Small Blessings (42 page)

Rose's customers had reported that Mr. Brownlow had been snooping around the college asking questions about the importance of her job to the college community. And Mr. Pitts had told her Mr. Brownlow was planning to come by and talk with her—in her lair, as the lawyer had phrased it—later today. So something was afoot on that front. Still, Rose didn't hesitate. “Of course! Just let me deliver this and ask Susan to cover, and I'll be right with you.”

“Good,” Russell said. “There's no time to waste.”

*   *   *

A few leaves had begun to fall. Henry scuffed along beside Rose, kicking at them, but then Henry kicked at
everything.
“I drew a dinosaur today,” he said. “We're studying brontosaurus. Did you know they only ate grass and leaves?”

“Will I ever get to see your picture?” Rose asked.

Henry turned coy. “If you come to my school's art show, you can. We each get to choose a picture to put up, and I'm going to choose that one.”

“When is the art show?”

“Just before Christmas.”

Rose smiled. “Don't you think you might paint a picture you like better before then?”

“No
way.
”

That was the end of that.

Henry carried his soccer ball. “How come we're not going home? Then we could go out in the backyard and practice head shots.”

“Because—” Rose began.

Russell interrupted her. “Because we're going to my house. I have a great big round room at the top of my house with lots of round windows that I thought you'd like to see. It's big enough so that you can practice head shots inside.”

“Cool!” Henry was obviously impressed. Rose involuntarily tightened her grip on his hand. Something didn't feel right about this, but what did she know? Nothing had felt right for several days now.

“I've got cookies and milk already laid out up in the Dome Room,” Russell said for Henry's benefit.

Henry, the cookie connoisseur, was immediately interested. “What
kind
of cookies?”

“Double Stuf Oreos.”

“Wow!” Henry, like everyone, had his price. “How much further, Professor Jacobs?”

“We're here.” They stood in front of the Dean Dome. Russell pointed to the top of his house, which stuck up over everything else around it. “That's where we're going.”

Henry's mind was still on Double Stuf Oreos. “How many can I have?” he asked.

“As many as you want.” Russell smiled at the boy, offering his hand. Henry took it, and together they trotted up the Dean Dome's front walk.

Russell opened the front door with a flourish. “Come in, come in! Welcome to my home.”

The space Rose entered was dominated by a curving staircase, the kind you floated up rather than climbed. Facing sets of French doors opened into what looked like a parlor on her right, a library on her left. From what she could see of it, Russell's house was exactly as people had described it—not so much a home as a stage set for the Russell Show.

“Excuse me, Professor Jacobs,” Henry said, “but I need to use the bathroom.”

“Right this way.” Russell gestured up the stairs. “There's a nice bathroom up in the Dome Room that you can use.”

“Okay! You show me where!” Henry turned and raced up the stairs.

Russell gave Rose a little shrug, as though to say
what's a host to do?

*   *   *

It was pleasant to be among the gaggle of parents waiting at Ed House for school to let out. Tom supposed that at some point he'd have to let Henry walk home by himself in order to foster independence. Unless, of course, Henry had
enough
independence already, and needed other things—such as a sense of belonging—fostered more.

Good Lord, parenting and being in love were fraught with decisions. Life with Marjory had been simple. He'd only had to be kind and keep her safe. Everything else had been so screwed up by fate, he didn't have to worry about making anything worse.

“Henry's already gone,” a thigh-high voice announced.

Tom looked down to find Sam Driskell standing before him. “Hello, Sam. What did you just say about Henry?”

“He's already gone. Someone came and got him during reading.”

Tiny wisps of panic rose in Tom. “Who got him?”

Sam gave the elaborate shrug of a seven-year-old pleased to be involved in a
situation.
“I didn't see who it was. Teacher just said Henry needed to go.”

Tom was still having trouble grasping what Sam was trying to tell him.

“Didn't he go home?” Sam asked.

“No, he didn't.” Tom had come from home.

“You can check with Teacher,” Sam said. “She might know.”

Tom was off. “Thank you, Sam,” he called back over his shoulder. “I'll do that.”

*   *   *

The second set of stairs Rose climbed was a much tighter spiral and emptied directly into the Dome Room. There was no landing; you just climbed until there were no more stairs, took one last step, and stood at the edge of a round space perhaps twenty-five feet in diameter. Russell's Dome Room had eight chest-high circular windows evenly spaced around its circumference, and one narrow door leading into the promised bathroom, contained by the little bump in the room's roundness you saw from outside.

Russell had furnished the space with only one couch and a scattering of comfortable chairs. There were lamps but no pictures. He evidently considered the space its own best decoration.

A rather incongruous apartment-sized refrigerator was off to Rose's right, and a single table was on her left. This had been laid with a cloth, a champagne bucket full of ice holding an old-fashioned bottle full of milk, and two unopened packages of Double Stuf Oreos.

The room's beauty was such that it trumped even the lure of Oreos or the need to use the bathroom. Henry's face shone with delight. “It's like a room in Hogwarts!”

“Isn't it?” Rose put her hand on the boy's shoulder.

Then there was a sound like a hospital trolley rumbling down a corridor. Rose turned to find that Russell was no longer there, and the hole in the floor opening to the spiral staircase had completely disappeared.

Something clicked into place, something turned, and it was as though that hole had never been.

*   *   *

Tom found Henry's teacher, Mrs. Parker, hanging gaudy tempera-on-newsprint pictures on a clothesline strung across the back wall of her classroom. “Professor Putnam,” she said, without the slightest trace of anything even approaching alarm, “how nice to see you. Come and look at Henry's lovely picture.”

