She could pick up the phone and make a call. She could fly to Boston and drive north or fly to Manchester and drive west. She could drive all the way from Baltimore if she wanted to, but she didn’t. She wasn’t ready to do any of those things. Not so soon after Abby’s death. Not with Kevin so sensitive. Not with the reality of Norwich Notch so new. She needed time to adjust to its existence.
The key, though, fast became an old friend. After holding it, turning it in her hand, studying it night after night for a week, she took out a jar of silver polish and, taking care not to wet the frayed ribbon, worked the cream between each of the miniature slides. With every bit as much care, she rinsed it and dried it.
Free of tarnish, the key was a beautifully intricate thing. It looped lyrically, with detailing that Chelsea guessed was exact. Though the slim blade extending from the mouthpiece was nicked at spots, the horn itself was in perfect condition. As she buffed its slides with the pad of her thumb, she fancied that a genie might appear in a puff of smoke and tell her everything she wanted to know. But the night was quiet, and she remained alone.
She had so many questions, so many questions—the major one being who had sent it and why. Thirty-two years was a long time. People died. Situations changed. Then again, she wondered whether the key wasn’t as crucial to her search as the postmark. Norwich Notch. So familiar. It sounded rural and charming; it could well be dirt poor and depressed. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find out which; she wasn’t sure she could resist finding out.
Meanwhile, the lure of the key grew. The more she studied it, the more intrigued she was not by the perfection of its crafting, but by the irregularity of the nicks on its blade. They were signs of use—use by people somehow related to her.
She imagined many different scenarios, all variations of those she’d dreamed up as a child. Her biological parents were always poor but in love. In one instance they were teenagers, too young and frightened to keep her. In another instance her father was married to someone else but desperately in love with her mother. In a third instance her parents were married to each other, with seven children already and no possible way to support an eighth.
Chelsea dwelt on that last possibility for a long time, because the thought of having one sibling, let alone seven, excited her. She had always wanted a brother or sister. She had begged Abby for one. In time she’d accepted that one child was as much as a woman with two useless legs and dubious health could handle, but she didn’t stop wanting a sibling. As she saw it, a sibling was tied to a person in a way that friends weren’t. She had grown up with hordes of friends, but she missed that other, special relationship. There were times when she felt a distinct sense of loss.
During those times, more often than not she turned to Carl.
Two
I’d like a large double-cheese pepperoni pizza with green pepper, mushroom, and onion,” Carl Harper said into the phone. He was grinning his let-good-old-Carl-fix-everything grin at Chelsea, who could only roll her eyes in return.
She was exhausted. They had returned to the office after making a twilight presentation for a health center that she had been hired to design. Normally she’d have made it herself, but with Abby’s death so fresh, she wasn’t focusing the way she normally would. Carl had come along riding shotgun, and though she hadn’t run into trouble, she was glad he’d been there.
He was Chelsea’s oldest and dearest friend. His father and Kevin Kane had interned together in the fifties, and their families had been close ever since. For as long as Chelsea could remember, the Harpers had summered in Newport in a house two blocks from the Kanes. Being the same age and both lonely onlies, Chelsea and Carl had meshed well. Where she was impulsive, he was practical. Where she was daring, he was sensible. He made her think, she made him feel. They moderated each other well.
Chelsea remembered the time, roughly between the ages of five and ten, when she had assumed that she would grow up to marry Carl. Then she’d moved into her teens, and the idea of marriage had taken a backseat to things like puberty, the Beatles, and vegetarianism, which she’d espoused from the time she was twelve until she’d turned fifteen and had had an intense Big Mac attack. Carl had indulged her all that and more. He’d lived vicariously through her, and, in turn, he’d always been there when she’d needed a friend.
Being partners in their own firm was a natural evolution from the days of building sand castles together. Carl was the technician of the two, the businessman. As apt to be drawn to a job for its investment potential as for its architectural challenge, he matched Chelsea penny for penny in their financial ventures. Within the firm he was the one who focused on getting projects, who identified their competition for public work, who saw that they were published in Architectural Record or Progressive Architecture. Chelsea was the one with the creative spark and the spirit. She was the artist.
She wasn’t feeling either spark or spirit just then, though. She’d been running from appointment to appointment all day, making up for the week she’d spent mourning Abby. She felt drained. Returning to work had been hard.
“Twenty minutes,” Carl said, hanging up the phone. “Can you last?”
“Of course. Do me another favor?” When he raised his brows, she said, “Call Dad. See if he’s okay. This is the first night I haven’t been with him.”
Carl called. His conversation with Kevin was quiet and brief, comfortable in the way of an old friend. When he hung up the phone, he told Chelsea, “He’s going over to my parents’ house. Said things were fine at the hospital. He’s pleased you’re with me.”
She smiled. “I think he got tired of my company. But it was a nice time, in an odd kind of way. After a while, he began to talk. Reminisce. He told me stories of his time with Mom before she got sick. I didn’t expect he’d do that. He’s usually so private.”
Carl crossed to her chair. “So are you lately.” Standing behind her, he began to knead the tension from her shoulders. “It’s been tough, huh?”
