Suddenly

by Barbara Delinsky

  “She’s dead,” Peter snapped. “Why can’t people accept that? It’s bad enough here in the office; not a day goes by without someone asking about her, like she has a cold and will be back at the end of the week, and it’s worse in town.”

  “She was loved,” Angie said with envy and no small amount of sadness.

  So are you, Paige thought, and tried desperately to catch Angie’s eye to convey the message, but Angie was looking at Peter, who was scowling.

  So she reached into her pocket and unfolded the letter she had been reading that morning before work. “Mara didn’t think she was loved.”

  “Are you kidding?” Peter asked sharply. “People thronged to her. She adored that.”

  “Listen,” Paige said, and read, “‘Life is so busy here sometimes that I fool myself into thinking that there’s a deeper meaning in it, but the fact is that everyone has his own life and it’s separate from mine. They see me, they talk to me, they even tell me how wonderful I am, then they go home to their own lives and don’t think of me at all. I’m incidental in the overall scheme of things. I come and go in people’s lives, just as people come and go in mine. Relationships go only so far, then stop, always short of the deep connect. I wonder what’s wrong.’”

  Angie was stunned. “Mara wrote that?”

  “When?” Peter asked.

  “I couldn’t find an exact date,” Paige answered. “It’s one of a whole bunch of letters. None of them were ever mailed, but they’re all addressed to a Lizzie Parks. Do either of you know that name?”

  “Not me,” said Angie.

  “A bunch of letters?” Peter asked. “Have you read them all?”

  “Not all. They’re pretty heavy. I can only take them in small doses. She truly saw herself as a failure.”

  “What did the other letters say?” he asked.

  “Most of the ones I’ve read have to do with her family. She would have had us believe that she didn’t care about them, but the opposite was true. Calling it an obsession might be taking it too far, but she thought about them a lot.”

  Peter left the door, took the letter from her, and stared at it front and back. “Why didn’t you tell us about these before?”

  “Because I felt guilty reading them, they seemed so private, and now I’m betraying her by reading them aloud.”

  “Then why did you?”

  It had been unpremeditated, an impulsive thing, but Paige didn’t regret it. “We’re all pretty uptight. I thought maybe sharing them would help. It’s easy to feel sorry for ourselves, picking up the remains of Mara’s life like we are, but the fact is that compared to Mara, we’re in good shape. The deep connect—what a phrase. She felt so alone, it boggles the mind.”

  Peter tossed the letter onto the desk. “She was unbalanced. I’ve been saying that for weeks.” He glanced at Angie, then back at Paige. “So, can we interview for a replacement, or should we sit around agonizing over Mara a little longer?”

  Put that way, Paige felt foolish. “You’re right, I guess. It’s silly to wait. We’ll need someone else eventually. Eventually might as well be sooner.”

  When she thought Peter would savor the victory, he was checking his watch. “I’m off for an allergy meeting in Montpelier. You’re both covering, right?”

  Angie sat straighter. “Not right. I had the afternoon off. What allergy meeting?”

  “My usual.”

  “But that’s on Mondays.”

  “This is a supplemental one.”

  “Ginny didn’t have it on the schedule.”

  “Then Ginny messed up.” He went to the door. “This is why we need a fourth. We’re stretched too thin. Can you help Paige, or should I skip the meeting?”

  “I can help,” Angie said, and he left.

  Paige turned to Angie, who was sitting at the side of the room looking peaked, and not only from lack of sleep, Paige knew. Dougie was boarding now, which left her home alone with Ben or, more aptly, waiting for Ben, who wasn’t doing much more than making brief appearances there. They were tiptoeing around each other, and though Paige had urged Angie to talk to him, argue with him, even beg him to see a counselor, she refused. She had been burned for years of taking charge, so she was lying low, waiting for him to take the initiative. It was a painful wait. She was dying a little more each day.

