Looking for Laura (17 page)

“The power of suggestion,” Sally murmured, smiling at how adorable Rosie looked when she slept. “This song knocked her out.”

“It was a long day for her,” he pointed out, surprising Sally with his empathy. “Don't kids her age usually take naps?”

“Some do, some don't. She doesn't nap too often anymore.” Another peek at the dozing child filled Sally with maternal warmth, a sweet nostalgia for Rosie's napping years. Just months ago, she couldn't get through a day without a nap. Now she was so mature.

Turning forward, Sally smiled at Todd, who probably didn't notice because he was focused on the highway. “She had a great time today.”

“Better than we did,” Todd guessed.

“We didn't have a good time?”

“Well, we didn't accomplish what we set out to do.”

“But other than that, it was good.”

He risked a glance her way. “You think so?”

“Of course it was. We walked, we saw things—'

“We walked, and we walked…” A grin tugged the corners of his mouth. “Then we walked some more.”

“We absorbed a little of Boston's history. We took a ride on a Swan Boat—”

“Which was about as exciting as sitting on a park bench.”

“A moving park bench. In a beautiful park. All the flowers were budding, Todd. It was very pretty.”

He seemed torn, as if he knew she was right but couldn't bear to agree with her.

“And we had a delicious dinner—'

“Your daughter ate eggplant and you ate squid.”

“And it was delicious.”

His grin grew wider. “You
are
a crackpot, Sally. A tolerable one, though.”

She bristled, even though she sensed that calling her a tolerable crackpot was his idea of a compliment. A tiny part of her was touched that after so many years of antipathy he could compliment her. But she would have been a lot more touched if he'd said he thought she was a tolerable genius or a tolerable wit, or even a tolerable companion.

“So, what are we going to do about Laura?” he asked, pulling her thoughts back to practical matters.

“Laura Hawkes?”

“Well, we're not going to do anything about
her
. We've met her, and she's not the right Laura. Who the hell is Vigo Hawkes, by the way?”

“You've never heard of him?” When Todd shook his head, she said, “He's probably the best-known ceramist in America.”

“Ceramist?”

“He makes pots.”

“Pots.”

“Clay pots. Beautiful ones. I wish I could afford one of his pieces, but I can't.”

“He must charge a lot for them, given that fancy little town house where he hangs his hat—to say nothing of a couple hundred acres in Lenox. To say nothing of his wife. She looked like the sort of woman you'd need to take out a mortgage to afford.”

“I thought she was charming,” Sally argued.

“Her apple juice was disgusting.”

“It was tart.”

“It was vile. She struck me as the kind of woman who has whims that cost a fortune. An apple juicer? Come on. The woman needs a life.”

“She seemed fond of Paul.”

“Then she needs a life and a shit detector.”

“He fooled me, Todd. I'm not going to put her down because she didn't realize he was a cheating creep. He didn't cheat her. In fact, he probably did an excellent job on her land purchase in Lenox.”

“He was the best real estate lawyer in western Massachusetts,” Todd conceded. “All the rich folks buying vacation places must have passed his name around.” He drove for a minute, ruminating. “She thinks the Berkshires are cute.”

“She's urban. She doesn't know better.”

The CD ended, filling the car with a silence that felt warm and damp, like steam. “So, what are we going to do?” Todd asked, his voice soft but striking against the sudden stillness.

“About what?”

“About finding Laura.”

“I don't know.” She honestly didn't. After today, she was no longer sure she wanted to go chasing down other mysterious Lauras, barging into other people's houses, drinking their apple juice and becoming acquainted with their pets. She didn't know whether she wanted to spend other weekends traveling places with Todd. With Rosie, yes—Rosie could turn any outing into an adventure. But Todd?

“I could go back to the phone list on the disk from his office,” he said.

“It's a long list.”

“Maybe there's something in it.”

“Or maybe we could give up.”

Todd gave her a stare that lasted long enough for the car to drift across the broken line that marked their lane. He straightened the steering wheel and frowned. “What about your pocketknife?”

There was that. She wanted the knife back. “You're right. Let's not give up yet.”

