Looking for Laura (27 page)

“Fine.” The phone call hadn't thawed Sally much. She was still chilly and terse, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze straight ahead, her eyes hidden by sunglasses.

He was determined to get a genuine conversation going. “Just fine? What were they doing?”

“Baking brownies.”

He frowned. “I hope Rosie knows how to bake brownies. My mom sure doesn't.”

“They were using a mix,” Sally told him.

“You were on the phone a long time, considering.”

“I made a second call.”

He gave her a swift, questioning look. He wanted to ask whom she'd called, but that might sound too nosy. “How come?” he asked, instead.

She cut him a break and answered the question he hadn't asked. “I called the café. Tina offered to work this morning, which was good because Nicholas, who usually takes the Saturday-morning shift, was coming in late. I wanted to make sure everything was all right there.”

“Was it?” At her silence, he added, “All right?”

“Yes.” She leaned back in the seat, her hair bunching in the hollow at the base of her skull. Her flying-saucer hat sat on the seat behind her, and he hoped it would
stay there until they got back to Winfield. It looked better on the seat than on Sally.

“Good.” He'd had easier conversations with convicted murderers at the state prison.

She loosened up a bit more. “Tina said several people from the
Valley News
staff came in for coffee. Apparently, your mother has been talking the place up.”

“I don't know why. The coffee we make in-house is terrific.” He grinned to let her know he was joking.

Sally arranged her dress over her knees. “You have someone working for you named Eddie, right?”

“Eddie Lesher. Why?”

“Tina told me she thought he was cute.”

“Eddie? Cute?” Tina had thought
he
was cute. He was much better looking than Eddie. “Eddie's a skinny twerp with Pulitzer dreams. He's earnest and whiny, and he's got the physique of a pipe cleaner.”

“I swear, sometimes I don't know where her head is.”

“Who?”

“Tina. Before she gets any ideas about this Eddie person, she really ought to deal with her breast.”

Her breast?

“I don't know why I agreed to this trip,” Sally remarked so casually he didn't immediately realize that she'd changed the subject.

He glanced at her to make sure she wasn't undergoing an emotional disintegration. She looked exactly as she had before, her eyes hidden, her head nestled against the headrest and her fingers woven together in her lap. “Look,” he said soothingly. “I know you miss Rosie, but really, she would have been bouncing off the walls if she'd come with us. And we'll be home tomorrow. And meanwhile, she'll be pigging out on homemade brownies.”

“It's not that. I mean, of course I miss Rosie. But I'm sure she'll be all right.”

“So will you.”

She scowled, as if she considered his comment painfully unnecessary. “It's a very long trip, just so I can have the pleasure of sticking my tongue out at Paul's girlfriend.”

“You want to get your knife back,” Todd reminded her.

“Yeah. My knife.”

“You do want it back, don't you?” If she didn't…hell. Women. They were too unpredictable, too fickle. “I thought this knife was like your Holy Grail.”

“It's a tacky knife with a hula dancer on it. And yes, I want it back, though I wouldn't put it in the same category as the Holy Grail.”

“We want to find Laura, right? I've got a really strong feeling this poet is our Laura. We're going to see her, we're going to confront her and you're going to get your knife back. That's what you want, isn't it?”

“Yes.” She sighed. “I just don't like this whole…overnight thing,” she said.

He wished he could see her eyes—but even without seeing them, he had a pretty good idea what she was trying to communicate: she just didn't like this whole overnight thing. He kept sensing glimmers of a rapprochement between them, and then those glimmers would fade and they'd be enemies again.

He wanted to get rid of the enemies part. He wanted to spend a stretch of time with her in which they started out peacefully and ended up peacefully, and didn't endure a knock-down-drag-out in the middle. If he thought about it honestly, he'd admit he wanted more than that. The more time he spent with Sally, the more he under
stood what it was Paul had seen in her, since he clearly hadn't seen her wit and compassion and her earthy intelligence.

Todd saw those things, but he also saw the things Paul had seen. And truth to tell, he wanted a hell of a lot more than peace with her.

She'd seemed pretty relaxed with him that night he'd dropped by at her house and wound up staying to eat the weird lentil stuff she'd prepared. At least, she'd been relaxed until the end, when she'd undergone a one-eighty in mood and started radiating an anger so hot and glowing it reminded him of Chernobyl. But at first she'd been friendly. Probably because he'd apologized to her.

Maybe it was time to apologize again. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“For what?” She didn't seem surprised. Rather, she sounded as if she was wondering which of his innumerable sins he was apologizing for.

He couldn't apologize for acting like an asshole, the way he had last time. So far today, his behavior had been unimpeachable. There were other things he could apologize to her for, though. He wasn't sure he wanted to, but if he hoped to salvage this trip, he might as well cleanse the stains from his soul. “I'm sorry that I used to listen to Paul when he talked about you.”

