The Unsung Hero (19 page)
“Why do I have to check with Kelly? It’s my house—”
“Because she’s your daughter and she lives here, too,” Tom cut him off. “Although it would be good when you check with her if you could ask if she minds my vacationing friends staying in some of your spare rooms.”
“You don’t want Kelly to know about this?” Joe asked.
Tom hesitated. Maybe Kelly should know everything. Maybe if she thought he was looney tunes, she’d back off and he wouldn’t have to worry about finding the strength to push her away.
“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Let me decide what to tell her. In the meantime, no one knows.” He looked from Charles to Joe. “We need to keep this to ourselves, gentlemen. I know you can keep a secret.” Obviously, since they’d been keeping something secret since 1944. “And I’m serious about needing you to stop the bullshit quarreling. If you can’t do that, then you better just stay the hell away. I don’t need that kind of help. Am I understood?”
Charles looked at Joe, and Joe looked at Charles. They both looked at Tom and nodded. Jesus, it was reluctant, though. As if they’d been mortal enemies these past sixty years instead of best friends.
Tom stuck it to them mercilessly. “From now on, I need you to be inseparable. Whenever you leave this estate, you go together, and you go with a cell phone. You see anyone suspicious, you stay out of sight. You follow them—if you can—and you call me. No heroics.”
“Do you want us to go over to the hotel, set up surveillance in the lobby?” Charles asked, enjoying this immensely. “If this Merchant’s in town, he’s got to be staying somewhere.”
“I’ll get the chess set,” Joe said. “It’ll be the perfect cover. This terrorist will never suspect that two old men playing chess in the hotel lobby are really looking for him.”
He disappeared into the other room, and Charles stood up, too. “Better get my hat.”
Tom watched him shuffle from the room, his oxygen tank forgotten. And for the first time in his life, he found himself thinking, thank God for the Merchant.
After hearing at the farm stand that Mrs. Ellis had seen her father and Joe playing chess in the lobby of the Baldwin’s Bridge Hotel, Kelly had been in a real rush to get home. But now that she was here, she paused just outside the door. She could see Tom through the screen, sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of papers and file folders.
He was wearing reading glasses, half glasses that made him look completely paradoxical—the intellectual warrior, or the thug librarian—and he rested his forehead in the palm of one hand. As she stood for a moment, holding the bag of fresh fruit and vegetables she’d picked up, he closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead as if he still had that terrible headache.
She shifted her weight slightly, and the brown paper of the bag made only the very softest sound, but he looked up, looked out into the darkness toward her, instantly alert. He was up on his feet, moving toward the door in one graceful motion. Flipping on the outside light, he opened the screen.
Kelly stood there, blinking at him in the sudden brightness.
He grabbed the glasses off his face and all but hid them behind his back.
Hi, honey, I’m home. For a few brief seconds, Kelly let herself imagine what it could be like to come home after a hard day of work to someone like Tom Paoletti. He’d meet her at the door with a soul kiss, start stripping her out of her professional doctor’s clothes before they even made it down the hall to the bedroom. They’d have sex right there on the kitchen table, or up against the wall outside her bedroom door, or on the living room floor, and all the struggles and pain and frustrations of her day would just slip away.
“Sorry,” he said, stepping aside to let her in. “I wasn’t thinking. I should’ve turned on that outside light earlier.”
“That’s okay.” Her voice sounded breathy and she cleared her throat, afraid he’d somehow know the direction her thoughts had gone. “It’s not as dark out there as it looks from in here.”
She put the bag down on the counter as he started to gather up his papers, having neatly made his glasses vanish into one of his pockets. He was wearing a loose-fitting T-shirt and a baggy pair of shorts that tried to hide the hard perfection of his body. But she could see most of his legs—long and tanned, lightly covered with golden brown, sun-bleached hair. His calves were muscular, his taut thighs disappearing up into the loose legs of his shorts. It didn’t take much imagination to visualize the way those thighs would keep going, leading up to the sculpted perfection of his rear end and narrow hips.
“You don’t have to put that away,” she told him. “You can work here as long as you like.”
“Thanks,” he said, “but I’m pretty much done. Everything okay?”
She managed to smile. “As okay as it can be when a six-year-old has a potentially terminal illness. Betsy’s going into the hospital first thing in the morning. There’s a few more tests to run before we start the chemo and . . .”
Kelly realized she could hear the sounds of a baseball game coming from the living room. The living room. When Charles was alone, he watched from his favorite chair in the room he called the TV room. But he usually watched in the living room on the big screen television when he wasn’t alone.
When Joe was with him.
She pushed open the kitchen door that led into the darkened dining room and moved toward the archway that separated the banquet-size area from the enormous living room. There was only one lamp on, but the light from the big screen TV more than illuminated the large room.
It flickered across Charles’s and Joe’s faces.
They were sitting together, in the same room, on the very same sofa, watching the Red Sox play Baltimore, discussing Nomar Garciaparra, who’d just gotten up to bat.
As she stood in the shadows and watched, Nomar hit one, and both men shouted in excitement as the ball went clear out of the park. She didn’t hear what Joe said then, but whatever it was, it made her father laugh.
Charles was laughing. With Joe.
Kelly felt more than heard Tom move behind her, and she turned to face him, putting one finger up to her lips. Whatever had happened between Charles and Joe today had to have been the result of some powerful magic, and she wasn’t going to risk breaking the spell. Gesturing for him to follow, she quickly led the way out onto the deck, through the dining room sliders.
Only when the door was shut behind them did she speak. “What did you do?” she asked Tom. “What did you say to them?”
“Don’t get too excited,” he warned her. “This thing they’re fighting about—it’s still not resolved.”
