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Authors: Judith Arnold

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BOOK: Looking for Laura
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But he had computer disks. Five of them—his index finger traced five edges in his pocket. Maybe Laura was on one of those disks. Maybe when Todd loaded them onto his computer, he would find out exactly what kind of man he'd once considered his best friend.

 

“Why are we going here?” Rosie asked.

Sally handed her an animal cracker. Animal crackers were easier to digest than most answers to the questions Rosie asked. They also kept her mouth occupied long enough to shut down her questioning mechanism for a few minutes.

Sally needed more than a few minutes to figure out why she'd driven over to the condominium complex where Todd lived. Evening was sinking down into the valley, compressing the light and forcing the trees and faux-facade town houses to release lavender shadows across the landscaped grounds. The development was shamelessly ticky-tacky, the rows of units staggered and shingled in such a way an observer might overlook the fact that they were all basically identical. It was the sort of place that seemed to shout, “Divorced people live here.”

Sally hadn't known Todd's ex-wife too well. The woman had accompanied Todd to Sally and Paul's on-the-fly wedding—a few words from a judge, followed by a cocktail party at the Olde Colonial Tavern—and a few weeks later Paul had informed Sally that Todd and
Denise were separating. “They were a terrible couple,” Paul had told her. “They were too much alike.”

She'd seen that as proof that Paul believed he and Sally were a perfect couple, because they were nothing alike.

“Look,” Rosie exclaimed, scampering to keep up with Sally as she stalked down the winding path through the complex. “I ate its head. It's the headless-horseman monster!” She galloped her decapitated horse cracker through the air, then popped it into her mouth. “I killed it,” she declared proudly. “So why are we going here?”

Sally glanced at the scrap of paper on which she'd noted Todd's address: unit 27, in the row of four town houses to her left. Taking Rosie's hand, she slowed her pace slightly. “We're going here because this is an old friend of your daddy's.”

“My daddy's dead,” Rosie reminded her. “How can he still have friends?”

How, indeed? The philandering creep didn't deserve friends. And if Todd maintained that he was still Paul's friend, then he was a creep, too.

Lacking an answer, she dug another animal cracker from the box in her tote and handed it to Rosie. She took a cracker for herself, too.

Rosie chomped onto the cracker and grinned. She was wearing her purple cloche with the floppy pink silk flower on it—she adored it, and Sally didn't mind her wearing it even when it didn't match the occasion or the rest of Rosie's outfit, which today consisted of blue overalls, a chestnut-brown turtleneck and her lime-green sneakers with sparkly laces. Sally always let Rosie choose her outfits, and Rosie possessed a bizarre sense of color and style. Paul used to hate her getups: “Damn
it, Sally—it's Easter Sunday! She can't wear pink jeans and a yellow polo shirt to church!”

That was last year's Easter. This year, Sally had taken Rosie to the Unitarian church, which she preferred to the staid Methodist church Paul used to insist they attend on the two holidays a year they felt obliged to honor organized religion. Sally liked the Unitarian church because the minister's husband was both black and Jewish, which seemed to sum up what God was all about to Sally.

Ironically, this year, Rosie had chosen to wear a dress for Easter—along with her purple hat.

“Here's his building,” Sally said, leading Rosie up the porch steps to the door labeled 27. She rang the bell and waited.

“Why are we going here?” Rosie asked again, peering up at her.

If Sally put her off with another animal cracker, she was going to get suspicious. She was no fool. She knew when her mother was trying to silence her. “I need to talk to this man.”

“About Daddy?”

“About something he has that belonged to Daddy and now belongs to me,” Sally said, pressing the doorbell button again.

This time, the door swung inward, offering Sally an eyeful of Todd Sloane's chest. He filled the doorway, tall and lanky in a pair of old jeans and a shirt that was untucked and hanging open.

He had quite a chest. Sally could see only a narrow swath of it, framed by the edges of his shirt, but that swath was sleek with muscle. The skin was golden, and a dusting of dark hair spread across the upper portion.
The lower portion, she noticed, was punctuated by an innie belly button.

She forced her gaze up from that belly button, past the contours of his rib cage to his throat, his chin, shadowed by a day's growth of beard, his hair damp and curling, and finally his mouth, which curved markedly downward. He was not happy to see her.

“I'd like the letters back,” she said, figuring the sooner she got them, the sooner she and Rosie could flee from Mondo Condo and go back to her house with its bright orange door. Imagine what would happen if someone tried to paint
his
front door orange. The Conformity Police would storm the place, slap on the cuffs and charge the resident with the high crime of imagination.

“No,” Todd said.

“Mommy says you're my daddy's friend,” Rosie declared, peering up at him.

He stared down at her, his expression filled with pity. Sally wanted to slap him. How dared he pity her daughter? Rosie didn't deserve anything remotely like pity. She was a goddess. A noisy, lively, rambunctious goddess, and if she missed her father, it was only because he hadn't betrayed her the way he'd betrayed Sally.

“I was your father's friend,” Todd confirmed. “You've met me before. Don't you remember?”

“Nope. How come your shirt isn't buttoned?”

He shot Sally a quick look that said,
Your kid needs manners
. Sally only smiled.

Grudgingly, he stepped back and waved them inside. Once they were crowded in the tiny foyer, he shut the door and crossed his hands over his chest. He glared at Sally, waiting for her to speak.

“How come your shirt isn't buttoned?” she asked.

“Look.” He sighed but made no move to close his
shirt. “I'm on my time, okay? This is my house. I just took a shower. I don't have to button my shirt if I don't want to.”