She digested that. “What were you supposed to do,
not
listen to him?”

“Well—maybe I believed him a little too readily. And enjoyed it a little too much.”

“Was he that nasty?” Her words were bitter, but he heard a quiver of vulnerability in them.

“He put you down, Sally. And I…” He exhaled. This apology business was truly unpleasant. He only hoped he'd feel better once he was done with it. “I didn't just
agree with him. I encouraged him. If he had told me he was having an affair, I wouldn't have been surprised.”

“You would have felt he was justified,” she said. Definitely more bitterness than vulnerability now.

“I—” Damn it, he would have. “I didn't know you then. All I knew of you was what Paul told me.”

She huffed and folded her arms over her chest.

“It wasn't right. But he was my buddy and I listened without judging. That's what friends do—they listen and they don't judge.”

“Even when their friend is doing something awful?”

“I didn't think he was doing anything awful. Along with the things I mentioned earlier, he told me you cooked tasteless vegetarian stews—and that concoction you made the other night wasn't bad at all, really. My point being, Paul wasn't honest with me. Not about Laura, and not about you.”

“So why are you apologizing?” she asked loftily. “Paul was dishonest. He's the one who should apologize.”

“I should apologize, too. I feel like an accomplice.”

She studied him through the dark lenses of her sunglasses. “You don't think I'm all the nasty things Paul said I was?”

“Not at all,” he said, meaning it. In another context, on another day, he might not have meant it quite so much. But right now, with a hazy sun seeping through the window and Sally next to him, strong and womanly, her arms golden and gracefully muscled as they extended from the short sleeves of her blouse, her nostrils quivering slightly as she breathed, her composure steady when she had to be hurting inside…

No. He couldn't think of a single nasty thing about her.

Her silence continued. He listened to Bonnie Raitt imploring some unnamed lover to have a heart, and his anger built. He'd
apologized
, damn it. He'd betrayed his Y gene and thirty-three years of conditioning to say he was sorry. If she didn't respond soon, maybe he wouldn't pull off the road. He'd just shove her through the window while the car was cruising at seventy.

“Do you know where we're going?” she asked.

They were heading toward a village called Mondaga Lake, a microscopic dot embedded in the Adirondacks. He'd pulled the directions off the Internet. He supposed he'd find it without too much reliance on luck.

But he wasn't sure she was asking him about whether he'd find Mondaga Lake. She might be asking him something profound and mystical, something about their destiny rather than their destination. Or she might be asking about whether they might actually make it to friendship.

“We're going north,” he said, deciding he'd just as soon skip the destiny discussion. And the friendship discussion, too. That might just carry them right back to the land of hostility.

“Great,” she said. Her lips curved into a shape that could pass for a smile. “North feels right to me.”

I
f there was actually a lake in Mondaga Lake, Sally missed it—unless it was the large puddle of slushy water that flooded half the dirt parking lot outside Tubby's General Store.

When she'd been in high school, she'd worked at a place just like Tubby's—a back-road emporium that sold everything a person could possibly need in an outpost like Mondaga Lake or her hometown: bread, eggs, beer, tackle, bullets, beer, hunting and fishing licenses, thermal socks, ice, potato chips, tobacco and beer. And hard liquor. As a high schooler, she hadn't been allowed to touch the liquor at the store where she'd worked, of course. The state of New York had deemed her old enough to sell ammunition, but if a customer wanted beer or applejack, she had to step away from the cash register and let one of the older clerks ring up the sale.

What troubled her wasn't the rustic grunge of Tubby's but the slush rimming that huge puddle. Winter took its time leaving the mountains. Even in the waning days of April, traces of snow lingered. And there she was, wearing a short-sleeve shirt, a jumper and sandals.

She remained inside the car while Todd entered Tubby's to get directions to the writers' colony. She was warm enough where she was, but once she left the car
she'd have to dig her sweater out of her bag, and maybe a pair of socks.

She watched the store's front door, which was plastered with advertisements for various brands of beer and cigarettes, and tried to imagine what the place's regulars must think of their poetic neighbors. Picturing someone as rhapsodic as Laura stopping at Tubby's for a quart of milk and pontificating on Sartre made Sally smile.

She'd started this journey with grave misgivings, but somewhere north of Albany they'd faded. It wasn't just that hearing Rosie's voice on the phone had reassured her. Her mood had lifted because of Todd.

He was being nice. Which should have compounded her misgivings, but she was tired of fighting with him, tired of viewing him as Paul's ally, his defender, his—what word had Todd used? Accomplice.

What he had said, in his own roundabout way, was maybe the nicest thing any man had ever said to her: that he'd been wrong about her, and he was sorry.

