One Night in Boston (4 page)
Well, no turning back now. I’ll find Dillon between now and then if it’s the last thing I do.
She smoothed the tangles at her temples and straightened. She’d call up whatever businesses Neve had found so far. She’d scour the Internet, she’d call Information in all fifty states, she’d do whatever she had to do to locate her stepbrother and get herself out of this mess.
Maggie marched back into the house, rain slicking the backs of her legs. She headed into the front office with a litany of questions circling her brain.
I need that list. I need a map of Boston. I need you to find out if anyone named Dillon Murphy is listed in the phone book up there
. But the words died on her lips. She barely had time to say hello to Andrew Weatherby, barely had a moment to register that his truck had been parked outside and she hadn’t even noticed, when a white-faced Neve collapsed on the loveseat in front of them.
*
Neve saw Maggie pull into the driveway like a wild woman, same as always, and made a mental note to remind her boss that suicide probably wasn’t the best way to escape foreclosure.
“Will she be able to get the money?” Andrew’s voice, smooth as dark honey, warm and homey and all hers, slid over her as he walked into the office. He ducked his lanky frame under the top of the doorframe.
She rose and went to him, winding her fingers through his and breathing in his scent, Ivory and Old Spice and sawdust from the jobsite. “I don’t know. I hope so.” She leaned into his chest and tried to find comfort there.
“Here’s that salami on rye,” Andrew said after a minute, fishing the cellophane-wrapped sandwich from the inside pocket of his coat. He chuckled. “Don’t know how you can stand that stuff.”
Neve grinned. “I told you, I just had a craving last night. I can’t remember the last time I ate salami either, but—“
The door flew open then, with Maggie on the other side. Neve was just about to point to the list of nearly one hundred landscaping businesses on her desk when a sudden head rush left her woozy. She reached for the arm of the loveseat to steady herself.
Not again
, she thought.
Not now
. Her breath came in short gasps, and pinwheels of light spun on the walls as she fought for composure. Andrew wrapped his arms around her, catching her as she fell, and Neve let herself cave into the safety of him.
*
Shadows moved against the back of her eyelids. A hum rose and fell in the distance, a rushing of waves, a foreign sound she couldn’t identify. A moment later, she realized that it came from somewhere inside her own ears. Neve rolled her head from side to side.
“She’ll be fine,” she heard Andrew say as she opened her eyes. He sat beside her on the loveseat with one arm looped around her.
Maggie stared at the two of them, shadows settling into the faint lines around her eyes. “You’re sick, aren’t you?” she said. “That’s why you’ve been drinking ginger ale and looking like you were going to pass out all morning. Well, you should go home, then. Andrew can take you. Get some rest, and—”
“She’s not sick,” Andrew interrupted. He patted his wife on one leg and moved to the sink in the corner, where he ran cold water over a fistful of paper towels. He handed them to Neve, who took the cool compress with relief and laid it over her eyes.
“She’s pregnant.”
Neve choked, a small sound in the suddenly-silent room, and she thought her breakfast might come up.
You weren’t supposed to say anything
. She slid a glance toward her boss.
I told you we needed to wait
. But she couldn’t really blame him. Andrew was thrilled, almost giddy, at the thought of becoming a parent. So was she. You couldn’t hide joy like that, Neve thought. It spilled out and colored the world when you least expected it to.
“What?” Maggie broke the silence. “You’re—” Her eyes widened until the moon could have slipped inside them. “Are you really?”
With shaking fingers, Neve patted her cheeks with the paper towels and nodded. “I just—I didn’t want to tell you. Not quite yet. Until I was a little further along.” She burst out in tears. “Sorry. I’ve been doing that a lot lately.”
Maggie leapt across the room and hugged her, spewing congratulations. She wound her arms around Neve’s neck and patted the still-flat belly. For just a minute, she looked like her regular old self, without bills or an ailing mother or her own loneliness to think about. Neve thought maybe it would be all right, after all. Then she saw the look, the one she had feared: a quick, subtle darkening deep inside Maggie’s pupils, a twitching at the corners of her mouth, the rapid blinking of pale eyelashes. She’d wanted to avoid that look at all costs. It was the reason she hadn’t told her boss in the first place, nearly one month ago when she and Andrew found out for sure.
