Ring of Truth (30 page)

“How do you know her?”

Eddie got up from his bench, moving stiffly and slowly. It could just be from the cold and from sitting so long, but Jack realized they hadn't gotten around to talking about a flu shot.

“She brings me my socks and coffee in the morning on her way to work.”

“And where does she work?” Jack asked as casually as he could. He kept his gaze on a passing container ship. It would be unlike Eddie to reveal, even inadvertently, any detail that might let Jack know where he slept at night.

Eddie took his time shouldering his pack. “The Hotel Belmont. She's a concierge there.” He said it with obvious pride.

Jack got up, too, careful not to show that he'd picked up on what Eddie had revealed. It was stunning information. If Eddie accepted help from this girl regularly, he must be hanging out more or less permanently in North Beach, an area of the city that was marginally less dangerous for the homeless. Jack felt a certain tightness in his chest loosen a fraction at the idea.

“So, did I talk you into looking her up?”

Jack was due back for his afternoon round of appointments, and he had one stop to make on the way. He wasn't going to admit it, but he was curious about the woman who had won so much of Eddie's trust. “You did convince me that I've made a big mistake agreeing to compete in the Mr. Single San Francisco contest. What woman is going to be interested in a steady guy with great dog-feeding skills?”

“Well, listen, you take Tara out, and I'll get that flu shot you want me to have.” Eddie turned and started to shuffle off. Squawking gulls swooped in over their abandoned bench.

“Did I say anything about a flu shot?” Jack shouted over the gulls' din.

“You can't stop being a doctor, you know. You've been checking my vitals mentally since you sat down. I'm going to give Tara your cell number.”

***

Across the lobby Tara saw Jennifer approaching to fill in while Tara took her lunch break. She could use one. Mrs. Woodford had returned from lunch with another series of complaints, and a list of anticipated difficulties about their dinner plans.

Jennifer threw a quick glance around and unwrapped another cough drop. “Whew, it's a going to be a crazy weekend, isn't it? Just don't get in Arturo's way.”

“I won't. Are you okay?”

“Just a dry throat.”

“Listen, I've got to do an errand on my break. Can you keep the desk covered if I'm a little late?”

“No problem.” Jennifer coughed. “But show me the ring. I heard from Hadley that your man proposed.”

Tara held out her hand. Okay, the Justin Wright thing was getting a little out of hand. Now she was deliberately misleading her friends, and that felt weird. She promised herself she would make it up to them. George opened the door to usher in a young couple, and traffic noise briefly filled her ears. She couldn't be sure, but she thought she heard a voice.
You've been misleading your friends for years.

Jennifer looked underwhelmed by the ring. “It must be an heirloom, huh? I mean it's not Tiffany's or anything, but it's sweet and traditional. It's Irish, too. I didn't know that your Justin could be so thoughtful.”

Tara looked at the ring, which seemed to lose its luster as she wore it. Was she the only one who did not know her Irish rings? “That's Justin, so thoughtful.”

“Oh. I didn't mean that he isn't. It's just that he always puts his work before you, you know, like when it's your birthday, or when you got promoted, and he was away.”

“He does travel a lot.” An unexpected thought popped into her head as if the words were spoken aloud, and she looked at the ring again.

Even your fictional boyfriend is a bad boyfriend. Why?

First the ring had sounded like Eddie, and now it sounded like a therapist. Her imagination was clearly out of whack and inventing voices.

“Well, congratulations anyway.” Jennifer took over Tara's position at the desk. “We should celebrate—pizza and gelato? And maybe the next time Justin's in town we'll meet him.”

Tara nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”

She collected her bag from the staff room and headed for the door. Since her grandmother's passing she made regular trips to her grandmother's attorneys' offices on Montgomery to handle matters relating to the estate. It was odd that the ring was Irish like her grandmother, whose people had come in the late nineteenth century to the foothills above Sacramento for the last of the gold in California's streams. She wasn't particularly familiar with Irish lore as her mother favored brioche over soda bread every time.

