“It looks like something out of a magazine,” he said. Then he noticed the people walking down sidewalks and vendors selling papers and hot pretzels. “They’re not paying it one bit of attention.”
“You get used to snow after a while.”
“I don’t think I ever could.” He was so delighted that he didn’t even notice it when I moved a few feet away and stooped to get a handful of snow and mold it into a ball. Not until I pelted him with it, that is.
“Hey!” I took off running across the snow-covered grass, but he quickly returned fire.
After we were both white with snow and laughing so hard we couldn’t run anymore, we called a truce and tried to knock the worst of the snow off before it could melt through our clothes. Then I treated us both to hot pretzels with mustard.
“This is good,” he said, taking his first bite. “I’ve seen them in movies, but I never had one before.”
I nodded in agreement, my mouth full.
“It still seems funny to me that nobody else is playing in the snow.”
“As I said, you get used to it. I don’t know when I last played in the snow.”
“Really?”
“Really.” Though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d played in the snow, I could remember my first time in Boston. The snow had started falling while I was in class, and by the time I’d come out, the ground was already covered by two inches of white stuff. I was looking at it, just as delighted as Thaddeous had been, when a snowball hit me squarely in the face. Philip, of course. He found a battered old sled, and we went sledding all afternoon. I wasn’t dressed for it, and I was sopping wet by the time we gave up, but it was so much fun I just didn’t care.
So much for avoiding thoughts of Philip. This time I caught myself blinking away tears. I guess it’s only natural that when a relationship ends badly, you only think about the bad memories, not the good ones. But there had been good times with Philip. It bothered me that it had taken his death to make me remember them again.
Thaddeous and I spent the day on the Freedom Trail, a walking tour that includes most of Boston’s historic sights: the State House, the Old Granary Burial Ground, the site of the Boston Massacre, Faneuil Hall, the statue of Paul Revere that shows up on so many postcards, and the Old North Church Revere used as a message post. The trail is usually easy to follow because it’s marked with a red line painted across the streets and sidewalks, but since the line was covered with snow, we had to rely on a guidebook.
We grabbed lunch and dinner along the way, but by the time we decided we were ready to head back to my place, I was hungry again. I said, “Are you up for ice cream?”
“In this weather?”
“Folks up here eat ice cream no matter how cold it is. In fact, I was told once that I wouldn’t be a true Bostonian until I had gone out in a snowstorm to get ice cream.”
“Laurie Anne, with that accent, nobody’s going to think you’re a Bostonian.”
“Hey, I’m bilingual.” In fact, my Southern accent had gotten thicker since Thaddeous had arrived. Usually I keep it toned down in Boston, but Detective Salvatore wouldn’t have any problem picking it up now.
We were walking back to the subway station when Thaddeous said, “Now, explain to me why it is that Northerners will eat ice cream all year long, but not drink iced tea.”
“The same reason Southerners drink iced tea all year long, but don’t eat ice cream.”
When we made it back to my apartment, there was a message from Jessie on my machine telling me that Philip’s wake was scheduled for the next night.
Chapter 6
Once again it was late for me to call Richard, but I really needed to talk to him. It seemed like a month since he had left, instead of just a few days. So I left Thaddeous in front of the TV and went to my bedroom to dial the number of the hotel where Richard was staying.
As it turned out, he was still awake. “Laura, I was just thinking about you. Longingly, I might add.”
“Glad to hear it. How was the trip to Stratford? Any problems with jet lag?”
“The trip was fine, but now I remember why they call it the red-eye. And I haven’t been having problems with jet lag because I’ve been having so much fun that I don’t want to sleep anyway.” Then he quickly added, “Of course, I miss you terribly. I keep turning around to tell you something, and it throws me that you’re not there.”
“That’s sweet,” I said, “but it’s okay to have a good time without me there. Just don’t go quoting the Bard to some pretty Englishwoman.”
“Are there Englishwomen? I hadn’t noticed,” he said innocently. “How are things in Boston?”
“I’ve got company. Thaddeous is here.” I explained how Aunt Nora had maneuvered it.
“That’s great,” Richard said. “I’d rather you had someone there with you. Have you two been hitting the hot spots?”
“Some,” I said.
There was a pause. “Is something wrong?”
I should have known that he’d be able to tell. “Well, I’ve got some weird news. You remember Philip Dennis, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes. The Oxfordian.” An Oxfordian is somebody who claims that the Earl of Oxford actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Stratfordians, like Richard, realize that the true author was indeed William Shakespeare of Stratford.
I explained the whole story, from Philip’s visit to how I’d been asked to identify his body the next day.
“Oh, Laura, I’m so sorry I’m not there with you. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think I’m sure.”
“But you feel guilty.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because I’d feel guilty if something like that happened to me. What would you say if I were you?”
I thought about it for a minute. “I’d say that there was no reason for you to feel guilty. That you couldn’t have known that Philip was going to die, and that you had nothing to do with it.”
“That’s right.”
“Would you believe it if you were me?”
He chuckled. “Maybe not at first. But it’s true.”
“I know. I just feel so bad about him.”