“Yeah. I miss her.”
“It’ll get better.”
“I know. More easily for me than for Dad, though. I feel so bad for him. I keep trying to think of things to say or do to cheer him up.”
“You’ve been with him. He needed that.”
“I sometimes wonder,” she mused, brooding as she had so often of late. Kevin had always defined his relationship with Chelsea in terms of gentle smiles and timely gifts. He was a busy man. His days at the hospital were long, and once home his first priority had always been Abby. That was why, tragic though the circumstances were, Chelsea so cherished his leisurely sharing of time and thoughts.
“We probably spent more time together in the last week than in all of last year. But I can’t be her, and she’s what he wants.”
She closed her eyes and swiveled her head in a slow circle to complement the work of Carl’s hands. “Mmmm. You know just where to touch.” She inhaled, ordered her muscles to relax, exhaled. “Carl?”
“Hmm?”
“Do you think the Hunt-Omni will go condo?” There had been rumor of the hotel being sold. It wasn’t a huge one by New York standards, but if the rooms were to be turned into condominium apartments, there would be a fine architectural challenge to be had.
“Looks that way. I talked with John Baker about it. He’s as close to the buyer group as anyone is. He knows we’re interested.”
Chelsea had never done a hotel conversion before. It would be a prize, just the thing to fill her thoughts while the pain of Abby’s death began to fade.
And then there was the other. It was preoccupying her nearly as much as missing Abby. She caught Carl’s hands and gave them a squeeze, then rose from the chair, went to her briefcase, and took out the small tissue package.
“Whatcha got?” he asked, coming close.
She unfolded the tissue and put the key in her palm.
“Wow.” He picked it up, turned it over. “What’s it for?”
“It winds things up. My jeweler�
��—whom she had seen between appointments earlier that day—“says it goes to a music box.”
Carl continued to study it, turning it this way and that. “Where did you get it?”
“My mother gave it to Graham to give to me. It was sent from a small town in New Hampshire called Norwich Notch. I was born there.”
His eyes went to her face. “How did you find that out?” He knew of the adoption, knew of her frustration at not knowing who she was, and though Chelsea had occasionally sensed that he agreed with Kevin about its irrelevancy, he listened patiently to her talk.
“That was what the postmark said. Graham confirmed it. His father handled the adoption.”
“Wow. Norwich Notch?”
She nodded.
“Why does that sound familiar?”
Her eyes lit. “Does it to you, too? I’ve said the name so many times by now that I’ve lost my objectivity.”
“Norwich Notch.” He grew focused. Chelsea could see him flipping through the files in his mind. Finally, frowning, he shook his head. “Nothing’s coming. Where is it in New Hampshire?”
“Near the southwest corner.”
“Ahhh,” he said. “That explains it. We’ve either passed by or through it on the way north to ski. We’ve probably seen signs.”
She didn’t remember seeing a sign, but she had a feeling that he was right. He had a good memory, and besides, it made sense. No doubt the name of the town had registered subliminally.
“So who sent it?” Carl asked.
She shrugged.
“No return address? No note?”
“Nothing. Just a postmark on an envelope that Mom wore thin opening and closing.” The image of that haunted Chelsea. “I wonder what she was thinking all that time.” Certainly not that she’d lose Chelsea. She was sure of Chelsea’s love. Chelsea suspected that if she’d agonized over the key, it was about Kevin’s reaction to it.
Carl placed the key back in her hand. “What will you do with it?”
“I’m not sure. But something. This is a clue to who I am. I can’t ignore it.”
“What does Kevin say?”
Chelsea turned a thumb down, then watched Carl grow thoughtful. He crossed to the window, where, six floors below, the Inner Harbor was alive with night lights.
“He isn’t totally off the wall, Chels. Put yourself in his shoes. He’s just lost Abby. He’s afraid of losing you, too.”
She scowled. “That’s like saying a father loses his daughter when she gets married—no, don’t shake your head, Carl, it is the same. He’s my father. He’ll be that regardless of what I find. The fact is that they gave me up while he took me in. I’ll love him forever for that.” She meant it, but that didn’t mean she had to be blindly obedient. She had never been blindly obedient in her life. “What’s wrong with my wanting to know the circumstances surrounding my birth? Kids ask their parents all the time. You know.”
“Yeah. I was a mistake.”
“Not a mistake. A wonderful surprise, as your parents put it, and they’re the first ones to say that in hindsight they’re glad you came when you did, even if they panicked at the time. That’s a terrific story, and the fact is that you know it. I’d like to know mine.” There was a huge void where certain knowledge should have been, a void that made her feel alone.
“You might not like it,” he warned.
She had considered that possibility. More than a nightmare or two had been mixed in with her dreams. Her birth father could be a murderer, her mother a whore, her siblings morons. Worse, they might not want any part of her, which would bring up to date the feeling of having been rejected at birth.
“You’re right,” she said, “I might not, but at least I’d know. It’s the wondering that gets to me sometimes. I can accept the truth. I can understand it and rationalize it. But as things stand now, I feel like my life is in limbo, like I can’t go out and really be the next generation until I know what the last one was.”