*
“It’s called HPV,” the doctor said across the desk. A nineteen-year old Maggie sat in the chilly, fourth-floor office clutching a worn leather purse as her roommate waited downstairs. They had a study session back on campus in fifteen minutes, and this follow-up to the gynecologist was just routine after some abnormal test results. She thought.
“What?” She leaned forward, glancing at the clock on the wall behind the middle-aged woman. “What’s that?”
The doctor removed the half-glasses that perched on her nose and folded her fingers together, lining them up like that old game of church-and-steeple that Maggie remembered from childhood.
“It’s a virus, a sexually transmitted disease,” she explained. “A fairly common one. It affects approximately sixty percent of people who are sexually active. Recently, some research has been done on developing a vaccine to prevent it, but…”
Maggie’s mind filled in the blanks. No vaccine existed. Not yet, anyway. She was out of luck on that one.
“In any case,” the woman went on, “most people’s immune systems take care of the virus and they’ll never know they had it. Occasionally, people contract a strain that’s tougher to get rid of. Young women, especially, seem vulnerable to those.”
“Is that what I have? One of the—” Maggie stumbled, not sure of the right words. “One of the tougher ones?”
The doctor opened Maggie’s folder. It was marked in various places with orange and yellow circles, stickers placed next to scribbles. Her finger rested on a typewritten lab result with letters and numbers Maggie tried in vain to read upside down. “Yes. That is what you have. One of the two strains that can cause cervical cancer, as a matter of fact.”
“Cancer? I have cancer?” All the air left the room. Saying the word seemed to stretch Maggie’s mouth to distortion. She felt a terrible ache inside the pit of her stomach. Her fingers closed into fists of panic, creating tiny half moons as her nails dug into soft flesh.
I’m nineteen
, she wanted to say.
I don’t have cancer. I can’t. I don’t have time, first of all.
Why, she had finals in another week, a weekend at the Jersey shore planned with her girlfriends, and a brand-new boyfriend who’d invited her to a party that night. She didn’t have cancer. It had to be some kind of mistake. They’d mixed up the results at the lab. Or she was dreaming, back in her dorm room, and she’d wake in another minute to a day void of doctors and exam rooms and tests.
The doctor shook her head. “We don’t know if it’s cancer right now. The chances are low, especially for someone as young and healthy as yourself. We’ll do a biopsy and go from there.”
Maggie closed her eyes and tears slipped down her cheeks. The doctor pushed a wad of tissues into her hand and she pressed them to her face.
“As I said, we don’t know anything at this point. The good thing about this kind of cancer is that, in most cases, the cells grow fairly slowly.”
But Maggie wasn’t most cases, as it turned out, and she didn’t do anything slowly, especially develop cancer. Which is why six weeks after staring at the doctor in disbelief, and three weeks before her twentieth birthday, she found herself lying on a stretcher, doped up for surgery. As she lay there, staring at the ceiling, she turned over a word in her mind that she’d barely heard, let alone considered, a year earlier.
Hysterectomy…
The O.R. nurse wheeled her down the hallway.
Hysterectomy. Hysterical. Switch a few letters, and they’d be the same word
, she thought.
That’s why doctors used to cut women open a hundred years ago, to take out the thing that drove them mad.
Yet the only thing Maggie could think of, before the surgeon with the kind eyes did the same to her, was how she couldn’t imagine that removing her womb would make her feel less mad or less angry at Dillon. He was part of the reason she lay there, after all. She’d never forget what had happened that night four years earlier, even if they removed all the cancer and she lived to be a hundred and ten. She’d always see him in the center of her memory, walking down the hallway and closing his door.
