Just Take My Heart - Mary Higgins Clark [36]
Kathleen had a small part in a revival of The Sound of Music at the Barrymore. It had been love at first sight for both of us. We got married the same week I took the job with Doc Yates. We were both twenty-four years old.
Deeply immersed in the past, Gregg jogged northward, aware of neither the chilling wind, nor of the other earlv-morning runners. We had eight years together, he thought. I went up the ladder fast at the agency. Doc groomed me for his job from day one. Kathleen worked pretty steadily but the minute she got pregnant, she said, happily, “Gregg, when our baby arrives, I'm staying home. You'll be the sole breadwinner in this family.”
Gregg Aldrich did not realize that he was smiling.
Those years had been so tender, so satisfying. And then to have Kathleen diagnosed with the breast cancer that had killed his mother and to lose her so quickly, to come home from the funeral to a sob?bing three-year-old Katie who was screaming for Mommy had been almost unbearable.
Work was the answer, and in those first years after Kathleen was gone, he had worked almost constantly. As much as possible, he handled things from home in the morning until Katie went to nurs?ery school at noon. Then he arranged his hours to be with her in the late afternoon. He'd go to cocktail parties and first nights, and film openings with clients, only after they'd had a good amount of time together.
Then when Katie was seven, he had met Natalie at the Tony Awards. She was a nominee and was wearing an emerald green gown and jewelry that, she confided to him, was purely on loan from Cartier. “If I lose this necklace, promise to shoot me,” she'd joked.
Promise to shoot me. Gregg felt his guts twist with pain.
She didn't win that night, and the guy who escorted her got drunk. I took Natalie back to her place in the Village, he remem?bered. I went upstairs for a nightcap and she showed me the play she'd been asked to read. I knew it and told her to forget it, that it had been bounced off half the major actresses in Hollywood and it was a lousy script. She told me her agent was really pushing her to sign for it and I told her in that case to drop her agent, then I fin?ished my drink and gave her my card.
Two weeks later Natalie had called for an appointment, he re?called. And that was the beginning of a whirlwind romance that cul?minated in the Actors' Chapel of St. Malachy's Church. Three months after their first meeting, he and Natalie were married. By then he had taken over as her agent. In the four years we were to?gether, I did everything I could to help her make her big break?through, Gregg thought. But didn't I always suspect that our marriage couldn't last?
He circled around the reservoir and began to run south. How much of trying to reconcile with her had to do with real love and how much did it have to do with obsession? he asked himself. I was obsessed with her. But I was also obsessed with the idea of recaptur?ing what I had, a wife who loved me, a good mother for Katie. I didn't want to lose Natalie and begin all over again.
I didn't want Natalie to throw away her career and it was going to happen. Leo Kearns is a good agent but he would have tried to cash in on her, do what her first agent was doing all over again.
Why did I follow her to Cape Cod? What was I thinking? What was I thinking the morning that she died?
Without realizing it, Gregg had run all the way to Central Park South and started north again.
When he got back to the apartment, he found Katie, dressed and frantically worried. “Daddy, it's seven thirty. We've got to leave in ten minutes. Where were you?”
“Seven thirty! Katie, I'm sorry. I was thinking things through. I had no idea of the time.”
Gregg rushed to shower. That's what happened the morning Natalie died, he thought. I had no idea of the time. And I didn't drive to New Jersey then any more than I drove there now.
For the first time he felt certain of it.
Almost certain! he corrected himself.
Just Take My Heart
24
At nine o'clock Emily called the first of her two corroborating