Live to Tell (10 page)

Into the toy chest go the cart and its cargo.

One by one, she considers several dolls, a few more games, and a little suitcase filled with dress-up clothes.

Now the floor is empty, the shelves and chest are full again, and Sadie wants to cry. What is she going to do? She can’t find even one toy she’s willing to part with, and Lucy said—

The moment she spots the pink stuffed dog on top of her dresser, she knows she’s off the hook.

There’s something she doesn’t want. Stupid dog. How could anyone mistake it for Fred?

Sadie climbs onto a chair and plucks it down. The chair teeters and she grabs the edge of the dresser to keep from falling.

If she fell and got hurt, it would be the stupid dog’s fault. And Daddy’s, too.

Scowling, Sadie climbs off the chair and takes one last glance at the dog, just to make sure. Its black button eyes seem to stare sadly at her, and she looks away quickly.

She doesn’t want it. Why would she?

She carries it out into the hall and down to the landing. In the foyer below, she can see a row of boxes Mommy and Lucy have spent the day filling with stuff for the tag sale.

The front door is propped open. She slips down a few more stairs and sees that her mother is out on the porch, stacking a box on top of a couple of others.

Sadie doesn’t feel like talking to her about the pink dog again.

Moving quickly, she goes all the way down and opens the doggy gate. She looks at the nearest box—one Mommy marked with a marker in big black letters. Sadie doesn’t know what they spell, but she recognizes the ABCs: F-R-A-G-I-L-E.

Sadie hurriedly stuffs the pink dog into the box.

As soon as she does it, she feels bad.

Why? It’s just a stupid toy.

Sadie shoves the top of the box closed. She can still see a clump of pink fur in the crack between the flaps.

She reaches out to push it deeper into the box, but instead, her fingers wrap around a fuzzy pink paw.

Maybe…

The phone rings, startling her.

Sadie hurriedly drops the paw and runs back up the stairs, leaving the gate open and the pink dog behind.

Lauren spent most of the day wishing the sun would come out, but now that it has, its rays stream through the living room’s bay windows to cast a greenhouse effect she definitely could do without.

She wipes a trickle of sweat from her cheek with her shoulder as she hangs up the phone at last, hoping it won’t ring again for a while.

She just spent a half hour on a pair of back-to-back calls—one from her mother, the other from her sister. Lauren figures the two of them probably talked to each other first and decided they were worried about her.

“I wish you’d come up and visit,” said her mother, who still lives in the small upstate hometown Lauren gladly left behind years ago.

“I wish you’d come down,” Lauren replied, knowing that was unlikely. Her parents rarely make the two-hundred-mile trip now that her father has had a couple of heart surgeries. Mom’s license is expired at this point; she relies on Dad to cart her everywhere she needs to go. Totally dependent on her husband. She always has been.

I swore I would never let myself become like her, and I’m not. Good thing.

Lauren found herself promising her mother she’d visit soon.

Then she found herself promising Alyssa she’d come into the city tomorrow afternoon for brunch while Nick has the kids.

She really doesn’t want to do either of those things, though.

Maybe I’m not as independent as I think. What happened to learning how to say no? Embracing my postdivorce inner bitch?

God, she misses Trilby. She’s always good for a swift kick in the pants, reminding Lauren not to let anyone push her around.

Then again, who knows? Maybe deep down, Lauren really does need a hometown visit. Maybe it would be nice to be miles and miles away, back in a simpler place where her private business isn’t churning the local gossip mill. And it would certainly be nice to let her nurturing parents take care of her and the kids for a while. So nice not to be in charge, for a change, of the household…

With a grunt, she hoists yet another heavy box of castoffs into her aching arms and hauls it out to the front porch to await transport to the church basement for the tag sale.

Returning to the hall, she notices that the doggy gate is ajar. Closing it, she wonders if she should just get rid of the gate. Chauncey knows he’s not allowed upstairs, and he’s never once snuck past it when it’s open.

She picks up another carton of discarded relics from the dining room. She marked the box “FRAGILE” due to a couple of mismatched teacups and saucers, but nothing else is breakable: stray silverware, fancy candlesticks, elegant linens that are never used because you have to iron them, and who has time to iron a tablecloth if you’re cooking the kind of dinner that would be served
on
a tablecloth?

After wearily depositing the box on the front porch with the others, she surveys the stack. Maybe she should cover it with a tarp or something, as much to protect the cardboard from the rain as to fend off potential thieves.

Then again, the boxes are filled with things she doesn’t want in the first place—and this is Glenhaven Park. Half the people in town don’t even bother to lock their doors at night or when they’re not home.

