Diane nodded.
“Here’s a pretty one. The center stone is a round brilliant, about two-thirds of a carat, and an excellent cut. The color is good. It’s G. Do you know about the GIA scale?” The saleswoman went on talking, offering information on the quality of each diamond as she put one ring after another on Diane’s hand. “Well,” she said at last. “I’ve been showing you my favorites. Which ones do you like?”
“I … I don’t know,” Diane said. Some of them were wonderful, but the prices shocked her. Three thousand dollars for the square diamond set compass-style in the broad band? Four for the smaller diamond in the platinum setting? Did it really matter to her whether the stone was colorless or flawless? Maybe, she thought, cocking her head to look at a trio of round diamonds channel-set in a band. If the ring was meant to be a symbol it ought to be as close to perfect as possible. But was that realistic? One thing she had never been able to get Keith to discuss was how much he could spend on a ring. She didn’t want him to beggar himself, but there was that little voice deep inside her that wanted to impress her sisters and her friends, to let them know she was marrying a man with potential. But she wanted to be practical, too. It was stupid to spend the price of a year’s tuition on a bauble that didn’t do anything, but still, these were so beautiful some primal urge was interfering with her common sense.
At least Keith wasn’t interfering with her looking at whatever she wanted. Whenever the saleswoman brought out a new case of rings she was able to browse freely. She looked at colored stones as well as diamonds. One of them was really beautiful, an eye-clear, champagne-colored oval topaz tilted on its side and slashed along its left edge with three horizontal grooves, set on an exaggeratedly wide band. In the end she pushed that case away. “I’d rather stay with the diamonds. I guess I’m more old-fashioned than I thought.”
The saleswoman smiled. “Well, someday you might like that one as a cocktail ring. Keep it in mind.”
“Do you like any of these?” she asked, when the saleswoman turned away for a moment to lock up the semi-precious stones. The three remaining cases had lots of good choices, but no particular one leaped up and shouted at her.
She felt a compulsion to turn her head toward the case to the left. Part of her wanted to fight the urge, to look anywhere else. She knew it was Keith’s best way of communicating with her, but she hated being controlled like that. The force relaxed when she let her gaze settle on the third row. A modest round stone with rich, rainbow fire glistened up at her. From her brief lesson in quality, she knew that it was a fairly good diamond. She liked the setting, a pair of flared lips of bright gold that looked like a thumb and forefinger holding the stone delicately between them. She tried it on, turning her hand this way and that to catch the light. “Mm-hm. That’s pretty.” She put it back in the box.
Her eye was drawn farther to the right and one row down, to a single princess-cut stone. She studied it for a moment. The setting was beautiful but Diane didn’t care for the way the light bounced off the center of the stone in flat glints. “No, I don’t think so. I like round or oval stones.”
Her invisible tour guide steered her eyes left and down again, skipping over winking points of light until it brought her to the bottom corner of the center case. Set into the blue-black velvet was a round solitaire with small, triangular baguettes on either side of the gold setting, wide edge facing the center stone. The band itself was pinched on either side of the diamond, emphasizing it and making it look larger. Diane tried on the ring. She was captivated by the gleam of the stone and the way the band resembled a ribbon tied in a bow around a gift. “That’s beautiful. Oh, no. It’s over five thousand dollars. That’s too much.”
She heard a gentle sigh from behind her. “You think so, too? Oh, well. I like the first one a lot. Should we get it?”
She gazed at the expensive ring for a moment, then her sight was dragged to the handle of the front door.
“Let go,” she hissed. Her gaze freed itself, and she turned to see the saleswoman staring at her as if she was crazy. “Will you excuse me for a moment?”
With as much dignity as she could muster, Diane marched out the front of the store into the snow, and turned into the nearest doorway. “What’s wrong?”
She caught a momentary glimpse of Keith’s face before her attention focused on the darkened metal plaque studded with doorbells for the businesses up the stairs of the building behind the security door.
