by Gail Hewitt
"How did you manage to get all this done?" he asked.
"Is it okay?" she asked tentatively. He didn't answer right away, and she thought he was displeased. Then she saw there were tears in his eyes.
"You're wonderful," he said, coming to her and holding her so tightly she could barely breathe. "I love you," he whispered in her ear. "You'll never know how much."
They didn't open the packages until after Christmas dinner, taking turns, Maggie going first. She was impressed at the creativity he showed — much of the stuff was silly, but it was the sort of silliness that she particularly liked. As for the handsome hair clip that was obviously intended to be her real gift, it was beautiful, the cultured pearls and tiny rubies glowing against a gold setting.
"If you don't like it," he said anxiously, "you can take it back. I got it at Maier & Berkele. I kept the receipt."
"I love it," she said sincerely, sliding the clip into her hair. "Now it's your turn."
His reaction was gratifying, particularly to the camel-colored cashmere sweater. When everything else had been opened, she reached behind the tree and pulled out the last package, the Florentine-paper-wrapped box.
She handed it to him, suddenly feeling very shy.
"I thought we agreed we wouldn't go overboard," he said, attempting to be disapproving but failing.
"It's nothing I bought," she told him. "You'll see."
He unwrapped the package carefully, and removed the lid from the box. Undoing the gold tissue with which she'd enfolded the watch, he caught his breath.
"It was my father's," she said quietly.
Tom looked up at her, a question mark in his eyes. "Are you sure you want to part with this? I wouldn't."
"I'm not parting with it," she reminded him, "unless you're withdrawing your proposal." She tried to smile, but she knew her voice sounded on the verge of tears.
"It's beautiful. Show me the best way to open it."
She took the watch and carefully depressed the tiny latch. The cover opened.
"It's you, isn't it?" Tom said, looking from the photograph opposite the watch face to her.
"My father always kept a photograph of me inside," she said. "That was the last one taken before he died."
"I'll take good care of it," he told her, carefully refolding the gold tissue and leaning over to kiss her.
On the afternoon of Christmas Day, Elizabeth McLaurin called to say that she was coming home. A dreadful virus had swept the ship, she told Maggie, and they were being flown back to New York. She thought they'd probably spend a couple of days in the city before returning to Atlanta, but they'd definitely be back no later than the following Thursday.
"Call Anna and tell her to have the house open by Wednesday, and you can start planning to come home as well. Eugenia tells me that she isn't happy with Carolyn's grades and is making her come home next term."
"But I can keep the carriage house, can't I?" Maggie asked with desperation.
She had to be able to keep the carriage house.
"You cannot remain there unchaperoned, Maggie. Be realistic for once. Just see that you're packed and ready to come home when I arrive."
It was all Maggie could do to keep from bursting into tears. She'd counted on being allowed to stay in residence here even after her mother returned. Otherwise, how could she realistically keep up her regular meetings with Tom?
"Don't pout. We've each had a nice vacation. Now it's time to return to our normal routine."
"Yes ma'am," Maggie said dispiritedly.
"Are you fully yourself?" her mother asked suspiciously. "Is there some reason you're reluctant to return home?"
"No ma'am," Maggie managed to force shock into her voice at the suggestion. "It's just that I'm in the middle of writing a big paper."
"You can work on it just as well at home," her mother said forcefully. "I almost forgot — I hope you're having an enjoyable Christmas."
"Yes ma'am," Maggie forced cheerfulness into her voice.
The phone call out of the way, Maggie was free to go over to Tom's as they'd planned, but she sat on the tiny sofa in the carriage house and tried frantically to think of some way around going home. She'd thought she'd have until the end of January to get ready for this moment, and she felt blindsided by the abruptness of her mother's announcement.
Tom didn't take the news well.
"You've got to move back home?"
"Yes. She's making me."
"You're a grown woman," he protested. "She can't make you do anything you don't want to do."
"She can as long as she's paying the bills," Maggie pointed out. It made a good excuse, certainly preferable to admitting the truth: that she was just seventeen and her mother did indeed feel she had the right to tell her what to do.
"She can't control you forever," Tom said firmly. "We can get along without her money. I've got some savings, and I've been offered a job working part-time while I finish at Tech, and you can always get a part-time job too. We can make it. Let's get married before she comes home."
"What about my birth certificate?" she reminded him.
"Damn." He thought for a moment. "I've got an idea. The sister of the kid I'm tutoring works for the whatever-you-call it, the department that keeps the records. I bet if I asked him she could figure out a way to get a copy of the certificate fast."
Maggie panicked. If he got it that way, he'd almost certainly look at it, and he'd know the truth. What he'd do if he discovered she was just seventeen, she wasn't sure, but she wasn't going to risk it. This was too important. She'd tell him some day, but at a point in their lives where a year or two wouldn't matter.
"Not in the middle of the holidays," she pointed out, trying to sound grownup and sensible. "The state offices won't reopen for days, and Mother could be here as early as day after tomorrow. I can get the key to the safe deposit box then."
"Just be sure you do," he murmured, holding her to him. "I have this feeling that something's going to happen, that if we don't do it now we won't do it at all."