Lauren was among them, until Nick left. Now, she locks the door at night. She’d lock it during the day, too, when the house is empty—if she could trust Lucy and Ryan not to keep losing their house keys.

As she told Ryan, bad things happen everywhere.

Inside, the phone rings once again.

Lauren sighs and goes in to see who it is. If her mother appears again on the caller ID, or even Alyssa, she’ll let it go straight into voice mail, not in the mood for any more chitchat this afternoon.

But the number belongs to Nick’s cell. Good. Maybe he’s back and wanting to see the kids tonight after all.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

The call must have been lost. He’s probably in the car and drove out of tower range, or maybe he’s still on the ferry.

Then she hears something on the other end of the line—a rustling sound.

“Hello? Nick?”

Heavy breathing—gasping, really—reaches her ears, and then a low moan. She recognizes it instantly as Nick’s voice. He used to gasp and moan like that when he was about to—

Lauren hangs up abruptly, horrified.

Obviously, Nick is in bed with his girlfriend. He must have rolled over on his phone, pocket dialing her.

Lovely. Just what she needs—an audio bite to go with the visions of Nick and Beth in each other’s arms.

Footsteps bound down the stairs. “Mom? Was that Dad?”

Uh-oh. Ryan.

“I heard it ring,” he goes on, “but I was in the bathroom.”

Maybe she should lie, say that it was a wrong number or something. But Ryan would be able to check the caller ID…or maybe he already has.

“It was Dad,” she tells him. “He just wanted to let us know that he, uh, made it home safely.”

“But I wanted to talk to him!” Ryan is already reaching for the phone.

“Wait, Ry… I could use a hand with these boxes.”

“Later.” He’s dialing. “I need to talk to Dad.”

Lauren watches helplessly as Ryan listens to Nick’s phone ringing, then going into voice mail.

“Dad, it’s me again… Mom says you’re home. I really need to talk to you, so…call me.”

He hangs up, avoiding Lauren’s gaze, and redials. Nick’s other number rings into voice mail as well. This time, Ryan doesn’t leave a message—just hangs up.

“Guess he’s busy,” he tells Lauren.

“Guess so,” she replies, hating Nick more than ever before.

Expertly knotting his black bow tie, Garvey eyes himself in the mirror. To look at him, standing here in a tuxedo, outwardly calm and collected, no one would ever imagine his inner turmoil.

By now, he expected to have received a reassuring all-clear. That has yet to come. For all he knows, the so-called human obstacle still exists and might just be preparing to get the better of him.

Satisfied that his bow tie is straight, he strides out of the bedroom and down the hall. As he passes the series of family photographs, his gaze falls on one of his paternal grandmother, and it stops him in his tracks.

What would Eleanor Harding Quinn think of his situation?

She wouldn’t have wasted time questioning how he’d managed to get himself into it, that’s for sure. She didn’t care much for details, had little patience for explanations of any sort. If she were alive, and knew what was going on, she’d advise Garvey to do whatever he can to extract himself from the situation with his reputation—and future—intact.

Don’t worry
, he silently assures his grandmother.
I always know what to do—thanks to you.

A sturdy, handsome woman, Garvey’s grandmother looks so like him. But where he prides himself on maintaining his cool, Eleanor Harding Quinn had a rip-roaring temper and rarely—if ever—smiled. She wears her no-nonsense expression even in photographs.

There were whispers about her within the family circle—mostly about whether she was mentally stable, as far as Garvey could tell. His father steered clear of her at all costs, but then, he was equally distant from his own children. To his credit, he never kept them from seeing his mother; in fact, he sent a willing Garvey to visit her every summer at Greymeadow, the family’s sprawling gray-shingled country house amid acres of woods and meadows in the Hudson Valley.

Grandmother Quinn was the one who believed in him, assuring him that he was destined for even greater things than his illustrious family had already achieved.

“You’re a Quinn. You can make anything happen, Garvey,” she told him when, as a child, he dared to confess that he wanted to become president one day. “Just be prepared to give it your all.”

He certainly has.

Now, with everything he’s worked for hanging in the balance, he remembers something else his grandmother once told him.

They were at the country estate one June weekend, and his grandmother was surveying a flowerbed that had been planted by the gardeners in her absence.

“I told them no red,” she noted, her black eyes dangerously displeased behind her wire-rimmed glasses. “See how the red clashes with the pink and purple? Do you see that, Garvey?”

Garvey nodded, more interested in the gate mounted to huge pillars alongside the long, winding driveway. The massive iron gate had been made in France, fancy grillwork etched with the word “GREYMEADOW.”

