Dearly Beloved (2 page)

Ethan Thoreau?

Sandy shakes her head and tosses the letter onto the passenger’s seat beside her.

This has to be a fake . . . some nut who gets his jollies by answering ads and propositioning strange women.

Grimly, she puts on her seat belt and shifts the car into Drive. As she pulls out onto the street and turns toward home, she mentally runs through his letter again.

He sounds too good to be true, a gorgeous MD with a name like Ethan Thoreau. Like a character in one of those category romance novels Sandy likes to read.

A romantic Valentine’s Day weekend on an island.

Yeah, right.

Bramble Rose Inn—the place probably doesn’t even exist.

Call the innkeeper.

Sure. And find out that this whole thing is a stupid trick.

Well, she should have known that sooner or later, some nut case was going to answer her ad. Her friend Theresa, a veteran of the singles classifieds, warned her that would happen.

Still, what if there’s a chance that this guy is for real? After all, he did send a picture. . . .

A doctor.

A gorgeous, muscular doctor.

A gorgeous, muscular doctor with a thriving practice and a weekend house on Tide Island.

Sandy chews her lower lip thoughtfully as she rounds the corner from High onto Webster Street.

Well, what if he is for real?

Things like this happen, don’t they? Sure they do. She recalls reading, a few years back, about some lonely bachelor who had rented a billboard, advertised for a wife, and proposed to one of the women who responded before they ever met in person.

This guy—this Ethan Thoreau—didn’t propose. All he’d done was invite Sandy to meet him. He doesn’t even expect her to stay with him.

The Bramble Rose Inn. Jasper Hammel.

Hmm.

Sandy slows the car as she approaches the two-story raised cape where she lives with her parents. The house is pale green, the color of iceberg lettuce, and it desperately needs a paint job.

A grime-covered, white panel truck bearing the name
Cavelli & Sons, Plumbing and Heating Contractors
sits in the short driveway. Sandy parks the Chevy behind it, inwardly groaning. Now that she’s on break from college, she likes to beat her father home at night so that she doesn’t have to get up early to move her car out of the way when he leaves in the mornings.

She grabs her purse from the seat beside her. Then she thoughtfully picks up Ethan Thoreau’s letter and photograph.

“So what’s the deal?” she asks, and sighs, her breath coming out in a milky puff of frost. “Are you real, or not?”

Sighing, she puts the letter into her purse with the rest of them. Then she steps out onto the slippery driveway and makes her way along the frozen walk to the house.

In the kitchen, Angie Cavelli is stirring a pot of sauce on the stove. The front of her yellow sweatshirt is splashed with greasy tomato-colored dots.

“Hi, Ma,” Sandy says, closing the door behind her and stamping her feet on the faded welcome mat by the door.

“You’re late,” her mother observes, then takes a taste from the spoon. “I thought you got off at four-thirty.”

“I did. I had to run an errand afterward.” Sandy shrugs out of her coat and walks across the worn linoleum.

“Your father’s already at the table. He wants to eat.”

Sandy fights back the urge to say,
then let him eat.

After twenty-five years of living in this house, she should know better than to consider questioning her father’s rule. If you’re living in his house, when it’s five o’clock, you sit down at the dining room table and you eat. Everyone. Together.

Sandy walks toward the hallway off the kitchen, carrying her purse.

“Ah-ah-ah—where are you going?” her mother calls.

“I just want to change my clothes. I’ll be right back down for supper, Ma. Two minutes.”

“Two minutes,” her mother echoes in a warning voice. She’s already at the sink, dumping a steaming kettle of cooked pasta into the battered stainless steel strainer.

In her room, Sandy kicks off her shoes and takes the letter out of her purse again.

She stares at it.

If she doesn’t call this Bramble Rose Inn place, she’ll probably always wonder whether she passed up the chance to meet a handsome, wealthy doctor.

If she calls, she might find out that he actually has made paid reservations for her. That he really does exist.

Sandy pauses for another minute, thinking it over.

Then she takes the letter across the hall to her parents’ room. Unlike the rest of the house—including her own room—which holds an accumulation of several decades of clutter, Angie and Tony’s bedroom is spare. The walls are empty except for the crucifix hanging over the bed, and the only other furniture is a dresser and the wobbly bedside table. On that sits the upstairs telephone extension.