Tara ducked out of the hotel behind a pair of guests as George helped them into a cab. She wanted to avoid any awkward questions about Eddie until she had a chance to warn him. She had not yet seen any of the security men. Outside the hotel the fog had lifted on a sparkling, crisp day, sunlight glinting off gleaming skyscrapers and the bright bay. She grabbed a Muni bus down to the financial district.

The late lunch crowd of returning lawyers and legal assistants streamed back into the neo-deco building that housed the firm of Burke, Wright & Ross. Tara's heels clicked on the patterned floor. With the holiday decorations down, the grand foyer resumed its more understated elegance, not that anyone bunched in front of the elevators noticed. They all seemed intent on snagging a spot on the next car. Tara felt invisible in the mob. She glanced at her phone. No texts. She just had time to do her errand.

A bell rang, the doors opened, and the crowd surged forward. Tara tried to press into the last available space before the doors closed, angling forward leading with her left shoulder. As she twisted to face the doors, she realized her bag was going to be caught. She tried to squish back and met a firm hand at her back.

“Whoa, lady, take that trunk of yours and get the next one,” a male voice suggested.

Simultaneously, she felt her bag turned ninety degrees by unseen hands and looked up through the closing doors to catch the merest glimpse of a gorgeous man in a dark gray suit and blue tie. He had wind ruffled dark hair and a pair of steady blue eyes that made her heart catch. He had seen her need and acted. The doors closed on his grin, trapping her bag against her shins as the elevator rose in a quiet whoosh. Feeling that she'd violated the unwritten code of elevator etiquette, Tara hunched her shoulders, and tried to make herself as small as possible. She felt the ring on her finger where her hand clutched her bag and heard again in her head the stranger who'd warned her—
Don't let your bag get in your way.
At the first stop three people exited, jostling past her bag, making her tighten her hold on it.

She stepped out on the eleventh floor. Maybe she should retain Burke, Wright & Ross to defend her bag.
Really, her bag had never been a problem before today.
A tight squeeze in an elevator was just part of city living, and she'd reached her appointment on time. Her bag had hardly held her back. In fact, it had earned her a grin from a handsome stranger.

On her way back to the hotel, Tara looked for Eddie in two parks and one cafe. When she didn't find him, she turned back to the Belmont and reached her desk in time for a brief afternoon lull while most guests were out shopping or touring the city. As soon as she took care of dinner reservations for a foursome from Sydney, she started an Internet search for Irish rings.

It wasn't hard to find them. They were called Claddagh rings and had a long history starting with a young Irishman captured by pirates in the seventeenth century and sold into slavery to a goldsmith in the Middle East where he learned jewelry making. Released after fourteen years, he had returned to Ireland to marry the girl who waited for him.
Talk about a global relationship
. The ring he fashioned for her represented love, loyalty, and friendship.

Since then the rings had been handed down in families and had accompanied the Irish wherever famine and troubles had driven them. The rich and famous had worn them as well as the humble and obscure. Over two hundred Claddagh rings had been recovered from the rubble of the twin towers after 9/11. That fact stopped her dead in her research tracks. A little
frisson
of awe passed over her.

She looked at the ring on her finger, wondering whether it had been lost on that day and found and passed on again because to bear the burden of such loss was hard work, and lighter for everyone if each bore it only a short time, sort of like the terrible burden of Tolkien's ring on poor unsuspecting hobbits.

She knew her own burden of loss was small compared to the losses of that day, but sometimes the memory of loss came back fresh and stingingly sharp. On a sunny October Sunday when she was eleven, a month into her parents' separation, before she had begun to use the word
divorce
, Tara had been reading in her favorite spot on the porch with her dog Sherlock when the first smell of smoke in the air alerted her to the fire. It was nothing like the smell of a barbeque.