“What's so special about the knife, anyway?”

She sighed. It was truly an awful knife, chintzy and kitsch. If she explained why the knife meant something to her, she'd have to explain her life. She'd already given Todd enough ammunition when she'd told him she grew up in a trailer. If she told him about her father, all Todd's deepest prejudices about her would be reinforced.

So what? She was damn proud of who she was and how far she'd come, and if Todd gave her a hard time, she'd give him an even harder time right back.

“The knife belonged to my father,” she told him.

“And?”

Sally sighed again. “And it was the only thing of my father's that I ever had.”

“The only thing? What do you mean?”

She leaned back until her head touched the headrest, then observed the slope of his headlights as they struck the pavement. “I never even met him. Unlike Paul, he didn't choose to do the right thing. He might not have even known my mother was pregnant. They had a fling and he left town. He was a rambling man, as my mother used to say.”

Todd glanced her way—not nearly as long a look as last time—but said nothing.

“All I ever had of him was that pocketknife. It was
a cheap thing, with a hula dancer painted on the handle. He'd left it behind when he took off.”

“You're kidding.”

“No.” She sat straighter, pressed her knees together and folded her hands in her lap, as if sitting primly would earn her a little respect.

“He knocked up your mother in the trailer, took a powder and left behind a knife with a hula dancer on it? Christ.” A sardonic laugh escaped Todd. “It sounds like a country-western song.”

“Oh, yes, that's me. Hillbilly through and through.”

“You said it, not me.”

“I am not a hillbilly. I grew up in upstate New York. We don't have hillbillies there.” He laughed again, which fed her indignation. “I happen to have been accepted to Winfield College with a scholarship. I manage a prosperous business in town. I was married for nearly six years to a successful lawyer. So don't go turning me into some exemplar of poor white trash.
Exemplar
,” she repeated, enunciating each syllable. “See? I've got an impressive vocabulary, too.”

His laughter faded. “Hey, don't get all defensive on me. I was just saying—'

“What were you saying?” she snapped.

“Nothing.” He drove for a moment in silence, then asked, “Why did you give Paul the knife, if it was so important to you?”

“Because I—' No, not because she loved him. Even if that had been the reason, she wouldn't have admitted it. And it really wasn't the reason. Love hadn't been a part of it. “Because I thought he was a decent, dependable man,” she finally answered, then nodded at the truth within those words. “My father wasn't decent or dependable, but Paul was—I
thought
—and giving him
the knife was kind of closing the circle. My mother had given my father's knife to me, so it made sense for me to give it to the father of my daughter. I guess I thought maybe in time he'd give it to Rosie. I didn't know he was going to pass it along to some floozy mistress.” The thought left a bitter taste on her tongue. Paul might have been more decent and dependable than her father, but not much. Bad enough that he'd cheated on her. Far worse that he'd given away an item she'd presented to him out of pure sentiment. The knife was her legacy, and he'd given it to some home wrecker with a penchant for gooey writing.

“You really want it back,” he half asked.

“Yes.”

“Then we're going to have to find the right Laura.”

One word seemed to linger in the air:
we. We're
going to have to find the right Laura. Todd saw this pursuit as a joint effort.

Just days ago, she'd been wishing he would return the damn letters and let her go about tracking down their author without any input from him. She'd thought Laura was her problem, her crisis, and he didn't belong anywhere close to it. She'd been irritated that he wanted to include himself in the search, and she'd allowed him to come along today only out of some possibly misguided impulse.

But now that they'd survived the day, she wasn't as eager to continue the quest alone. For all his grumpiness, for all his prickly reactions, his scowling and eye rolling and obvious annoyance, Todd had made the trip to Boston more…well, interesting. Maybe even more fun, although she'd have to think long and hard before admitting that.

And he'd bought Rosie the rice necklace, which he hadn't had to do.

A minute passed. All she heard was the hum of the tires against the road, Rosie's faint snore, the purr of the engine. “You can pick another CD,” he said. “There's a light in the glove compartment.”

“Are you sure you don't want to listen to ‘Animal Sweet'?” she asked.

