by Bill Eidson
As it was, he could barely look at her with what he had just learned.
She said, “I’m glad you came.”
He turned from her to take in the apartment. It was a high-ceilinged Back Bay apartment, with walls painted antique white, dark wood trim and wainscoting. From the hallway, he could see a view of the Charles River through a bay window in the living room. On the Beacon Street side of the apartment, there were two bedrooms; a kitchen and small dining room were right before him. She led him toward the living room.
Ben’s stomach tightened even further as Peter’s four-year-old daughter, Cindy, looked up at him from a picture book. Ben had only seen her in photos before, and even those were at least six months out of date.
Unlike her mother’s blue eyes, Cindy’s were gray. Her fine hair was honey-colored and there was a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks.
She’s her father’s girl, Ben thought.
Ben could feel Peter’s presence even though he had never lived in the apartment. There was a picture of him holding Cindy as an infant, his arm around Sarah. The shot was taken in winter, snowflakes were falling. Ben looked closely. He could see a stiffness to Peter’s pose, a bit of withdrawal from Sarah.
“Not the best picture,” Sarah said. “Just the last that has us together.”
Cindy looked at Ben quietly over the edge of her book.
“Cindy, say hello to Mr. Harris. He was a friend of Daddy’s.”
The girl continued to observe him, but said nothing. Her lower lip trembled slightly but she didn’t take her eyes away from him. Finally, she said, “My daddy’s dead.”
“I know that, honey,” Ben said. Seeing his van explode.
“Why are you here?” Cindy said.
“I’m a friend of your mom’s, too.”
“We don’t want any friends,” the little girl said.
“Cindy,” Sarah said, a faint warning in her tone.
“It’s OK.” Ben squeezed Sarah’s arm slightly. “I know good manners are important, and I’m sure Cindy has them.”
He took his folding loupe from his pocket and knelt down beside her.
“I see you’re looking at your book. When my daughter was about your age, she liked to play with this. It makes the letters and pictures really big.”
“You’ve got a girl?”
“And a boy.”
“Why aren’t you at their house now? Are you divorced?” At four, she had no trouble pronouncing even the last word.
“Yes.”
She looked at him somberly.
After a moment, he ran the loupe over the page, magnifying letters and bits of the picture.
“Like it?” He tried to give her the loupe, but she folded her hands in her lap.
He set it on the table beside her. “It’s here if you want it.”
Sarah told her daughter to say thank you, which the girl did, in a small voice. Her eyes no longer met Ben’s.
“Cindy’s already eaten,” Sarah said. He followed her into the dining room. “We’re having Cornish game hens and wild rice.”
“Sarah … please sit with me.” Ben pulled up a chair at the end of the table so they could talk quietly. He told her what Ludlow had showed him.
Sarah’s face turned pale as she listened. She sat back, and sipped her wine.
Ben waited.
Finally, she said, “It does seem different, actually knowing. But it’s what I suspected since we saw Sands this morning. It was certainly the way the police were headed. Kurt told me some of this as well, from conversations he had with the police this afternoon. Not in this detail, but enough.”
“Maybe I should leave.”
She looked at him evenly. “Go if you want to. I could’ve called you if I didn’t want you to come. I didn’t because I know you did the right thing back in that barn. And if that’s what ended up killing Peter then it is certainly someone’s fault, but it’s not yours. Sands is dead. Maybe they’ll put Johansen to death for it someday. If so, I’ll go cover the story if they let me. But you didn’t do this to Peter and I’m not holding you accountable.”
“She would,” Ben said, inclining his head toward Cindy.
“Probably. But that’s not a conversation I’ll be having with her for many years.” Sarah put her arms around Ben and whispered in his ear. “You did nothing wrong.”
* * *
Ben poured the wine while Sarah served the dinner. They ate in silence, both concentrating on the food. Ben found he was famished, even though he was swaying from exhaustion. He realized he hadn’t eaten all day.
