Tiffany Girl (55 page)

“No, she keeps the door closed so that her paints don’t smell up the whole downstairs.”

He eased his grip. “Why didn’t you tell me she’d moved?”

“You didn’t ask.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I didn’t ask about Mrs. Holliday, yet you told me when she went to and from Texas to visit her parents. I didn’t ask about Oyster, yet you told me when he left. I didn’t ask about Miss Love, yet you told me when she got a new roommate.”

“You did, too, ask me about Mr. Oyster—and that’s when Flossie moved to your room, by the way.”

He stared at his, or
her
, door.

“Don’t worry,” Maman said. “You needn’t go in if you don’t want to. She should be home in fifteen minutes and you can give the book directly to her.”

He glanced at a clock on the wall, then surged to his feet. “I’ll be right back.”

Swiping the book off the dresser, he crossed the hall, opened his old door, and froze. The potent odor of oil paints and turpentine hit him full force. The bed was in the same place as before, but it was covered with her white, fluffy linens. His desk held a palette, jars with brushes, tubes of oil paints, rags with an assortment of colored stains, and a jar of dirty turpentine.

His chair had been moved by the window, where she had an easel set up. Resting upon it was a canvas with a partially painted child wrapped in winter clothing and attempting to skate on the ice.

Completed paintings covered the walls. All of them with her signature in the corner. Of their own volition, his legs carried him inside her self-made gallery. A young girl with yellow sausage curls fed ducks at Central Park, a scruffy boy sold newspapers on a corner, a nanny pushed an elaborate baby carriage down a walkway.

But it was an oversized portrait of Cat that drew him like the gravitational pull of the earth. Cat was on her back and her paws swatted at a man’s hand, a hand that was obviously playing with her, a hand that looked very familiar.

Swallowing, he turned away, then froze again. Wedged between the wall and the mirror was the phenakistascope he’d left behind. Removing it, he studied the photographs. The feelings he’d had for Flossie that day resurfaced in a surprising rush.

He held the phenakistascope in front of the mirror, spun it, then watched the two of them dance. He didn’t think he’d ever forget the dress she’d been wearing or the way her hair had loosened or the scent of rosewater on her neck. He squeezed the handle. Die and be blamed, but he missed her. He returned it to its spot, wondering if she ever watched it anymore or if it was there merely to keep from hurting Mr. Holliday’s feelings.

Tossing the book onto the bed, he exited the room, closed the door, crossed the hall, and pulled Maman to her feet. “I have to go.”

“Running away, are we?”

“Absolutely.” He gave her a fierce hug. “I love you. I’ll try to see you within the next couple of weeks—before Christmas, in any event.”

“Coward,” she mumbled.

“Shrew,” he quipped back. Then he gave her a kiss and all but flew out the door to the streetcar stop, until he realized Flossie would be disembarking there. Spinning around, he walked to a different one. He didn’t want to force her into a meeting with him. Fifteen months might have passed since he’d last seen her, but that didn’t mean time had healed her wounds. Of course, she’d sent him that Christmas card last year, but no matter how many times he read it, it was simply too cryptic. It left too much room for interpretation.

Even if it had been an olive branch, what if she didn’t like the new him? With all the things that were different about him, he wouldn’t even know where to start with her. What to say.

No, he’d done as she’d asked. He’d written her a book, and there was nothing cryptic about it. He’d laid himself completely bare. Either she’d accept the new him or she wouldn’t.

By the time he arrived at the unfamiliar streetcar stop, he was cold, wet, and nervous. Yet his thoughts kept circling back to the notion that through the summer, the fall, and well into the winter she’d been working at his desk, sitting in his chair, and sleeping in his bed.

FRONTISPIECE 
⁴⁰

“Friendship is a sheltering tree.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1797

CHAPTER

80

O
pening her door, Flossie stepped into her room and closed her eyes, filling her lungs with the wonderful scent of paints. It was good to be home. She pulled off her gloves, then noticed a black book making an indention on her white downy bed.

Picking it up, she glanced at the spine, the title embossed in gold.
Beneath a Sheltering Tree
. Frowning, she opened it, then froze.
By I. D. Claire
.

Reeve had written a book? How had it gotten in her room?

She looked over her shoulder, then walked to her door and peered down the hall. It was empty. The
click-click-click
of Mrs. Dinwiddie’s knitting needles drew her attention.

She crossed the hall. “Mrs. Dinwiddie?”

“Hello, my dear. Welcome home. How was work?”

“Fine, fine. Um, I found this on my bed.” She lifted the book.

Mrs. Dinwiddie nodded. “Yes, it’s Reeve’s new novel. Isn’t it marvelous?”

“I didn’t know he’d written one.”

“Oh, my, yes. He started working on it right after Christmas.”