He flashed a look at her, then realized she was joking and grinned. “Put on ‘Animal Sweet' and you're walking the rest of the way home.”

She removed the Cream CD from the stereo, opened the glove compartment and searched through Todd's collection. “Sting! I love Sting.”

“You do?” He eyed her as she inserted the Sting CD into the tray in the dashboard.

“You sound surprised.”

“I am. I like Sting, too.”

“And I liked Cream. Hmm. If we both like the same two CDs, does that mean you're a crackpot?”

He laughed.

They drove deeper into the evening's darkness. Sting sang about lying in fields of gold with his lover, and beyond the car was a nearly empty road flanked by the silhouettes of trees and gentle hills against a deep blue sky. Todd leaned back in his seat, his right hand draped casually over the gear stick, his left hooked around the steering wheel. Sally wondered how tall he actually was. He barely had enough room to extend his legs beneath the steering column.

She didn't think they could be friends. Not really. Not knowing that he and Paul used to talk about her, that he'd been Paul's sympathetic confidant as Paul griped about her and poked fun at her, that he thought she was
a hick, possibly psychologically impaired, the sort of woman his best friend would cheat on—maybe the sort who deserved to be cheated on.

No, she and Todd couldn't be friends.

But they could be colleagues. Comrades. Partners in a quest for the truth—and a knife.

H
er house was dark and her kid was snoring. She obviously hadn't expected to arrive home so late; she would have left a porch light on if she had.

He hadn't expected to get back to Winfield so late, either. He'd thought they were going to drive into Boston, have it out with Laura and drive home, not turn the trip into a marathon of sight-seeing, shopping and dining.

He had to admit the meal he'd eaten in that cozy restaurant on a charming, narrow street in the North End had been pretty damn good. And even though he'd put more miles on the soles of his shoes in one day than he ordinarily did in a week, he felt invigorated, not tired.

The outing had been educational. He now knew that Sally Driver could use the word
exemplar
correctly in a sentence, and that Vigo Hawkes was famous in certain circles for making bowls. And that it was possible to write on rice.

He'd gained other knowledge, too. Knowledge of things he couldn't quite put a name to, things that zipped and zapped inside him like electrical currents, refusing to congeal into a solid, recognizable shape. Things that made him feel as if the day he'd spent in Boston had changed him somehow.

He braked to a stop in her driveway and turned off
the engine. She unclipped her seat belt and twisted to study her happily dozing daughter. “I hate to wake her up,” she whispered.

“I can carry her in,” he said, startling himself. What had made him blurt out such a suggestion? He wasn't even certain he liked the little girl who insisted on calling him “Daddy's Friend,” as if “Daddy's” was his first name and “Friend” his last. She'd already taken him for that silly necklace. Did he really want to lug her dead weight into Sally's house?

Well, he'd offered. And Sally was looking so grateful, her eyes radiant even in the car's shadows.

She lifted her tote bag from the floor, then got out of the car and opened the back door. Rosie didn't stir, although her nose twitched slightly as the cooler outdoor air mingled with the car's warm interior. Sally released Rosie's seat belt and lifted the crossbar, then stepped back, leaving Todd to do the heavy lifting.

Actually, Rosie wasn't too heavy. Considering how much she'd packed away that day—cannoli, eggplant, tempura and intermittent animal crackers—she was a little creature. As he hoisted her into his arms, her arms dangled down his back, her chin dug into his shoulder, her feet poked his belt and her butt settled comfortably into the bend of his elbow. She shifted and sighed, her hat tumbling to the ground and her hair tickling his ear.

Sally gathered the fallen hat as well as her own straw hat, Rosie's car seat and the bakery box. She shut the car door, then sprinted up the walk to the porch ahead of him.

Maybe her front door wasn't that garish. If the orange had been as awful as he'd thought, it would have glowed in the dark. But at 9:00 p.m. on a half-moon night, it looked a rusty brown.

She wiggled the key in the lock and the door swung inward. She flicked on a hall light, then a light above the stairway. Todd followed her up, less aware of Rosie's limp body than Sally's animated one. Not for the first time, his thoughts wandered back to what she'd said about wearing skirts, how she liked to feel them flow freely around her thighs.

