The Unsung Hero (11 page)
“When I was about six, she married the mailman. I didn’t get it. I asked Joe why he didn’t marry her, and he told me he loved my Gram like a sister. He was glad she was getting married—glad she’d found someone to spend the rest of her life with, glad she didn’t have to be alone anymore.” He looked up at the statue. “So I asked him how come he never got married, how come he didn’t find someone so he didn’t have to be alone.”
He laughed softly, remembering. “I was only six, I didn’t have a clue about the boundaries I was stepping over with that one.”
“What did he say?” Kelly asked, intrigued.
“He told me he wasn’t married because he’d met and lost his one true love during the war. I remember him saying that as if it were yesterday. His one true love.” He was silent for several long seconds. “He told me that after he met her, there was really no point in looking any further, you know? No one could ever compare. And Joe, he said he wasn’t the kind of man who was willing to settle. He’d rather be alone.”
Kelly stared up at the statue’s grim face. “Lost,” she whispered. “Did she . . .” She looked at Tom. “Did he mean that she died?”
“I don’t know,” Tom admitted. “Lost could mean a lot of things, couldn’t it? Maybe she married someone else.” He looked down at the papers he still had in his hands, as if surprised by the sight of them. He stepped toward her, holding them out.
She exhaled her disbelief as she took them from him and put them back into her bag. “God. It all seems so, I don’t know . . . So romantic.” Yet Joe had always struck her as pragmatic and down to earth. He was a gardener, a handyman. To think that he’d spent all these years carrying a torch, refusing to settle for anyone else. Who would’ve thought? . . .
“Do you think he’s right?” she asked Tom. “That we each have only one chance at true love? Do you think there even is such a thing as true love?”
He shook his head. “You’re asking the wrong guy. I don’t have a lot of experience with this subject. I don’t really, um, do love, you know? It doesn’t quite . . . fit with my line of work.”
“But you have an opinion, don’t you?” she persisted. “We all have ideas and beliefs about what love should or shouldn’t be. In fact, your beliefs about love are probably behind your determination to avoid serious relationships.”
“Well, thank you, Dr. Freud,” he said, amusement in his voice. “Has it occurred to you that I might not be in a serious relationship because I know that with the combination of my, shall we say, restless temperament and the strains of my intensely relationship-unfriendly job, the odds of any relationship working out are zip?”
“So if your dream woman approached you—someone who fulfilled your every physical and emotional and mental expectation for what a life partner should be,” Kelly hypothesized, “and she said, ‘Tom, here I am, ready to be your friend and lover forever, ready to stand beside you through bad and good, ready to play out your every sexual fantasy,’ you’d turn her down?”
Tom laughed. “I don’t know. You want to be more specific about those sexual fantasies?”
Yes. This was flirting. There was definitely an underlying current of attraction beneath his words. Now what she had to do was zing one right back at him. She could do this. She looked him squarely in the eye. “You tell me. It’s your fantasies we’re talking about.”
Now it was his turn, but instead of pressing forward, he stepped back. He laughed.
“I’d feel kind of funny going into detail with Uncle Joe listening in,” he said lightly, glancing up at the statue.
“I don’t think you’d turn your dream woman down.” Kelly didn’t want to laugh. She didn’t want this conversation to turn lighthearted. She wanted to get back to that place where the very air between them crackled with sexual energy. Then all she had to do was ask him to dinner. She could do this.
Tom shook his head. “I’d have to turn her down,” he countered. “If she was that perfect . . . I wouldn’t want to hurt her.”
“But if you were her one true love, you’d hurt her by not being with her.”
He rubbed his forehead as if he still had a headache even as he laughed again. “Okay. Whoa. That’s enough. You can’t set up a completely fictional, no-chance-of-it-ever-happening scenario, and try to force a point of any kind with it. Let’s get real here, Ashton. No ‘dream woman’ is about to walk up to me and offer to—” He broke off, clearing his throat. “Fill in the blank—I’ll leave it to your imagination, but figure it probably involves whipped cream and black lingerie.”
