Looking for Laura (8 page)

He looked dubious. “All right. Stay out of my way, though, okay? Let me handle this.”

“Of course.” Not a chance, she thought. No way was she going to stand idly by while Todd prowled through Paul's office, discovering information already well known to Sally's five-year-old daughter. No way was she going to let Todd steal her anguish, her quest for the truth…or her letters.

This was
her
disaster, not his.

O
fficer Bronowski entered the New Day Café at his usual time, gaunt and towering in his crisp uniform. Sally shot a glance toward Tina, who was listlessly rinsing one of the stainless-steel coffee decanters. Circles rimmed her eyes, and her hair strayed from her barrettes and stuck out in weird tufts around her face. She must not have slept much last night. Either she'd been studying into the wee hours, or she'd been doing the horizontal two-step all night with Howard.

She made no move to get Officer Bronowski his daily coffee and pastry, so Sally sidled past her and faced the cop above the counter. Smiling, she said, “Good morning. What can I get you today?” as if this day were different from every other day and she had no idea what he might want.

“A cup of coffee, Mrs. Driver,” Bronowski said in his dull, guttural voice. “And I think I'll try—is that an apple turnover?”

“Peach,” Sally told him. “They're wonderful.”

“All right. A peach turnover.”

Still smiling, she plucked a tissue of wax paper from the box and lifted a turnover onto a plate for him. Then she filled a cup with the breakfast blend and poured in exactly the amount of cream Bronowski liked. He paid
and nodded, and she nodded back, her smile refusing to quit as he crossed the room to a table near the window.

Paul had been wrong about him. He wasn't light in the trousers. He was reserved and maybe a little awkward, but she bet he had more horsepower in his engine than anyone named Howard.

Why was she thinking about men and horsepower? she wondered.

During the first weeks after Paul's death, she'd thought about sex constantly, about how she wasn't getting any, how she might not get any ever again—or at least for a while—because mourning came with its own set of rules, and one of them, she was reasonably sure, was that the bereaved widow wasn't supposed to think about sex, let alone pursue it in a productive way. But by the time a month had passed, her craving for sex had faded, and she'd recognized that it had been based more on having lost Paul than on being horny. Gradually, she'd grown accustomed to sleeping alone, waking alone, sharing her days with Rosie and then retiring to the bedroom she shared with no one.

She'd assumed that eventually, sex might seem like a reasonable option for her. Not right now, but in time, when the pain faded. Once she'd found the letters from Laura, however, she'd decided she hated men so much that doing without sex for the rest of her life seemed like a good idea.

So why was she thinking about it now? Why was she thinking about it in the context of Officer Bronowski, of all people? He was tall and gawky, with buzz-cut hair and a glum smile. Not her type.

Of course, Paul hadn't been her type, either. Before she'd met him, her taste had run to big, sloppy, teddy bear fellows who lacked the patience to make sure they
were tidy and impeccable, men who believed that expertly tailored apparel and expensive hairstyles were a waste of money. She'd liked guys who weren't polished to a high gloss, who might be less than a hundred percent tactful, who said what they were thinking and backed up their words with actions.

Men with sexy chests.

Paul had had a sexy chest, she reminded herself—but when she closed her eyes and tried to picture it, she couldn't. All she could see was Todd with his shirt untucked and gaping. Todd, the tall, gruff jerk who thought he and he alone could track down his best friend's favorite pen pal.

“Tina?” Sally moved close behind her so she could speak softly. “Can you watch things for a few minutes? I want to make a phone call.”

Tina sighed melodramatically and tossed down the damp cloth she'd been using on the decanter. “I suppose.”

“What's wrong with you? You look like you didn't get enough sleep.”

“I didn't.” Her voice quivered with what sounded like sublime self-pity.

“Why not?”

She sighed again, a great, gusty puff of air that seemed to originate in the soles of her feet. “Howard told me he's planning to transfer to Dartmouth.”

“Oh.” Dartmouth was only a couple of hours away by car. Surely this wouldn't doom their relationship. “Any chance he'll get in?”

“I don't know. He's so smart. I don't know what I'll do if he goes to Dartmouth.”

“You could date him long distance.”

“But there are
girls
there. He's going to meet them and forget all about me.”

“How can you say that? He loves you.”

“If he loved me, he wouldn't want to transfer to Dartmouth.” Tina fingered the cloth she'd been using to wipe the decanter. Her voice was still quivery, shimmering with wretchedness. “He says his father went to Dartmouth and always wanted him to go. But he rebelled against his father and wound up at Winfield College, instead. But now he says he's tired of being rebellious and he thinks he ought to honor his father's wishes.”

It sounded as if Howard was a wimp, knuckling under to his father when he ought to be knuckling under to Tina. Sally's impulse was to tell Tina to forget about him, but forgetting him would be impossible. Every time she undressed, she'd have his name staring at her from her left boob.

“I'm sure you'll work it out,” Sally said, although she was sure of no such thing. She would love to solve all Tina's problems for her, but right now she had her own problems to deal with. “Could you watch things for just a couple of minutes?”

“Yeah, sure. Bronowski's gonna want his refill in exactly 12.3 minutes. I'll be ready.”

“I'll be back by then,” Sally promised. “I'm just going to make a phone call.” She patted Tina's shoulder, then hurried down the counter to the kitchen and through it to the closet-size office near the back door. Greta kept two file cabinets and a desk in there, everything clean to the point of sterility. Sally had been working at the café for three years before she learned that only one file cabinet contained business documents—billing records, tax records and the like. The other file cabinet contained nothing but recipes.