  Paige, in turn, felt the agony of seeing a friend suffer and wanting to help but not knowing how. “Is working now a problem, Angie?”

  Angie let out a breath. “No problem. I didn’t have specific plans. I never do lately, it seems. I feel like I need time to think, only when I sit down to do it, I can’t.”

  “Did you talk with Dougie last night?”

  “Sure did. He’s having a ball, and that’s a quote. Don’t ask me what it means. He may be doing very little of what he should and a whole lot of what he shouldn’t, but one thing’s for sure, he’s pleased to be free of me.”

  “Don’t you think that’s taking it too personally?”

  “Maybe.” She picked her cuticle. “At any rate, Ben isn’t upset. He believes that whatever Dougie does at Mount Court is important for his development.”

  “You must agree on some level,” Paige pointed out, “or you wouldn’t have gone along with the decision to let him board.”

  “I do agree. I guess.” She tucked her hand in her lap. “I don’t know, Paige. I’m terrified when I think of the harm that could be done to my son’s mind, body, ego, if this doesn’t work out. But then, some of Ben’s arguments have merit. I have been protective. Maybe overly so. I can see that now. I just wish that we could have found an in-between measure. Boarding is so total.” She rubbed her palm against her skirt. “Then again, he’s home on weekends, and on those times he’s his old affectionate self, so maybe Ben’s right. Maybe the problem was me, after all.”

  Paige could hear it coming. She left the desk. “Angie—”

  “I’ve failed as a mother.”

  “No way.” Paige perched on the edge of the chair by Angie’s. “No way at all, and you have an incredible kid to prove it. Think about it, Angie. We’ve seen hundreds of kids over the years. Some of them have been troubled in ways that stem directly from their parents. Think of the Welkes, the Foggs, the Legeres—they are failures as parents, but you aren’t in any way, shape, or form related, even with a gross stretch of the imagination, to any one of them. Dougie isn’t troubled. He isn’t suicidal. He doesn’t skip school to play body games with girls behind the maintenance building. He doesn’t drink on the steps of the war memorial. He doesn’t steal hubcaps from tourists passing through town. He’s a well-adjusted kid who has reached the very normal stage of needing to share more of his life with his peers. It’s possible that if Mount Court had been three hours away, he would never have wanted to board, but it was an incredible temptation to him—to board and still have his parents close by. The kid has the best of both worlds. He’s a smart little guy.”

  “Not so little,” Angie mused. “I have to keep reminding myself of that—and of the fact that he’s rooming with one of the top students in his grade, and that his dorm parent is new and very good, and that the Head of School has enough confidence in the system to let his own daughter live in a dorm. Did you know he had a daughter at Mount Court?”

  Did she ever; but Paige had thought it a secret. “Who told you?”

  “Marian Fowler,” one of the few Tucker natives on the Board of Trustees. “I called her right before Dougie moved into the dorm. I knew she’d give me a positive picture of the school, but that was what I wanted. She said that if the new Head trusted the school with his child, I should, too.” She paused, cautious now. “I heard something else about the new Head.”

  Paige arched a brow, understating her curiosity.

  “I heard,” Angie said, “that he was seen leaving your house early one morning. Do you run with him?”

  The front door, rather than the window. Paige had known that would come back to haunt her. “Uh, not really. But w
e are friends. He was out running one morning and stopped by to say hello.”

  “Good friends?”

  Paige shrugged as casually as she could. She didn’t know what to call the kind of friend Noah was. She wasn’t even sure she should be calling him a friend, but the alternatives were either boss or lover, neither of which would do.

  “He’s a handsome man,” Angie invited.

  Had Paige denied it, Angie would have been instantly suspicious. So she didn’t try. “That was the first thing that struck me. I would have thought the girls at Mount Court would have crushes on him right and left.” She shook her head. “They can’t stand his rules. Neither can I. He can be rigid.”

