The Secret History - Donna Tartt [247]
We sat down on a cramped Victorian sofa, as far from the desk as possible.
Francis was jittery and kept glancing around. “I don’t want to stay here,” he whispered, his lips barely moving, close to my ear. “I’m afraid the wife will come back.”
“This guy is from hell, isn’t he?”
“She’s worse.”
The innkeeper was, very pointedly, not looking in our direction. In fact, his back was to us. I put my hand on Francis’s arm. “I’ll be right back,” I whispered. “Tell him I went looking for the men’s room.”
The stairs were carpeted and I managed to get up them without making much noise. I hurried down the corridor until I saw 2-C, and 2-B next to it. The doors were blank and foreboding, but this was no time to hesitate. I knocked on 2-C. No answer. I knocked again, louder this time. “Camilla!” I said.
At this, a small dog began to raise a racket, down the hall in 2-E. Nix that, I thought, and was about to knock on the third door, when suddenly it opened and there stood a middle-aged lady in a golfing skirt. “Excuse me,” she said. “Are you looking for someone?”
It was funny, I thought, as I shot up the last flight of stairs, but I’d had a premonition they’d be on the top floor. In the corridor I passed a gaunt, sixtyish woman—print dress, harlequin glasses, sharp nasty face like a poodle—carrying a stack of folded towels. “Wait!” she yelped. “Where are you going?”
But I was already past her, down the hall, banging at the door of 3-A. “Camilla!” I shouted. “It’s Richard! Let me in!”
And then, there she was, like a miracle: sunlight streaming behind her into the hall, barefoot and blinking with surprise. “Hello,” she said, “hello! What are you doing here?” And, behind my shoulder, the innkeeper’s wife: “What do you think you’re doing here? Who are you?”
“It’s all right,” Camilla said.
I was out of breath. “Let me in,” I gasped.
She pulled the door shut. It was a beautiful room—oak wainscoting, fireplace, only one bed, I noticed, in the room beyond, bedclothes tangled at the foot.… “Is Henry here?” I said.
“What’s wrong?” Bright circles of color burned high in her cheeks. “It’s Charles, isn’t it? What’s happened?”
Charles. I’d forgotten about him. I struggled to catch my breath. “No,” I said. “I don’t have time to explain. We’ve got to find Henry. Where is he?”
“Why—” she looked at the clock—“I believe he’s at Julian’s office.”
“Julian’s?”
“Yes. What’s the matter?” she said, seeing the astonishment on my face. “He had an appointment, I think, at two.”
I hurried downstairs to get Francis before the innkeeper and his wife had a chance to compare notes.
“What should we do?” said Francis on the drive back to school. “Wait outside and watch for him?”
“I’m afraid we’ll lose him. I think one of us better run up and get him.”
Francis lit a cigarette. The match flame wavered. “Maybe it’s okay,” he said. “Maybe Henry managed to get hold of it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. But I was thinking the same thing. If Henry saw the letterhead, I was pretty sure he’d try to take it, and I was pretty sure he’d be more efficient about it than Francis or me. Besides—it sounded petty but it was true—Henry was Julian’s favorite. If he put his mind to it, he could coerce away the whole letter on some pretext of giving it to the police, having the typing analyzed, who knew what he might come up with?
Francis glanced at me sideways. “If Julian found out about this,” he said, “what do you think he would do?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t. It was such an unthinkable prospect that the only responses I could imagine him having were melodramatic and improbable. Julian suffering a fatal heart attack. Julian weeping uncontrollably, a broken man.
“I can’t believe he’d turn us in.”
“I don’t know.”
“But he couldn’t. He loves us.”
I didn’t say anything. Regardless of what Julian felt for me, there was no denying that what I felt for him was love and trust of a very genuine sort. As my own