The Pilot's Wife_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [62]
Robert studied the number, and she could see from the flicker of his eyes that he understood what she was thinking.
“A U.K. phone number, you think,” he said.
“It’s a London exchange, isn’t it? The one eight one?”
“I think so.”
“Isn’t that the right number of digits?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Let me see,” she said. She put out her hand, and Robert gave her back the ticket, though not without a certain reluctance.
“I’m curious,” she said, defending herself. “If it’s a phone number, why is it written on this ticket? And this is recent. He must have bought this ticket the day before he left.” She looked at the ticket’s date. “Yes, he did,” she said. “December fourteenth.”
This was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, she thought as she walked to the telephone by the sofa. She picked up the receiver and tapped in the numbers. Almost immediately, she could hear a distinctly foreign ring, a sound that always put her in mind of old-fashioned Parisian telephones with spindly black cradles.
A voice answered at the other end, and Kathryn, startled by the voice, unprepared for it, glanced quickly up at Robert. She’d given no thought at all to what she wanted to say. A woman said hello again, this time in a slightly irritated voice. Not an old woman, not a girl.
Kathryn searched for a name. She wanted to ask: Did you ever know a man named Jack Lyons? but the question suddenly seemed absurd.
“I must have the wrong number,” Kathryn said quickly. “Sorry to have bothered you.”
“Who is this?” the woman asked, wary now.
Kathryn couldn’t bring herself to say her name.
There was the click of a phone hung up in annoyance. Followed by silence.
Her hands shaking badly, Kathryn replaced the receiver and sat down. She felt rattled much in the same way she once had as a girl, in junior high school, when she had called a boy she liked but hadn’t been able to say her name.
“Let this go,” Robert said quietly from the table.
Kathryn rubbed her hands along the thighs of her jeans to stop their trembling.
“Listen,” she said. “Can you find out something for me?” “What?”
“Could you find out the names of all of the crew Jack has ever flown with?”
“Why?” he asked.
“I might be able to recognize a name if I saw it. Or put a name to a face I’ve once seen.”
“If that’s what you want,” he said slowly. “It’s hard to know what I want,” she said.
While Robert went up to Jack’s office to get the crew list, Kathryn spread out all of the other papers from the crumpled wad and scanned them. She noticed particularly the receipt from the post office for a twenty-two-dollar purchase. Perhaps it was not for stamps, she thought, peering at the receipt more closely. She opened up the piece of white-lined paper and looked at the lines of poetry Jack had copied.
Here in the narrow passage and the pitiless north, perpetual Betrayals, relentless resultless fighting.
A random fury of dirks in the dark: a struggle for survival Of hungry blind cells of life in the womb.
What did the poem mean? She glanced up at the white-out beyond the windows. Already there was a significant accumulation on the lawn, and she thought she should probably call Julia to make sure she and Mattie were OK. She wondered if Mattie was up yet.
She unfolded the second piece of lined paper — the remember list. Bergdorf FedEx robe to arrive 20th.
Odd, she thought, but a FedEx package had not come on the twentieth. She was certain of that.
Rising from the table, she once again pondered the significance of the lines of poetry. They meant little to her now, but perhaps she could find the whole poem and that would suggest an idea to her. She walked over to the bookshelf. It was little more than a tall tier of wooden planks, stretching nearly to the ceiling. Jack had read books about airplanes and biographies about men, sometimes a novel with a clever plot. For her part, Kathryn mostly read fiction written by women, usually contemporary novels, although she had a special fondness for Edith Wharton