“Why wouldn’t you feel bad? You were close once.”
“I know, but face it, Philip treated me like garbage. I don’t think he had any more feeling for me than I’ve got for … for Prince Charles.”
“Philip’s feelings—or lack of them—aren’t the point. Yours are.”
“But why do I still have feelings for him? Am I stupid?”
“No!” Richard said, sounding exasperated. “Listen to me, Laura. You loved him, didn’t you?”
“I thought I did. But that was before I’d met you.”
“I don’t mind it that you loved another man before me.”
“Okay,” I conceded. “I loved him.”
“And you’re not the kind of person who can just shut off your feelings. With some people, love turns into hate, but you’re not that kind of person, either. Of course you feel something toward Philip. So even though your head knows that Philip’s death is not your fault in any way, your heart doesn’t know it yet.”
“How long will it take for my heart to catch up?”
“Not long. I promise.”
The big thing taken care of, we talked for a while about less urgent matters, like Richard’s plans for his time in England and how we already missed each another. Eventually I looked at the clock, realized how long we’d been talking, and told him goodbye.
Chapter 7
I would have liked to have taken the next day off to run around with Thaddeous some more, but I had work that needed doing. Besides which, my feet needed the rest. I left him with a guidebook, the spare set of door keys, a pocketful of subway tokens, and directions to my office in Cambridge. The plan was for him to meet me later so we could go to Philip’s wake together.
I spent the day finishing up the last
details of the project I had told Thaddeous about, so time went by quickly. It was about five-thirty when Michelle, my company’s receptionist and a friend, called me.
“Laura, there’s somebody here looking for Laurie Anne,” she said, and I could tell she was smiling.
I sighed. There was a reason I had never told Michelle or anybody else at work what my family called me. “I’ll be right there.”
Thaddeous was standing by the front desk. “Hi, Thaddeous. Did you have a good day?”
“I sure did. That Aquarium is something else. You know that big tank with the sharks in it? They have divers who go in there to feed the fish. They’ve got more guts than I do.”
I turned to Michelle, who clearly wanted to know who Thaddeous was. “Michelle, this is my cousin, Thaddeous Crawford. He came up to keep me company while Richard is gone. Thaddeous, this is Michelle Nucci.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Thaddeous said.
“My pleasure. So you’re one of Laura’s cousins from Byerly. Laura’s told me all about her family. Are you one of the country singers?”
“No, that would be my cousins Clifford and Earl.”
“Then you must be the one who went into the Army.”
“No, that’s my brother Augustus.”
“I can tell that you’re not the quiet one.”
“That’s my little brother, Willis.”
“You’re not the one who makes Yankee jokes, are you?”
“No, that’s Linwood.”
She grinned. “Then you must be the handsome one.”
Poor Thaddeous turned bright red and didn’t have a word to say.
“Would you like to see where I work?” I said, giving him an escape.
I took him back to my desk, showed him a little of what I was working on, then shut down my system and got my coat and pocketbook.
“Are you two dressed up to go somewhere special?” Michelle asked, when we got back to the front door. “Or is that how you always dress, Thaddeous?”
“Not hardly,” he said with a shy grin. He was much more likely to be found in jeans than in a suit. I was surprised he had a suit with him at all, but I imagined that his mama had insisted he bring it “just in case.”
“A friend of mine died over the weekend,” I told Michelle.
“That’s terrible! I’m so sorry. Was it a close friend?”
“Not anymore. I knew Philip in college,” I said, which was true, if not complete.
She made sympathetic noises.
“We’re going to get something to eat,” I said, “then go for visiting hours at the funeral home.”
“Where are you going for dinner?” she asked.
“I thought we’d walk over to Legal Seafood.”
“Oh, I love Legal Seafood. Their scrod is out of this world. And the lobster …” She sighed as if remembering, then looked at her watch. “Well, I guess I’d better get going, too.”
“Have you got plans tonight?”
“No,” she said, looking directly at Thaddeous. “I guess I’ll just go home and open a can of soup.”
I waited a few seconds, wondering if Thaddeous would get the hint. He didn’t, so I said, “Why don’t you come with us?”
She was still looking at Thaddeous. “Are you sure you two wouldn’t rather be alone? I mean, you probably haven’t had a chance to talk yet.”
“Shoot, we’ve got plenty of time for that,” Thaddeous said. “No need for you to eat by your lonesome if you don’t want to.”
“Well, if you insist. Just let me run to the ladies’ room first.” She scooted down the hall.
“Sure you don’t mind?” I asked Thaddeous.
“Now why would I mind taking two pretty ladies to dinner?” he said.
It wasn’t exactly a declaration of interest, but I thought he might at least be curious, especially since his last romance had ended badly. Michelle was awfully pretty, and Thaddeous didn’t often see a woman with such dark, glossy hair and big, dark eyes in Byerly. I was fairly sure Michelle was interested in him, especially when she returned with makeup freshened and hair glowing from a vigorous brushing.
Thaddeous held the door for us, then took our arms as we walked down the sidewalk. I noticed that Michelle walked a little closer to him than I did, but couldn’t tell if Thaddeous encouraged it or not.