  “Reassuringly so, from a parent’s standpoint,” Angie commented. “It was only after I talked with him that I felt at all at ease about Dougie boarding.”

  Paige imagined Noah at his desk talking with Angie. No doubt he would be reassuring. He was articulate, smooth, clearly dedicated to his cause. Given that his was only a year’s appointment, he might have easily maintained the status quo. Instead he had gone out on a limb, taking unpopular stands. Paige might not agree with some of those stands, but she had to respect his courage.

  She hadn’t seen him since the morning he had left her bed. Not in real life, at least. In her mind, a dozen times, and each time in the buff.

  “Paige?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “What’s that look?”

  “No look,” she said, embarrassed. “Just irrelevant thoughts.”

  “Then add these. The last school Noah Perrine worked at was a private school on the outskirts of Tucson. He had worked his way up from science teacher to director of development and was on a direct track to the headship when he suddenly resigned his position. It seems that his work required a fair amount of travel. His wife, who was a native New Yorker and wasn’t wild about being in the desert to begin with, was even less pleased when he was gone. She felt he was abandoning her to raise their daughter alone. So she took up with another teacher at the school. By the time Noah returned from his last trip, the whole school knew what was going on.”

  Paige’s heart went out to Noah. “How awful.”

  “It was a small school. Word spread quickly. He knew right away that he couldn’t ever be Head there, so he left.”

  “He must have been humiliated,” Paige argued. She didn’t believe he had left solely because he would never be Head. He didn’t strike her as that ardently ambitious. “In such a close environment, it would have been an untenable situation.”

  Angie went on, seeming steadier now that she was imparting information. “The wife and her boyfriend left soon after he did. They moved to San Francisco and married, and for years they were part of what they thought to be the academic elite. Last year they split.”

  Ahhhh. That might explain problems between Sara, whom Paige had always seen as more wounded than malicious, and her mother. If the tension of a failing marriage was rocking the home, if Sara blamed her mother for it, if she was losing the father whose name she had taken years before and turning to Noah as a source of stability, the move made sense.

  Of course, that said nothing about the dubious involvement Noah had had with Sara over the years and the fact that their relationship was far from strong.

  Angie was looking crushed. “It seems to happen more and more, parents splitting, kids suffering. That’s what worries me most.”

  Paige forced herself back. “Dougie?”

  “What he’s thinking about Ben and me.”

  “What are you thinking about Ben and you?” Paige asked just as the phone buzzed. She pressed the intercom. “Yes, Ginny.”

  “The examining rooms are filled.”

  “Be right there.” She hung up, looking at Angie expectantly.

  “I’m not thinking much,” Angie said in dismay, and rose. “I’m trying to get through one day at a time.”

  “But if you talk with Ben—”

  “If I talk with him,” she went to the door, “I may hear things I don’t want to hear.”

  Paige was right beside her, holding the door shut. “Like what?”

  “Like without Dougie there’s nothing. Like we’ve grown in different directions. Like he wants a divorce. Like he loves her.”

  All painful things. Paige wanted to deny each, but she wasn’t an expert on Ben or on any other man, where matters of the heart were concerned. The only thing she knew was that she didn’t want the demise of Angie’s marriage to haunt her the way Mara’s death did.

  “So you’re not saying anything, hoping the problem will go away. But it won’t, Angie. It may recede for a time, but if it’s there, it’s there. You can only ignore it for so long. Talk with him. You have to.”

  “I know,” Angie wailed softly. “I know.” She drew herself up, the professional once again. “Have to go to work.”

  “Will you talk to him?”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Please, Angie? Talk soon?”

  With a look that said, “Enough,” Angie opened the door and left the office.

  Paige and Angie saw all of the scheduled patients and then some between that midmorning point and the lunch break that was built into the appointment book. As happened often, Paige lingered with her last patient, leaving herself ten minutes to eat a tuna sandwich and call home to check on Sami, before starting on the afternoon cases. She had until three, when she would pick up Sami and head for Mount Court. Jill had asked for the afternoon and evening off to help the mother of one of her friends prepare a surprise birthday party for the girl, and Paige wasn’t about to refuse. Jill needed to be with her friends. And Paige liked taking Sami along.

