The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [24]
Did he know about Midnight? Did the blond call girl know? Did anyone who visited Allure know the answers he needed?
There was no other sound inside the small office, only what was coming from the VCR.
Stefanovitch hadn’t looked over at Sarah McGinniss for the last several minutes.
“Two thousand dollars a night.” Stefanovitch finally spoke. He felt that he had to say something, to break the tension.
“She’s very clever,” Sarah McGinniss said from the other side of the room. “She never let him touch her.”
23
Sarah McGinniss; Kennedy International Airport
“DADDY! DADDY!” SAM hollered. His little-boy voice was light with joy and expectation.
At that instant, Sarah winced. Her pain was sharp and immediate, almost overwhelming. Roger the Dodger was striding toward them inside the streamlined, crimson and blue TWA terminal. He was straightening imaginary wrinkles in his corduroy sports jacket and trousers. Daddy was home.
His face, as usual, looked nervous and too thin. He finally smiled and waved at Sam, both arms crisscrossing high over his head.
Sarah had to reach inside herself for a deep breath. Roger’s smile made her remember how the two of them had been in the very beginning, for almost six years, actually. She remembered how funny and charming Roger could be, when he was in the mood. Plus the undeniable fact that he had been a good father, a real daddy, right up until the time he had left them.
“Hello, pumpkin.” Roger immediately picked Sam up. In her mind’s eye, Sarah could see him stooping and picking Sam up hundreds of times before that. She noticed how Sam was watching them both, still trying to understand what could have happened two years ago between his mom and dad. Sarah was still trying to understand that one herself.
“How are you, Sarah?” Roger finally acknowledged her. “Looking all summer-brown and pretty,” he answered his own superficial question. “You too, sport. Do you like your mom’s beach house?”
“Sure, it’s neat. Are you coming out there with us?” Sam asked, once again checking them out, both their reactions to his innocent-sounding question.
“Well, I don’t know. We’ll see, pal, but I think there will be enough other things for us to do for a while. I was thinking of taking Sam upstate to see my parents,” Roger announced to Sarah.
It was purely informational. He had Sam for two weeks during the summer, and two more weeks at Christmas, no strings attached. He could take him anywhere he liked. When he had called Sarah yesterday, Roger had even made a crack that this was a good time for Sam to be away—while she was working on such a potentially “dangerous” story.
Sarah was conscious of the way Roger had used pumpkin, pal, and sport to address Sam. It was a little like the way she might avoid using the same word twice in a sentence in her writing, very self-conscious and uncomfortable. She was surprised at how hard these occasional meetings continued to be.
“Do you remember going up to Batavia?” Sarah asked Sam. She sensed that her voice was strained and sounded slightly unreal.
“Sure Sam remembers,” his father said.
“Of course. Grandpa and Grandma live there. The snow gets twenty feet high in the winter. Mom calls it Outer Bavaria.”
“She’s quite the writer. Great imagination.”
Sarah didn’t want to let Sam go, and the three of them continued to exchange cheery, if hollow-sounding, small talk in front of a flight insurance kiosk.
Both of them waved good-bye, their own zany two-handed wave. They smiled as if this were no big deal.
Sarah finally forced herself to turn away. She started to walk back toward the airport parking lot and her car.
She noticed that she was biting her lower lip, and then, finally, she was crying. Hot tears streamed down both her cheeks, her throat, and under the collar of her blouse. Her mascara streaked, but she didn’t care. She coughed and began to choke as strangers stared.