy,” Sally warned.

“A little crazy isn't such a big deal. A lot crazy I'd worry about, but not a little crazy. So, what do you say?”

“Well, I could use an assistant Tuesdays. Actually, every morning from nine-thirty to eleven or so.”

“Mornings are fine.”

“I really think you ought to try it for a day to see if
you like it. It's not exactly the most exciting job in the world.”

“Who needs exciting? I did exciting. Forty years at the newspaper, I raked muck. I uncovered graft on the zoning board. Did you know that? Twenty-two years ago, I wrote a series of exposés that blew this town wide-open. Three members of the zoning board went to jail, thanks to me.”

“You must be very proud,” Sally said.

“When Walter and I were running this paper, we helped push through the sewers. Way back, they didn't have city sewers. We ran articles, editorials—we even invested part of the newspaper's pension fund in the sewer bonds—and got an excellent return on the investment, I might add. Now Todd writes editorials about improving the sewer system, making it cleaner or something. I don't know. It's not like what we did.”

Sally suffered a pang of sympathy for Todd. Did he have to listen to his mother gripe all day about how under his management the
Valley News
wasn't as wonderful as it had been when she'd been at the helm, when a journalist could make her career on sewage and graft?

“Now my husband wanders from golf course to golf course while, cell by cell, his brain disintegrates. And me, I'm bypassed. I'm obsolete.”

If Todd made his mother feel obsolete, he deserved to listen to her gripe. “If you want to work here, I'd love to have you,” Sally said.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Good. Because I know a great way to brew coffee. You crunch an eggshell into the grounds. That's how my mother taught me. I don't know what purpose the
eggshell serves, but if you put it in, it makes a great pot of coffee. An excellent pot.”

And off she headed to the kitchen, whether to check on the children or to find an eggshell Sally couldn't say.

T
odd stormed into the New Day Café, nearly knocking over the woman at the counter. She had long black hair of differing textures, as if someone had woven yarn and spiderwebs into it, and when she moved her hands the silver bangles circling both forearms jangled like the contents of Sally's tote bag.

If he hadn't been the editor and publisher of the region's preeminent newspaper, he might have been embarrassed by the fact that he recognized Madame Constanza, tarot card reader. But he knew her not from patronizing her downtown salon in search of spiritual guidance, but from writing a profile of her for the
Valley News
a few years ago, before he'd ascended to the editor-in-chief desk.

Madame Constanza wore a long red dress with an odd, crepe-paperish look to it. It was the sort of dress Sally might wear, except that Sally preferred more muted colors and she lacked Madame Constanza's heft. Madame Constanza was built like someone who did the carbo loading but skipped the marathon.

She stared at him for a long moment, then turned her heavily mascaraed eyes back to Sally, who stood behind the counter, and said, “Didn't I tell you there was a tall, dark man in your future?”

“You say that to all the girls,” Sally reminded her
with a smile. Her hair was pinned back from her face in a style that emphasized the contours of her cheeks, the gentle curve of her jawline and her soft pink lips.

No. Her hairstyle didn't emphasize her lips. He didn't even notice her lips. As far as he was concerned, her lips didn't exist.

“Actually—” Madame Constanza sent him another assessing look “—I said there was a tall, dark,
handsome
man in your future. What do you think?”

“I think he's cute,” came a voice from the far end of the counter. Todd glanced that way and spotted Sally's college-student assistant emerging from the kitchen carrying a tray laden with muffins. Their cinnamon aroma blended with Madame Constanza's patchouli perfume in an unfortunate way. Todd prayed for Winfield's resident prophet to leave so he could enjoy the scent of the fresh-baked muffins.

“Hear that, Todd?” Sally teased. “She doesn't think you're handsome.”

He frowned—not because he took her words as an insult, but because her voice lacked an edge and her eyes were dancing. Could Sally Driver be flirting with him?

Was he actually pleased by the possibility?

Damn, but he missed the good old days when he loathed Sally and knew the loathing was mutual. He missed the days when he could snicker at her peculiar earrings—the pair she had on today appeared to be small silver-toned replicas of the space shuttle—and her orange front door and her ridiculous hair, which wasn't anywhere near as ridiculous as Madame Constanza's, of course, just as her space shuttle earrings weren't as ridiculous as the glut of hoops and beads adorning her assistant's lobes.