Kelly couldn’t keep from giggling. Black lingerie and . . . She took a deep breath and tried to pretend she wasn’t blushing. Whipped cream and Tom Paoletti. My God. Somebody come take her order. She wanted a double.
“You think it’s a no-chance scenario,” she argued. “But what if Joe had actually met his dream woman? His true love?”
Tom shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe he did.” But even that was too strong an admission for him, and he tried to back away from it. “Look, Kel, all I really know for sure is whatever Joe felt, it had to be pretty powerful if it made him prefer to spend nearly sixty years of his life alone rather than settle for someone he didn’t really love. And we’re talking alone alone,” he added. “Joe didn’t have girlfriends, he didn’t have lady friends, he didn’t go out to bars and have one-night stands. He was Alone, with a capital A. No black lingerie. No whipped cream. Just Joe and his memories.”
God, that was sad. Had Joe simply quit looking at age twenty-two? Or did he hold on to hope for years, hope that he’d find someone to replace the woman he’d loved? If so, that hope had surely died slowly, painfully.
“In a lot of ways, I can understand his not wanting to settle,” Tom said quietly. “There’re a lot of things in my life I wouldn’t be willing to settle for.”
Kelly’s pager went off. She’d set it on silent when she went into the library, and the shaking made her jump. She checked the number.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Tom as she dug through her purse for her cell phone. “I have to call my office.”
She dialed the number, turning slightly away from him. “Hi, this is Dr. Ashton. I was just paged.”
“Doctor, I’m sorry to disturb you.” It was Pat Geary. “But the McKenna test results finally came in.”
Kelly closed her eyes. “Please tell me it’s some kind of weird anemia.”
“No such luck. It’s about as bad as it gets,” Pat said grimly. “Brenda McKenna’s pretty anxious for the results. Should I call her back, schedule a meeting for tomorrow?”
“No, better make it today,” Kelly decided. “And call Dr. Martin. Let’s get Betsy in to see the oncologist as soon as possible.”
“So much for your vacation.”
“It’s not a vacation, it’s a temporary partial leave.”
“Well, for someone who’s taking temporary partial leave, you’re sure here nearly all the time.”
“Schedule the meeting with the McKennas for about an hour from now,” Kelly told her assistant. “I’m on my way in.”
She closed her phone and grabbed her keys from her purse before she realized. Her father. She swore and opened her cell phone again to call Pat back.
But Tom was already one step ahead of her. “I was going from here to pick up some paint from Home Depot,” he told her, “but that’s a pretty low priority. If you want, I’ll stay with your father.”
“You don’t need to change your plans,” Kelly said, “but if you wouldn’t mind checking in on him when you get home . . .”
“No problem,” Tom said. “Think he’d be up for a game of chess?”
“Oh, God, that would be so nice. I’m sure he’d love it.”
“Is there a number where I can reach you? I mean, I probably won’t need it, but . . .”
Kelly dug through her purse for her business card. “This has my office number—a direct line to my desk—and my pager, too. Please don’t hesitate to call. And don’t feel as if you need to stay with him the entire time. Just stick your head in every now and then.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Tom said. “It’s not going to be a hardship. Believe it or not, I like the guy. And maybe if I’m lucky, there’ll be a Red Sox game on, and I’ll be able to get Joe to sit in the same room with him without fighting.”
Kelly had to hold on to herself to keep from hugging him. “If you can manage to do that, I’ll love you forever. And if you can get them to make up and be friends and stop fighting for good . . . I’ll bring home some whipped cream.”
Oh, my God, had she really said that out loud?
She had.
For about a half a second, Tom looked completely surprised, but then he laughed. “Well, hey, there’s incentive.” He pointed toward the nearby marina parking lot. “Go,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
She ran for her car.
It was him.
