Roses in Autumn (4 page)

Laura came back from her introspection to pick the raisins from her bran flakes before adding skim milk. Then she looked at Tom. He was chewing a sausage, but his mind was obviously in Sacramento or Kansas City or … She shrugged; wherever he was, she wasn’t with him.

How could she reach him? She looked around for a topic of conversation and sighted two little gray-haired ladies seated across the room. “Look, Tom. They’re just like the ‘dollar ladies.’”

He didn’t exactly frown as he looked up. “Dollar ladies? Sounds sleazy.”

She tried not to bristle at his finding an innuendo in her words. He certainly knew her better than that. “Hardly. They were residents of the Empress in the ’20s. Elderly ladies living on fat trust accounts—until the stock market crash wiped them out. They had no place to go, so the hotel allowed them to move up to the garret rooms for a dollar a day.” Laura strained to keep the conversation light, impersonal.

And her story was rewarded by Tom’s warm smile. The smile that in all the time she had known him had never once failed to make her heart turn over. “I like that—the grand hotel with a heart.”

Encouraged, she continued, “There are lots of stories about the Empress dowagers.” She searched her mind for snatches of her research. “Like when they could no longer afford to eat in the dining room, so they smuggled hot plates into their attic rooms. The management discreetly looked the other way except in the most flagrant cases—like the one who let her homemade strawberry jam boil over, or the one who had to be asked not to cook liver and onions in her room, or another whose penchant for pickling onions had to be restrained.”

A small thing, but all at once they were laughing together over such goings on by dignified little old ladies in the stately halls of the Empress. It was so good to be laughing with Tom again. How long had it been? Weeks? Months, at least. A lifetime? She couldn’t really remember. But it meant there was hope. Please, God, it
had
to mean that.

Then she noticed the family seated on the other side of the balustrade from them. “See, my egg melted.” The dad pointed to his empty, half eggshell in its tall crystal eggcup. His small son clapped his hands and giggled. Laura looked at Tom just in time to catch his glance at the father and son—and to see the hurt look in his eyes. Again she felt the guilty stab of failure.

“Right. Museum first, then?” Laura was grateful to Tom for breaking the small tension that crept back so quickly.

“It seems a good place to start. I don’t suppose Gwendolyn and Kevin would actually go there since they live here, but I need to know some local history for background.”

“Gwendolyn and Kevin?”

“My hero and heroine.”

“Oh. Yeah. What’s your story about?”

“Well, all I’ve done so far is the first chapter and an outline, but Kevin is a doctor, and he won’t make a commitment to Gwen until he can really give their relationship the attention it needs—which he can’t do right now because of the demands of his job and some family problems.”

“So why does it have to be set in Victoria?”

“Because they live here, silly.”

“Uh-ho. Breathing already, are they?”

“Starting to. But I originally chose Victoria because it’s such a romantic spot. And because I wanted to do something about rose growing—so what better place than the Butchart Gardens?”

“Well, I wish them happiness.”

“Me too, but not too soon.” Laura gathered her notes. “I’m not into writing short stories.”

“I suppose you’ll want to stop at a bookstore first.”

“Ah, you know my methods. Guidebooks, maps, local flora and fauna …”

“Fine.” Tom signaled the waitress for their check. “You go on to your bookstore. I need to go back to the room to make some calls. We’ve got to firm our offer for the Kansas City deal. This is too good a thing to let go too cheap. I’m going to press for half a point more.”

He went on explaining, but Laura wasn’t listening. Who was
we?
Marsden and James or Tom and Marla? Her mind spun. Tom was still doing
business?
This was a honeymoon. He was supposed to be here for her. Of course, it was a business trip for her—but that was different.

All the way up the street to the bookstore Laura kept telling herself Tom was just being efficient. After all, his business didn’t stop just because he was out of town. And she didn’t expect him to follow her around like a puppy dog all the time they were here. After all, if they’d gone to an investment seminar, she wouldn’t have attended classes with him. But this wasn’t an investment seminar. It was a honeymoon. Wasn’t it?