He missed the days when Paul was still alive, keeping
Todd anchored, keeping his mind focused on the simple, irrefutable fact that Sally was a fruitcake.

But Paul was dead, and he'd been posthumously exposed as a duplicitous bastard. And right now, as Todd viewed Sally and tried to interpret her playful smile, the pastry that came to mind was not a fruitcake but a warm, spicy muffin, round and moist, slightly crusty on the outside but soft and buttery on the inside.

The college girl reached Sally's side and busied herself transferring the muffins from the tray to a shelf behind the glass display case. Every now and then she cast a flickering look Todd's way. Her smile was much more openly coquettish than Sally's.

She thought he was cute. Not handsome but cute—which was probably a higher designation among women younger than twenty-one. Was she flirting with him, too?

If she was, it was undoubtedly just for practice. He was no Adonis, no exemplar of studly appeal. He was no exemplar at all.

In fact, he never wanted to think about the word
exemplar
again.

Sally wasn't flirting with him, either, he decided. She was simply taunting him, trying to undermine him, trying to keep him off balance—and very nearly succeeding.

“I need to talk to you,” he said, determined not to let these three dizzy ladies—one a professional fortuneteller, one a student with earlobes as porous as a colander and one Sally—detour him from his mission.

“You'll have to wait your turn,” Sally said calmly. She resumed waiting on Madame Constanza, who was apparently quite particular about her biscotti. She wanted one plain and one chocolate dipped—no, one chocolate dipped and one amaretto—no, make that two amaretto,
but without all those blanched almonds on the top. Although now that she thought about it, all the amaretto biscotti had a generous sprinkling of blanched almonds on them, and she really wasn't in a blanched-almond mood, so perhaps it would be best to skip the amaretto biscotti and go with two chocolate dipped. And a plain one, just for the hell of it.

Todd stood at the counter beside Madame Constanza, twitching from the effort to remain patient. He'd like to tell Madame Constanza her fortune: someday in the not too distant future, someone was going to punch her in the nose for being so picky about her biscotti.

As irked as he was by Madame Constanza's dithering, he was even more irked by Sally. She looked so relaxed, so serene, as if she actually enjoyed plucking biscotti from their bin, pinching the long, crescent-shaped crackers in a square of rattling tissue paper, then setting them back down and sifting through the assortment in search of specimens lacking in almonds. She seemed to take enormous pleasure in serving her customer.

Well, good for her. But his mother was a whole different thing.

“I need to talk to you,” he said again, once Madame Constanza had finally settled on three biscotti she could live with, paid for them and toted her little paper bag out the door in a cacophony of clinking bracelets and rustling skirts.

“If it's about Laura Ryershank—”

“No, it's not,” he interrupted, then hesitated and tossed a quick look at her assistant, who ducked her head and blushed at having been caught staring at him. He turned back to Sally. “What about Laura Ryershank?”

“I asked Tina about her.”

Tina promptly spun away from him and emptied a
sack of coffee beans into a grinder. The beans clattered down the metal funnel. The clatter was replaced by a rumbling buzz once she turned on the machine.

Todd tried to ignore the noise. “And?”

Sally glanced over her shoulder, then shrugged. “She says Laura Ryershank is beautiful and charismatic.”

“Okay.”

“She gave two poetry readings on campus last year that were such a big hit, she was hired to be the visiting artist this year.”

“So she was in Winfield last year.”

“Indeed she was.”

He leaned toward Sally, resting his elbows on the countertop and murmuring, as if anyone could have heard him above the pulverizing drone of the grinder. “This could be the right Laura, Sally. This could be our lady.”

Sally didn't back away. She held her position, her nose just inches from his, her lips—the lips he had absolutely no interest in—so close he could almost feel the air between their faces vibrate as she spoke. “It could be.”

“We need to find her.”

“I was going to make some calls this afternoon after I left here.”

“I'll make calls.”

“That's all right. I'm sure I can handle it.”

“I've got resources you don't have.”

Her eyebrows quirked upward. “Resources?”

“I'm a newspaper publisher.”

“Oh.” She smiled wryly. “And all I've got is a telephone directory. I can't hope to compete.”