  Shortly after two, though, Jill called, out of breath and upset. “I took Sami for a long walk, like I told you I would, and when we got home, the back door was open. Someone’s been in there, Dr. Pfeiffer. Someone’s gone through your things.”

  Paige’s stomach lurched. “Someone broke in?”

  “Well, I didn’t lock the door. But I’m sure I shut it. I wouldn’t leave it open. Not with kitty running around. I called to her, but she didn’t come.”

  “Is Sami all right?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Next door at the Corkells’. I don’t know what to do.”

  Paige put her fingertips to her forehead and tried to think. Her heart was pounding. “Don’t do anything, Jill. Just stay where you are. Whatever you do, don’t go near the house until I get there. I’ll call Norman Fitch. He’ll meet me there.”

  Fortunately Peter had returned and could see the last of her patients. She paused only to call Mount Court and cancel the afternoon’s practice, and within minutes was driving across town, trying not to let her imagination run wild. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before, not during her growing-up years in the kind of wealthy suburb thieves loved, nor during her school years in the city. The last place she would have thought it could happen was in Tucker—small, friendly, law-abiding Tucker.

  But it had. Someone had entered her house uninvited. Drawers had been rifled, books removed from bookshelves and set aside, papers and magazines fanned. Pieces of clothing lay on the closet floor, seeming less thrown there than inadvertently dropped, but that made the violation no easier to swallow. A neat intruder was an intruder nonetheless. Only the medicine chests showed no sign of trespass, suggesting that the search hadn’t been for drugs.

  Nothing appeared to have been taken except kitty, who was nowhere in sight. While Norman and his deputy dusted for fingerprints, Paige ran to the Corkells’. She took Sami in her arms and held her tightly, then carried her back to the house and went from room to room.

  “Kitty? Kitty? Where are you, kitty?”

  She made a second round of the rooms, this time shaking a box of kitty treats, usually a surefire way of drawing kitty from hiding. But there was no small furball scampering out, and Paige grew frightened.

  She return
ed to the front hall to find Norman talking with none other than Noah Perrine.

  “I heard you’d canceled practice,” Noah said by way of explaining his presence, but Paige’s mind was on a single track.

  “I can’t find my kitten. She must have run out of the house while the door was open.” She slipped past, out the door to the front porch, calling, “Kitty? Come here, kitty!” She ran down the steps and began a search of the perimeter of the house, looking behind bushes, into trees, down the window wells of the basement. “Where are you, kitty? Here, kittykittykitty!”

  Noah met her at the garage. “I don’t see her.”

  Paige was close to tears. “She’s just a baby. She isn’t used to being outdoors. She can’t possibly protect herself against other animals, and if she wanders too far, she’ll never find her way back.” Still holding Sami, she set off for the neighbor’s yard and searched it the way she had her own. Jill was searching, too, and Betty Corkell, and before long the search had spread down the street. Paige’s shoulders were aching by the time she returned home. She sank down on the front stairs, propped Sami on the lower step between her legs, and buried her face in her hands.

  She didn’t have to see to know that it was Noah who settled beside her. The solidness of him was a tangible thing, and that was before he began to rub her shoulders. His hands were masterful. They knew just where she ached.

  “She’ll show up, Paige. She can’t have gone far.”

  “But she doesn’t have a collar. I was just keeping her for a little while, only until I found a permanent home for her, and since she was staying inside all the time, I didn’t bother with a tag, but now no one will know where she belongs.”

  “Maybe someone will find her and keep her. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “No!” She shot him a glance. “I want to find a home for her myself. A good home. Not just some place she wanders into. Do you know what people do to cats they take on the spur of the moment and then tire of?”