Sandy perches carefully on the edge of the old white chenille spread, lifts the receiver, and starts dialing.

L
iza Danning hates Monday nights.

Especially rainy, slushy Monday nights in early January, when you can’t get a cab and the only way of getting from the office on West Fortieth Street to your apartment on the Upper East Side is the subway. That, or a bus . . . and the glass shelters at the stops are so jammed that waiting for a bus that isn’t overcrowded to finally roll by would mean standing in the rain. Which wouldn’t be so bad if she had an umbrella.

And she doesn’t.

She’d left for work this morning from Alex’s place, where she’d spent the night. And since the sun had been shining brightly when they rolled out of bed, borrowing an umbrella from him, just in case, hadn’t occurred to her. Besides, she’d been too busy dodging his efforts to pin her down for next weekend.

“I don’t know, Alex,” she’d said, avoiding his searching gaze as she slipped into her navy Burberry trench—a gift from Lawrence, an old lover—and tied the belt snugly around her waist. She’d checked her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror in his foyer and tucked a few stray strands of silky blond hair back into the chignon at the back of her neck. “I think I have plans.”

“What plans?”

She’d shrugged. “I’m not sure.”

“You think you have plans, but you’re not sure what they are,” he’d said flatly.

So she’d told him. She’d had no choice. “Look—” She bent to pick up her burgundy Coach briefcase. “I like you. Last night was great. So was Saturday. And Friday. But I’m not ready for an every-weekend thing, okay?”

He’d stared at her, the blue eyes she’d found so captivating on Friday night now icy and hard. “Fine,” he’d said, picking up his own Coach briefcase—black leather—and Burberry trench, also black.

Then they’d walked to the elevator, ridden the fifty-three stories down to the lobby in silence, and stepped out into the brisk Manhattan morning. Alex had asked the doorman to hail them separate cabs, even though his law office was just two blocks from the publishing house where she was an editor.

The doorman had blown his whistle and immediately flagged a passing cab. Alex stuffed some bills into his hand, then leaned over to again narrow that ice-blue gaze at Liza as she settled into the back seat.

“West Fortieth at Sixth,” she’d said to the driver. Then, to Alex, “Call me.”

“Right,” he’d replied, and she knew he wouldn’t.

She’d shrugged as the cab pulled away from the curb. So he’d expected more out of their little tryst than she had. He’d get over it.

She hesitates on the street in front of her office building, trying to talk herself into taking the subway. But it will mean walking the two and a half blocks to the station near the library on Forty-second Street. Then she’ll have to take the Seven train one stop to Grand Central and wait for the uptown local. That will take forever.

She shakes her head decisively and checks the Movado on her left wrist. Six-fifteen. If she goes back upstairs and works until seven-thirty, she can take a company car home. The publishing house pays her peanuts and doesn’t offer many perks besides free car service for employees who work late. But it’s the least they can do. After all, most of the editors are females, and Manhattan’s streets are increasingly dangerous after dark.

Liza walks briskly back into the lobby.

Carmine, the night guard, looks her over appreciatively, as he always does. At least this time, he doesn’t tell her how much she resembles Sharon Stone, or ask her if she’s ever considered becoming an actress.

“Forget something?” he asks, his eyes on her breasts even though she is bundled into her trench coat.

“Yes,” she replies shortly, walking past him toward the elevator bank, conscious of the hollow, tapping noise her heels make on the tile floor.

An elevator is just arriving, and she steps aside to let the full load of passengers step off.

“Liza, what’s up? I thought you’d left,” says a petite brunette, emerging from the crowd.

Liza vaguely recognizes her as one of the new editorial assistants who started right before Christmas. The girl is one of those bubbly, fresh-from-the-ivy-league types. The kind who can afford to take an entry level job in publishing because her rich daddy pays the rent on her Upper East Side studio.

“I have to go back up. I forgot something,” Liza tells her briefly.

“Oh, well, have a good night. See you tomorrow,” the girl says cheerfully, fastening the top button of her soft wool coat.