“That sounds like your kind of logic,” Sally told Rosie, who nodded and wriggled her hand free from Sally's. She wandered into the living room, Todd right behind her as if to protect his treasures from a dangerous threat. But there were no fragile treasures in the living room, as far as Sally could tell. Big, overstuffed furniture, a mess of newspapers—including the
New York Times
and dailies from Springfield and Boston—scattered across the coffee table, books shoved willy-nilly into built-in bookcases along one wall, a pair of athletic socks on a footstool near one of the easy chairs and an array of model cars displayed on a sideboard. Rosie raced directly to the cars, reaching for the most flamboyant, a five-inch-long dune buggy painted metallic turquoise.

“Don't touch that,” Todd snapped. Two long strides carried him across the room, enabling him to beat her to the cars by less than a second. He barred her from the display, and she poked her lower lip out in a sulky pout.

“She lost her father,” Sally reproached. “Can't she even look at your toy cars?”

“They aren't toys,” Todd explained, blocking the sideboard with his body as he buttoned his shirt. “I built them myself. It's a hobby.”

A hobby? What a quaint idea, Sally thought, studying Todd in a new light. She would never have taken him for a hobbyist. He was too important, too busy, too worldly. Paul had never had a hobby—unless getting some action on the side was considered a hobby—and Paul had been Todd's best friend.

“They could break very easily,” he explained to Rosie, who glowered up at him.

“Do you have anything else she could play with?” Sally suggested.

Todd scowled. “I don't have kids, and I didn't know you were coming. So no, I don't have anything else she could play with.”

“Here, Rosie.” Sally rummaged through her tote until she located a pencil and a spiral-bound pad of lined paper. “Why don't you draw a picture while Mr. Sloane and I talk.”

“Are you gonna talk about Daddy?”

“Possibly.” She handed the pad and pencil to Rosie.

“Do you have any cookies?” she asked Todd, clutching the pencil in one hand and the pad in the other.

“No.”

“He wasn't expecting us,” Sally reminded her. “I'll give you another animal cracker and you can draw a picture, okay?”

“I want two animal crackers,” Rosie said.

“Fine.” Sally fished two crackers from the box and extended them toward Rosie, who spent a good minute shifting the pencil to the same hand that held the pad. She took the crackers and glared at Todd. Obviously, she didn't like him. He had no cookies and he wouldn't let her touch his precious little toy cars.

“Come into the kitchen if you're going to eat those.” Todd stalked past a dining alcove and into a small, dark kitchen that smelled of roasted chicken.

“Are we interrupting your dinner?” Sally asked, following Rosie, who followed him. She honestly didn't care if they
were
interrupting, but it seemed only polite to ask. Especially since the kitchen smelled so home-
cooked-mealish. Was Todd a good cook? Did he go to a lot of trouble preparing meals for himself?

Paul had hated cooking, and he'd been compulsively neat. Maybe opposites attracted in best friends as well as lovers. Or maybe he'd been cheating on Todd with another best friend, the way he'd been cheating on Sally with another woman.

“It can wait,” he said, adjusting a dial on the wall oven and flicking on a fluorescent overhead light. The kitchen had no windows in it, Sally noted. She would die if she had to work in a kitchen with no windows.

Rosie climbed up into a chair at the small butcher block table in one corner. Kneeling on the seat, she stuffed one cracker into her mouth and flipped through the notebook, searching for the perfect page to draw on. Once she found it, Sally turned to Todd.

He was tucking his now-buttoned shirt into the waistband of his jeans. She watched his flattened hand slide in and out of the denim, shoving the shirt in.

Just as she'd never thought of Todd as building model cars, she'd never thought of him as having a real chest. She felt slightly disoriented, even though he was now covered. He angled his head in the direction of the living room, and Sally nodded and led him out of the tiny kitchen.

“I want the letters back,” she said in a low voice once Todd had joined her.

“I'm not done with them yet.”

“I don't care. I've been thinking about this all day, and I decided I want them back.”

He shook his head. “Sorry.”

“They're mine. They were Paul's, and Paul died, and that makes them mine.”

He shook his head again. “You seem to forget that
I'm the executor of his will. I know exactly what he left to you. I don't recall the letters being part of his estate.”

“They were part of his personal effects,” she argued. “I found them in a drawer in my room. That makes them mine.”

“He didn't leave them to you.”

“He didn't leave them to you, either,” she retorted.

He shrugged. “I'll give them back to you when I'm through with them. For now, I need them.”

“Why? Are you going to have a handwriting analysis done on them?”

He gazed thoughtfully at her. “That's not a bad idea,” he murmured.

It was a ridiculous idea. She'd said it just because she wasn't as good an arguer as he was.

“I'm trying to figure out who Laura is,” he explained. “Once I do that, you can have the damn letters back.”

“Why are you trying to figure it out?”

“Because…” He faltered, then glanced toward the window overlooking the front lawn and let out a weary breath. “It's not like you were the only one he lied to. I was his best friend, Sally. And he never breathed a word of this to me. Not even a hint. It pisses me off.”

“Oh. It pisses you off.” As the aggrieved wife, she was pretty pissed off, too. Yet the hurt she sensed in Todd's voice was genuine. The anger in his eyes was real. He felt cheated on as much as she did. Even if she didn't like him, she could sympathize, and out of sympathy she could avoid sarcasm. “What do you think will happen if you figure out who Laura is?”

“I don't know.” He shrugged. “Maybe I'll figure out who Paul was.”

He was my husband
, Sally wanted to say.
He was the
father of my daughter. He was a two-timing jackass
. “How are you going to find her?”

Todd studied Sally's upturned face in the filtered light from the window. Annoyance still resonated in his frown, but she saw more in it—acquiescence, a reluctant kinship. No pity, thank God. “I sneaked into his office today,” he said in a near whisper, as though he thought Rosie might hand him over to the authorities if she overheard his confession. “I stole some of his diskettes.”

BOOK: Looking for Laura
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