Impulse (18 page)
Rosemary shut off the ignition. The Buick’s new car smell had faded into something she thought of as “Early Frank.” She sat behind the wheel biting her lower lip and studying the brightly striped awning shading the restaurant’s entrance. She’d spent more time in eateries in the last few days than she had in the last three years. So much change in so little time. She rubbed the now vacant place on her left ring finger. That would take some getting used to as well, but she had to start sometime. Now she needed to take the next step, which meant shedding herself of a major portion of her old life. Bart would be in there, waiting. Would she be able to do it? They were old friends. He’d understand.
Are you sure about this?
“I don’t know. Yes, I think so. Am I being foolish?”
It had to happen some time, you know. The kids are gone and not likely to come back to the area. That life is over. Time to move on.
Yes, but it’s a big step. He’ll be upset.
Well, don’t tell him about Frank. He won’t understand that part. Just say it’s a decision you came to on your own.
“Okay, here we go.” She exited the car, locked it and walked toward the double doors. Barton, she thought, he would understand—wouldn’t he?
***
Frank thought he should have rented a car. He puffed up the rise to the hotel. The clerk greeted him and checked for messages. Just two, on the phone. He’d wait until he got to the room, he said. The room seemed stuffy. Before he switched on the air conditioner, he tested the air, hoping for a trace of her scent. He imagined he caught it and smiled. The cooling unit hummed to life and he sat.
The message button on the phone winked at him. He picked up and listened to Rosemary’s report of her session with Elizabeth Roulx. He already knew Stark had DISH that day. He did not know Light did, too. So, if Stark had told him the truth about Luella Mae and Light, it would explain why she insisted the time the boys were in the woods was two o’clock. It would remove any possibility that she and Light were in the woods together. Not that it would have mattered in the long run. Everybody seemed to know what they were up to. He smiled at the psychic’s pronouncement. You had to hand it to Sister Roseanne. No way would she be caught off base on that one.
His daughter had left the second message. She wanted him to come to dinner. The children wanted to see him and Robert asked if he would take a moment to talk to him. He called her back. Robert would pick him up and why didn’t he just check out of the hotel and come back. It was silly and she was sorry. He considered it but refused. Not because it didn’t make sense—it did—but because he had all his papers and notes in the room and he didn’t want to gather them up and then have to spread them out on her dining room table.
Now, if Rosemary had made the offer….
***
“You’re sure about this, Rosie?” Barton Flagg insisted on calling her Rosie. Rosemary had hinted repeatedly she did not like the name. She never had, but he seemed impervious to subtlety. He leaned forward, earnest. She pulled back, his after shave or cologne had nearly caused her to choke. Musk, subtle like a rhinoceros. Well, this would pretty much be the end to their relationship. She wondered if, as a friend and because she would not be seeing him again any time soon, she should say something about his cologne. She supposed that should be his wife’s job.
“I’m sure, Barton. Look, the house is too big for me. Alice lives in Houston with her oil man; George junior is in Denver and settled. His wife’s parents live there and there’s no way they’ll ever move back east. I don’t need four thousand square feet of house and eight acres of lawn to mow and leaves to rake. The heating bills alone are out of sight. It was George’s place, not mine. Look, George already had the land rezoned. There are fifteen half-acre building lots plus the one the house is on. I want to sell the house, its lot, and two adjacent lots. The last time George had an appraisal made, that bit priced out at seven hundred and fifty thousand. That would be eight years ago. You value it any way you like, but that’s what I want to walk away with. That’s my bottom line.”
“But where will you live?”
“I’ll put most of the furniture in an auction house, some of the smaller pieces and the ones I have some feeling for, in storage. I plan to move around.”
“Gee. I don’t know, Rosie—”
“Bart, I’ve never said this to you before, but now is as good a time as any. Please don’t call me Rosie. I hate it.”
He looked stunned. He’d called her Rosie for three decades “I had no idea. Sorry. You’re sure about all this?” She nodded.
“Okay, then.” He pushed a standard real estate representation contract across the table toward her. She read the contract carefully and signed it. In turn she pushed plat maps across to him and marked the lots she wished to sell.