They couldn’t build bridges to each other if they weren’t together. And Tom had gone off as if he didn’t really care—as if he were relieved to be going to work.
No! I won’t think like that. If he didn’t care at all, he wouldn’t have agreed to come with me in the first place … Now, you’re here to do a job. So do it.

Laura forced herself to focus on the city around her rather than on her own inner turmoil. By the time she had walked the five blocks from the hotel to the bookstore, admiring the imported tweeds and plaids in the windows, quickly scanning the sumptuous China shops, feeling the almost-warmth of the almost-shining sun on her head, she had become Gwendolyn.

She paused to jot a few notes and stuff them in the briefcase that was always an extension of her arm on a research trip. Then she walked faster to make up for lost time. When she began to feel the bounce in her step, she recalled her earlier apprehensions—fear that is always part of the process of writing a novel—the “what if no words come” syndrome. Now with every word that appeared on the notepad she relaxed.

Sometime later she left the bookstore with a heavy package that made her think perhaps her order of activities lacked logic. She dithered: The way to the museum passed the hotel, she could just run the books up to the room. If Tom was already at the museum, though, she didn’t want to make him wait. In the end she shifted her parcel to the other arm and hurried on. She looked briefly at the Classic Car museum. Tom would enjoy that, but it wasn’t a place Gwendolyn would go. Laura could see that her two lives were going to have to make some compromises.

A shadow fell across her path. She had a sense of someone reaching for her arm. “Tom! How did—?” She turned, but no one was there. Laura smiled and shook her head. Writer’s imagination. It could make one feel so foolish sometimes.

She hurried on past the park filled with totem poles—interesting, but not really her thing. And yet, she sensed already that that was one of the charms of Victoria: Olde England alongside Eskimos; Queen Victoria serving tea to Mounties and fur trappers; union jacks and maple leaves. And as if in reply to her musings on cultural mix she nodded to a pole bearing bilingual street signs and a Think Metric mileage marker, giving kilos in white and miles in yellow.

Just finding the main entrance to the enormous, multilevel provincial museum was something of an accomplishment. And then, how to find the rooms she wanted? And most importantly, where would Tom be? “Where are the period rooms?” She approached a guard.

“Third floor, up the escalator, turn right.”

“Thank you.” Laura looked around, still feeling dazed at the every-which-way spaces surrounding her. “Do you ever lose people in here?”

“The odd one.”

“That’ll be me.”

“Not to worry. We always find them at 5:30.”

Laura smiled and turned toward the escalator, shifting her briefcase and books. She hadn’t realized it all weighed so much, but she would just have to get used to it.

“—and then the bit I like best I find when I’ve got 10 minutes to catch my bus.” The lady behind her on the escalator seemed to open a conversation in the middle of a sentence.

“Oh, yes, isn’t life like that.” Laura smiled, but her mind was on finding Tom. She had told him she wanted to see the period rooms first because a member of her writers’ group had recommended them. But would he remember? Should she wait here or go on in? Was he already inside waiting for her? Or was he still on the phone? On the phone with Marla? Well, she certainly wasn’t going to stand around here all morning while he chatted up his paramour.

She strode forward and stepped backward 90 years in history: past an old theatre playing a flickering silent movie on the screen, past the city garage housing a flivver named Elizabeth, past the Columbia Printers displaying a window banner announcing Gold in Yukon. At each building her pen moved across the notepad, but her eyes were searching every man that entered. Where was Tom? How would he ever catch up with her in this maze? Why hadn’t she made more explicit arrangements? And her book purchases were getting heavier. At least she had a shoulder strap for her briefcase. Thank goodness it was soft-sided, lightweight nylon. Even though it somehow felt about a pound heavier today.

She smiled as she heard a solid, male footstep behind her. “There you are!” She turned, then frowned. No one. And yet she was sure she had heard … Oh, well.

She walked on, past the Dominion Drapers displaying elegant Edwardian dresses, Chinese fans, and embroidered satin shoes. Then farther up the street she stepped across the boardwalk into the plush-carpeted Grand Hotel and climbed the wide staircase. Grateful that this was a handson museum, she sank onto the red velvet Victorian loveseat on the landing and dropped her books before continuing her note-taking. Coveting the sculptured decoration around the foyer ceiling for her own living room, she sought the right word. “What do you call that trim at the top of the paper?” she asked a fellow visitor, an older lady wearing two antique brooches at her neck.