Flossie rubbed a thumb against the spine. She’d asked him to write a book in the Christmas card she’d sent him, but he’d not bothered to respond, hadn’t so much as acknowledged the candy
or fruitcake, nor the card she’d painted—though Mrs. Dinwiddie had assured her he’d received them.

She shook out her skirt. “Had he been working on the book before Christmas?”

“No, he had no plans whatsoever to write fiction again until suddenly, right after Christmas, he started a book out of the blue. Finished it in February, sold it in March. Now, here it is. He brought it over himself.”

Flossie looked down at it again. Had her card been the impetus for it after all? “He was here? At 438?”

“He certainly was. You just missed him.”

Crinkling her brows, she glanced again down the hallway. She would have loved to have seen him. He had to have known she’d be home any minute. If she’d just missed him, then it was because he’d wanted her to.

Mrs. Dinwiddie pulled at the yarn in her basket, then continued to knit. “I told him it was okay to leave the book in your room. I hope that’s all right.”

“Yes, of course. It was very generous of him to give one to me. Did he bring one for everyone?”

“Generosity had nothing to do with it. And no, he brought only you a copy. And me, of course.”

“Of course.” Generosity had nothing to do with it? What did that mean? But she couldn’t quite get up the gumption to ask. Mrs. Dinwiddie was well ensconced in Reeve’s camp. Flossie had seen the deluge of letters he’d written to the woman and feared that anything said might very well be reported back to him.

If only Mrs. Dinwiddie had shared his letters with her, but the woman had never offered and Flossie had never asked.

She bit her lip. “How is he?”

“Handsome and charming as ever.”

“I see.” In a bit of a daze, Flossie took a step back. “Well, thank you. I was—I was just wondering.”

Mrs. Dinwiddie continued to knit, the
click-click-click
of her needles loud in the sudden silence.

Flossie returned to her room, then closed the door and leaned against it. He’d been in her room. Her gaze shot to the painting of Cat, then to the phenakistascope, then to the collection of scrapbooks by her bed. They appeared undisturbed, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t seen them.

Rushing to them, she picked up the one on top. It had all of the features he’d written this year. The scrapbook below it held his articles from last year. The scrapbook below that had each installment from
The Merry Maid of Mumford Street
. She’d saved them even before she’d known who I. D. Claire really was.

She’d almost burned them when she’d discovered the identity of Marylee Merrily, but something had kept her from it, and that same something had prodded her to glue them into a scrapbook.

She sank down onto the bed, her stomach bobbing like a buoy. What if he’d seen them? What would he think? And what had he thought when he’d discovered she was in his room? Had he thought she was pining for him? How desperate she must have looked. Just like the old maid in the board game.

She covered her face with her hands, then remembered he’d brought her a book. A book he’d started writing after he’d received her Christmas card.

She peeked up over her hands at the black volume she’d tossed on the bed. Grabbing a buttonhook on her side table, she undid her boots, pulled them off, then removed her watch pin from her shirtwaist. Six o’clock already.

She took off her skirt and shirtwaist, draped them over her chair, then crawled up into bed in her petticoats and held the book in her lap.

Who was the heroine? Was it Marylee? Or someone like her? Surely not. Still, her heart began to hammer.

She opened it.

BENEATH A SHELTERING TREE

by

I. D. Claire

She studied the frontispiece of a man standing beneath a leafless tree in the winter, alone and exposed. She tried to read the artist’s signature, but couldn’t make it out. She read the caption beneath it.

“Friendship is a sheltering tree.”

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1797

She turned the page.

DEDICATION

To my little magpie.

The songbird who changed my winter to spring.

You are never far from my thoughts, my mind, my heart.

I’m sorry.

She covered her mouth with her hand. Her pulse shot up. Her face turned hot. Her breathing became labored. She read the words over and over, trying to comprehend, wanting to believe. Believe that perhaps, just perhaps, he hadn’t forgotten about her after all.

He was sorry? For what? Then she knew. For something she’d forgiven him for so long ago that she’d almost forgotten their last words. Her last words.

A pox on you, Reeve Wilder, you spineless, arrogant, lily-livered, son of a sea cook!

Oh, how she’d regretted those words, wished she could take them back. She’d read Marylee’s story over and over. At first, she’d read it as a sort of self-flagellation, but the more she’d read it, the
more she saw when Reeve’s feelings for her had begun to change. When he’d begun to respect her as a person, then desire her as a woman. That’s when she’d realized he was Mr. Bookish.

As the year progressed, her older and wiser self began to recognize the naiveté he’d seen in her and then portrayed in Marylee. At first, he’d portrayed it in a most uncomplimentary fashion. But as Marylee and Mr. Bookish began to walk down the path of The Old Maid Board Game, the things that Bookish had at first despised, he eventually came to cherish. When Marylee’s foolishness endangered her, Bookish stepped in and protected her, saved her, even when, at times, he was saving her from herself.