Liza recognizes the expensive lines, rich coral color, and ornate gold buttons. She’d reached for that coat in Saks a few months ago. The price tag was over a thousand dollars.

She’d put it back.

“See you,” she echoes, and strides onto the elevator. She rides alone up to the sixth floor and steps into the deserted reception area of Xavier House, Ltd.

She fishes in her pocket for her card key and flashes it in front of the electronic panel beside the double glass doors behind the receptionist’s desk. There is a click, and she pushes the door open.

Liza walks swiftly down the dimly lit hall, past a janitor’s cart parked in front of one of the offices. She can hear a cleaning lady running a vacuum in another part of the floor. She turns a corner and heads down the short corridor toward her own office. The other editors who share this area are either long gone or behind closed doors, probably catching up on manuscript reading after taking the holidays off.

Liza unlocks the door marked LIZA DANNING and steps inside. She slips her coat over the hanger waiting on a hook behind the door, then smooths her cashmere sweater and sighs. She isn’t in the mood for reading, although she
should
try to make a dent in the pile of manuscripts that sit waiting on her credenza.

You could open the mail,
she tells herself, glancing at the stack in her IN box. She hadn’t gotten to it today. Or Friday either, for that matter.

She sits at her desk and reaches for the first manila envelope, slitting the flap with the jewel-handled letter opener that had been a gift from Douglas. Or was it Reed? She can’t remember anymore. And it doesn’t matter, anyway. He’s long gone, whoever he was. Like the others.

She removes a sheaf of papers from the envelope and scans the top sheet. It’s a painstaking cover letter, composed on an ancient typewriter whose vowels are filled in with smudges. Some anxious would-be writer, a Midwestern housewife, describes the enclosed first chapter and outline of a historical romance novel about a pirate hero and an Indian princess heroine. The woman has spelled desire
d-e-z-i-r-e.

Liza tosses the letter into the wastepaper basket and reaches into her top drawer for the packet of pre-printed rejections letters she keeps there. She removes one and slips it under the paper clip holding the partial manuscript together. She tucks the whole stack into the self-addressed stamped envelope the woman has included, seals it, and tosses it into her OUT basket. Then she reaches for the next envelope.

Fifteen minutes later, the stack in her IN box has dwindled and her OUT basket is overflowing. She has worked her way through all the large packages and is now starting on the letters in their white legal-sized envelopes.

She glances idly at the return address on this first one.

What she sees makes her sit up and do a double take.

D.M. Yates, P.O. Box 57, Tide Island MA.

D.M. Yates—David Mitchell Yates, reclusive best-selling author? She recalls that the man has a home on some New England coastal island.

Liza grabs the letter opener and hurriedly slits the envelope open. She unfolds the single sheet of creamy white stationery and notices that a train ticket is attached to the top with a paper clip. Amtrak. Penn Station to Westwood, Rhode Island. First Class.

Intrigued, she skips past the formal heading to the body of the letter.

Dear Ms. Danning:

As you may or may not be aware, I am the author of several best-selling spy novels released by Best & Rawson, a New York City publishing house, over the past ten years. Since my editor, Henry Malcolm, retired last month, I have been searching for a new home for my novels. Would you be interested in meeting with me to discuss the possibilities of a deal with Xavier House, Ltd.? I have enclosed a round-trip train ticket to Westwood, Rhode Island, for the second weekend in February. You will be met by a limousine that will transport you to the dock in Crosswinds Bay, where you will board the ferry to Tide Island. I have arranged for you to stay at the Bramble Rose Inn. I will, of course, pay all expenses for your journey. I will be traveling abroad for the next several weeks. To confirm, please contact the innkeeper, Jasper Hammel, at (508) 555-1493. It is imperative that you keep this meeting confidential. I’ll look forward to meeting with you.

Sincerely,

David Michael Yates

Liza is electrified.

David Michael Yates.

The man is gold.

He’s also an eccentric recluse whose face has reportedly never been seen by the world at large. The jackets of his books bear no photograph; not even a biography. Over the years, it has been rumored that David Michael Yates is actually a pseudonym for a high-ranking government official; that he’s really a woman; that he had his face blown off in Vietnam.