Garvey always wondered what it would be like to shed all decorum, jump on that gate, and swing on it. He spent his entire childhood speculating about it, and never did find out.

When his grandmother—in pearls and silk stockings—dropped down on her hands and knees beside the flowerbed, however, he forgot all about the gate. He watched in fascination as she clawed at the soil with her manicured, diamond-bedecked fingers. She tore out one red petunia plant after another, ripping them into shreds and tossing them aside—she even tore a dangling earthworm in half and tossed it aside.

“There,” she said, when the plants had been decimated, their remains in an untidy heap.

“Why didn’t you just ask the gardeners to fix it?”

“Because sometimes, the only way to get something done right is to do it yourself.” She brushed her hands against each other, and crumbles of soil fell away. Her fingers were stained red from the blossoms. “You do what has to be done, and then you wash your hands and you move on. Don’t you ever forget that, Garvey.”

He never did. He frequently reminds himself that Grandmother Quinn wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty when necessary—and that he shouldn’t be, either.

And he never has.

But garden soil is one thing.

Human blood is quite another.

Shaking his head, Garvey heads out the door.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I
can’t take your call right now, but if you’ll leave your name and—”

“Where do you think Daddy is?” Lucy asks yet again, as Lauren hangs up on Nick’s voice mail yet again without leaving a message.

She’s already left three on his cell and a couple more on his home phone. Ryan texted and e-mailed him as well, about an hour ago—when Nick was almost an hour late.

Now it’s been two hours with no word, and Lauren is growing concerned, though she’s not letting on to the kids.

In response to Lucy’s question, she simply shrugs and says, “I’m sure he’s on his way.”

But she isn’t sure at all.

She hasn’t heard from Nick since yesterday’s unfortunate pocket-dial call—which, of course, she didn’t share with the kids.

When he failed to return Ryan’s call last night, she privately thought it was possible that Nick might have since realized what had happened earlier. Maybe he’d been so embarrassed that Lauren had overheard his intimate moments with his girlfriend that he didn’t want to call back and risk an uncomfortable confrontation.

Not that Lauren would ever bring it up.
Ever
. She’s done her best to forget it, in fact.

Anyway, Nick could have just dialed Ryan’s cell to talk to him directly. She’s surprised he didn’t.

With a pang, Lauren looks at her three children, sitting around the kitchen table dressed for brunch with their father. Ryan has on a polo instead of a T-shirt; Lucy’s wearing a too-skimpy—in Lauren’s opinion—skirt and top, and Sadie’s in a pink ruffled sundress with a dozen strands of beads around her neck.

They’re such great kids. How can Nick bear to be away from them? How can he ignore them?

Maybe he isn’t. Maybe something’s wrong.

“I’m worried about Daddy.” Lucy echoes her thoughts. “What if—”

“You know, I should have talked to him myself when he called Friday night and made these plans with you guys.” Lauren shakes her head. “I bet he meant next Sunday. He’s probably still on vacation.”

Ryan’s head snaps up. “You said he called yesterday to say he was home.”

“Oh, right. I forgot about that.” She shouldn’t have lied. But she was trying to protect Ryan—and, perhaps, to protect Nick as well. Big mistake.

“Anyway, Mom, he definitely meant this Sunday,” Lucy insists.

“Maybe you misunderstood.”

“No. I make plans with people all the time. Trust me, I didn’t screw it up.”

“Well, Dad did.” Ryan, who has been mostly silent, scowls. “He totally blew us off.”

“Maybe he’s on his way and he’s stuck in traffic or ran out of gas or something,” Lauren suggests.

“He would have called.” Lucy clutches the Robert Ludlum book she started reading last night. She was planning to show it to her father.

“Maybe he forgot his cell phone,” Lauren tells her, “or the battery’s dead.”

“Why are you making excuses for him, Mom?”

I’m not. I’m protecting the three of you from disappointment.

“Do you want more Goldfish crackers, Sadie?” she asks, picking up the bag.

Her youngest nods and slides her plastic bowl toward Lauren, who refills it for the third time. Poor little thing has been starved.

So is Lauren. She looks at the stove clock. Right about now, she should be sipping a Bloody Mary in an upscale Manhattan bistro. When she called Alyssa earlier to say she’d be late, her sister moved the reservation ahead an hour. “I’m just glad you’re not calling to cancel,” she told Lauren. “I had a feeling you might.”

No. Lauren is actually looking forward to her outing in the city. She’s exchanged her usual shorts and flipflops for a little black dress she found in the back of her closet last night. She’d worn it years ago, for someone’s wedding, but a couple of kids later, had been unable to squeeze into it again.