After the briefest pause, Carl said, “You’re talking about marriage and kids.”
She held his gaze, sighed, then smiled. He had a knack of cutting through the frills to the nuts and bolts. “Maybe I am.”
“Sure you are. It’s the most obvious thing in the world. You’ve never been married, never had kids, and you’d love both, you know you would.”
“I haven’t had time for either.”
“Okay,” he conceded, “you haven’t had time, but you do now. The firm is established. Business is good and getting better each year. Our investments are paying off. We have real momentum going. You could be relaxing a little, spending time with a husband or working out of a home studio while a baby naps. You’re thirty-seven. You’re not getting any younger.”
“Neither are you, but I don’t see you rushing off to get married. What’s happening with Hailey?” Hailey Smart was a lawyer in an office two floors below theirs. She was pixieish and enterprising, and she was dynamite in court. Chelsea liked her.
He wrinkled his nose. “Hailey’s too offbeat for me.”
“She is not. She’s super.”
“I’m constantly out of breath when I’m with her.”
Chelsea grinned. “That’s passion, my friend.”
“No, it’s old age. Besides, Hailey isn’t you.”
The sound of a buzzer announced the pizza’s arrival. Since everyone else had left for the day, they went for it themselves. Carl wrapped an arm around her waist as they walked.
“I’ve been in love with you since I was two years old,” he said. “You’re my best friend in the world. How could I ever marry Hailey with you in my life?”
“Have you and Hailey talked marriage?” Chelsea asked in surprise. She hadn’t thought it had gone that far.
“She talked marriage,” Carl specified.
That surprised Chelsea more than the other. Hailey struck her as the kind to wait until the last minute to marry. At twenty-nine she had time. Her career was barely into adolescence.
“Hailey believes,” he went on almost tongue-in-cheek but not quite, “that she can do whatever she sets her mind to. That means being a lawyer, a wife, and a mother all at the same time. If that girl has her way, she’ll be nursing a baby in the judge’s chambers.” When Chelsea laughed, he said, “She told me so. She has it all planned. She’ll wear sophisticated clothes and play the part of the successful attorney to the hilt, only she’ll let the courtroom know that recesses are for milk. She says the juxtaposition of the two images will be irresistible. She says she’ll have the jurors eating out of her hand.”
They arrived in the reception area, which was separated by chic partitions from the larger drafting room. The entire space, which had been built to Chelsea’s design, was high-ceilinged and open, with an abundance of windows and skylights to counter the deep russet of the exposed brick. The furnishings leaned heavily on glass and chrome and, while practical, were also state-of-the-art sleek. Track lighting, glowing low, gave gentle relief from the night.
Carl paid for the pizza. They retraced their steps, past the workstations of the three draftspeople and the project architect who supervised them, to the area where the principals’ offices were. They went into Chelsea’s.
She promptly picked up the conversation where they’d left off, because his words were echoing in her mind. She felt oddly unsettled. Carl had been hers, albeit innocently, for so long. “Do you love Hailey?”
He cleared her drafting table of several sketches and set the pizza there. “I love you.”
“Seriously, Carl.”
“I am serious,” he said, then disappeared into his own office and reappeared seconds later with a handful of napkins.
“I’m used to you, Chels. When I’m with other women, I feel like I’m betraying you.”
“You shouldn’t. We’re not bound together that way.”
“Maybe we should be,” he said with such seriousness that she was even more startled. Then he took a bite of pizza and spoiled the effect. Half of the
topping slid off and fell back into the box. He scooped it up carefully, replaced it on top of the pizza, folded the piece, and tried again.
Chelsea took an easy bite. She was trying to figure out where he was headed when he said, “I’ve been thinking about this a lot since Abby died. I guess it’s natural. When you lose someone close to you, you face mortality. You think about all the things you want that you may miss out on if you don’t do something about getting them. We’re both thirty-seven. Neither of us has married, mainly because we have each other. Why not make it official?”
Chelsea was taken totally off guard by the suggestion, not to mention the earnestness of it. She put down her pizza and asked weakly, “Is that a proposal?”
“I suppose it is.”
“You’re not supposed to suppose,” she cried, frustrated because she didn’t know how to react, “you’re supposed to know.” She had a sudden thought. “Are your parents on your back again?”
“They adore you.”
“I adore them, but that’s no basis for a marriage.”
He cracked an unsure smile. “You don’t adore me, too?”
Her heart ached. “I do, but I don’t know that I’m in love with you, any more than you’re in love with me. We’ve never really thought along those lines.” Carl was always just there. She didn’t see him in a romantic role, certainly not a sexual role—which didn’t mean it wasn’t possible, simply that she wasn’t used to thinking that way.
“We could give it a try,” he said. “See if it flies.”
She curved a hand around his neck.
“Oh, Carl, I’m not sure I can think of marriage. I’m still thinking of Mom, and then there’s the key. You’re right. Knowing who I am has everything to do with my being wary of getting married and having kids. God only knows what kinds of genetic defects I’m carrying.”
The Passions of Chelsea Kane Page 3