Her sarcasm reminded him of why he'd left his office and stormed up Main Street to the New Day Café that
morning like Sherman marching into Atlanta. He was on the warpath, raring to burn and pillage. “You hired my mother.”

The abrupt change of subject seemed to bewilder her. “What?”

“You hired my mother to work here. You gave her a job.”

“Oh—well, it's just a few hours a week, to see if she likes it.”

“Sally! My mother ran a newspaper! She's overseen staff. She's managed production, finances, union negotiations—she isn't a waitress!”

Sally leaned back a bit, her smile growing canny. “I'm glad to hear that, Todd, because we don't have waitresses here. So you don't have to worry about her being a waitress.”

“Then what did you hire her to do? Grind coffee beans?” The coffee grinder shut off just as he spoke the last three words, which resounded starkly in the small dining room. He glanced behind himself and noticed that skinny cop Bronowski glaring at him over the rim of his coffee cup, his right hand hovering near his service revolver as if he expected Todd to erupt in violence. Evidently, shouting “grind coffee beans” in a coffee shop marked one as having criminal tendencies.

Todd held up his hands and smiled at the cop, demonstrating his harmlessness. Then he spun back to Sally. “What did you hire her to do?”

“Whatever needs doing. It'll be one full morning a week plus a few extra hours, just to see if she likes it.”

“Sally.” He took a deep breath and tried to recover his composure, which dangled just out of reach, like the string of a helium balloon floating up into the clouds.
“Sally,” he said again, envying her her equanimity. “My mother can't work for you.”

“Why not?”

The question brought him up short. All he knew was that yesterday afternoon, when his mother had shouted across the newsroom from her office to his, and he'd picked up his phone and dialed her office so they could talk to each other without screaming through glass walls, she'd surprised him with the news that she was going to be serving coffee at the New Day Café a few mornings a week. She'd added a garbled quote from a Robert Frost poem, recited a few clichés about turning over new leaves and rolling with the punches and told him she'd be starting tomorrow.

Todd had been fuming ever since. But now, standing eye to eye with Sally, he wasn't sure what about the situation upset him the most. Was it the notion of his mother engaged in what amounted to menial labor, a job that required no education or experience? Was it the subtle message she might be giving him, that because he'd made her feel unwelcome at the newspaper, she'd been forced to demean herself by accepting a waitressing position? Or was he infuriated by the fact that she'd be working for Sally?

He couldn't mention the servile nature of the job without insulting Sally or her assistant. Nor could he complain about the absurdity of his mother, a certified power broker in Winfield, a friend of the mayor and the college president and a member of the board of directors of at least three major philanthropic organizations in town, being employed by Sally.

“She's supposed to go to Hilton Head Island with my father,” he said.

Sally picked up a dishcloth and wiped the counter. “No problem. She can start when they get back.”

“They'll be getting back at the end of June.”

Sally flashed him a puzzled look. “Two months? She's going to be gone for two whole months?”

“They aren't leaving until the beginning of June,” he explained, then sighed. “If they go at all. My father really wants to.”

“Ah.” Sally's gaze narrowed slightly. She was studying him critically. Judging him. Condemning him.

“Ah? What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means, you don't want your mother to make any commitments that might interfere with what your father wants.”

He couldn't miss the scorn weighing down her voice. “The trip is my father's idea, not mine,” he said defensively.

“I don't suppose your father asked your mother for her input, did he?”

“Sure he did. It's a great opportunity. They have the use of his cousin's villa down there, gratis, for a month.”

“Well, it's up to her whether she'd rather go there or stay here and work.”

“Stay in Winfield and pour coffee for minimum wage, or golf and lie on the beach on Hilton Head Island for a month. You tell me which choice she ought to make.”

“I
won't
tell you. It's her choice to make.”

He shook his head and snorted. “And she thinks my father's going senile.”

“Maybe he is,” Sally said with a cheerful wink. “Maybe both your parents are nuts. You're genetically compromised on both sides.”

“I am not.” He took several slow, even breaths, cleansing his lungs and settling his nerves. He resented
everything about Sally: her certitude, her martini-dry irony, her inexplicable alliance with his mother, the way her dress draped over her body. “I am not genetically compromised,” he insisted. “I am worried that my mother took this job of yours only because she wants to make a point.”