“I’m sorry about Cindy’s reception,” Sarah said, quietly.
“Don’t be. Has she reacted this way to other men before?”
Sarah shrugged. “I’ve had a few dates, here and there, but I always just met them someplace. One four-month disaster with a Washington Post reporter that I broke off.”
Sarah kept her eyes on Ben for a half second before she returned to her meal. “I suppose Peter told you about how he and I broke up.”
“Some,” Ben said.
Sarah waited.
“The way he tells the story, he blew it.”
“We both did.” Sarah kept her voice low so that Cindy couldn’t hear. “The fact is, we got married for the wrong reasons. I wish I could blame it on youth, but I wasn’t that young. I was so enamored with what we were together as a team that I just thought it’d extend right to our wedding bed. I respected Peter so much, and just liked him so … but in that first year, not long after Cindy was conceived, I knew that I’d made a mistake. Before Cindy, our life was like a roller-coaster anyhow, the kind of stories we were chasing. Sometimes after finishing something big, he would get drunk for a day, say he was just chilling out. After that, he’d pull himself right up, barely touch a drop. I didn’t worry about it.
“But not long after Cindy was born, he took on a story in Papua New Guinea. I couldn’t go, because Cindy was too young. The U.S. has spent over a billion dollars in the past twenty years trying to eradicate malaria and it’s come back stronger than ever, defeating the drugs. Classic case of a reporter thinking he was invulnerable to everything around him. The mosquito didn’t care about Peter’s press pass. He came back with malaria. And I saw a side I had never seen of him before. He was so depressed because he couldn’t keep up the pace … and he just gave up for a while. He and I were always competitive, but because we were so well matched, workwise, it was fun. Both of us could hold our own. Once he couldn’t, he turned to drinking.
“Finally, it looked like he was on the road back. I had given him an ultimatum not long after Cindy reached her first birthday. Us or the bottle. And he took me seriously. He quit drinking, his health was far better. He began to take on more assignments, and we were given a couple to work on together again …”
Sarah shook her head.
“Then I picked up Cindy at day care one night, came straight home, and found him with this girl, Pamela Bartlett, this cute little summer intern from Columbia J School. Kid who you knew would be a rising star. Hell, he was in his mid-thirties, I wasn’t even thirty yet, and I came home to find him in bed with this kid. And he was drunk. Both of them were. Pamela got dressed in seconds flat, just said, ‘Sorry, Sarah,’ like, ‘God, isn’t this embarrassing?’ She scooted out of there while he just lay there, waiting.”
“Sounds like he burned his bridges on purpose.”
“That’s right,” Sarah said. “He got up, started packing. Weaving around the room looking for a suitcase. I let him. I let him go out and get a hotel that night, and we were even cordial two days later when he showed up and apologized and said he would be looking for a job out of town. I remember thinking that it would either kill him or cure him.”
“He was never much of a drinker here,” Ben said. “He was careful about it.”
“I certainly thought of picking up the phone about a hundred times. We were both lonely, these past three years. When I got the job at the Times we
saw more of him. He’d come down to the city, take Cindy out. That made it harder in some ways, because I could see he wasn’t drinking, he seemed to have his head on straight.”
She looked down at her glass. “He asked for another chance, but I said no. I loved him, but not the way I needed to.”
“So why this?” Ben asked. “Why did you quit your job, come to Insider, and invest so much in finding out what happened to him?”
Sarah looked up from her glass. “When it seems as if I don’t care? That’s what the cops think, that I’m just here for the story.”
“That’s not what I think.”
There was a glint in her eyes that she quickly brushed away. “The one thing Peter and I had besides Cindy and a really good friendship that we screwed up … was that we were both good at digging up the truth. Even when this time the truth meant we didn’t love each other well enough to go through the hard stuff together. So I figured for him, for me, and for Cindy someday, I should come here and at least find out the truth about what happened to him.”
