I'll Walk Alone - Mary Higgins Clark [5]
Her mother had pointed out that when Anne grew up, her body had filled out and her hair had darkened to a warm, rich auburn shade.
Mom used to joke and call me Green Gables Annie, Zan thought. It was another memory not to be dwelt on today.
Ted had insisted they have dinner tonight, just the two of them. “Melissa will certainly understand,” he’d said when he phoned. “I want to remember our little boy with the only other person who knows how I’m feeling on his birthday. Please, Zan.”
They were meeting at the Four Seasons at 7:30. The one problem with living in Battery Park City is the traffic jams to and from midtown, Zan thought. I don’t want to bother coming back downtown to change, and I don’t want to bother dragging a different outfit with me to the office. I’ll wear the black suit with the fur collar. It’s dressy enough for the evening.
Fifteen minutes later she was on the street, a tall, slender young woman of thirty-two, dressed in a black fur-collared suit and high-heeled boots, wearing dark sunglasses, her designer shoulder bag in hand, her auburn hair blowing across her shoulders as she stepped down from the curb to hail a cab.
3
Over dinner, Alvirah had told Willy about the funny way that guy was looking at their friend Fr. Aiden when he was leaving the Reconciliation Room, and at breakfast she brought it up again. “I was dreaming about that guy last night, Willy,” she said, “and that’s not a good sign. When I dream about a person, it usually means there’s going to be trouble.”
Still in their bathrobes, they were sitting cozily at the round table in the dining area of their Central Park South apartment. Outside, as she had already pointed out to Willy, it was a typical March day, cold and blustery. The wind was rattling the furniture on their balcony, and they could see that across the street, Central Park was almost deserted.
Willy looked affectionately across the table at his wife of forty-five years. Often referred to as the image of the late legendary Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, he was a big man with a full head of snow-white hair and, as Alvirah told him, the bluest eyes under the sun.
In his fond eyes, Alvirah was beautiful. He didn’t notice that no matter how hard she tried, she’d always be trying to lose ten or fifteen pounds. Neither did he notice that only a week after coloring her hair, the gray roots became visible around her hairline, the hair that, thanks to Dale of London, was now a subdued russet brown. In the old days, before they won the lottery, when she colored it herself over the bathroom sink in their apartment in Queens, it had been a flaming red-orange shade.
“Honey, from what you tell me that guy had probably been getting up the courage to go to confession. And then when he saw Fr. Aiden leaving, he was trying to decide whether or not to catch up with him.”
Alvirah shook her head. “There’s more to it than that.” She reached for the teapot and poured herself a second cup and her expression changed. “You know that today is little Matthew’s birthday. He’d be five years old.”
“Or is five years old,” Willy corrected her. “Alvirah, I have intuition, too. I say that little guy is alive somewhere.”
“We talk about Matthew as if we know him,” Alvirah sighed as she added a sugar substitute to her cup.
“I feel as though we do know him,” Willy said, soberly.
They were silent for a minute, both remembering how nearly two years ago, after Alvirah’s column about the missing child in the New York Globe had been posted on the Internet, Alexandra More-land had phoned her. “Mrs. Meehan,” she had said, “I can’t tell you how much Ted and I appreciate what you wrote. If Matthew was taken by someone who desperately wanted a child, you conveyed in that article how desperately we want him back. The suggestions you made about how someone could leave him in a safe place and avoid being recognized on security cameras might just make a difference.”
Alvirah had agonized for her.