It fits now, though. It’s even a little baggy. But at least it’s presentable.

While she was browsing through her closet, she found countless outfits that are suitable for the tag sale. She’ll get back to filling boxes later, or tomorrow. It was cathartic.

“Can I call Ian?” Ryan interrupts her thoughts.

“Mom already said no,” Lucy reminds her brother. “Why don’t you stop asking?”

He shoots her a glare and turns back to Lauren. “Mom, this is so stupid. We’re sitting here wasting a beautiful day and Dad’s not even going to show up.”

He has a point. The sun is shining in a brilliant blue sky, and the heat wave has broken—for now, anyway. The temperature is in the low eighties and a refreshing breeze stirs the white ruffled curtains at the windows.

“Anyway, how do you know Dad’s not going to show up?”

“I just do, okay?” Ryan tells his sister.

“No, you don’t.”

The phone rings, putting an abrupt end to the bickering.

“Daddy!” Sadie exclaims, as Lucy answers it with an anticipatory “Hello?”

Lauren sees her face fall immediately.

“Oh, hi, Aunt Alyssa. Yeah, she’s right here. Hold on.” Lucy glumly hands the phone to Lauren.

She lifts it to her ear. “Hi.”

“Why aren’t you on a train?”

“We’re still waiting for Nick, so…”

“Where the hell is he?”

“I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

“I’ll change the reservation again. Do you think two-thirty is safe?”

“No, just go ahead without me. Even if he shows up now, there’s no way I can catch a train in time to meet you.”

“Three?”

“No, seriously, Lys, forget it for today.”

“This is so unfair of him to do to you, Lauren.”

Never mind me…what about the kids?

She hangs up, unsettled.

“I want to do something with my friends, Mom,” Ryan says promptly. “Please? I haven’t seen Ian all summer and—”

“Okay, okay. Go ahead and call him.”

Ryan makes a beeline out of the room.

“Thanks, Mom,” Lauren calls after him.

“Thanks, Mom,” he calls back, footsteps pounding up the stairs.

“Why did you let him go?” Lucy asks, turning on Lauren.

“Because he’s right. He hasn’t seen Ian all summer, and it’s a beautiful day.”

“But what if Daddy shows up and Ryan’s not here?”

“We’ll deal with that when it happens.”

If
it happens.

Where on earth are you, Nick? Are you okay?

“Hey, Mom! I need a ride to Ian’s,” Ryan calls from the top of the stairs.

It’s Lucy who responds, clearly exasperated. “How about asking and saying
please
?”

“You’re not Mom!”

“I am,” Lauren calls, “and how about saying
please
?”

She can just see Ryan rolling his eyes before offering a perfunctory “Please?”

“Okay.” Lauren turns to her daughters. “Come on, we’ll all go. We can drop off Ryan at Ian’s and go to the mall to buy some back-to-school clothes.”

“Yes!” Lucy fist-pumps the air as Sadie looks up from her Goldfish crackers, stricken.

“I don’t want to go.”

“Sure you do. We can shop together,” Lucy tells her little sister. “Won’t that be fun? I’ll help you pick out some new big girl shoes for school.”

“I don’t want new shoes.”

“Come on, Sadie, everyone needs new shoes for kindergarten. And nice new dresses, and—”

“But what about Daddy?”

“Daddy couldn’t come today, sweetie,” Lauren tells her gently. “But Lucy and I want to take you shopping.”

Sadie looks down, saying nothing.

Lounging beneath an umbrella, his toes buried in hot sand, Garvey watches Caroline paddle back into the breakers on her surfboard.

“That’s far enough,” he calls, but his daughter can’t possibly hear him over the pounding waves.

Marin, in a chair beside him, looks up from her book. “She’s careful. Don’t worry.”

Don’t worry.

Yeah, right.

Worrying about Caroline comes as naturally as breathing for Garvey. You don’t live through the horror of almost losing a child without becoming hypervigilant.

Garvey sits forward in his canvas chair, shielding his eyes with his hand.

“Did you come out here just so you could keep an eye on her?” Marin asks.

“No,” he replies truthfully. “But now that I’m here…”

“I’m just glad you are.” His wife reaches over and squeezes his hand. “That was the best surprise ever.”

She’s referring to last night, when he showed up, unannounced, at the Cottingtons’ big, gray-shingled beach house. Still wearing his black tuxedo, carrying a hastily packed overnight bag, he arrived close to midnight. The girls were asleep, but Marin and Heather Cottington were sitting on the deck polishing off a bottle of pinot grigio. Garvey suspected it wasn’t their first when Marin swayed to her feet and threw her arms around him.