She reached up and nibbled at his ear. "Nothing's going to happen. Everything will be just the way it is right now." Except, of course, it hadn't been.
The world had splintered, and no matter where she turned she couldn't see a whole reality any more. So she had lain here, in this bed, doubly victimized by the evidence of her own ears listening to Tom making love to another girl and of her mother's determination to keep her quarantined from anything outside parental control. Here she had obsessed about Tom, waited for Tom, yearned for Tom, ached for Tom.
She must, she remembered, have literally cried buckets. Would they have been the softest tears, as a much later professor had quoted a poet as saying of the crying of a young girl? She didn't think so. They had made her head ache as they started, burned as they streamed from her eyes, and left her feeling as drained as if her insides had been literally scraped. They had leached away her appetite. They had sometimes made her so nauseated that she would barely make it into the bathroom before retching or at least suffering dry heaves over the toilet in the pretty white-and-lilac space.
How could he?Sometimes she would start to retch, leaning over in the tub, the shower's hard stream hitting her in the back.
She never heard from him again. Time had enabled her to work through her feelings toward him, and — from her perspective — the young man who had begun as the ultimate object of desire became the most-hateful person who'd ever lived and then, finally, was transmogrified into a master sexual strategist who'd known exactly the things to say and do to create the mood to elicit the total surrender of her body to his in that tiny room with its spartan bed and no frame of reference save what he'd created.
Now, all these years later, she lay in the bed with the fishnet canopy, the sheets fresh with the scent of rosemary, her adult self a multi-layered version of the girl who had lain here then. She thought about how defining an event Tom's betrayal and abandonment had been in her life. She thought, too, about ho
w unnecessary all the pain had been. He hadn't abandoned her. He'd evidently loved her as she'd loved him. She thought about what he'd said at Lake View, about what they had missed, what they might have had if they'd not been such idiots.
Truth be told, she wasn't sure how she felt about all of that now. Had Tom's seeking her out and his admission that he thought she'd dumped him turned the whole thing from tragedy into farce? Had she really pined herself almost to death for nothing? She supposed at least now she could, if she stopped the memories at just the right time, enjoy the recollection of the positive experiences they'd shared – the laughs, the long talks, the almost incandescent intimacy, and (she admitted) the things they'd done to each other in the quiet dimness of the little bedroom.
It was the first time she'd allowed herself the luxury of reexperiencing the good times they'd had, and the intensity of it made her breath catch involuntarily. If she'd had a vibrator at hand, she'd have used it. As it was, her fingers instinctively slipped between her legs and pressed down with frantic intensity, as they so often had back then, as if in pretense that it was Tom touching her, Tom about to do things with her, to her.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid . . . but she did not stop.
Afterwards, she thought about the question Tom had so unexpectedly posed this morning: did she feel there was unfinished business between them? She hadn't thought so. Now she wondered. Was it possible that, at some level, Miles had been right?
Prep Time And A Lot of Questions
Maggie, not wanting to face Tom and any more of his questions, had dreaded the Christmas flight from Atlanta back to New York. In the event, she needn't have worried. He and the three men who'd met with him on the morning's trip had already returned on a different plane. That this was nothing unusual was indicated by Mrs. Evans' unsurprised attitude. "It looks as if it'll be just us, my dear. Tell me about your day."
"It was very nice," Maggie told her, then described the lunch Amanda had laid in the dining room.
"She sounds like an excellent caregiver, your Amanda."
"She is," Maggie said sincerely. "I'm lucky to have her. My mother is lucky to have her."
"Alzheimer's is such a cruel disease," Mrs. Evans said thoughtfully. "My husband suffered from it. Or perhaps Tom has told you?"
"No ma'am. All Tom has said about you is how smart you are."
Mrs. Evans chortled, but it was clear she was pleased. Then her expression became serious again. "My husband was only fifty-nine when I began to notice that something wasn't right. He lived another ten years, and it was increasingly heartbreaking. If it hadn't been for Tom, I couldn't have managed."
"My mother has always been, well, different in her reactions in many ways," Maggie admitted, "so I wasn't aware that anything was going on until, five years ago, she disappeared and unexpectedly turned up in New York. Since then, she's been in a holding pattern that's gradually become weaker. I think that Amanda is the main reason she's held her own for this long without the deterioration accelerating even more. That's made it possible for her to remain at home, which her doctors say is crucial to delaying the onset of the worst of the disease."
"Tom told me how determined you are to keep her in her house, and I commend you. It can't be easy."
"It's all I can do," Maggie told her.
"People who haven't dealt with this have no idea of how troubling the situation can become," Mrs. Evans said sympathetically, "but let's speak of something happier, or at least less depressing. Let me tell you the funniest story that I heard at lunch."
Actually, Maggie thought as she listened, the story wasn't that funny, but she appreciated Mrs. Evans' tact in trying to make her feel more cheerful. She could see why Tom was so fond of his aunt.
Once they were airborne, Mrs. Evans pulled out her Kindle and began to read, as Maggie activated her laptop and started to work. The flight was uneventful. Back in New York, the two security men saw the women back to Mrs. Evans' townhouse, where Sari had hot tea and cheese toast waiting for them. This time Maggie knew the way to the Herter Bedroom, and — showered and changed into the flannel pjs — she fell at once into a deep sleep, full of dreams she could not quite remember afterwards.
