Looking for Laura (7 page)

“Why?”

“I thought, maybe this Laura was a client of his. Someone he met through work.”

“So you brought his diskettes home?”

“Yeah. I was going to have a look at them after dinner.”

Sally had to admit she was impressed by his enterprise. She couldn't have gotten into his office. She'd never gotten along with anyone at the firm. This hadn't bothered her; lawyers had never been her favorite people. Years after she'd married Paul, she was still astonished to think of herself as the wife of an attorney.

But her failure to become friends with Paul's colleagues had never been an issue. He'd kept his professional life separate from his home life. She'd never gone to the firm's Christmas parties, and she'd never regretted missing them. If one of his associates had telephoned him at home, she hadn't had to knock herself out making small talk, asking how the kids were doing and whether that stubborn crabgrass situation had been licked. She'd simply said, “Hang on a minute—I'll get Paul.”

So it would never have occurred to her to snoop around in Paul's office. If she'd showed up there, that surly receptionist, Patty Pleckart, would have become suspicious, whereas most of the people who worked at
the firm had known Todd since his diaper-rash days and wouldn't question his reasons for stopping by.

If she'd stolen Paul's work diskettes, though, she wouldn't have waited until she'd finished dinner before loading them onto her computer to see what nuggets of information they contained. She would have tossed Rosie a fistful of animal crackers and then started plowing through the data.

To men, food was undoubtedly more important than the truth.

“Let's go look at them now,” she suggested, searching for a computer.

He raked his hand through the thick, damp waves of his hair and contemplated her. “I don't think so,” he said.

“Why not?”

“I don't think you should be here while I go through them.”

Indignation flared inside her. She pulled herself straighter, stretching enough that she would have been standing eye to eye with Paul. Todd was a good six inches taller than Paul had been, and he towered above her, staring down at her. “What if you find out who Laura is and fall apart?”

“If I was going to fall apart over all of this, I would have fallen apart when I found the letters.”

“I don't want you snapping in my house,” he explained. “I don't want you blubbering and wailing and acting like a ninny.”

“Oh, is that all?” So kind of him to care about her emotional well-being. “I promise I won't act like a ninny.”

He opened his mouth and then shut it. He was tactful enough not to say what he was thinking.

At least he hadn't ordered her to leave. She crossed to the kitchen. “Rosie, honey, Daddy's friend and I are going to go look at something on his computer. We'll be—” She glanced questioningly at Todd.

Resigned, he turned toward the kitchen. “Upstairs, first door on the right,” he called in to Rosie, then headed for the stairs without waiting for Sally.

She easily caught up to him on the narrow stairway. At the top was a hall with several doors opening off it. One must lead to his bedroom, she guessed, and another to a bathroom. The first door on the right opened into a study that could double as an extra bedroom. It contained a boring beige futon, another wall unit of shelves filled with disheveled rows of books and an L-shaped desk with computer equipment set up on its bland white surface. A small stack of black squares rested next to the computer. The monitor featured a screen saver that depicted a cartoon dog gnawing on the corner of the screen, swinging its head and growling ferociously while the screen image seemed to peel away from itself and into his teeth.

Rosie would have loved it.

Not bothering to offer Sally a seat, Todd dropped onto the wheeled swivel chair in front of the desk. He loaded the first diskette from the pile into the machine and booted up its contents.

A director's chair stood in one corner of the room, and Sally dragged it over to the desk and sat beside Todd. In the bright light of his desk lamp, she could see the fatigue that creased the skin around his eyes, the stubble of beard that darkened his jaw, the twitch at the corner of his mouth, a sign of annoyance or tension or both.

“What is it?” she asked, angling her head to view the screen. A column of names and numbers appeared.

“Looks like phone numbers,” Todd said, scrolling down the monitor as he scanned the names. “No one named Laura on the list.”

“Maybe Laura was her nickname. Or the pet name he used for her.”

Todd snorted. “Did Paul ever use pet names?”

“Never.” He even called Rosie Rose most of the time. He'd complained more than once that Sally sounded more like a nickname than a real name. He'd asked why her mother couldn't have named her Sarah, and Sally had suggested that he ask her mother himself. She knew he never would. He considered her mother several castes below him—which she was, but he hadn't had to be so snooty about it. He'd spoken a few words to her at their wedding, but otherwise he'd pretended the woman didn't exist.

At least her mother wasn't a hypocrite. At least she didn't collect florid letters from a lover and hide them inside a brown sweater.

Todd opened another file on the disk. More phone numbers. “Who are all these people?” he wondered aloud.

“Clients?”

“Doubtful. He would have kept his clients' phone numbers with their files, not in a separate list.”

Sally skimmed the list. “There aren't any female names on there at all,” she observed. “I'll bet that's his alumni list from his old prep school. He was class something-or-other.”

“Something-or-other?” Todd twisted in his chair to look at her.

“Vice president or secretary. I know he wasn't president. It really steamed him that he wasn't.”

“All right.” Todd pulled the diskette out of the computer and inserted another. When he loaded it, the screen filled with a blaze of color, and thumping music—drums followed by a noodly melody—emerged tinnily from the speakers flanking the monitor. “What the hell—?”

“It's a game,” Sally guessed. “Arch-Enemies.”

“You're kidding.” Todd gaped at the monitor as the colors exploded with kaleidoscopic effect. “What was he doing with a computer game at work?”

Sally shrugged.