“What about the others?” he asked.
“I’m holding those. My brother is well off in his own right. My grandchildren are going to the colleges of their choice, not the state school because it’s all they can afford. And if they don’t need it, well, maybe I’ll throw a party.”
“Hell of a party. What I meant was, if I find a buyer and he wants to negotiate for more or perhaps a different lot or lots—”
“Then call me and we will see. Are you okay with that?”
“Yes, that’ll be fine. Where will you go, Rosie…Rosemary?”
“I don’t know. I’ll vacation this summer, maybe travel, take a cruise, and then decide. I’m thinking Arizona. I’ve never been to the Southwest. What’s the Grand Canyon really look like? You know, I’ve never seen it, never seen Arizona.” There, she said it.
“It’s hot.”
“So I’ve heard, dry and no bugs, only coyotes and rabbits that…never mind.”
Boy, talk about burning your bridges.
“That’s it, I guess,” she said. “Now you can buy me dinner, Barton. With the commission you’ll make on this sale you can afford it.”
***
“Can I talk to you, Frank?” Robert kept his eyes on the road. They were in the middle of rush hour, but luckily they were headed toward town while the traffic made its frenetic evening migration to the suburbs in the opposite direction.
“Certainly. What’s up?”
“I don’t know what Barbara’s been telling you about us, about me, and I wanted to clear the air.”
“Sure. Clear away. She thinks you’re fooling around, by the way. Are you? It’s not that I don’t care about you, you understand. I’ve always liked you, Robert, but blood, as they say, is thicker than water.” He flinched a little at that.
“No, Frank, I am not. Why would she say that?”
“Well, I gather you spend a lot of time away from home claiming to be at work, only a call to your office reveals you aren’t there. Woman’s intuition, Robert. If a man says he’s at work and he is not at work, he’s seeing another woman. Not intuition, really—eighty-five percent of the men who tell their wives that story are, in fact, cheating. And you’ve lost weight—another tell, as they say in Las Vegas.”
“Count me in the remaining fifteen percent, then.”
“Okay, so what are you doing and with whom?”
Robert clenched his teeth. The muscles on the side of his jaw bunched up like he’d swallowed a fist. He glared out the windshield.
“I’m working three jobs, Frank. I have two part-time positions.”
“Why?”
“Barbara. I know she’s your daughter, but somewhere along the way she acquired expensive tastes. She spends more than I make. And now she’s on about Scott Academy. I can’t send the boys to Scott. I can barely manage the parochial school where they are now.”
“So you work the other jobs to do what? Earn tuition for Scott?”
“If that’s what it takes to keep her happy, yes.”
“You’ll burn out, Robert. You will explode. You won’t live long enough to see them graduate. I hope you have plenty of life insurance. Why haven’t you told Barbara? You don’t need her thinking you’re playing around.”
“Because if she finds out how much money I’m pulling in, she’ll spend that, too. She’ll find something else we absolutely have to have—she’s already mentioned a bigger house. What the hell do we need a bigger house for? I’ll be right back where I was, only working three times as hard.”
“Greater love has no man than he lay down his life for his kids’ tuition. What about college? It gets even worse then.”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.”
“Robert, you don’t have to do this. Barbara will have to get used to it.”
“She thinks you are going to pay for it. She’s afraid Mrs. Mitchell is after your money.”
Frank burst out laughing. “Rosemary Mitchell is probably worth three or four million dollars. What would she want with my not even close to a million dollar net worth? I’ll talk to her, Robert. In the meantime, consider some family counseling. You two are killing each other. Spouses aren’t supposed to do that.”
Robert gave him a sharp look but said nothing.
The talk with Barbara did not go well. At first she did not want her husband in the room at the same time. Then she insisted she did not have a spending problem. Robert had an earning problem. When he pointed out to her that Robert’s income put them in the top ten percent of wage earners, she laughed out loud. No one in their right mind, she declared, would believe that. Finally, Frank made her a deal. He would subsidize the boys’ tuition—he laid heavy emphasis on the word
subsidize
—but only on the condition that she and Robert enter family therapy. She practically screamed at him then. Why, she wanted to know. They didn’t need some phony baloney shrink poking his nose into their lives. Frank explained that they needed it because, one, they did not communicate with one another at even an elementary level, and two, if they didn’t get help, the deal was off. If she had been a cartoon, lightning would have flashed out of her eyes and smoke from her ears. Hell hath no fury…,
Dinner began in icy silence. The boys’ eyes flicked back and forth between their parents. Frank guessed many mealtimes were characterized this way. Finally, Tooth grew tired of adult-imposed penance and turned his attention to his grandfather.