“Borrder. Joost a borrder.”

“Oh.”

“It isn’t done now.”

“No, that’s why I like it so much.”

“I’m old enough to remember much of it in my grandmother’s house—but that was in Scotland.” The lady pronounced her homeland’s name with a long
o.

Laura’s informant moved on, and she wrote fast to capture the woman on paper, but her pen bogged down. That was the only trouble with a soft briefcase—it didn’t make a good writing table. She ran her fingers absently over the slick, padded surface.

“Doesn’t that lady look lifelike?” A pair of visitors grinned at her.

“Oh, yes.” Laura smiled back. “Part of the display—but I’m afraid I don’t look sufficiently Victorian.” Everyone here was so friendly and helpful. It seemed Victoria’s residents took a personal responsibility to offer friendship and welcome to their tourist guests.

Leaving the town display, Laura walked into a farmyard and stood for several seconds in front of a horse, expecting him to move his head and scare away the chirping birds. Oh, where was Tom? She wanted to share all this with him. They could be having so much fun experiencing it together. Of course, if it didn’t work—if they couldn’t stick the pieces of their lives back together—she would have to get used to doing such things on her own … No. She refused to think like that.

She moved on into the gold rush era that was such an important part of Canada’s heritage. Descending a mineshaft, she shivered at the chill air produced by water dripping and splashing off a massive cedar water wheel. But she felt a different sort of chill at the sawmill.

She stopped to examine the jagged teeth of the open blade stopped midway into slicing a giant log. What interesting patterns—she jumped in alarm when it whirred into sudden life with a screeching cry. How could she have been standing so close to that? She turned and fled out to the harbor scene.

With everything so realistic she shouldn’t have been surprised when the seagulls flapped and cried, but she had to restrain herself from throwing her arms up as protection.

She turned and stumbled aboard a 200-year-old sailing vessel, the HMS
Discovery.
Other visitors milled around the display, chatting, but she felt isolated and vulnerable. As if one of the passersby might grab her. Silly, but that buzz saw had spooked her. She put a hand to one ear, trying to silence the high-pitched scream she still heard.

She gave herself a shake and looked around. The anthropology rooms were just ahead. That was a subject that fascinated Tom. He would be here. Leaving the Victorian elegance and industrious pioneers behind her, she entered the aboriginal world of Indians and Eskimos. A forest of totem poles rose before her. A mesmerizing drum-accompanied chant filled the air, the throbbing beat leading into a cave of supernatural power filled with ceremonial masks.

The thick blackness of the chant-echoing cave engulfed her. She could see nothing. Thrumming beats and hypnotic incantations echoed from wall to wall. And then a closer sound.

She more felt than heard the breathing behind her. More ominous than the buzz saw had been. In a headlong lunge Laura rushed from the cave. Then stopped, blinking at the sudden light. And her heart leapt. Tom. Tall and straight in his camelhair jacket, his back to her, gazing up at the highest totem pole. She hurried forward, a greeting on her lips.

He turned and held out his arms. Laura started forward, then stopped in dismay. The open arms were not for her. A small blond woman emerged from behind another pole to be engulfed in the embrace.

Chapter
4

Laura’s stifled cry of anguish died in relief as the couple walked toward her. In full face the man didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to Tom.

What’s wrong with me? I must be coming completely unglued.
Laura leaned against a roughly carved totem, forcing herself to breathe slowly to regain her composure. Without thought, a fingertip found its way to her mouth. On the second nibble she caught herself and jammed her hand into her pocket.
Concentrate on your work.

Going down the escalator Laura pulled out her pen and headed a new page: Living Land, Living Sea—natural history of British Col—… The title ended in a scrawl as she lost her balance on the moving stairway and her tired, aching left arm dropped her books. The whole pile scattered the length of the escalator.

She lunged for her books, forgetting the stairway was still moving. The double momentum hurled her heavily down the final steps toward an ominous crash-landing.