“I can’t buy the ring now,” Keith said plaintively.
“Why not?” Diane asked, pretending to read the names as a police officer walked by. “If you can’t afford it all at once, I’m sure they’ll let you buy it on time. I thought you would. You can put the down payment on your credit card.”
“I can’t use my credit card. Beach and his people said they’re tracing me wherever I go. They have access to all my computer files. Dunn thinks with the kind of program they’re running they could even find me if I use my ATM card.”
“You’ve known this for weeks!” Diane’s eyes blazed bright green with outrage. “So you asked me to come all the way to Chicago to look for rings but you didn’t intend to buy one? This whole afternoon was just to mollify me? I feel like I’m marrying into the witness protection program!”
“I did intend to buy a ring!” Keith tried to take her hand, but she jerked it away from him. “I want to. I would do it this minute, but I’m afraid they’ll catch me again. I don’t think I could stand up to their questioning, not so soon. I haven’t had any sleep.” He sat down on the doorstep. “I’m sorry. I’m not explaining myself very well. I can’t endanger our friends. And they are our friends, not just mine.”
Diane spat the words out bitterly. “Sometimes I wonder if you care more about them than you do about me.”
“It’s different,” Keith said, putting his head in his hands. “I’m the one who’s responsible for helping them go public in the first place. They need my protection. No, not exactly. They need my discretion.”
“Well, they need mine, too!” Diane said, trying to turn her head away from the doorplate. Keith realized her dilemma, and let her focus on a spot at the edge of the street. “I know where they are. No, I’m not going to lead some power-mad nutcase to them, but come on, Keith! They’ve gotten along for thousands of years without you, and they will go on after we’re all long gone.”
“Will they?” Keith asked, a little sadly. “Look, I swear I was going to buy you a ring. If it hadn’t been for last night, I would have. You know you mean everything in the world to me. I have to think. I’ve been knocked off balance. I don’t know where to go. I don’t feel safe anywhere. I’m just so tired.”
Diane sank down next to the sound of his voice. She could almost see him out of the corner of her eye. When he reached out to put a hand on her knee, she didn’t pull away. “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “You sound exhausted.”
The invisible hand squeezed hers. “Can we start your visit all over again?”
“Sure,” Diane said. “Let’s pretend I got here Saturday morning, the way I was planning to originally.”
“But, that’s tomorrow.”
“Right,” she said briskly, rising to her feet. “You’re going right home and going to bed. I was freaked out about you telling me you’d been kidnapped and everything. I wanted things to be okay and back to the way they were before, even though they’re not. You go to sleep. I brought my new textbooks with me. I can get a head start on the semester while you sleep.”
“You are the best,” Keith said. His voice rose until it was close to her ear. “I wish I could buy you a million diamond rings.”
“I’ll settle for one,” Diane said. “And don’t worry about the elves. When I go back I’ll tell them the whole story in person. That way no one can phone-tap you. They’ll decide if you’re too much of a danger to them. But I doubt it. You’re the best friend they’ve ever had.”
***
Chapter 28
At t
he sound of the door shutting behind her, Dorothy sat bolt upright in her seat, but she didn’t turn around.
“Whatever your excuse, I don’t want to hear it,” she said.
“Okay,” Keith said. “Do I still work here?”
“Maybe.” Very slowly, Dorothy rotated her chair, then bolted out of her seat when she saw him. Her angry expression changed into one of concern. “Oh my God, Keith, what happened to you?”
He winced as she probed the bruise on his cheekbone. “Four guys, all bigger than me. Believe it or not, they didn’t want my wallet.”
“Were you in the hospital? Did you go to a police station? Your roommate didn’t know where you were.”
“I was wandering around for a while, but I’m okay now. Can I stay? I’m ready to go back to work.”
“Maybe,” Dorothy said again. “Jason wants to see you. But I think he’ll go easy when he sees that eye.”
