by Thomas Perry
“Hi, sweetie.”
“Hi, Dad. Checking up on me?”
“I guess so. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not me. Where are you?”
He sighed. “I’m in a hotel.”
“By yourself?”
“Checking up on me?”
“I guess so. Do you mind?”
“Not me. I’m alone at the moment. I was missing you, and I wanted to hear your voice and I wanted to tell you I love you. So here I am. I love you.”
“I love you, too. Do you know when you’re coming home yet?”
“It should be in a few days. Things are going pretty much as I expected, so I’m hoping I’ll be there in time for the weekend. But I’ll call and let you know.”
“Good.”
“Holly, do you remember what I said about this job the day I left?”
“I don’t know.”
“I said it was a job where people were going to know who I was. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah. That.”
“I really hope you’ve been doing what I said.”
“I have. The only places I’ve been are work and home. I stopped wearing my name tag at the store. I’ve been wearing one that used to belong to a girl who quit. The tag says ‘Louise.’” She laughed. “Everybody keeps calling me Louise.”
“Have you been keeping your eyes open?”
“Yes. No strange men, no cars parked at work or at home. Bobby and Marie and I go to work together and come home together. If I wake up at night, I check to see if something woke me up.”
“That’s good. Don’t stop watching.”
“Hey, you know what? Mrs. Fournier is waiting for me. We’re going to pick up some paint for the walls in the back part of the store, and I can’t keep her waiting for too long.”
“Oh, sorry. You’d better get going, then. Nice to talk to you.”
“It was. And Dad?”
“What?”
“Don’t worry so much. Everybody here looks out for me.”
“Good. Go back to work. Love you.”
“’Bye.”
Till hung up and sat in Ann Donnelly’s room, staring out the narrow gap in the curtain at the ocean. During his career as a cop, he had guarded against situations where Holly might be in danger. Right now he probably had even less to worry about. Holly hadn’t lived with him in three years, and the phone at Garden House wasn’t in her name. He had sold his house when he’d retired.
Till was accustomed to living with a constant low-level anxiety about Holly. Letting her out of his sight was an act of trust and confidence that he had not felt when she was four, and did not feel now. Every time he turned his back on her, his mind was crowded with images of Holly being careless or confused or victimized.
“Good morning.”
He turned and saw Ann Donnelly standing in the doorway between the rooms. “Hi.” He felt an unexpected hollow in his stomach, a feeling that he might have let something precious and important slip away. He told himself that it would have been out of place and unethical to make some romantic overture to her last night, but now he could not help feeling a terrible suspicion that she had been telling him to try. She looked appealing, squinting in the beam of sunlight from the open curtain, running her long, thin fingers through her light hair, trying to search for tangles that weren’t there.
“Did you just wake up, too?”
“Yes.” He looked out the window again. “I was just checking to be sure nobody was standing on the rock watching our room with a pair of binoculars or something.”
She stepped close to him, her body touching his as she opened the curtain a few more inches. “Holy shit. I didn’t see it last night.” She laughed. “I can’t believe I actually didn’t notice that huge thing.”
He shrugged. “It was dark. I drove straight into town from the inland side.”
She stretched her arms, brought them forward and bent her back and then arched like a cat. He felt the hollow in his stomach deepening into regret, and looked away. She seemed to see his unhappiness. Did she guess what he was thinking? He said, “Let’s get showered and dressed. We can find a place for—what time is it? Lunch, I guess it would be.”
“Great. I’m starving.”
He went back to his room and closed the connecting door behind him, but before he was two steps from it, the door opened again. She looked at him apologetically. “I’m sorry, Jack, but would you mind if we still left it open? Having it closed gives me the creeps.”
“No, not at all.” Of course she was afraid—not stupidly afraid of shadows, but realistically afraid of genuine danger—and she thought he had the remedy, or maybe was the remedy.
But fear was not affection.
29
JACK TILL WALKED Ann Donnelly to a small restaurant at the harbor with white wooden walls where the smell of food overpowered the smell of the sea air, and made them both even hungrier. He talked about neutral things that seemed to calm her. He praised the food and the sights at Morro Bay, and talked about the other places where tourists usually went around here—Cambria, San Simeon, Pismo Beach. All the time Till watched her face, wondering what he could do to make her tell him the parts of the story she was hiding.
When she seemed to be revived, Till said, “Let’s go for a walk.” He watched her for a time as she surveyed the windows of shops that sold beach clothes or exotic seashells. She was quiet and her eyes seemed not to focus for long on anything, so he judged it was time. When they reached the beach and the other people were too far away to overhear, he said, “What are you thinking about—being scared?”
“Yes. And no. I’m still so scared that I keep looking in window reflections to see who might be sneaking up on us. But what I’m trying to do is hold on to reality and not get hysterical.”
“You seem pretty calm to me.”
“I keep going over everything and finding lots of things I did wrong, misinterpreted, or ignored, but what I can’t find is anything I did right.”