When we got to Legal Seafood, Michelle talked Thaddeous into ordering lobster, which surprised me. We had seen lobsters in an aquarium at the airport, and Thaddeous had said he’d as soon eat road-kill as “one of them ugly things.” He enjoyed it, too, obediently eating only the parts Michelle told him to eat.
Michelle spent most of the meal quizzing Thaddeous about how long he was going to stay and where he had been so far. Then she moved on to Thaddeous’s job, family, and, of course, girlfriends. Some people might have been offended at such a concentrated interrogation, but then, Aunt Nora or Vasti would have asked even more personal questions. Thaddeous took it in stride.
Michelle seemed pretty satisfied by his answers. I had never pictured Thaddeous dating a Northerner, but it had worked out for me, despite dire predictions by some of my cousins. Come to think of it, Thaddeous had been a bit doubtful about Richard at first, too. If things worked out between him and Michelle, I was going to have to remind him of that.
Chapter 8
After dinner, Thaddeous and I walked Michelle to the subway, then caught a taxi to the funeral home in Cambridge. I had never been to a Northern visitation, so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but the receiving room looked pretty much like what I’d find in any funeral home. Maybe the fixtures were a bit more formal than those in either of the places in Byerly, but the Hickory funeral homes were just as nice.
Unlike many of the visitations I’d been to, the coffin was closed. I was just as glad—seeing Philip once after his death had been plenty enough for me.
There weren’t many people in the receiving room yet, and I didn’t see Philip’s estranged wife Colleen or anybody who looked like they could be his family. At the far end of the room I spotted a cluster of the people I had known at MIT who had gone on to work at SSI with Philip.
Jessie, a plump redhead who won’t believe that freckles are cute on her, saw us and came right over. “Laura, I’m so glad you could come. Are you doing all right?”
“I’m fine, thanks. Jessie Boyd, this is my cousin, Thaddeous Crawford.”
They exchanged pleased-to-meet-yous. “I’m afraid you picked a bad time to come up,” Jessie said. “The weather, and now this.”
“I’m just glad Laurie Anne wasn’t alone when she found out about your friend,” he said.
“Come talk to everybody,” Jessie said, and started to draw us toward the SSI crowd.
“I should pay my respects to Philip’s family first,” I said. “Which ones are they?”
“Colleen is in the ladies’ room,” Jessie said with an expression that told me she was peeved at Colleen for some reason. “His parents and his brother aren’t here yet. I guess it took them longer to drive from Worcester than they’d expected.”
“His family’s late?” Thaddeous whispered to me as we followed Jessie.
“I don’t think they were very close to Philip. He said they traveled most of the time. High-society types.”
Despite the circumstances, I was glad to see the people I had spent so much of my time at college with. It had been several years, and now I felt silly for letting Philip stop me from keeping in touch.
As big a part of my life as they’d been in college, none of them had met any of my family, and it took a few minutes to introduce Thaddeous to everybody.
“Thaddeous, this is Vinnie Noone. He’s chief executive officer at SSI,” I said.
“Vincent,” he gently corrected me, and shook Thaddeous’s hand. In college, Vinnie had dressed as sloppily as the rest of us, but as Vincent, he was wearing a stylish pin-striped suit with black shoes so shiny I could see myself in them.
“This is Inez Parra, the chief
operating officer.”
I hoped Thaddeous wouldn’t ask what the difference was between the two positions, because I didn’t know myself. Maybe they didn’t, either. According to Jessie, though Vincent and Inez had been quite an item in college, they now argued constantly about who was in charge of what.
Inez had seemed wonderfully exotic to me in college. With her olive skin and sleek black hair, she was very different from the people I had grown up with. Though slender and not very tall, she didn’t look at all dainty, especially with her nails painted deep red.
“Here are Dee and Dominic Henniel. They’re programmers.”
Dee and Dom both had round bodies and heads, with round glasses and short, curly brown hair. Tonight, with Dee in a dress and Dom in a suit, it was easy to tell which was which, but when they both wore jeans and rugby shirts, like they had in college, I had trouble sometimes. Their names, their figures, and those striped shirts had inspired Philip to call them Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I had giggled over it at first, but I thought it was mean when he used those names to their faces.
Murray was apparently growing impatient with the formalities. Without waiting for me to introduce him, he thrust his hand at Thaddeous and said, “Murray Wexelbaum, QA.”
“Quality assurance,” I explained. “Murray makes sure that the software does what it’s supposed to do.” Murray had been balding since college, and his Coke-bottle-bottom glasses made him look more than a little like an owl. He had never been high on my list of favorite people, but when it came to abrasive, annoying, nitpicking people, he was right at the top. I swear that he walked so precisely that each stride was the same length. Of course, most of those traits come in handy when performing the endless measurements and tests a good QA process requires, but they didn’t make him fun to hang out with.
I didn’t know the last person in the group, so Jessie introduced her. “This is Sheliah Turner, our new technical writer. Well, relatively new. She started a few months ago.”
Toni L.P. Kelner - Laura Fleming 04 - Country Comes to Town Page 4