* * *
As Keith could have predicted, Jason Allen gave him a dressing up one side and down the other, bringing up the issue of trust, responsibility and reliability but he stopped short of firing him. Keith ate crow willingly, without salt or ketchup, hoping for another chance. If this was the soft treatment, he’d wear a suit of armor if he had the rough treatment coming.
“The only reason I’m keeping you,” Allen explained, after an extended tirade that Keith accepted without rancor, “is that the client really likes you. They’re coming in for another briefing today. You’ve got six hours to come up with some more copy to replace what they rejected on Thursday. Got that? Get out of here.”
“Yes, Jason. Thank you,” Keith said, backing out the door as quickly as he could.
“Remember, you’re still an independent contractor. You could be out of here any time.”
“I know, Jason. Thanks.”
* * *
Misdirection spell firmly in place, Keith scooted back to Dorothy’s office. He spent the next several hours hunched over his desk scribbling all over ad roughs.
In spite of Dorothy’s nervousness about having had to lead the discussion over Keith’s i-business ads, the meeting must have gone pretty well. Keith found initials denoting approval in the corner of more of the proposed ads than he’d thought. The twenty remaining still needed to be winnowed down to four, one for each major trade show, but all of them needed to be given the quality treatment. Keith found it easier than he’d thought to buckle down and concentrate on rewriting copy. A feather of creativity began to tickle the back of his mind. Surprised that such a thing was possible after all he’d been through so recently, Keith made notes, chortling to himself while he wrote. Busy with layouts in the keyline department, Dorothy left him alone.
Around lunchtime, he heard a rap on the door.
“Hey, there,” Paul Meier called. “May I come in?”
With a cautious glance at the window behind him, Keith let the charm drop and opened the door.
His mentor’s compassionate brown eyes looked him up and down. “Dorothy was right. You look like you were run over by a train.”
“I wish it had been that easy,” Keith said.
“So you knew the guys?” Paul asked, concerned.
“Yeah. At least, I’ve seen them around.” It was on the tip of his tongue to say that their leader was the man who’d shown him the leaked ad, but Keith held that back. Such an admission would spawn too many questions, and open up speculation again about whether Keith had betrayed the agency months ago. Since it had turned out the ad was only a means to an end, as it had been for him, he wanted the matter left alone. And he didn’t want to touch on the subject of the elves.
“Well, a clear ID ought to help the cops find them. Is the girlfriend going to join us for lunch?”
Keith shook his head sheepishly. “She went back this morning.”
“Oh?” Paul asked, his saturnine face sympathetic. “I thought she was supposed to be here all week. Things didn’t work out?”
“I …” Keith took in a deep breath and let it out before he spoke. “Let’s just say the weekend was a strain. We’re still together. I think. I hope.” His heart gave a painful squeeze. He didn’t know whether that was entirely true. “It was pretty hard on her that I got mugged. I hate to admit it, but I’m glad to be back at work.”
“Well, you probably need a little time alone after a trauma. Want me to bring you back a sandwich?”
“That’d be great,” Keith said, taking a ten out of his wallet. Paul held up a hand.
“Today’s on me. I’m just glad you’re back here in one piece.” Giving Keith a friendly chuck in the arm, Paul headed for the elevators. Keith reinitiated the charm and went back to his table.
Paul was right: a little time by himself would do him good.
He felt guilty about how relieved he was to return to the office. He had escorted Diane to the six a.m. bus back to Midwestern. They had said a very formal goodbye to one another. He’d given her a peck on the cheek before she boarded the bus. She hadn’t returned it. Keith was pretty sure they hadn’t broken up, but being around one another was just not working. Keith knew it was his fault. He had disappointed her about once too often. He had some major trust rebuilding to do with her, too.
When they had returned to the apartment from the jewelry store on Friday, Diane insisted on fixing Keith a second big breakfast. He laid out his sleeping bag under his desk, the only place in the apartment out of the usual foot traffic, and slept for nineteen hours.