He'd never realized how arousing it was to hear a woman utter the word
thighs
. Especially when she was referring to her own thighs without criticizing them. Sally hadn't commented on the circumference of her thighs, their shape or their ratio of flab to muscle. She'd mentioned them in the context of freedom.

And he'd been thinking about that far too much during the drive home.

He felt more of those electrical pulses zooming around inside him. Something had become skewed today, something that should have remained stable and familiar. Something regarding the way he felt about Sally. She'd been her usual flaky self, dragging him all over the city, clunking around in a silly hat and toting a silly bag. And yet…

He couldn't seem to stop thinking about her thighs.

At the top of the stairs she turned on another light, which illuminated the second-floor hall. They moved past a freestanding wardrobe with a filmy mirror adorning the door, past a bathroom and into a bedroom at the end of the hall.

Todd would have known this was Rosie's room even without the assortment of toys cluttering the top surface of the dresser, the stuffed animals crammed onto the rocking chair in front of the window, the wallpaper featuring flocks of colorful balloons and the dirty socks piled on the floor in a corner. He would have known
because on the wall above the bed hung a huge construction of colorful yarn strung between two sticks that had been lashed into an X.

The dream catcher.

The yarn was layered, some wrapped outside the sticks and some inside to give the object depth. When Sally turned on a night-light near the door, he could see some of the colors—turquoise, magenta and lime green accented with black and cream-colored strands. The ends of the sticks were trimmed with more yarn dangling in multicolored tassels.

It was an odd piece. Definitely not Paul's style. Not Todd's style, either—but he could sort of see why someone might want to hang such a decoration over a child's bed. Not
his
bed—it would give him nightmares, all that bright color looming just above his skull—but he could see it working for Rosie.

He lowered her carefully onto the mattress, centering her head on the pillow. She made a snorting sound, loud enough to wake herself up, but after blinking once or twice without focusing her eyes, she rolled onto her side and exhaled, as if expelling what little consciousness she'd had. Sally deftly pulled off the little girl's sneakers and worked the blanket out from under her, then spread it over her. She touched Rosie's hair, reminding Todd of the way it had felt against his neck, silky and fine.

What would Sally's hair feel like? It was much thicker than Rosie's, with all those hints of red. He bet it would feel heavier, denser, more womanly.

What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he thinking about her hair?

And her thighs.

She was Paul's wife, for God's sake. Paul's widow.
The woman Paul never should have married. Why should Todd give a damn about Sally's thighs?

She straightened up from the bed and smiled at him, and he found himself thinking about her thighs and her hair and her smile, too. Again he told himself that she really wasn't pretty. Her eyes were too far apart, her nose too broad, her chin too round. But when she smiled…

More electrons rocketed through him, glancing off his heart, ricocheting the length of his spine, detouring to his groin.

She nodded toward the door, then tiptoed around the bed and led him out into the hall. “Are you going to let her sleep in her clothes?” he asked in a muted voice as they started down the stairs.

“That's easier than trying to get her undressed while she's asleep. When she wakes up tomorrow and finds herself dressed, she'll think it's cool.”

“Won't she worry about her missing hat?”

Sally grinned over her shoulder at him. “I'll tell her I took it off her so the dreams would be able to reach her head.”

They arrived at the front hall. He spotted Rosie's purple hat, as well as Sally's straw sun hat, tossed onto a chair beside a small semicircular table, atop which sat the bakery box and Sally's tote bag. The car seat lay on the hardwood floor next to the chair.

“Can I get you—

“So what do we do?” he said simultaneously. They both stopped. Sally grinned again and he edged a step backward, trying to will away those tiny, prickly shocks that nipped at him from inside.

“I was going to offer you a drink or something. A cannoli, maybe?”

“Save those for Rosie. She likes them more than I do.”

“A drink, then?”

“No, I'm…”
I'm much too tempted to say yes
. “It's late. I think I just want to get home.”
Actually, I don't. But I should. I know I should
.

“I appreciate your doing all the driving today.”

“Even though you hate my car?”

“Well, it's a bourgeois car. That's probably one of the reasons you bought it.”