“You did quite a few things right, or you would have been dead for six years.”
“Before that. I was thinking far back, to the start.”
“Tell me about the start. What was it?”
“It started with a girl named Olivia Kent. I hired her as the very first waitress at Banque, before we even opened. She was a great waitress. Beautiful, too. She had long brown hair and blue eyes, and the figure I wish I had. She had a quick sense of humor, probably from a lifetime of being hit on and turning guys down without hurting their feelings. She liked people and they felt it when she talked to them, but she was fast and efficient, so they didn’t notice she was manipulating them into ordering quickly and clearing her table for the next customer.”
“How old was she when she was killed?”
“She wasn’t. She’s not the one. You asked me where the trouble started, and it started with her.”
He guided her along the shoreline. “Let’s walk out to the rock. There’s a long spit of land that leads out there, and you can tell me while we walk.”
“All right.”
“So place me in time and space. You and Eric were about twenty-three when you started the restaurant.”
“Twenty-five. Olivia was twenty-one. I remember because when she applied for the job, she came in with recommendations from her last two jobs, two years and one year at restaurants in Cleveland when she was in college. Twenty-one meant she could serve alcohol, which was essential.”
“Okay. You and Eric were twenty-five, and she was twenty-one.”
“Yes. The whole staff was young. Eric had become a very good chef by then. He was precocious. Nobody gets to be a three-star chef after working in kitchens for seven years, half of it part-time. You can’t get enough hours in the kitchen, enough instruction, enough years of tasting and screwing up and redoing. But he was very good. He had worked up a menu of twelve entrées with a few variations, all of them superb, and six appetizers that relied on small dabs of expensive ingredients arranged beautifu
lly on a plate. That way, after a helper had assisted him a few times, he could make one himself. Even I could do it after a while if we were rushed.”
“You said everybody was young. What were the rest of them like?”
“Like us. The waitstaff were all women, my age or younger. There were six of them to start, all with some experience. I picked the ones I did because I understood them, and they seemed to understand me. Until six months before we opened, I had been a waitress, and I still had the blisters, the burns, and the aching wrists to prove it. I didn’t notice at first that they were so similar. But now I realize that I was so inexperienced that I could only evaluate people who were like me.”
“You were still a waitress until six months before you opened Banque?”
“It was one of my jobs. I worked as a stockbroker during the day, starting at five A.M. before the New York markets open. I got home at three, then worked at Bernard’s in the Biltmore from five until ten. Eric had lots of jobs, too. He was head chef at Désirée, and he also wrote food articles for a few gourmet magazines, and catered.”
“Catered what?”
“People would come to Désirée and ask him to cook for private parties—mostly studio people. It helped him to build a clientele. If those people had a party, they wanted everybody there to know that they hadn’t just had it catered, they’d hired the head chef from Désirée. Getting to know people was a big part of getting started. I think almost everybody we hired was somebody we met in the restaurants where we worked, and most of the customers at first were people who knew us from jobs. The big thing was money, of course. We saved everything—my tips, Eric’s magazine checks and extra pay, even money people sent him from home as birthday presents. We spent nothing. The only time either of us was in a restaurant was for a paycheck. On Fridays I would deposit our checks at lunch, and I’d have most of the money invested by four, so we wouldn’t be tempted to touch it. Then the weekend would come and we’d work all day and late in the evening, so there would have been no time to spend it anyway.”
“All that was for the restaurant?”
“When you start up, you have to be prepared to lose money for a couple of years.” She smiled. “I figured everything out in advance. We would run out of money and credit on April 26. For a while, we were all calling the place Le Vingt-six Avril.”
“How did you get past April?”
“Dumb luck and lots of help. All of the people who worked for us took a cut in pay from their last jobs. They shared tips, and we were lucky with the waitresses. They were all young and shameless about coaxing big tips out of the customers. Whenever we had some windfall profit—we did a few wedding receptions, a few after-hours parties—the money would help us stagger through another week or two.”
“When did Banque catch on?”
“We started pretty well and grew steadily. The big factor was that Eric had a following. There were some articles and reviews, and then we had to hold on tight.”
“But you did, obviously.”
“It was hard work for everybody. You have to maintain the quality of the food when you can barely cook it fast enough, preserving friendliness and efficiency when the staff are practically sprinting in and out of the kitchen for a whole shift. Every restaurant in history started with owners asking employees to kill themselves to get it going, and then never sharing the wealth. If you’re smart, you start sharing after your first good week. We did that.”
“So you managed to keep everybody friendly.”
“That’s a laugh.” She shook her head as she walked along. “Banque was way too friendly. We had this great place where all these friends of ours were regulars, and at least a couple of times a night some celebrity would arrive. It felt glamorous, and the money started coming in. The bartenders and waitresses and all the kitchen staff were young and unattached, and worked long hours. They didn’t just get along. The restaurant started to be a scene, and it took over their personal lives. After a couple of months, there was no way to keep up with who was with whom, and there were friends of both sexes from outside who would get drawn into the mix.”