“But they’re sitting there. . . . How did you do it? Did you hypnotize them? I thought nothing short of a miracle—” Kelly’s voice broke, and she turned away as her eyes welled with tears. It was a miracle.
“I didn’t really do much of anything,” Tom said. “I just told them about a . . . well, a project I’m working on, and I said if they wanted to help me with it, their arguments and fighting would have to stop.”
Kelly could feel him watching her, feel him wondering if she was about to experience emotional meltdown and burst into tears. But he needn’t have worried. Ashtons didn’t do meltdowns. They tried to stay as far as possible from such unpleasantly base things as emotions. She herself had been well trained. Get a grip, her father had told her without passion back when she’d been small, burying himself behind his open newspaper. Come back when you’re prepared to discuss this like a rational human being. Tears of any kind—even joy—were to be avoided at all costs.
She’d learned to distance herself from her emotions—to separate and partition away everything she was feeling so she’d be calm and collected. It was an ability that had proven quite useful in her medical career. In fact, she’d used it extensively just today when talking to Betsy McKenna’s distraught parents.
The only problem was, it didn’t keep her from feeling all those untidy emotions. And it didn’t keep her from carrying them around with her until she reached a time and a place where she could unload. Or explode.
Now was neither the time nor the place.
“Are you all right?” Tom asked, his voice gentle in the growing darkness. “Tough day, huh?”
“I’m a little . . . tired,” she admitted. Ashtons were the kings and queens of understatement, too, god damn it. But why was she being so careful, so polite? This was Tom she was talking to—the closest thing to a friend she had here in Baldwin’s Bridge. So she told him the truth. “Actually, I’m so exhausted I can barely see straight. It’s been a complete bitch of a day.”
Her voice broke again, but she no longer cared.
“Or at least it was until I stopped at the farm stand and heard that my father and Joe spent the afternoon playing chess together in the hotel lobby.” Her voice wobbled as she turned to face him. “I don’t know what I can say or do to thank you for whatever it was you did.”
She wanted to embrace him, the way Joe had embraced him out on the driveway, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. She didn’t know how.
Besides, she could see from the look on his face that she was scaring him to death—the same way she’d scared Gary back when they were first married, before she’d learned to hide everything she was feeling from him, too, the same way she’d scared her father when she was a little girl.
“Don’t worry,” she reassured Tom. “I’m not going to cry.”
Of course that was the precise moment she burst into tears. But it wasn’t just tears—she was laughing, too. Laughing at her perfect timing, at the comical look on his face, at the thought of all those pure Bostonian Ashtons rolling in their graves at the idea of their offspring emoting so loudly and violently.
She did the only thing she could do under the circumstances.
She excused herself—politely, of course—and ran for the privacy of her room.
Tom didn’t follow.
She hadn’t expected him to.
“She isn’t going to show.”
David glanced up from putting a new roll of film into his camera to see that Brandon still had on his jeans and T-shirt. “She’ll be here soon. Get changed, will you?”
“No way, bro. Not until she’s here. No point to it. I’ve got places to go, people to see—Sharon, that redheaded cocktail waitress who works the pool the same shift I do? She dropped a major hint that she was going to go see the Jimmy Buffett wannabe over at the Marina Grill tonight. She’s definitely mine if I want her.” Bran wandered over to David’s drawing table. “Whoa. Is this Mallory?”
“Yeah.” David had done some preliminary sketches this afternoon, from memory.
“You’re using her just for her face, right? I mean, this body—that’s whatchamacallit . . . artistic license, right?”
David adjusted the white sheet he’d spread out on the bare wooden floor. “Nope.”
Brandon whistled. “Yow. I hope she does show.”
He looked up at his friend. “Don’t hit on her, Bran. She’s . . .” Fragile. It was true, but no one would know that from the tough bitch facade Mallory had erected for the world to see. Most people wouldn’t try to see what was behind that mask. “She’s too young,” he finally said. “I don’t think she’s even eighteen yet.”
The doorbell rang.
“Please,” David said, heading for the door. “Don’t scare her off.”
He took a deep breath before he opened it, but then there she was. Standing out on the wooden steps that led up to his top-floor apartment, trying to hide the fact that she was having second thoughts about being here.
“Hi,” he said, coming out onto the little wooden landing instead of pushing open the screen door so she could come inside. If she was at all nervous, taking it slowly might help. “Did you have any trouble finding this place?”
She shook her head. God, she was young. And incredibly uncertain.
“You know,” he said, “it’s okay if you’ve changed your mind. I don’t want you to do this if you’re—”
Scared. He was going to say scared, and he realized just in time that that would not be a word this girl would ever want used to describe her—even it if was true.
She lifted her chin and gave him a scathing look. “I’m not, like, afraid,” she told him.
“She says she’s not afraid,” Bran echoed from behind the screen door. “But I am—because you have completely lost your mind. You’re supposed to talk her into doing this, fool, not give her permission to run away. Mallory, you gorgeous thing, come in here and see what Sully’s done just from memory.”
Brandon opened the door and, taking Mallory by the hand, drew her inside.
“Oh, my God, it’s cool in here,” she said. “You have air-conditioning.”
“You and me, babe,” Bran said as he led Mallory toward David’s drawing table, “we are going to be so freaking famous when Sul hits it big. Hasbro’s gonna make little action figures with our faces on ’em. We’ll go to comic book conventions and sign autographs until our hands hurt. It is gonna be such a blast.”
As David closed the door, Mallory leaned over his drawings, studying them carefully. And then she looked up at him, seeming to examine him just as completely. As she did, he could not for the life of him read the look in her eyes.
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