She'd looked up as her neighbor's front door banged open, and the woman came running out to her car. Seeing Tara, she shouted that there was a fire and they needed to evacuate the neighborhood now. Tara was still staring at her when a car careened wildly down their narrow street. The driver's panicked face had set her heart pounding, and she'd dashed inside to find her mother painting. Her mother insisted on confirming the news, but once she turned on the radio, she acted, instructing Tara to pack an overnight bag for each of them. While Tara put the bags and her rabbits' cage in the car, her mother went back to her studio. She gathered up several canvases, and as they rearranged things in the car to fit the paintings, Sherlock bounded away down the street. They took off, Tara with the car window down calling for Sherlock, while ash and embers blew around them in swirling eddies. The scale of that disaster was nothing like the attack on the Twin Towers, but people had perished that day, too, and at least one marriage.

Tara's grandmother liked to say that love was the enduring memorial that marked a person's passage through this life. But Tara's parents saw things differently. Each wanted to leave a body of work. For her father that meant his life-saving medical research; for her mother that meant her art. For them the fire had intensified that determination. Her father had disappeared into his research. Her mother had answered the old philosopher's riddle of what to save in a fire—the pet or the painting—by saving her paintings. Sherlock had not turned up among the lost pets recovered later.

There had been nothing left of their house but the foundation and the skeletons of appliances. The blackened twisted metal of Tara's eleventh birthday bicycle marked the end of the porch. Tara and her mother had moved in with her grandmother in the city. The rabbits had found a new home in Danville.

At her grandmother's house Tara collected the remnants of her childhood that had survived. The only toy left was Bingo Bear, a stuffed animal she'd wanted one Christmas because the TV ads had suggested that the bear could talk like a real friend. Her grandmother had given Bingo to her, but it had only taken Tara a few minutes to see through the illusion. Each time she pulled the string on Bingo Bear's back, he uttered a recorded message. She had abandoned him that day at her grandmother's, and so he'd been waiting there for her after the fire. As soon as her mother settled Tara in the city's French school—
so you can visit me later
—she had left for southern France.

Tara shook off the old memories and turned back to her research. There was no image that looked as old as her ring, nor anything in the information about a Claddagh with powers of speech. Now that she knew the ring was Irish, maybe she should listen for a voice like Bono's or her grandmother's.

A disturbance at the hotel entrance made her look up. George ushered in an elegant and obviously shaken woman, signaling to Tara with raised brows that he needed her help. Tara went immediately to the woman's other side to take her arm. She was tall and blonde, fortyish, with blunt girlish features and a perfect pouty red mouth, the lipstick flawlessly applied, the kind of mouth that invited male attention. A knee-length textured gray cashmere sweater over a white, collared shirt and jeans leggings flattered her slim figure, and jeweled open-toe heels revealed a great pedicure. She was a woman used to being noticed.

They guided her to a sofa, and Tara brought her a glass of water.

After a few sips, she began to speak, her voice shaking a little. “I've never been so viciously and personally insulted. The man must be mental. He came at me out of nowhere, right in front of the hotel. What kind of neighborhood is this?”

“Ma'am, can you describe the man who attacked you?” George asked.

A diamond bracelet flashed on the woman's wrist. Her expression was uncomprehending. “He was a street person.” She shuddered. “Grimy clothes. Body odor. Scraggly beard.”

George shot Tara a grim glance over the woman's head.

“He shoved me. That's assault. I had to grab my purse, and he yelled vile things at me. He said
he
was a vet and
I
should show respect.”

Tara shook her head at George's grim look. He was ready to blame Eddie for the incident, but Tara knew Eddie. True, Eddie was a vet, like the man their guest had encountered, but Eddie stayed away from the hotel, and he would never yell at a woman. The woman's assailant was likely one of the shouters, someone off his meds and inclined to take out his frustrations on anyone in his path.

“Excuse me.” The woman shot Tara a sharp look. “Don't shake your head. Do you people think this is some kind of joke? I assure you this is no joke. I expect you to call the police. I want charges filed against this man.”

At that moment Arturo hurried over to them. “Ms. Ralston, how may we help you?” He gave both Tara and George a look that said he was seriously displeased.