He awoke at eight o’clock Saturday morning to the aroma of cooking. Diane had taken care of meals, enlisting Dunn and Pat to help her shop so Keith didn’t have to leave the apartment.
Watching her stand in the kitchen, slender in tee-shirt, jeans and fluffy pink slipper socks, her long blond hair floating around her shoulders, with a recipe card in one hand and an eggshell in the other, he had a sense of future nostalgia, but the present reality couldn’t live up to his hopes. Diane greeted him briskly, not warmly, acting more like a caretaker than a girlfriend or fiancée. The latter sure didn’t seem possible any time soon. He felt like a ghost in his own home, having the others walk past him without seeing him. They even began to talk to one another as if he wasn’t there.
He was ashamed of himself for not being able to follow through on his promise. His roommates were no help. Pat pointed out, more accurately than tactfully, that Keith had agreed only to shop for rings, not to buy one. Keith backed away from that argument, knowing that sticking by the letter of the law was only going to get him deeper in trouble. Diane had observed acidly that that was why Pat wasn’t in a permanent relationship. The comparison led Keith to hope that she hadn’t dismissed completely the idea of them as a couple, but he didn’t get any reassurance from her. He was on probation, and he knew it.
The evening that Keith had set up to be so special was a failure. They’d gone to the play and out to dinner, but he had had to keep his guard up the entire time they were in public. Diane understood why he had to do it, but she hated being with someone she couldn’t look at. He couldn’t blame her.
Sunday had been worse because they had made no advance plans. Unable to decide on an outing that required the minimum possible public exposure, they decided to stay inside and just chat. That, too, was chalked up in the disaster column. It was difficult for Keith to find a topic that wasn’t full of land mines. School: Diane was pretty certain she’d gotten a low grade in a key subject and might need to retake it during the spring semester. Work: Keith didn’t dare talk about the Origami, which left him little scope except to tell her the latest news about the people in the office, and that was of little interest to someone who had never met them. Marcy and Enoch: too close a subject to their own situation. Keith got enthusiastic about showing off his folder of responses to the party invitation, but not even telling about meeting the sidhe in the storm drains was enough to cheer her up. The story only reminded Diane that Keith was in trouble because of the Little Folk. She assured him that it wasn’t his faul
t, but he knew she still felt let down. They spent the day being painfully polite to one another, but the truth was that their nerves were jangling. Only the undeclared truce they were observing kept them from releasing the tension in an extended argument. He’d accepted without quibbling when she said she was leaving the next morning.
He couldn’t feel any worse if he tried. It made him weary looking into an infinite future of having to stay invisible. It could be years before Beach gave up looking for him. Diane would never consent to marry him if he insisted on staying out of the wedding pictures. He loved her so much that it half-killed him to hurt her feelings, but he hadn’t yet figured out another way to cope.
He kept thinking they should have found a way to get past the badness. Were they just too young to be considering making a lifetime commitment?
It also half-killed him to be thinking about limiting contact with the elves. There was no way he would lead Beach to them. Beach was based somewhere in Chicago. Keith wondered if he should call the local Hollow Tree clients and asked them not to cooperate if someone asked about him. No, he thought, crumpling up a sheet of paper and tossing it into Dorothy’s wastebasket fifteen feet away, that would only draw attention. Maybe he could say that someone was trying to steal Hollow Tree’s designs, and ask them not to give out any information. But that sounded fishy, too. He didn’t know what to do.
With a sigh, he went back to work. Two hours to go before the client arrived. Advertising only sounded like it came out of Never-Never Land. In reality, it was always Right Now Land.
* * *
“Hey, sharp tie,” Jen Schick said, smiling as Keith sidled into the boardroom behind Dorothy.
“Thanks,” he said, flipping the bright orange, blue, and green-swirled strip of silk in his fingers. He took a place at the table opposite the window. If he hunkered down a little, he was shielded from view by Bill Mann and Rollin Chisholm. An intern came by with his decaf quadruple-sweet mocha latte. “I took it from a clown.”
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