Sarah poured more wine for them both. “And since we’re on the subject of the truth, tell me why Kurt is walking around with a fat lip.”
Ben looked at her carefully. He believed he saw—and wanted to see—more than simple curiosity.
“C’mon,” she said, kicking him lightly under the table. “If you’re a thug, I want to know it before I fall for you completely.’’
“Is that what you’re doing?”
Her gaze was steady. “You’re telling me I’m alone in it?”
“No. You’re not. It’s just that everything is so … complex.”
“Tell me about it,” she said, looking over at Cindy sitting in her chair. “And tell me what happened with Kurt.”
Ben told her about the dinner, the argument with Jake. About hitting Kurt. She listened well, her eyes intent upon him. He felt no sense of judgment from her, which he sincerely hoped was not simply a reporter’s trick.
When he was done, he felt relieved. Somewhat ashamed, left wide open … but relieved. “So,” he said. “That’s my baggage. Want to skip dessert?”
She looked at him carefully. “Is this a one shot deal? Or has this happened to you before?” She smiled faintly. “Don’t lie now, I’m a trained reporter. I can find out.”
“Check all you want,” he said. “My one and only brush with this kind of thing.”
“And Kurt hit you first?”
Ben nodded.
She considered him carefully, and then said, “OK. Let’s say that’s the end of it and take it from there.”
She turned and opened a cardboard bakery box to reveal two raspberry tarts and a selection of cookies. “Ta-dah. I bought them myself.” She asked Cindy if she wanted to join them for dessert.
Ben turned and was pleased to see that Cindy had picked up the loupe and was curiously looking through it at the pages of her book.
He smiled. As he did, he thought abruptly of Kurt handing that expensive present to Jake. Buying his way in. As Ben had reflexively just done himself.
Cindy saw Ben looking.
Abruptly she drew back her arm and threw the loupe at the fireplace, shattering the glass.
“You’re not my daddy!” she cried. “You’re never going to be my daddy!”
Cindy began crying. Big, shivering sobs that Ben knew were for real.
Sarah left the table and picked her up. “Sssshh, ssssh. You’re all right, honey. You’re all right.”
“I know that I won’t, Cindy,” Ben said, quietly. “Believe me, I know.”
CHAPTER 25
“SHE’S ASLEEP,” SARAH WHISPERED AS SHE JOINED BEN IN THE living room a half hour later. He had swept up the broken glass and was sitting on the couch looking at the empty fireplace.
“I made us some coffee,” Ben said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.” She sat beside him, tucking her leg under herself as she had that day in the van. “As long as you’re not turning too serious on me.”
“Might have to.”
“Uh-oh,” she said. “Cindy’s scene scared you off?”
Ben smiled. “No. Gave me some insight, but she certainly didn’t scare me away.”
“So what is it?”
He took her hand. “It’s those complexities.”
“How about I list them? Let’s see if I’ve got them all: the bomb that killed Peter was probably meant for you? You were his best friend and best friends don’t date the other guy’s girls? You already have two children and troubles of your own?”
“Add in that I don’t know if I’m still a target. Johansen has more than a few nuts he can send my way. And I still don’t know why Dawson was in my studio. I’m keeping my distance from my own family, why should yours be different?”
“All valid points,” she said. “Tell me what you want.”
He hesitated, just looking at her.
Then he reached over and touched her face, running his hand down the line of her jaw. She closed her eyes, and let him. “I want this.” His voice grew hoarse. “I’ve wanted to do this since I met you.”
She opened her eyes. “And I’ve wanted you to.” She grinned, suddenly. “Ever since you went into McGuire’s wearing that ridiculous pizza-man outfit, anyhow … I know you’re a good man, Ben. I simply know it. Everything else is truly complex. But you didn’t kill Peter. And I’ve already shoved my face in front of McGuire and Johansen, and so those risks are mine just as much as they are yours. The damage is done. What’re we going to do about it?”