He was sleeping, her stepbrother,
he was Goddamn-fucking sleeping
, when the monsters came to life and she had no one else to save her from them.
1:00 p.m.
Jack dashed off the last sentence of his email. There. Now the board of directors had a heads-up about the situation in Hart’s Falls. If Carl couldn’t manage to get a verbal agreement from the home owner today, and the papers signed by early next week, Jack would drive down there himself to close the deal.
He ran a hand over his head, mussing the curls and knowing Paige would finger them back into place. With a glance at the clock, he cursed.
One o’clock.
He grabbed his jacket, mumbled to his secretary that he’d be back in an hour, and dashed past the elevator doors. He took the stairs two at a time all the way to the ground floor. The wind caught his breath, stole it from his throat the minute he stepped onto the sidewalk, but he barely noticed.
Paige hated to be kept waiting.
Hands shoved deep into his pockets, eyes slit against the unusual early summer gale, Jack crossed against the light and turned left. One look at the bank clock on the corner told him all he needed to know. Almost ten minutes late. He hurried on, regretting the whole idea of meeting Paige for lunch in the first place. Neither of them could afford time away from the office; he should have simply agreed to meet her at the engraver’s and been done with it. Distracted, he stepped off the curb and nearly lost a foot to a cab speeding through a yellow light. A horn blared and a woman beside him squawked a warning. He jumped back just in time.
“Dammit!”
Thirty seconds later, the light turned red, and Jack hurried across the street and into Jacque’s Café, a cozy bistro and the newest place for Boston’s upscale crowd to lunch. He looked around.
“Sir?” The hostess, a young woman with thick fake eyelashes, stepped from behind the kiosk. Buttons strained across her chest and stretched the pink fabric of her blouse into dangerous puckers. “May I help you?”
“Table for Major. I’m meeting someone.” Jack kept his eyes away from the pink puckers and pretended to study the specials board.
“A woman—tall, blonde?”
He nodded.
“Right this way.”
He shrugged off his jacket and followed her, letting his eyes adjust to the half-light of the café. They passed a collection of small round tables, a few booths, and the hallway leading to the restrooms. In the very back corner of the restaurant sat Paige. His heart gave a little flip.
Even unsmiling, with lines of tension etched around her mouth, Jack’s fiancée lit up the room. With blonde hair styled neatly around her face, pale blue eyes, and a figure that still fit into the cheerleading skirts she’d worn in high school, the city’s star criminal attorney was one of the most attractive women he had ever known. That she was brilliant, successful, and a tigress in the bedroom didn’t hurt their relationship any. From the moment they’d met through a mutual friend, Jack had thought Paige Webster a perfect match for him. She turned heads in a crowd. She knew the stats of every Red Sox pitcher in recent history. She could make grown men cry on the witness stand. And she made a mean veal piccata.
As Jack bent down and kissed her, he reminded himself again of his luck in finding such a suitable woman to marry. He slid into his chair and picked up a menu. In fact, the only thing he wished for sometimes was that she’d crack. Show a tender side. Reveal her vulnerability. Sometimes—most times, if Jack was really honest with himself—he felt as though Paige would do just fine in life with or without him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Once in a while, he liked to be needed.
“Sorry I’m late. Lost track of time.”
“Hope that doesn’t happen on our wedding day.” She smiled, as though to make it a joke. Jack wondered if it really was.
“I already ordered for you,” she continued. “Clam chowder and whatever the sandwich special is today. Hope that’s okay.”
Jack didn’t say anything. He didn’t mind the chowder, though he wasn’t really a sandwich guy. “It’s fine.” Cracking his knuckles, he bumped one knee against the table as he tried to get comfortable.
“Here,” Paige said and reached into the large leather purse at her feet. Out came a thick binder, decorated with flowers and lace. She passed it to him.
“What’s this?”
“I’m thinking about calla lilies instead of roses.” She sipped at her seltzer and gestured at the half-dozen yellow notes stuck inside. “I marked some pages for you to look at.” Reaching over, she brushed some errant curls from his forehead and patted them back into place.
