скачать книгу бесплатно
Dark-haired Lillith was making a kissy face, just as energetic and full of spunk then as she had been until the night she died.
Kelly shut her eyes briefly, unable to look at Lillith very long.
They were standing just as they had planned to stand the next day, lined up by height. Dolly, the shortest of the bridesmaids, was on the very end, holding up her dress, because she’d just caught her hem in her high heel and torn it. She was glaring over at Kent Snyder, who, Kelly remembered, had just made a rude joke about Dolly, the clumsy cow.
Kent had been very drunk. The photographer had caught him sticking his tongue out and holding up two fingers to make devil horns behind Bill Gaskins’s head.
Alex VanCamp looked bored. None of them had known Alex very well. He’d been a special friend of Sebastian’s from college, and he’d seemed as if he could have been interestingly dangerous, if he’d found them worth the trouble of leading astray. Dolly had flirted with him, to no avail.
Kelly remembered thinking how peculiar it was that no one in the wedding party seemed to be connected to Tom, not even his groomsmen. Should that have tipped them off? He had seemed like a stranger at his own wedding.
Which brought her, finally, to Tom’s handsome face.
This was the one face that should tell the whole story, and yet, even now, it didn’t. Gorgeous in his tux, he was smiling that familiar lopsided smile, and one of his eyebrows was arched, as if he found the whole thing entertaining, but unimportant.
He seemed unaware of Kelly, of course, though just thirty minutes before she’d been with him in a corner, crying, touching his face one last time. But then, in a weird way he seemed unaware of all of them, as if he were alone in the picture.
Sophie clung to his arm, her whole body yearning toward him. But his body wasn’t responding. Not a single muscle bent in her direction even a fraction of an inch.
Still, though any stranger could look at this picture and see that the bride was more in love than the groom, Kelly didn’t think anyone would guess that, less than seventeen hours later, the groom would disappear.
“Hello?”
Kelly dropped the photo, shocked to realize that someone had answered the telephone. It was a woman.
“Hi. My name is Kelly Ralston. I’m trying to locate Kent Snyder. Do you know if I have the right number?”
A pause stretched oddly. “Yes,” the woman said finally. “This is the right number.”
Kelly couldn’t believe her luck. She’d been trying all morning to reach any of the other members of the wedding party. She wasn’t sure why—just a vague sense that one of them might know something about the wedding lace she’d found on the roadside marker, whether it really was a match for Sophie’s gown.
But they’d all moved away. Only she and Lily had stayed in touch. Tracking even one of the others down had proved more difficult than Kelly had imagined.
Kelly wouldn’t have chosen to start her inquiries with the hard-drinking, slightly vulgar Kent Snyder. But she’d take what she could get. Though she’d left messages several places, this was her first breakthrough.
“Oh, good. I’m sorry to bother you, but Kent and I—” What could she say? They hadn’t been friends, exactly. She’d spent a lot of time with him for the week of wedding festivities, and then she’d never seen him again.
“Some years ago we were in a wedding together. I needed to get some information, and I thought perhaps he could help me. Is he there?”
“No,” the woman said. “Look, what did you say your name was?”
“Kelly Ralston.” Kelly thought the woman sounded edgy. Darn it. Kelly hoped she hadn’t stumbled into some kind of divorce tangle. “I was Kelly Carpenter at the time. We were both in Sophie Mellon’s wedding, ten years ago, in Cathedral Cove.”
“Well, I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you, Kelly, but Kent is dead.”
Kelly was so surprised she couldn’t speak for a moment. Her glance fell on Kent’s picture. He had been a good-looking young man, in a thick-neck, not-very-bright sort of way. He’d been putting on weight even in his early twenties. His shirt was too tight, the buttons threatening to burst. And his face was already too red, flushed by alcohol.
“Kelly?” The woman on the telephone softened her voice, though she still sounded edgy. “I’m sorry. I know it’s a shock. It was to us, too. It was an accident. Two weeks ago.”
Kelly’s voice felt rusty, as if she’d been mute for hours, not seconds. “He had an accident? A car accident?”
“No, although God knows it’s a miracle he never did, the damn fool.” The woman cleared her throat. “It was a hunting accident. He must have stumbled. His gun went off.”
“I’m so sorry.” Kelly shut her eyes. “But are you sure? I mean, are you sure it was an accident?”
“I guess you didn’t know him all that well. I lived with him for eight years. I knew him inside and out. He was a good man, but he drank too much, no reason to sugarcoat it. He had no business handling a gun, the condition he was in, but there was no stopping him when he had his mind made up.”
Somehow Kelly got through the rest of the call, offering condolences and apologies for calling at such a terrible time. When she put the telephone down, her hands felt cold.
Strangely numb, she picked up one of her rich green-glass leaves and held it to the light. The striations really were lovely. She hoped she’d got all the veins “growing” in the right direction.
She remembered what her first stained-glass teacher had told her, all those years ago in the basement of the Mellon house. A gorgeous young French artist, Jean Laurent, had been hired to create a two-story St. George and the Dragon window to hang at the top of the Coeur Volé staircase.
Kelly and Sophie had both instantly fallen in love. But while Sophie lusted after the Frenchman’s black hair and bulging shoulders, Kelly had fallen in love with the glass. The shining green of the dragon’s scales, and the rich, glowing red of his bleeding heart, the twining vines and billowing clouds behind St. George’s triumphant sword.
Probably Jean had become Sophie’s lover. Kelly remembered odd absences, lingering glances. But he had also recognized Kelly’s passion and he had given her hours of his time.