She entered the tiny office and bumped into the desk, which took up so much of the available space that it was nearly impossible not to bump into it. Hoisting herself up to sit on it, she reached around the computer for the phone and dialed the number of Paul's old office. On the second ring, Patty Pleckart answered. “Patty,” she said, “this is Sally Driver.”

“Oh. Hello,” Patty said with all the enthusiasm of a corpse.

“I have a question for you.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did Paul have any clients named Laura?” Sally might not be able to snoop around in Paul's office, but she thought Todd's hunch that Paul had met Laura through work seemed plausible.

“Why do you ask?” Patty said, suspicion oiling her tone.

Sally had worked out a story last night, lying wide-eyed in her bed and trying to figure out how to get information Todd had been unable to dig up. Now she answered Patty's question with well-rehearsed composure. “I just received a condolence card from someone named Laura. In her note she implied she'd known Paul in a professional capacity, and I wanted to send her a response. But the envelope got wet and her return address and last name were blurry so I can't read them.” Did that sound as good to Patty as it had sounded to Sally at two in the morning?

“Oh. Well. Let me look.”

Yes, it sounded good. Of course it did. Todd, the intrepid reporter, the muckraker, the only man in Winfield willing to take on city hall in the matter of sewer improvements, had failed in his mission. Sally might not be a newspaper editor with a degree from Columbia Uni
versity and a shitload of connections in town, but she was obviously a lot smarter than Todd.

Patty put her on hold. She shifted on the desk, smoothing her paisley skirt under her. Sitting on the hard surface, she felt pressure on the bones in her bottom. She'd lost a few pounds in the past couple of months. All those flavorless, well-intentioned casseroles had suppressed her appetite.

Patty returned to the line with a click. “He had two clients named Laura,” she reported. “Laura DelVecchio you probably know. She lives right here in town. She was at the funeral.”

“Of course,” Sally said, thinking,
Laura who?
She didn't remember half the people who'd clasped her hand and recited clichés about brilliance-struck-down-in-its-prime and how Paul was in a better place now—which, when Sally had thought about it, seemed kind of insulting, as if being dead was better than being married to her. If Laura DelVecchio had been among those mea-lymouthed mourners, Sally doubted she was the same Laura who had written Paul the letters. A woman having an affair with a married man wouldn't have been likely to shake Sally's hand and murmur platitudes in the funeral parlor. She'd have stayed away, or at least not introduced herself to the grief-stricken wife of her lover.

Nonetheless, Sally scribbled Laura DelVecchio's name on the message pad Greta left beside the phone. “I think it must be the other Laura,” she lied smoothly, “because in her note she said she'd only just heard that Paul had passed away.”

“Well, that would be Laura Hawkes, from Boston.”

“Yes, that's it,” Sally said with conviction.

Patty read off her address and Sally wrote it down. After abundantly thanking the secretary, she hung up and
whooped a laugh. Take
that
, Todd, she thought. All his sleuthing had come up empty. But Sally's sleuthing had paid off. He could keep the damn letters as long as he wanted. She didn't need them to figure out who and where Laura was.

One simple phone call, and she was hot on the woman's trail.

 

He was standing on her front porch when she arrived home with Rosie a little after four o'clock.

As Sally steered her car up the street, Rosie spotted him and said, “Look, there's Daddy's Friend with the computer games. See, Mommy? On the porch.”

Sally saw. Muttering a few juicy words, she jammed a little too hard on the brakes. But Rosie's safety seat held her securely in place.

“Did you use a swear, Mommy?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

“It sounded like you said fuck.”

“I didn't. And don't you say that word, either.”

“What does it mean?” Rosie asked.

“It means, this is a word I should not say.” Sally coasted to the house and into the driveway.

At least his shirt was buttoned and his hair was dry. It looked as if he had combed it several hours ago and then spent much of the intervening time standing in a wind tunnel. Dark waves tumbled over themselves in a wild mess that needed someone to tame it.

Actually, Sally preferred wild to tame. But not when it came to Todd or his hair. She didn't prefer anything about him.

She stopped the car and reminded herself to be courteous. He'd been courteous to her when she'd dropped by his home uninvited and interrupted his supper. And
anyway, she had nothing to lose by being courteous. She was way ahead of him in the Laura race. She could be generous in victory.

She unfastened the buckle on Rosie's car seat and helped her out of the cushioned shell. Then she hauled her tote bag from the back seat and smiled politely at Todd. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he said. No sharp edge to his voice, no accusation in his gaze. No hostility in his loose-limbed posture.

He must have come to return the letters. He must have realized that Paul's betrayal of her was much greater than his betrayal of Todd, and he was going to do the gentlemanly thing and let her be the more aggrieved party.

“I was wondering if I could talk to you for a few minutes,” he said, sounding almost friendly, even a little apologetic.

She liked this. She liked Todd minus his arrogance, Todd kissing up, Todd being obsequious. Not that asking her for a few minutes of her time was the same thing as throwing himself prostrate at her feet, but she liked it.

“Sure. Do you want to come in?”

“Thank you.”

Todd being obsequious would likely grow nauseating after a while, she realized as she unlocked the door and led him inside. He didn't care for her. Never had, never would. If he was acting nice, it had to be because he wanted something from her.

“Did you win Dark Thunder?” Rosie asked as they gathered in the entry hall.

He peered down at her, obviously bemused. “What?”

“Dark Thunder. The computer game. Did you win it?”

“No.” He must have sensed that Rosie needed a more elaborate answer than that, because he added, “I don't enjoy computer games.”

“But you have them. That's stupid, to have things you don't even enjoy.”

“Those were your father's games,” Todd explained.

“Did you bring them here? I could teach you how to play them and then you'd enjoy them. I could teach you even if you're stupid. Lots of stupid people play them. Do you want an animal cracker? That's one of my favorite snacks, except for scones.”