Looking for Laura (4 page)

Tina giggled and her cheeks grew rosy. “Well, of course not. You can't get tattooed
there
.”

“Why not?”

“Well, like, it's so…wrinkly. I don't know. And anyway, that would look so weird. Like, if you misread it, you might think it said ‘Tiny' instead of ‘Tina.' I don't think any guy would want to go around with the word
tiny
tattooed on his…well, you know.”

“Penis,” Sally said, because uttering the word appeared to have the same effect as shaking Tina by the shoulders would have had. The girl blushed, she flinched, she looked flustered. “If he loved you as much as you think he does,” Sally observed, “he ought to be willing to put up with that humiliation.”

“Well, and anyway, I just don't think you can do it there. Like, the needle would hurt too much.”

“This—” Sally gestured toward Tina's breast, which she'd tucked back into her bra “—didn't hurt at all, I take it.”

“Well, I don't really remember. I mean, once it's done, you sort of forget about it.”

“How can you forget about something like that? Every time you get undressed, you'll be reminded of it.” Sally clicked her tongue and shook her head, feeling unbearably old.

“We better go back out,” Tina muttered, her smile fading. Evidently, Sally's reaction to her tattoo was not what she'd hoped for.

But how could she have expected anything different? She and Sally got along well, but Sally was a mother.
A widowed woman with a checking account, insurance and a car. Someone who might have believed in everlasting true love when she'd been Tina's age, which seemed terribly long ago, but who'd stopped believing in it the instant she'd found those letters stashed inside Paul's brown crew neck.

The suburban ladies were gone when she and Tina returned to the dining room, but the grim young man in black was still at his table, scribbling away. Tina glanced at the clock behind the counter and cringed. “I gotta go. I've got Social Ethics at ten.”

Sally remembered Social Ethics from her brief sojourn at Winfield College. It was a guaranteed A, and always solidly enrolled. She hadn't been able to squeeze into the class because upperclassmen had had priority. If her life had taken a different turn, if she'd been able to stay in college, she would have taken it, even though she had no idea what “Social Ethics” meant. As far as students were concerned, it meant an A.

“Go ahead. It's dead here,” Sally urged, although Tina still had twenty minutes before the class would begin. She would probably need those twenty minutes to recover from her disappointment that Sally hadn't flung her arms around her and said, “What a fine, wise decision, to tattoo ‘HOWARD' onto your bosom! I'm so proud of you.”

Nodding, Tina lifted her backpack from the floor under the counter. As she straightened, the door swung open and Todd Sloane walked in.

Sally grimaced. Todd was not a regular at the New Day Café. In fact, he wasn't even an irregular. She couldn't recall his ever having come into the café before.

He headed directly for the counter, aiming his eyes at Sally. “Friend of yours?” Tina whispered.

“No.”

“He's cute.”

“No, he's not.” He most definitely wasn't cute. He was too tall, too rawboned, his hair too dark, his eyes even darker. His features might have been handsome if they'd had any sort of grace to them, but they were too harsh, too angular. His nose was big, which helped offset the sheer force of his gaze. His hands and feet were large. So were his shoulders. In fact, everything about him seemed large. She doubted he was deserving of a tattoo reading “tiny” on his penis.

What an odd thought. She'd never even thought of him in terms of sex.

And she wasn't thinking of him in terms of sex now, she reminded himself. She was thinking of him in terms of his anatomy. Merely glimpsing him made her think,
What a prick
.

He moved directly to the counter, his gaze sharp and hard. Tina peered up at him, looking even more lovesick than she'd seemed when talking about Howard. More than ever, Sally wanted to shake her. If there was anything worse than tattooing “HOWARD” on your breast, it was looking as if you were thinking about tattooing “Todd” on your other breast.

She gave him a smile so chilly she felt the cold twinge in her fillings. “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.

“No.” He stared past her at the blackboard on the wall, which listed that morning's available coffees. “Cinnamon hazelnut?” he read from the sign. “Kona?”

“The Kona is imported from Hawaii,” Sally informed him.

His frown could curdle the cream in the insulated silver pitcher on the counter. “No kidding.”

Maybe the prospect of admitting the truth put him in a lousy mood. Maybe the notion of coming clean to his best friend's widow befouled his spirits.

Tina was still studying him, rapt and misty eyed. “Would you like a cookie?” she asked in a whispery voice.

He eyed her with mild curiosity, his frown softening. It hardened again as he turned back to Sally. “I don't know,” he muttered.

“You don't know if you'd like a cookie?” Tina asked hopefully.

“Go to Social Ethics, Tina,” Sally ordered her.

Slumping, Tina trudged out from behind the counter, adjusted the strap of her backpack on her shoulder and waved. “See ya,” she said, heading for the door. The legs of her pants sagged around her shoes and brushed the floor with each step.

Todd stared after her for a minute, then frowned. “Social Ethics?”

“Something you wouldn't know anything about,” Sally retorted. If not for the letters, Todd would have been nothing more than her late husband's pal. But with the letters he'd become Paul's accomplice, his partner in crime. He'd become the living embodiment of Paul's deceit, which meant she could be as nasty with him as she wanted.

“Look, Sally.” He bent close to her over the counter, so he could keep his voice down—as if the black-clad chronicler had any interest in their conversation. “I read those letters and I'm stumped. I don't know who Laura is.”

“Liar.”

“I swear. Paul never told me he was cheating on you.”

“He told you everything.”

“Not this.”

“Then you agree that those letters prove he
was
cheating on me?”

Todd considered his answer, his face softening again, becoming less angry, more reflective. “I don't know.”