“How’s Miss Rosemary?”
“Mrs. Mitchell,” his mother corrected, her face screwed up like she had been sucking lemons.
“Why, she’s just jim-dandy,” Frank said and smiled.
“What’s Jim Dandy? Is it like hunky-dory? Paula’s granddad always says hunky-dory. Do all old people say stuff like that?”
“They do, Tooth, and you know what? Someday some smart little sprat is going to ask you the same question.”
“What’s a sprat?”
“Shut up, Tooth,” Jesse said. “Grandpa, will you help us build a tree house?”
“No tree houses,” his mother said, “and we don’t say shut up.”
“Sorry. Why not build a tree house?”
“Why? For one thing you don’t have a tree big enough to hold one.”
“We could build it in the park. They wouldn’t mind.” They, Frank assumed, would be the city government. He shook his head.
“Come visit me in Arizona. We’ll build one there.”
“Dad, you don’t have any trees at all.”
“We’ll build the tree first.”
“Did you have a tree house when you were little?” Tooth asked.
“Oh, my yes. Your great uncle Jack and I built one behind the house where we lived, and we had hiding places all over the campus. Back in the woods we found these big growths of honeysuckle. We’d crawl into the middle and trample down the center bushes. That would make a bushy circle with an open space in the middle, like a doughnut. We could sit in there and people could walk by not ten feet away and never know we were there. We built forts out of fallen trees and once we dug a cave.”
“Cool. Can we see them?”
“You mean the forts and hideouts?”
“Yeah, all that stuff.”
“Oh, they’d be long gone by now. Oh my….” Frank paused. A memory jumped up at him. Jack….
“What, ‘oh my,’ Grandpa?”
“Sorry, I was about to repeat myself—bad habit.”
“Old guys do that a lot, don’t they?” Tooth volunteered. “Paula’s granddad tells me the same story every time he sees me. He says, ‘Hey, you look just like Macaroon. I was in a movie with him one time.’ And then he tells me about an old movie he was in when he was little, where kids sang and danced and saved some old guy’s business or something. What’s a macaroon?”
“I think he said Mickey Rooney.”
“Is that anything like a Jim Dandy?”
“Almost exactly.”
***
“Mr. Light, this is Harlan Mosley. You wrote that this time would be the best to call you. I hope I am not too late.”
“No, this time is fine.” Dexter had no plans. Any other night he would be nursing shooters at the Ironman Tap, but not tonight.
“Very well. I have opened the envelope and the contents are as follows: A short, typed letter addressed to you, several photos of Mrs. Farragut holding a small child, and two bearer bonds valued at roughly twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“Read the letter.”
“It’s personal—are you sure?” Dexter grunted his assent. Mosley read:
Dexter, dearest,
If you are reading this, it means I am dead. For a long time, I’ve wanted to tell you I’m sorry. That time I found you in Annapolis I didn’t know how to tell you what had happened. I shouldn’t have called you…
.
The phone call had come after dinner. She said she just wanted to find out how he was doing. He’d have known her voice anywhere.
***
“Are you all right, Dex?”
“Where are you?”
“Here…I mean, in Annapolis. I—”
“I’ll meet you. Give me a half hour.”
“Dex, I can’t. I’m with people and you aren’t supposed to—”
“At the bridge near the yacht club. Someone can tell you where that is.”
“I know where it is. We’re staying at the hotel down the street, but—”
“Thirty minutes.”
“Dex, this is not a good idea.”
He hung up and persuaded his roommates to cover for him. Slipping off campus had not been easy, but to see her one more time…She waited for him on the bridge and he drew her into the relative darkness at one end. She looked small and forlorn. Her hands were cold.