He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. She closed her eyes and he kissed them, feeling her lashes against his lips. When she turned her mouth up to his, he felt as if he were drinking from her. He pulled her close so the swell of her breasts pressed against his chest. And though he was as excited as a schoolboy, he didn’t feel particularly nervous. There was a sense of calm underneath it all, as if they had done this before, or at least knew it was coming.
She took his hand and led him to the little office off the living room and closed the door.
Ben quickly opened a small pullout couch while Sarah lit a candle near the window. They turned to each other, awkward for only a moment before she began unbuttoning his shirt. The top of her head came just under his chin.
She said, “I want to see you.”
Once his shirt was off, Ben said, “My turn,” and pulled off her sweater. He stepped behind her to help her draw off her jeans. Ben felt his throat constrict and his breathing began to rush as he explored the surprising voluptuousness of her body. She turned around and tugged at his belt. Moments later, he arched forward to receive her touch, shivering with pleasure.
Although there was urgency, they didn’t hurry.
“Where were you hurt?” she asked, and kissed his scars along his back and touched his leg lightly, her hand warm. She had him turn around and worked her way up, until her mouth was on him. She took her time, teasing, and licking. Looking up at him in the candlelight.
With that, the urgency overwhelmed the essential calmness of their lovemaking. Ben drew her up. For that first time, they never made it to the little bed. She wrapped her arms around his neck as he slid into her and they kissed as he stumbled against a chair, her desk, and finally against the wall.
They made some noise, to be sure. But even when they climaxed together minutes later, they kept their cries between themselves, between their tightly pressed lips.
All passion aside, they didn’t want to wake Cindy.
He awakened as she was pulling another blanket over them. He looked blearily over at the digital clock on her desk. Just before three- thirty in the morning. She was silhouetted against the windows, naked in the moonlight. It was cold in the room and he welcomed the blanket.
“Get in here,” he said.
She scooted in beside him and he rubbed his hands over her quickly, warming her. He said, “Goose bumps.”
“Mmmm,” she said. “I just made the rounds, put
another blanket on Cindy, too. I thought Boston was hot in the summer.”
“It’s whatever it wants to be.” He hugged her tight, reveling in the newness of it all. He said, “I guess I must’ve crashed right after.”
“Like a big tree. No time for chitchat and snuggling.” She rubbed her face against his chest, her nose still cold. “You’re a terrible bum.”
“We can talk now,” he whispered.
“Uh-uh,” she said, grasping hold of him. “Save it for later.”
Afterwards, she turned her hip into him and he spooned around her.
She said, “You must think I’m such a slut.”
He kissed her hair. “That’s just what I’ve been thinking.”
“It’s been almost a year for me.”
“That Washington Post reporter? I’m jealous already.”
“Don’t be. It was a disappointing four months.” She turned to look at him in the faint moonlight. “Thanks for reintroducing me to how good it can feel.”
“The pleasure’s all mine.”
“Not true,” she said. “But was it just the horniness? From both of us?”
He thought about it. “Not from me. Maybe for you? Was I just some sort of substitute for Peter? A way for you to say good-bye?”
He felt tears against his chest. “No. Not a substitute. But maybe good-bye.”
“Hey,” he said, running his hands down her back. “You’re missing him?”
She nodded. “Already you and I have something that Peter and I never really had. I can feel it. He’s dead and gone, and he’s never going to have the chance to get it right.”
CHAPTER 26
BEN KISSED SARAH GOOD-BYE AT THE DOOR AND STOPPED ONE flight down to put his shoes on. He got behind the wheel just before six and headed back toward his apartment. Instead of getting onto the faster Storrow Drive, Ben circled around to head up Commonwealth Avenue and enjoy the view of redbrick town houses, the green of the park, brilliant with early morning dew.
The morning air was still brisk so he cranked up the heat and rolled the window down to take in the fresh breeze as he drove through Boston on the way back to his apartment.