Jack flipped through the book, wondering if the centerpieces on page nine were supposed to look different from the ones on page sixteen.
“They look nice. The lilies, I mean.” He pulled at his collar. Why couldn’t they just fly off to Vegas? Or even some island and swap vows on the beach? Did they really need to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on pedestals and ice sculptures and miniature tuxedoes for her boss’s twin nephews, serving as ring bearers?
Jack knew he could afford the ritziest wedding the city had seen in decades. More important, he knew Paige wanted it. But unlike his father or his fiancée, pomp meant little to him. Money was useful, certainly, as a tool to carve out a comfortable life. If necessary, it could be a weapon to wield in the world of big business. But on a personal level? Spending hard-earned cash on silly things and material items just to keep up appearances left Jack cold. He didn’t need to release two hundred doves at his wedding to show the city how much money he had. Most of the city already knew. It made no difference to him one way or the other.
Maybe I am like Mom after all
, he thought suddenly.
She never needed fancy china on the table. She served steak on plastic plates, and it tasted just the same.
Invisible fingertips trailed up his spine. Funny the pieces of you that traced back to your parents. The stuff in the mirror was easy to see. The details under the skin and buried in the soul emerged differently. Jack rubbed his chin, sorry all over again that he wouldn’t dance with his mother at the wedding. God, how he missed her sometimes.
“You really like them?” Paige looked worried. “But what about the favors? What goes with lilies? Almonds or candles? Or both?”
Jack’s stomach growled. “Either is fine with me.”
Fine
. The best he could come up with.
Paige settled back in her chair as the waitress brought their food. “I don’t know.” She set her napkin on her lap and nibbled at leaves of watercress.
He took a long sip of clam chowder and burned his tongue. “Ow! Shit.”
Paige drew her brows together in disapproval and shook her head. Jack suddenly wished he’d ordered a good, strong cocktail, but she probably would have disapproved of that too. Growing up on the outside of Boston’s social circles, Paige had since honed a keen awareness of propriety. Appearances mattered. Behavior mattered. In fact, as far as she was concerned, what you looked like in the public eye counted for just about everything.
“…so will you have time to stop at the dry cleaners after work today?”
“What?” Distracted, Jack took another gulp of soup and burned himself for a second time.
“I was hoping you could pick up my red dress. The Vera Wang.” Paige finished her salad and signaled their waitress to bring the bill. Out came her company credit card, shiny and silver in the half-light.
“That’s all you’re eating?”
“It’s all I have time for.” She signed her name with a flourish and looked at Jack with sad, tired eyes.
His heart melted a little.
“I told Stefan I’d meet him for a drink after work.” Not exactly true. He’d yet to make the phone call to his best friend from college, though he’d been meaning to for well over a month. “But if you really need me to get the dress—“
“No, it’s okay. I guess I can have one of the girls at the office run out.” She reached for her coat and stood. At nearly six feet tall in high heels, she struck an imposing figure. The busboy stopped and stared from the next table over, and Jack didn’t blame him. “Don’t forget we’re going to the Deveau Charity Ball tonight.”
He froze.
“Oh, honey, you didn’t.” Paige clucked her tongue. “Please tell me your tux is dry cleaned.”
“It is.” That, at least, was true. “Where is it this time?” The Deveau Ball was held every year on the last Friday in June and had become the premier summer event for Boston’s upper class. Marty Deveau, owner of a multi-million dollar investment company, threw a lavish party each year to raise money for a variety of the city’s charities. Once known as a pompous playboy with too much money, since his marriage a dozen years ago the prestigious Mr. Deveau had become the darling of the media and a hero to Boston’s underdogs.
“The Hotel Victoria.” Paige wrapped a silk scarf around her hair. “Eight o’clock.” She flipped open her cell phone and scanned for messages, frowning. “But I may be a little late. I have a deposition this afternoon, and I had to reschedule a meeting for six.”