He emerged from the store, wrestling with a map that refused to fall back into its folds. The late-afternoon sunlight had a pink cast to it, giving his face a ruddiness that reminded her of the sunburn he'd gotten on his nose in Boston. She wouldn't have to worry about his getting a sunburn today. The trip had taken much longer than she'd expected, and the mountain road they'd been driving for the past half hour, a narrow, winding two-lane strip of pitted asphalt with a yellow stripe down the middle, was bordered by dense evergreen forests that blocked out the sun more effectively than the office towers of downtown Boston. When Todd opened his car door he let in a gust of cool mountain air that smelled sharply of pine.

“Is this like where you grew up?” he asked.

“Higher elevation, but the same basic idea.” She took the map from him and deftly folded it. “Did he know where the writers' colony is?”

“I think so.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, he kept referring to a lunatic asylum, but I'm pretty sure we were talking about the same place.” Todd turned on the engine and eased out of the parking lot. “It's about three miles down on the left. The entry is poorly marked—we must have driven right past it. Just a dirt driveway with a little brown sign next to it.”

“Why does he think it's a lunatic asylum?”

“According to him, it was the site of a major skirmish a few years ago, when some hunters strayed onto the grounds. It's usually closed up by hunting season, so the hunters didn't think there would be a problem. But there was a literary conclave going on there, and these hunters suddenly appeared, and all the writers started throwing rocks at them. What kind of idiots would throw rocks at heavily armed deer hunters?”

“Literary idiots, I guess.”

“Anyway, the incident became known as the Battle of Mondaga Lake.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“One of the hunters sprained his ankle. A writer fell and broke her wrist, and she sued the hunters for loss of income because she couldn't type for four months. Oh, and an all-season radial took a bullet through the tread and bit the dust.”

Sally laughed. So did Todd. She must have heard him laugh before, but she couldn't remember ever really listening to the sound. It started as a rumble in his chest, then erupted into a bark of joy.

She couldn't believe she and Todd were convulsed in
laughter when they were just minutes away from meeting the home wrecker who had written all those gooey love letters to Paul. It would no doubt be an unpleasant encounter. Sally would demand her knife, and Laura might refuse to return it, and they'd glare at each other like two harpies picking over her husband's corpse. Not exactly the stuff of mirth.

Yet here she was, laughing with Todd, laughing at the silliness of the Battle of Mondaga Lake and laughing because his laughter sounded so wonderful.

“There it is!” she shouted between chuckles. “There's the little brown sign.”

It stood next to a narrow dirt lane, a square of boards fastened to a short stake. Mondaga Colony was carved into the brown wood, deliberately rough-hewn, the letters constructed of only straight lines, the
O
s like squares and the slanting sides of the capital
A
s extended above the point so the letters resembled tepees. The sign looked like something a Boy Scout might construct in the hope of earning a merit badge.

Todd's laughter ebbed as he steered onto the lane. Orange pine needles carpeted the road, camouflaging ruts and roots that tested his Saab's shock absorbers. Sunshine drizzled thinly through the trees surrounding them, striking the windshield like raindrops of light.

He slowed the car as they bumped along the path, and slowed it even more as they neared a clearing, where the road opened into a circle in front of a massive lodge, two stories high, with wings extending on both sides. The roof sloped steeply and the log walls were interrupted by expanses of glass. Someone very rich must have built it. Sally hadn't realized poets could be that rich.

“Are you ready for this?” Todd asked.

She turned to him. All traces of his earlier humor were gone as he soberly scrutinized the lodge. He looked impressed, but not really daunted.

She wasn't daunted, either. She hadn't been daunted by Laura Hawkes's prestigious town house on Beacon Hill, and she wasn't going to be daunted by Laura Ryershank's literary retreat. No matter how awe-inspiring the place was, anyone who could write such nauseatingly gushing letters to a man who was someone else's husband didn't engender fear in Sally.

“I'm going to need my sweater,” she said, then unbuckled her seat belt and pushed open the door.

The air outside was menthol crisp and bracing, not so cold that she instantly broke out in goose bumps but cool enough that she knew she'd be shivering within minutes. Todd hit the release button to unlatch the hatchback, allowing her access to her bag. She groped around in it until she found the thick blue cable-knit cardigan she'd brought with her. Her feet would survive without socks as long as she didn't stand outside for too long.

Once she'd wrapped herself in the warm knit wool, Todd locked up the car and walked with her to the front door, which was proportionately huge, constructed of dark, heavy wood, with wrought-iron handles instead of knobs. It took Todd and Sally several minutes of sleuthing to locate the doorbell, which was disguised by a decorative wrought-iron filigree. Todd pressed the button and they waited on the slate front step, Sally cuddling her sweater tightly around her.