The next morning she woke early, dressed, and texted the Security office as she'd been told to do before relocating. "Lving Evans house. Rdy strt work office. MMcL."
"I need to get into the house next door," she told Mrs. Evans' housekeeper Sari, who was observing the proceedings with interest. "Can you deactivate the alarm on this side?"
Once sure nothing would go off, Maggie went through the first-floor door by which she had entered Mrs. Evans' living room on Christmas Eve. A woman in uniform was waiting for her in the hall that served as a connecting point between TTI's business premises and Mrs. Evans' part of the townhouse complex.
"Hi, Ms. McLaurin. I'm Tami Lane, TTI Security, and I'm to escort you to your office and remain with you."
"I'll be fine," Maggie told her. "I'm working in the office all day."
"I've been assigned specifically to you," Tami told her. "You're not to be left unattended. Mr. Scott's direct orders."
"Well then," Maggie said, recognizing the time-wasting pointlessness of protesting once Tom's name was invoked. "Let's go."
The two of them trooped downstairs where Tami closely inspected the perimeter of the office and its adjoining bathroom. She then examined the French doors and windows that opened to the rear terrace. The windows had protective grillwork, which she pulled at, checking its stability. As for the French doors, she closed the interior wooden shutters and bolted them. "I'm sorry, but I have to ask you not to go outside unless I'm with you." The young woman was courteous but firm.
"I understand," Maggie sighed. "It doesn't matter. I'm going to be concentrating on a project all day. I don't plan on going anywhere."
"I know this must be irritating, Ms. McLaurin, but it's for your own protection." Tami had obviously been told to expect resistance.
"I know," Maggie told her. "I appreciate it."
"I'll be in the corridor outside, with the door cracked," Tami told her. "If you need me, I can be with you in a matter of seconds. When you get ready for lunch, let me know and I'll call it in, same for snacks and dinner. My orders are that you are not to go anywhere on your own until we get a definitive notification from the police that Josh Wells is in custody and that they're satisfied that Heather Thomas has no intention of pursuing her threat. They seem almost as concerned about her as about him."
With Tami settled into a chair outside her door, Maggie connected her laptop to the network and set out lists and files. She was irritated that Tom had arbitrarily lumbered her with full-time security rather than allowing her to make her own threat assessment. Still, she was almost relieved that, for now at least, she had to think of nothing save her Monday presentation to the rest of the TTI staff.
Maggie had over the years made many presentations. She had sat through even more that were made by associates and others. She was, therefore, no stranger to the phenomenon of what she thought of as the missing Rosetta Stone. That is, the presenter offered PowerPoint after PowerPoint of data in support of a hypothesis that never quite materialized. It was a peculiar failing to which even the best presenters were sometimes prone. That was why she'd developed the habit of periodic reviews throughout the preparation process in order to assess how what she was doing related to what she needed at the end. Her goal in this instance was straightforward: to gain and share necessary information and to do it in a way that enhanced her credibility. She was acutely aware of the fact that the impression that she made Monday would be her most important at TTI. She had no illusions that the team of stars assembled by Tom would ever see her as a full member of their club, but a well-constructed presentation could at least ensure that they viewed her as a professional asset rather than a liability.
The work went well. After about two hours, Tami checked in to see if she'd like anything, and they shared Diet Cokes and
crackers before returning to their respective responsibilities. Around eleven the desk phone rang, When Maggie picked it up, she recognized the voice on the other end and – as the police had requested – immediately hit the "record conversation" button. Tami had heard the ring through the cracked door and stuck her head into the office, to be motioned further inside. Maggie put the call on speaker phone, and the two women listened as the obviously panicked Josh Wells began a long, agitated monologue that alternated between pleading with Maggie to stop the police pursuit of him and threatening her as to what he'd do if she didn't help him get his job back. When he stopped for breath, Maggie said what the police had told her to say.
"Josh, this is out of my hands. I'm sorry you're having trouble, but there's nothing I can do. You should go to the police and tell them your side of the story. Joanna Banks, the detective in charge of this case, has indicated that she thinks she can help you if you'll call her. That's all I can tell you."
This response did not satisfy the angry young man, and he began another tirade about corporate bitches and what should be done with them, most of it involving breasts and various sharp objects. This guy had a serious fixation, Maggie thought.
Tami had texted an alarm code to the Security office, and Josh was still ranting on speaker phone when Jack Holt entered the room. He listened silently for a moment, then picked up the receiver. "Josh, this is Jack Holt. I've intercepted this call because you can't be talking to people like this, son, much less a nice lady like Ms. McLaurin. You let me know where you are, and I'll meet you. We can go somewhere and get a pizza and talk all this over. There's a solution to all this, son, but calling Ms. McLaurin isn't it. Now where are you?"
Tom Scott had entered in time to hear Holt's comments, and he grinned broadly when Holt gave the thumbs up. After Holt left, Tom told Tami to take a break, that he'd be with Maggie for a few minutes.
