The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [38]
Smiling, Eddie watches her flounce through the swinging door. “Looks like you.”
“No.”
“Reminds me of you.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Now, that's not very welcoming.”
“You have a reason, what is it?”
“No! No reason.” He laughs. “I was in the area. Thought I'd stop in, say hello.” He is unfolding a newspaper. “Pretty impressive. Family paper.” He turns the page, reads the masthead: OLIVER P. HAMMOND, PUBLISHER. KENNETH L. HAMMOND, ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER.
“What do you want?” She already knows. Money.
“You've turned into a very skeptical person, Nora.”
“I'd like you to leave, please.”
“Please! So, it's a request, it's up to me.”
“It's not a request. I'm telling you, I want you to leave! Now!”
“Nora,” he chides, holding up his hands. “I thought you'd be happy to see me. I'm all right. See! Aren't you relieved? It was all so crazy that night, so confusing.” He grins and his dimples deepen with an intimate sweetness that turns her stomach. “I was so worried about you. All this time I been wondering, did some psycho pick her up? Does she even know what happened? Does she care?”
“So you refuse to leave, is that what's going on here?” She comes around the counter nearer the phone.
“No, I just … actually, I'm a little hurt. I just wanted to set your mind at ease, that's all.” He picks up a stack of photographs from the counter and riffles through them. They were taken on Chloe's junior class trip to New York City. “Good-looking kids. Think the world's their oyster, that nothing bad's ever going to happen to them.” He chuckles. “Good thing they don't know,” he sighs, grinning at the picture of Chloe pulling herself up the ladder from the hotel pool. She is wearing a skimpy bikini that Nora said not to bring. Suggestive enough on a beach, but definitely inappropriate on a class trip, especially in such close quarters as an indoor pool. “Now you've even got bikini rules?” Chloe laughed. “That's right!” Nora snapped back, troubled by the echo of her own mother's stridency.
“Like us,” he continues. “We didn't know, did we?”
There was no us, no we, she almost says, but that's what he wants. She snatches the picture from him. “I'm really very busy.”
“Go ahead, don't let me hold you up.” He pulls out a stool. “I'll just sit here while you do whatever it is you do.”
“My husband'll be home any minute.”
“Great! Unless … he doesn't know about us.” He laughs softly.
She takes the head of lettuce Chloe laid out and begins to tear the leaves into the salad spinner in the bar sink.
“So what happened? Where'd you go? I always wondered.”
She turns the water on high. Fill in the blanks and maybe he'll leave. “I got a ride.” She speaks so quietly he has to lean forward.
“What about me? Did you ever think, ‘Oh, poor Eddie. I should've stayed and helped him out a little’?” He wrings his hands, that same way, slender fingers writhing through one another.
“I was upset.” She stares at him.
“Yeah!” Like himself, he means.
“I was very young.”
“That's your excuse?” he asks in disbelief.
“Excuse?” Floating romaine leaves brim over the spinner into the sink.
“For letting me take the fall. Twenty years I been in.”
Her knees sag. “I don't know what you mean.”
“Never gave you up, though. Gentleman to the end, I'm proud of that. ‘So who is she? What's her name?’ they kept asking. ‘I don't know,’ I said. ‘I don't know’” He shrugs. “Just kept playing dumb. ‘Some chick,’ I said. ‘Some chick by the side of the road, thumbing a ride, next thing I know some guy's passed out in his car.’ ‘No,’ they go. ‘Try dead.’”
Water, the only sound, it keeps running.
“He didn't die.” She can barely breathe.
“Really?” Again, his amusement. “That what you wanna hear?” He jams the faucet down, shutting off the water. The sudden silence stunning, like the jolt of an electrical shock. “That what you been telling yourself all these years?” He slips a business card from his breast pocket, scribbles on the back. “My cell.” He slides off the stool.
She doesn't pick it up until he is gone.
HARMONY LTD.
P.O BOX 0367
NEW YORK CITY