So maybe I can stall a little
, Jack thought. He stood to say goodbye. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the party scene; he appreciated celebrating the warm weather along with the rest of the city. And he was the first person to make donations to charity. It was just that everyone seemed so stuffy at these fancy events, so made up. They postured for the cameras and talked in sound bites, fully aware they were fodder for the next day’s social column. Jack shuddered. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had an honest conversation at the Deveau Ball or gone home without a blasted headache.
“I’ll call you,” Paige said, and brushed a kiss across his cheek. Her perfume, floral and familiar, hung in the air over him. For an instant, his groin throbbed with wanting. Jack watched as she pushed open the door, bent her head against the wind, and marched in quick, short steps down the pavement. At the corner she raised two fingers, and a cab stopped at once. She slipped inside and was gone.
Jack sat back down and checked his watch. Almost two. An entire afternoon stretched out before him, filled with telephone calls he didn’t want to make and meetings he didn’t want to schedule. To top it all off, he had to end the day by sticking himself into a monkey suit and making small talk.
Great. Just great
. With one hand he punched buttons on his cell phone until he found the right number.
“Stef? Hey, it’s Jack. Yeah, yeah, I know. So how ’bout tonight? I don’t know—say five-thirty at Cecil’s Pub?” He watched a young couple stop for a kiss on the corner. Arms wrapped tightly around each other, they leaned in, closed their eyes, and ignored the whistles of people walking by. Jack shook his head. He’d never been one for public displays of affection. He couldn’t understand why people couldn’t save the pawing and groping for the bedroom. He turned away as Stefan came back on the line.
“Good. I’ll see you then. Yeah, you owe me a game. Better practice up.”
*
“So that’s it, then?” The man with the graying temples and muscular forearms signed his name and pushed the paper back across the table. “You’ll start next week?”
Dillon checked his calendar. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Either my partner, J.J., or I will be here Wednesday morning. Maybe Thursday, depending on the weather.”
Thunder rattled the windows of the library where they sat.
Ellis Casterline snuffed out the end of a cigarette and shook his head. “Not your partner. I want you. Don’t care how good your buddy is. You’ll be overseeing the work.”
“Well, sir—” Dillon began, careful of his words. He didn’t want to blow a job that looked to net several thousands of dollars in profit, but he also had a business to run. Since that last radio interview, seemed like everyone wanted Dillon himself on site at all times. He did his best to please, but sometimes that couldn’t happen. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t be in two—or four or six—places at one time.
The man held up a palm. “I don’t want to hear any excuses. You’re the one I read about in the
Globe
, the one Cassie and Ronald Weinberg recommended. If it takes more money for you to be here in the flesh, then so be it. I want the best.” He leaned in and Dillon could smell tobacco mixed with some kind of cologne. Jabbing a finger into the air, Casterline went on. “And you’re the best, from what I’ve been told. Let’s not play games and pretend you have to work me in to some kind of schedule. My wife is throwing me a retirement party in four months. I want these grounds looking like the White House. Better, in fact. Can you do that for me?’
Dillon glanced down at the long list they’d generated over the last hour.
Custom paved walkways, ornamental trees, pond with waterfall…
“Yes, sir,” he said, erasing any doubt from his voice. He held out his hand, which the guy shook, too hard. “You’ll see me later next week. I’ll call and confirm the day before.”
“Very good.” Ellis Casterline lit another cigarette. “I’ll look forward to it, then.” He picked up his telephone, and Dillon took that as the cue to leave. He made his way past shelves of books, all coated in a fine dust, and hoped he could find his way back to the front door. Jesus, but these mansions had more hallways and side rooms than their owners knew what to do with.
As soon as he pushed open the library door, the redhead appeared again.
Must have been waiting right around the corner
, Dillon thought. She cocked her head and sent him a smoldering look. White shorts showed off tanned legs. Ample cleavage peeked from beneath her bright yellow polo shirt.
Willow
, she’d said earlier as an introduction, as she slipped her warm hand into his and purred the word up at him.
Like the tree
.