“What are you doing here?” she kept asking.

Providing myself with an alibi.

Imagine if he had told her the truth. All of it, right then and there.

He would never do it, of course…but he can’t stop thinking about how Marin would react if she knew. A part of him wonders if she might not just understand what happened all those years ago, and why he would go to such great lengths to see that it stays buried.

She is, after all, his wife…

And the mother of his children.

Ah—the great irony in that. Marin’s maternal role is the one reason she might be able to forgive him—and the one reason she might not.

That’s why he’s never told her. He never will.

And should anything not have gone as planned yesterday—should there be any kind of mess, despite his instructions—he’ll be in the clear.

Such a shame that anyone had to die.

But really, just look at all the lives that will be saved in the grand scheme of things. Yes, when Garvey takes office, health care will be at the top of his agenda. That will more than compensate for this weekend’s unfortunate casualties.

I just have to focus on the greater good.

I have to do whatever it takes to make this go away.

“I just wish you could stay.” Marin is still holding on to his hand.

“So do I.”

The morning flew by—breakfast, church, and now this sun-soaked respite before he hits the road.

He looks at his watch, then glances up at the Cotting-tons’ house above the dunes. Heather’s up there preparing a lunch he’s told her repeatedly he can’t stay to eat. He has to get back to Manhattan for a late afternoon rally, a photo op, and a dinner.

“Ten minutes,” he tells Marin, “and then I’ve got to go.”

“Are you sure you can’t wait until Annie gets back?” Their younger daughter went off with Chelsea Cottington to visit a friend down the beach.

Garvey shakes his head. “I have to be back for the—”

“Excuse me,” a voice cuts in, and a shadow falls over Garvey’s outstretched legs.

He looks up to see a woman standing there. She’s wearing a gauzy white cover-up that whips around her in the sea breeze, and a large sun hat she’s holding to her head with a tanned hand. Her face is almost completely concealed by a pair of movie star sunglasses.

“You’re Garvey Quinn, aren’t you?”

With an inward sigh and a campaign smile, he tells her, “Yes, I am.”

“I knew it!” She gestures at a pair of chairs a few yards away, where her companion, clad in boardshorts, sits watching them. “I told my boyfriend that was you, but he didn’t think so.”

“Well, if you made a bet, you won.”

She laughs delightedly—then goes on to tell him, in excruciating detail, about the proposed housing development that will infringe upon her wooded backyard in Nassau County. Garvey listens dutifully and gives her all the appropriate feedback, ever conscious of the ticking clock, Marin’s impatience, and his baby girl out in the Atlantic trying to catch a wave.

At last, the woman makes her way back to her boyfriend.

Marin sighs. “It never ends.”

“You know that it—”

“I know, I know. It goes with the territory. Sometimes it’s exhausting.”

“Sometimes?”

She squeezes his hand. “I just wonder if it’s worth it.”

“It will be.” He looks at his watch. “I have to go.”

“I know you do.”

He can’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses, but her mouth is taut.

“I’ll see you and the girls back in the city tomorrow. Don’t forget, we have that dinner at—”

“I won’t forget, Garvey.”

“Tell the girls—”

“I will.”

He stands and checks to see if Caroline is anywhere near shore so that he can wave her over for a hug.

No.

Casting a gaze out at the water, he doesn’t see her there, either.

For a moment, his heart stands still.

Then her head pops up amid the breakers.

Garvey watches her for a few more seconds, until he’s satisfied that she’s okay. Then he reluctantly turns his back, forces himself to walk away.

Over the years, he’s found comfort in the familiar Bible verse he learned years ago, in Sunday school: “Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin.”

Now that his past is closing in, Garvey can’t help but wonder…

What about a child who would not be alive at all, but for her father’s sins?

Shopping with the girls, Lauren almost managed to put Nick’s absence out of her head.

Almost
.

Every so often, she stepped away from the girls to surreptitiously check her cell phone, just to make sure she hadn’t somehow missed a return call from him. She hadn’t.

Now, arriving back home in the late afternoon, she sidesteps a barking, tail-wagging Chauncey and goes straight to the phone to check the voice mail and caller ID log.

No Nick.

He obviously got confused about the day, or forgot, or…something.

Fear threads its way through her once again. Nick might be forgetful—and, okay, a jerk—but he should have called to check in by now.

Lauren listens impatiently to a message from her mother, wanting to pick a date for the visit, and one from a boy named Josh, looking for Lucy.

“Daddy didn’t call?”