No one answered.

She recalled their experience in Boston. Unlike that time, they weren't within walking distance of the Public Garden and its lovely Swan Boats today. They weren't even within walking distance of Tubby's General Store.
The miles they'd driven between that swampy parking lot and this place had been interspersed by a few mysterious driveways marked by roadside mailboxes, and nothing else but Mother Nature—trees, birds, moss-covered rocks, squirrels and chipmunks.

She peered at Todd. His chin set, his shoulders squared, he gripped one of the door handles and squeezed the lever with his thumb. The door opened.

He shot her a triumphant smile and pushed the door wider. Sally wasn't sure which satisfied her more—that they'd gained entrance or that she could get out of the chilly late-afternoon air.

They found themselves in a great room, cathedral ceilinged, with stone walls and exposed rafters, slate floors and oversize leather seating. It was someone's macho Adirondack fantasy, the sort of architecture New York power brokers might have chosen when they'd built their hunting lodges and family compounds a hundred years ago. Not a single warm or charming detail spoiled the room. No colorful pillows on the sofas, no bright curtains framing the windows, no whimsical knickknacks resting on the shelves. No stained-glass ornaments, no children's toys. The lighting, provided by wrought-iron chandeliers dangling from the cross beams, was dim, contributing to the overall gloom of the place.

She caught Todd's eye. His upper lip rose in a curl of distaste.

“Can you believe Paul would have screwed around with someone who hung out here?” she whispered. Her muted voice echoed against the room's hard surfaces.

“I don't know what I believe about Paul anymore,” he whispered back.

“Hello!” a voice boomed across the room. Sally turned to see its owner, a tall, egg-shaped man in a yel
low V-neck pullover, new jeans, moccasins and wispy gray-blond hair that floated around his skull like an ion cloud, approach them in long, bouncy strides. “Hello there!” he hailed them, his smile warming the room markedly. “What can I do for you? We're still getting set up. Were we expecting you?”

Sally wondered whether she should defer to Todd or speak up. She'd ad-libbed pretty well with Laura Hawkes, but this was different. This place was spooky.

Todd took over. “We're here to see Laura Ryershank.”

“And you're…?”

“From Winfield College,” Sally interjected.

“Winfield College! Wonderful!” The man clapped his hands, like a toddler presented with a balloon. “Is she expecting you?”

“No,” Todd said. “It's a surprise.”

“Even better. I love surprises.” The man clapped again. He had a sweet, soft face, with pale blue eyes and a cushion of fat below his chin. “I'm Claude Macy. I suppose if you want to surprise Laura, I'd best not tell her you're here.”

“We
would
like to see her,” Todd said. “If you could just tell us where we could find her—”

“Oh, no,” Claude said jovially. “She's working now, and you know what a bear she can be if she's bothered while she's working. We do have some other guests here, but they're all in their cabins writing, too. Our kitchen is up, though. If you stay for dinner, I'm sure Laura will emerge from her cabin for that. She'd never miss a meal.”

Sally wondered if Laura was fat.

Todd checked his watch. “When is dinner?”

“At seven. Why don't I get you two settled in the meantime? I'm afraid I didn't catch your names….”

“Settled?” Todd asked.

Claude Macy's smile was so bright Sally wished she hadn't left her sunglasses in the car. “I assume if you're colleagues of Laura's from Winfield College, you'll be staying for the night. No problem. We have plenty of empty cabins. What were your names again?”

“Todd Sloane,” Todd said, offering his hand.

Claude shook it, then extended his hand to Sally. “Sally,” she said, opting not to mention her last name, in case Claude mentioned it to Laura. If she heard Driver, she'd know Sally was related to Paul, and she might lie low until they left.

“So, you'll stay the night, then. Do you have any bags?” Claude's expectant gaze shuttled from Todd to Sally and back again, as if he assumed it would take both of them to answer the question.

Sally wasn't sure what it would take. She smiled hopefully at Todd, who said, “We were planning to take a room at a motel.”

“Oh, no. Absolutely not,” Claude declared. “The nearest motel is over an hour away, and it has an infestation problem. It's run by locals, if you catch my meaning.”

Sally caught his meaning: the poets of Mondaga Colony were still engaged in hostilities with the local residents. Maybe no bullets were being fired, but guerrilla warfare included casting aspersions on the local motel. Which, she acknowledged, wasn't exactly local if it was an hour away.

“Let me take you to a cabin,” Claude insisted. “It'll be so much nicer than that old mildewy dive. We've just had all the cabins cleaned last week. The water's been
turned on, they've got heat and electricity and they're ready to be used. Please—I insist. Winfield friends of Laura's are always welcome here.”

Sally glanced at Todd, who shrugged. “I'll get our things from the car.”