Mrs. Parker moved to stand beside a picture of a big green blob with a long tail on one end and an improbably toothy smile on the other. “It's a brontosaurus. Henry's quite proud of the fact that it has very small teeth because brontosauruses were vegetarian. I'm sure he'll tell you all about it at supper.”

Tom forced a smile. “Er, where
is
Henry, Mrs. Parker?”

There can be no more alarming question to ask a teacher. “Why, he's with Rose. Rose Callahan. She came to fetch him about an hour ago, saying you'd called and asked her to pick him up. Was that not true?”

It was not. But surely, if Rose was involved, Henry was fine, whatever was going on. Perhaps she and Henry were in cahoots with Agnes and were planning some sort of surprise for him? “No worries, Mrs. Parker. I'm sure we've just gotten our wires crossed.”

Mrs. Parker, a thirty-year veteran of elementary school teaching, was not so easily fooled. “Surely you'd know if you had called Rose? Was she making that up? I thought it was fine since she's on Henry's list, and you and she are … are…” Mrs. Parker ground to a halt.

“I'm sure everything's fine,” Tom said, to reassure himself as much as her. “Tell you what, I'll leave now and get this figured out.”

“Will you call me when you do?” Mrs. Parker said. “Please? I won't sleep a wink tonight unless I know everything's all right. Henry's such a dear little boy, and he's been through so much.”

Tom was already on his way out. “Yes, he has,” he called back over his shoulder. “And yes, I'll call you as soon as I find out what's going on.”

*   *   *

He went directly to Rose's cottage. She was not there, but her car was. Which meant she was probably at work.

At the Book Store, he was told that Rose had left abruptly around one o'clock with Russell Jacobs. Her reason for leaving had been something vague about an emergency. Ted Pitts told Tom he'd expected her back shortly, but so far there had been no sign of her. He promised to call Tom as soon as she showed up.

Tom went next to Russell's and knocked on the front door. Russell opened it immediately. “Well, hello, Tom,” he said, sounding much like his old self. “Sorry I can't ask you in. I'm kind of in the middle of something.”

Tom was by now too worried for polite preliminaries. “Have you seen Henry, Russ? Or Rose? They left school together and I can't find them. The Book Store said Rose left work with you.”

“She did. We went to a late lunch.”

The panic returned, less wispy and more robust. “You went to lunch? Ted said Rose told him there was some kind of emergency.”

Russ shook his head. He smelled heavily of cologne and something else that could have been whiskey. But he seemed sober enough, and Tom had more important things to worry about than Russell Jacobs's drinking. “I don't know anything about any emergency,” Russell said. “Rose and I parted company outside the dining hall. She said she was headed back to work. Did you check at the Book Store?”

“Yes, I checked at the Book Store,” Tom snapped. “I just
told
you I talked to Ted.”

Russ looked offended. “Well, don't bark at
me,
Tom. You could, after all, have talked to Ted on the phone, you know.”

“I know,” Tom said. “I'm sorry. I'm just worried about Henry.”

“As well you should be,” said Russell evenly. “Would you like me to call the police?”

Tom's first instinct was to say yes, but then he remembered Mr. Brownlow and immediately changed his mind. Things had been going so well, but that didn't mean they couldn't turn sour once Mr. Brownlow found out that Tom couldn't even keep track of Henry. “No,” he said. “I need to think first.”

“Are you going to start a search?” Russell asked.

Tom shook his head. “Not yet. I have to think things through.”

“You do that,” Russell said. “Now, if you'll excuse me, as I said, I'm kind of in the middle of something.”

“Certainly,” Tom said. “I'll call you if I find out anything.”

“You do that,” said Russell, smiling at Tom as he firmly closed the door.

*   *   *

The bathroom door closed behind Henry.

Rose was instantly on the move, hurrying over to the rectangle of floor where the entrance had been. There was no visible way to open it, no handle or even a bit of mismatched edge to grab on to. Rose jumped up and down on it, testing its sturdiness. Solid as the Rock of Ages.

“Russell,” she called softly, “are you out there?”

No answer.

“Russell! Are you there?” Louder this time.

Still no answer. Had he gone downstairs and left them locked up in this top hat of a room without even telling them
why
?

It was then Rose noticed a sheet of stationery taped to the wall. She snatched it down and found that it was a letter to her, written in a hard-etched, emphatic scrawl on Russell's elegant letterhead.

Dear Rose,

What you are doing with Tom Putnam is
not real,
and it is also
wrong
—wrong for you, wrong for me and wrong for Henry. I'm sure you will realize that I'm right about this as soon as you have had time to think.

I'm sorry to have to do what I have done, but everything was happening too fast, and this was the only way I could figure out to
slow things down
, and keep them from going past
the point of no return
! Which would have been a
great tragedy
!!!

Tom Putnam may be a very nice person, but he is
wrong
for you and
wrong
for Henry. You both need someone with more
substance
, and I feel strongly that
I am that someone
!

I have instigated a DNA test which will prove once and for all that I am Henry's
real father
and that Tom is just a pretender. So that situation is relatively simple and straightforward.

With you, however, the situation is more complicated. The relationship you have begun with Tom Putnam is not so much an error of taste, as an error of
judgment
. I feel certain that given time to reflect calmly, you will realize that
I am the one for you
!!

Over the last few days it has become crystal clear to me that
I would not be able to feel as comfortable with you as I do, if you did not feel equally comfortable with me
. I'm not saying you need to marry me, just that people who are as comfortable together as you and I are
cannot marry anyone else
!!!

My plan is to keep you and Henry safely away from distraction for a few days so as to give you time to think things through. Given this time to reflect, I'm sure you will reach the same conclusion I have: Tom Putnam is
not
the man for you and
I am
.