“What else would they be? A correspondence with his grandma? Come on, Todd—don't defend the indefensible. Your very best friend in the whole wide world was an adulterer. Maybe you covered for him when he was alive—”

“I didn't!”

“—but it's a little late to be covering for him now.”

Todd drummed his fingers on the counter. They were broad and blunt tipped and clean. She lifted her gaze to his face. Cute? Tina was obviously a woman of weird taste—anyone who could fall so deeply in love with a man named Howard that she'd tattoo his name above her heart was by definition weird—but Sally would never call Todd cute. He was gruff. Seething. Haunted. His hair was mussed and wavy, his apparel expensive yet somehow dowdy, the blazer a dull gray tweed, the trousers not quite baggy enough to be fashionable but not tight enough to look tailored, the charcoal-gray shirt wrinkled.
Cute
was for puppies and candy canes, blue jeans and dimples. Todd didn't have dimples.

“You want a cup of coffee?” she asked again, because he seemed tense. Nothing like a shot of high-octane caffeine to soothe the nerves, she thought sarcastically. But he seemed as if he needed something, and coffee was the strongest drug she could offer him.

“No. I've got to go to work. I just wanted to tell you I don't know anything about Laura.”

If he was lying, he was good at it. He looked earnest
and bewildered, even upset. He wasn't entitled to be upset—it wasn't as if Paul had done him wrong—but he certainly seemed bothered by the whole thing.

“Where are the letters?” she asked.

“They're at my house.”

“I want them back.”

“Why?”

She had to think about that. Why did she want to possess the miserable evidence that her marriage had been a fraud? She wouldn't be using the fireplace until next winter, so she wasn't going to have occasion to burn them in the next eight or nine months. What did she need them for?

An excuse to hate Paul. An excuse not to miss him, not to mourn him, not to want to wrap herself up in his sweaters and think about what a wonderful husband he'd been.

“I was thinking,” Todd said, “that I'd like to investigate this further.”

“Investigate what?”

“Laura.”

Oh, great. Todd was probably figuring that Laura had to be someone special. A hot prospect, gorgeous and sexy, someone Paul could love and Todd could approve of. She'd likely be the antithesis of Sally—rich, well bred, endowed with a
Hahvahd
accent. Maybe she'd gone to finishing school and was a member of the Junior League. Maybe she was thin and blond and wore miniskirts and laughed at Paul's jokes. Maybe she was kinky in bed.

Todd probably wanted to track Laura down so he could console the poor woman. She'd lost her lover, hadn't she? Todd could find her and ease her loneliness.
He could try his luck with her and learn whether she'd been worth Paul's breaking his wedding vows over.

Of course she'd been worth it. Paul wouldn't have broken his vows otherwise. He hadn't been the kind of man who did things just for fun. He'd always been intent, focused, organized. Laura must have fit into his life in just the right way. She'd thought the knife Paul had given her was vulgar, just as Paul had thought it was vulgar when Sally had given it to him. They'd probably laughed about it behind Sally's back, never acknowledging that Sally had given it to Paul because it had been the most precious object she owned.

If Todd had seen the knife, he probably would have laughed at it, too. He'd never done anything to hide his loathing of her. His best friend had married her under pressure, out of obligation. Todd obviously believed this was her fault.

“The letters belong to me,” she said, mostly to spite him.

“I wasn't thinking of keeping them. I just wanted to hang on to them for a while, to see if I could figure out just who the hell she was.”

“Why should you care?”

He ruminated for a moment. “I can't believe he'd do something like this behind my back,” he finally admitted. “I was his best friend. I can't believe he kept Laura a secret from me.”

“He kept her a secret from me,” Sally pointed out.

“Of course he did. You were his wife.”

She nearly reached over the counter and slapped him. But she sensed that he hadn't meant to wound her with his words. He looked too confused. He'd just fired into the air, and the bullet had wound up hitting her.

“You can keep the letters on one condition,” she stip
ulated, grabbing the sponge and wiping the counter. She felt a surge of nervous energy. Offering to cooperate with Todd was an alien idea; it made her edgy.

“What's that?”

“Anything you find, you've got to tell me.”

“No,” he said quickly.

She did reach across the counter this time, not to slap him but to grab him. Unfortunately, she still had the sponge in her hand, and she wound up squeezing water from it onto his sleeve. Dropping the sponge, she clung to the soggy wool to prevent him from backing away. “You're not going to keep me in the dark, Todd. That's the deal. I've been lied to enough. Bad enough your buddy lied to me. I won't have you lying to me, too.”

He stared at the wet spot on his sleeve, at her hand arched around it. Her fingers were stubby, her nails short and unpolished because she never had time to take care of them. Sally bet Laura had gorgeous hands, the sort of hands that could model in commercials for moisturizers and Swiss watches.

Todd didn't try to shake free of her, though. He simply stared at her hand on his forearm. After a moment, he sighed. “The thing is, anything I find out is probably going to hurt you. There's no need for you to go through that kind of hurt.”

Did Todd want to spare her? Did he actually care enough to want to protect her from pain? He'd never expressed any concern for her before. Why did he suddenly want to be nice to her?

He didn't
want
to. He was only pretending to be nice so he wouldn't have to share with her whatever he might learn about Laura. “I've already been hurt by this,” Sally argued. “Nothing you find out is going to hurt worse.”

“I'm not so sure of that.”

She released his arm, picked up the sponge and surprised herself by smiling. “In case you haven't noticed, I'm pretty tough. Go ahead and find out what you can, but if you don't tell me, you're dead.”