“So the employees were all very social. What about you?”
“I was the one who had her eye on the bottom line—the only one who did. It was what I studied to do in college, and managing the place was my only contribution. I tried to keep everybody paying attention.”
“What about Eric?”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a great chef at work, but it’s hard to describe. He was tuned in. He had his eyes on everything that went on behind the kitchen door, cooking with seven or eight timers going in his mind at once. If a new molecule had entered the kitchen, he would have known it. He was always sweating, moving from burner to burner to plating table to mixing bowl. We talked about all the pairing off, but the social dynamics of the restaurant were my problem, not his. He said, ‘Who’s not doing his job?’ I said, ‘Everybody is.’ He said, ‘Then what’s there to worry about?’”
“So you both felt like outsiders?”
“Eric and I were in the center of it, but not part of it. We had hired people we found pleasant, and the consequence was that we ended up with young people who found each other pleasant. The atmosphere was charged. If there had been such a thing as a pheromone detector, it would have burned up.”
“I think you made a good decision. You stay out of people’s personal lives until somebody asks for your advice.”
“Well, anyway.” She looked away for a second. “That was the place, the atmosphere. We were there seven days a week, and working hard. People came in and out when the restaurant was closed, making deliveries or fixing stuff, cleaning and restocking. It was always active, always alive. We were surrounded with people. The business was charmed. We were making so much money that I paid off our start-up loans in a year. When I renegotiated the lease to buy the building, the landlord wanted to carry the mortgage himself. In the third year, we were making enough so that Eric and I bought a house with a big down payment. Around that time, he asked me to marry him. That was the beginning of the end.”
“Because you said no?”
“I said yes. It was a surprise, but not in the way you might think. When he asked, it reminded me that we weren’t already married. It was, ‘Oh. That’s right. We’re not officially related, are we?’ That kind of detail had been my job, usually—to keep us on the right side of the laws and solvent and secure. I knew that marriage was a necessary part of that, like liability insurance and fire coverage and a business permit. It was just a chore I had neglected.”
“Girls are always planning their weddings. Why do you suppose the idea of marriage wasn’t on your mind?”
“Yes, that’s probably why. I didn’t let myself suspect it, of course. I didn’t want to delve into how I felt about my parents or what they’d shown me about marriage. But even more, I didn’t want to spend time thinking about Eric and what I felt about him—or didn’t feel. He was like a relative, my only one.”
“I remember you said your mother had died when you were young. What about your father? He was an artist, right?”
She knitted her brows and shook her head. “That’s right. When my mother left him, he didn’t notice for a week or so that she had left me there, too, because his studio was always a gathering place for women—models, artists, dealers, buyers—and one of them took care of me. Her name was Margaret, and she was a rich woman who had come to learn to paint like Moss Harper. It took her a couple of years to realize that she never could, and she left, too.”
“Moss Harper? I didn’t realize that’s who your father was.”
“The great Moss Harper. When Margaret left, she took me with her. We went to her house in Poughkeepsie, and she was the one who raised me.”
“Just like that? Nobody signed any papers?”
“That only happens when there’s a possibility of a disagreement. He seemed to feel that taking care of children was the responsibility of the nearest woman, so w
hen she left, he thought it was only natural that she took me with her.”
“Were you in touch with him?”
“I saw him once, for two days, when I was in college. I went to New York to his studio. It was like going to visit a person who had donated an organ to you. The excuse for going was to thank the person, but the real motive was curiosity, and that part was more egotism than interest in him. I was seeing one of the factors that had contributed to the making of the glorious twenty-year-old me. There was no connection, really. He didn’t care about me, and even my curiosity wasn’t reciprocated. He had seen a million twenty-year-old girls, and I didn’t strike him as one of the most interesting.” She walked along the dirt path on the spit that led them toward the looming rock. “No, my father wasn’t close to me. After Margaret died, only Eric was.”
“That’s why you agreed to marry Eric?”
“Of course. We told ourselves and each other that not marrying before was a small, amusing oversight. We didn’t make a big deal out of the engagement, or even mention it at the restaurant. I noticed something I hadn’t known before. Not being married was okay because some people assumed we were, and others thought we would be, but had some political objection to official marriage. Telling anyone we were going to get married would have weakened my position because Eric was the one who was indispensable, not me. As long as we seemed unbreakably tied together, I had authority. If I was just the boss’s girlfriend with wedding plans, it would be different. There would be a period of time when he was still up for grabs.”
Jack Till wondered why these were the details she was choosing to tell him, but he could see that she was choosing, so he waited.
“It became a problem. I knew that beneath all of the automatic stuff that was happening—like saying ‘I love you’ at all the right times, but hearing it sound like ‘God bless you’ or ‘You’re welcome,’ instead of ‘I think about you all the time and you make my knees weak,’ there was something missing. We both felt that way, I think, but we didn’t want to admit it even to ourselves.”
“What did you say to him?”