“I’m to be married,” she said, sounding like a heroine in a gothic romance. “I was pregnant and a man I met took me in.” His heart rose and sank. Pregnant?
I married a man from my home town. He is wealthy and kind and took care of me. I really didn’t have much choice back then. He adopted the baby as his own. The baby has been well cared for so you don’t have anything to worry about….
“He’s yours.”
“Marry me, then,” he said. “I’ll quit the Academy and we—”
“Dex, honey, it would never work…but, oh my, I am tempted—”
“Then say yes.”
“No, I can’t, I….”
She turned from him. Her scent, soap and lilacs he thought, competed with the briny aroma of the incoming tide. A cold December breeze whipped her hair back from her forehead.
“I am almost old enough to be your mother, did you know that? I am nearly twice your age. How will that work? In ten years or so, what will we be like?”
“I don’t care. I love you. And you’re not that old.”
“You’re nineteen. I’m thirty-two, Dex, going on thirty-three! And what would you do…what would we do? How would we live?”
“I’ll get a job. I heard about these guys who left the Academy and they are making big money in Norfolk.”
Tears streamed down her cheeks. “I can’t, Dex. You have your whole life in front of you. You are going to do wonderful things. I am…I am not what you want or need.” He started to protest. “No, no, it’s true. You have to let it go, Darlin’…for my sake, let it go…please.”
It was very cruel of me to meet you that night. I guess I just couldn’t help myself. Was I so awful? Please forgive me. As for the boy, do not try to find him. He has a wonderful future and an adoptive father who dotes on him.
Keep the memories, let the rest go.
Luella Mae
She reached out and pressed his right palm to her breast and kissed him one last time. His hand fell empty to his side and he heard her scurry off into the darkness. He didn’t remember how he made his way back to Bancroft Hall.
The picture came in the mail two months later. No return address.
***
“That’s it, Mr. Light.” Mosley’s southern drawl brought him forward twenty-five years. “Mr. Light, are you there?”
“Sorry. I slipped away for a moment. So many memories, I…sorry, you were saying?”
“There is a birth certificate naming the baby Dexter Light Parker. His surname, however, has been changed pursuant the adoption. What would you like me to do with these papers?”
“Mr. Mosley, do you have a shredder?”
“I do.”
“Then send me the bonds, certified mail, and destroy the rest, shred everything else.”
He put down the phone and stared at the wall, not seeing the faded wallpaper and ragged posters. He gazed back a quarter of a century to a time filled with light and promise. As he did so, the images finally began to fade. First the forsythia that crowded the honeysuckle in their hiding place…gone to gray, all gone…sounds, scents, her voice, and the kids he’d heard that afternoon—the kids. She’d gone to join the missing boys.
***
“Light?” Frank asked, unsure if he had the correct phone number.
“This is Dexter Light.”
“Good. Frank Smith here, I’d like to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“Over the weekend, you and some of your friends challenged me to solve the mystery of the missing boys. I need to speak to you about that day.”
“I’m on record—”
“The record is horse manure, Mr. Light. Horse manure piled so high it’s buried the truth. You can help dig it out, once and for all, if you’re up to it. What do you say I buy you breakfast tomorrow?”
“I have to work tomorrow.”
“Call in sick. I expect you’ve done that once or twice before.”
“Listen—”
“No, you listen. You and your friends started all this and now we have to finish it. Something awful happened in those woods twenty-five years ago and you were a part of it. At the very least, you are a material witness, a probable perjurer and I’m guessing maybe even more than that. Meet me at seven o’clock at the restaurant next to the hotel near the school. You know it? It’s near the Metro. I won’t keep you long. What the police will do is another matter.”
Light hesitated but agreed to meet him. He hoped that by the morning, Light would be more agreeable. His next call was to Rosemary.
“Will I see you tomorrow? All your appointments cleared? Good.” Rosemary sounded cheerful—a good sign. Whatever distracted her earlier seemed to have been resolved.
“Meet me at the hotel at ten. I have an appointment with Dexter Light for breakfast first. Oh, and wear or bring some sensible shoes and slacks. We’re going for a walk in the woods.”