Through the speakers came the sound of a man howling in the final throes of some fatal agony. Todd removed that disk and inserted another. More pounding drums and a squeaky, whiny melody.

“Mommy?” Rosie hollered up the stairs. Her footsteps merged with the drumbeats. “Mommy, are you playing DragonKeeper?”

“Is that what this is?” Todd muttered.

Sally nodded and turned in time to see Rosie enter the room. “We're not playing it, Rosie. Daddy's friend just wanted to see what was on this diskette.”

“I know how to play DragonKeeper.” She darted to the desk, her eyes round and glowing rapturously as an animated dragon filled the screen, exhaling flames through its nostrils. “Press control and an arrow key,” she instructed Todd. “It'll get you to the setup.”

“I don't want to get to the setup,” he told her.

“But it's a cool game. Set it up, Daddy's Friend. I'll show you.” She didn't wait for Todd to follow her orders, but instead scrambled onto his lap and hit the control and arrow keys herself. The dragon disappeared, replaced by a screen of writing.

Todd peered helplessly at Sally. “Get her off my lap,” he mouthed.

“She wants to play,” Sally whispered.

“
I
don't want to play.”

Sighing, she reached around Rosie's taut little tummy and hauled her onto her own lap. “No playing DragonKeeper. Daddy's friend needs to look at some more disks.”

“But that's a great game,” Rosie insisted. “It really is, Daddy's Friend.”

“My name isn't Daddy's Friend,” Todd growled at her. “It's Todd. Mr. Sloane.”

“Todd Mr. Sloane? That's a silly name. You should just get rid of the mister part.” Rosie arranged herself more comfortably on Sally's lap. Sally remembered when the little girl weighed only twenty pounds, or thirty. She weighed forty knee-crushing pounds now, but Sally still loved holding her on her lap.

Rosie handed Todd another diskette. “Try this one. I bet it's Dark Thunder.”

He looked quizzically at her, then inserted the disk into the drive. Within three seconds, the title “Dark Thunder” filled the monitor. “How did you know that?” Todd asked, awe tempering his obvious irritation.

“These are Daddy's games,” Rosie said. “He kept them in a little wooden box at work.”

“He did?” Sally asked.

“How did you know that?” Todd asked simultaneously.

“He tol' me,” Rosie answered with forced patience, as if she believed she was addressing two morons. “He tol' me he kept them hidden there. If you're not gonna play, I'll go back downstairs and draw some more. But
it's really not fun without colors, Mommy. You didn't bring any crayons with you, did you?”

“I'm afraid not.” She let Rosie slide down her legs to the floor.

Todd stared after her as she scampered out of the room, then turned back to Sally. “Maybe she knows about Laura.”

“No,” Sally said sharply. She'd already imagined that possibility, and it made bile rise in her throat. As venal as Paul had been, she refused to think he would have risked letting Rosie find out about Laura. “She knows about computer games because they're designed for immature children. Like Paul,” she added spitefully.

“I think we should ask her about Laura.”

“Absolutely not.” Sally shook her head. “I don't want her being questioned about this disgusting situation.”

“What makes you think it's disgusting? Maybe Laura was a classy lady.”

“Sneaking around with another woman's husband? Real classy.”

He leaned back, and his chair went with him, hinging backward until he was nearly reclining. “Maybe I can sneak back into his office and look around some more,” he said.

“Why the hell should you care?” Sally asked, still fuming. “It's my problem. It's my pocketknife he gave her. It was my marriage that was a sham.”

“Maybe my friendship with him was a sham, too,” Todd said, seeming to struggle with the words. “Paul was like a brother to me, you know? We told each other everything. And he never told me this.” He swiveled in the chair and straightened. The chair back straightened
with him. “He had a good reason not to tell you about Laura. He had no reason not to tell me.”

“Perhaps he didn't trust you,” she said, knowing it was a mean thing to say but not caring. “Perhaps he thought it was none of your business.”

“Well, you found those letters, and that made it my business.”

“Mine,”
she asserted. “
My
business.
I
found the letters.”

“And I'll figure this thing out.” He pondered for a minute, then frowned. “It bugs me. I think maybe there's a mistake, or—or maybe it was some fantasy thing. Maybe Laura doesn't even exist.”

“The letters exist. And my knife is gone.”

“You're sure about that?”

“I've searched everywhere it could be—and some places it never would be. It's nowhere.”

“Maybe he gave it to Rosie.”

“He gave a knife to his five-year-old daughter? Uh-huh.”

Todd conceded with a nod. “Okay. Maybe he lost it.”

“And maybe I'm the reincarnation of Catherine the Great.” She snorted. “It was in a letter. She wrote about the knife. She described its
very vulgarity
. That's got to be the same knife I gave him. It's got to be.”

“Okay.” His eyes met Sally's, and for a flickering instant she thought,
Tina's right—he
is
cute
. That notion evaporated as soon as it formed. He was just a guy, as selfish as his supposed best friend, believing he'd been wronged more than she had. There was nothing cute about him, nothing at all.

“I want the letters back,” she said.

“You'll get them back,” he promised, pushing him
self to stand. “As soon as I'm done with them, they're all yours.”

“Whatever you find out I want to know. Because they
are
mine, even now. I want to know who Laura is. I want to know why Paul jeopardized our little girl's happiness because of her.”

Again Todd opened his mouth and then shut it. He had thin, wide lips, she noticed. The kind of lips designed for slow, lazy smiles.

“Whatever you find out, I promise I won't blame you,” she swore.