He shrugged. He wasn't going to admit how right she was. “You've got your CD, don't you? I don't want to find those sweet animals corrupting Nirvana in my glove compartment.”

“I think I've got it.” She turned away and poked around inside her tote. “Yes, I've got it. And you know what else I've got?” She poked around some more, causing the contents to clatter and clang. When she turned back to face him, she was armed with a small white tube. “Vitamin E cream.”

He wasn't sure what to say to that. If she'd managed to lose a playmate of Rosie's in her tote bag for three days, why shouldn't she have a tube of vitamin E cream, whatever that was, in there?

“Let me put a little on your nose.” She unscrewed the cap and touched a dab of ointment to her finger. “You got a sunburn today.”

He wasn't going to let her smear that gunk on his nose. “I don't need—'

“It'll soothe the skin, keep it from getting dry and peeling.”

“Really, Sally, I—'

She ran her finger gently over his nose. The ointment had no fragrance, and it didn't feel particularly greasy.
But having her rub her fingertips the length of his nose, across the bridge, over the slight bump where bone met cartilage and then down to the knob of skin between his nostrils…

It should have felt weird—and it did. But more than weird, it felt nice, her fingers moving on him, stroking his face, her hand so close to him, her whole body so close. Her freedom-loving thighs. Her breasts. Her hair. Her smile, a smile that transformed her features into something astonishingly sexy.

He'd blame that thought on the long day and the rich dinner he'd eaten, and Sting's seductive tenor serenading them during the last thirty miles of their trip. He'd blame it on the sheer exhaustion he felt, and the frustration of having gotten no closer to finding Paul's Laura, and the way Sally was gazing up at him. The way her fingers brushed his cheek, his upper lip, the whisper of her touch.

He snagged her wrist and eased her hand away from his face. Her arm was more slender than he'd thought, smoother. Did she rub vitamin E cream on her inner wrists? Was that what made the skin so soft?

He'd blame it on the night, on the moment, on the possibility that if a man spent enough time with a crackpot, he could go a little crazy, too.

Bowing, he touched his lips to hers.

She didn't pull back. Didn't wrench her hand from his grip and wallop him. Didn't gasp and jerk away and say,
What the hell is wrong with you?

He could have handled any of those responses. But no. She did the one thing he couldn't handle. She angled her head, made a tiny moan and opened her mouth.

All right, then. He was crazy. For the next brief portion of his life, he was going to be an absolute lunatic.
He was going to grab Sally, haul her lush body against him, fill her mouth with his tongue and let those circuits fire wildly inside him.

Who cared that he didn't exactly like her? Who cared that he'd never in his entire life thought of her in sexual terms? Right now,
sexual
was exactly the term in which he was thinking of her.

She was a phenomenal kisser. Her tongue matched his, teased, taunted. She lifted the arm he was holding so she could cup her hand over his shoulder, and combed the fingers of her other hand through the hair at the back of his head. His pulse was thumping so forcefully in his skull she could probably feel the beat through his scalp.

God, he wanted her. He released her wrist so he could circle his arms around her waist and pull her even closer. He was as horny as a kid glimpsing his first centerfold, as out of control as a teenager his first time. The warmth of her breasts pressing into his chest made him nuts. The nearness of her hips made him want to shove up her freedom-permitting skirt and stroke her thighs, spread them apart, fit himself between them. He was dying for her. Sally. He wanted her, wanted her more than he'd ever wanted a woman before.

Sally.

Sally?

He drew back slowly, trying not to wrench out of her embrace. Withdrawing too abruptly would insult her. But his sanity was returning to him in a sudden, stunning rush, and as his brain took over the thinking from his gonads, he realized that kissing Sally Driver had to be one of the most bizarre acts he'd ever indulged in. Stranger than riding the New York City subway system for three days straight, which he'd done on a dare in college. Stranger than trying to teach his mother how to
access the Internet. Far stranger than going all the way with Patty Pleckart at a high-school party.

As recently as a day ago, he couldn't stand Sally. Not standing her made sense to him. Nothing that had happened in the past two minutes made any sense at all.