Right there in Home Depot on Route 1 in Baldwin’s Bridge.
Tom had filled his shopping cart with cans of paint and rollers and was pushing it through the crowd toward the checkout when he saw him. The Merchant. Or at least it was the very same man he’d seen in Logan Airport by the luggage carousel. The man was pushing his own shopping cart to the exit, away from checkout number four.
Tom got a brief but very clear look at his face before he turned the corner. It was him.
Brown hair shot with gray, weak chin, slightly stooped shoulders as if he were trying to make himself shorter. It was definitely him.
What the fuck was the Merchant doing here in Baldwin’s Bridge?
Shopping. He had an entire cart filled with his purchases. Tom could see a roll of electrical wire sticking out of his bag.
The hair on the back of his neck went straight up.
The man responsible for the 1996 Paris embassy car-bombing was buying electrical wire.
Tom left his cart right there, in the middle of an aisle, much to the displeasure of the shoppers around him. He deserted all his wayward thoughts about Kelly Ashton and whipped cream, too, as he pushed toward the same door the Merchant had used.
He fought the throng, silently cursing the time it was taking, the precious seconds he was wasting. He broke into a run as he hit a less crowded area. Hitting the sidewalk and the glaring brightness of the day, he skidded to a stop, shielding his eyes with one hand and fighting his dizziness as he quickly scanned the parking lot.
The Merchant was gone. The parking lot was busy, filled with cars, some pulling in, some pulling out. There were people walking to and from their vehicles, some with shopping carts, but none of them was the Merchant.
Tom scanned the area again. Come on, come on. Stand up and show yourself. No one could have pushed his cart out to a car, loaded up the trunk, and been inside it that quickly. Unless. . .
There were four cars heading for the entrance onto Route 1, a number of empty shopping carts left forlornly on the sidewalk outside the exit door. If the Merchant had had a car waiting for him, if he’d loaded it up right here from the sidewalk . . .
Tom looked again at the cars at the far end of the huge parking lot, waiting for the light to change so they could pull out onto the busy main road. Two were white subcompacts, one was a boxy red minivan, the last a blue sedan—probably a Ford Taurus. They were all too far away for him to see the license plates, and as he watched, the light changed and they all pulled away.
Shit.
Tom went back inside through the exit doors, back to the clerk working cash register four. She was an older woman, a senior citizen, probably looking to make a few extra bucks to bolster her Social Security checks. She was currently ringing up a whole cartful of plumbing supplies, her movements quick and sure. She glanced at Tom and he made himself smile at her despite the fact that his heart was still pounding. She looked as if she’d be able to multitask, so he didn’t wait for her to finish.
“Excuse me, ma’am.” He read her name tag. “Mae. There was a man who was just in here—he bought a whole cart of stuff? Some electrical wire? . . .”
She looked at him again, one eyebrow raised this time as she kept working, holding the various types of pipe and connections up to the scanner. “You’ve just described nearly every customer I’ve helped since my coffee break at ten-thirty.”
She smiled at her own small joke and Tom took a steadying breath. Okay. She seemed friendly. At the very least she was good-natured and intelligent.
“This was just a few minutes ago,” he said. “He had brown hair, going gray. About forty-five years old, about my height. He bought a roll of wire? . . .”
“Pleasant brown eyes?” she asked.
Brown eyes. But okay. “Yes,” Tom said. If he were the Merchant, he would figure he’d call less attention to himself by not wearing the cheap blue contact lenses once he was away from the potential scrutiny at Logan Airport. But Christ, what was he doing in Baldwin’s Bridge?
Mae was looking at him, waiting for him to go on.
“He’s my brother-in-law,” he said smoothly. Jenks would have been proud. “My crazy sister just sent me down here to make sure he didn’t forget a bunch of things we need. We’re rewiring the house and . . . But I just missed him. He pulled away before I could make sure he got everything. I saw he had the wire, but maybe you could tell me—did he also get pliers?”
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