When you cut your leaves, he showed her, or created your clouds, you couldn’t just pick the prettiest spot on your sheet of glass. You had to pick the one that followed the correct lines and rhythms of life.
Hair curled, leaves grew, shadows fell, and even dragons died, according to natural laws. Violate them in the glass, and the entire piece would always be vaguely unsatisfactory.
She picked up a second leaf, twirling it slowly in her bandaged fingers.
Natural laws.
She picked up the picture in her other hand. Two of those smiling people were dead now. Did that follow the laws of nature? Two of ten was twenty percent. If you took any random group of ten relatively intelligent, well-to-do twenty-somethings… Would twenty percent of them be dead within ten years?
The phone rang again.
She dropped the picture but held on to the two leaves. She clicked the talk button.
“Hello.”
“Is this Kelly Ralston?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“This is Phil Tammaro.”
At first Kelly didn’t recognize the name. Tammaro? Did she know anyone named Tammaro?
“I’m Dolly’s husband.”
Oh, of course. She’d left a message there, after she’d finally tracked Dolly down through three completely different marriages, names and addresses.
“Yes,” she said, eager to make up for not remembering. “Yes, Phil, thank you for calling me back.”
“I just came in. I heard your message. I thought I’d better tell you—”
His voice broke, and at the sound Kelly’s heart stopped.
“—tell you about Dolly. You see, Dolly was in an accident. She—she’s dead.”
TOM HAD BEEN LOOKING for Jacob more than an hour before it occurred to him to check the cemetery.
It was a beautiful Saturday morning, still warm but with a crisp hint of fall. After the funeral, Jacob had asked Tom to stay in Cathedral Cove a few days. Jacob didn’t need to be alone right now, and since Tom wasn’t eager to get back to the whole stupid Coach O’Toole mess—not to mention the phone messages that would be waiting from an injured Darlene—he’d said yes.
He’d let his office know he was taking a week of vacation time, which hadn’t gone down well with Bailey, but so what? Every vacation Tom had taken for the past five years had been a working trip, schmoozing some potential client or attending some business conference. They owed him.
Besides, there wasn’t really any such thing as “getting away” if you had a cell phone and a laptop.
Yesterday, Jacob had slept late, so Tom had spent all morning answering e-mails, issuing instructions to his paralegal and hand-holding a couple of clients who wanted to know why you had to notify everyone on the planet before you set a court date for a hearing.
He assumed today would be the same. This morning, though, by the time he got off the phone, Jacob was gone. And he’d left his cell phone behind, which seemed to hint that he’d like to be alone.
It had been a sticky moment. Tom didn’t want to crowd Jacob, who was free to go wherever he wanted. Tom wasn’t exactly the prison warden. But still…though Jacob seemed to be pulling himself together a little, it had been only a week since his wife had died. He was still fragile enough that Tom would rather keep an eye on him.
Finally, just when Tom was starting to admit he was worried, he spotted Jacob’s car. It was pulled off the road, near the entrance to Edgewater Memorial Gardens.
Great. Just perfect. Tom felt for Jacob, really he did. Losing Lillith had put the man through sheer hell. But to tell the truth, Tom had endured all the hair-tearing and teeth-gnashing he could take for a while.
This definitely wasn’t how he handled his own challenges. His personal recipe for emotional recovery was a fourteen-hour workday followed by a run of maybe ten miles, or fifteen, or whatever it took to wear out every muscle and brain cell he had.
Cemeteries were for wallowing, and he didn’t wallow. His own parents, who had died when he was in college, had been cremated and scattered at sea. Clean and sensible. No desolate angels clinging to crosses, no granite effigies, no gut-wrenching epitaphs. No tilted, weed-covered tombstones and withered flowers to remind you that, in the end, even love gets tired of grief and forgets to mourn.
But what could he do? He couldn’t exactly call Jacob’s friend Joe and say, Hey, could you go get him? He’s in the cemetery, and I don’t do cemeteries.
So, indulging himself in one heavy sigh, he parked his car and began walking around, looking for Jacob.
This particular cemetery was a pleasant surprise. It was restrained, with no marble explosions of showy grief. Just neat rows of well-tended headstones, and comfortable benches under apple trees and spreading oaks.
For a cemetery, it seemed strangely full of life. The trees were restless with chattering squirrels and noisy birds, and ahead of him on the path a young couple walked slowly hand in hand, as if this were just another pretty park.
Off to his right, toward the river, a funeral service was in progress. A soft blue tent held a dozen mourners and a priest. The priest smiled at him as he passed. Smiling back seemed strange, so Tom merely nodded and walked on.
To his left, where the cemetery blended comfortably into a neighborhood of old, charming, well-kept houses, Tom saw three little girls, maybe ten or eleven years old, playing among the trees. One girl had a sword made of an apple branch, and the other two wore crowns of tinfoil and Shasta daisies.
Jacob sat on a bench very near the children, though he faced the other direction. Tom braced himself, took another deep breath, sat on the bench beside him.
“Hey, buddy,” he said. “You had me a little worried there.”
Jacob looked over at him. Just as Tom had feared, Jacob had been crying. But for the moment, at least, his red eyes were dry.
“Sorry,” Jacob said. “I just felt like I had to come see her.”
Tom glanced over at the lawn. Though he could tell where the freshly dug grave was, he saw no headstone. Of course not, he thought. It wasn’t ready yet.
“I haven’t even decided what it should say.” Jacob had followed Tom’s glance. “We never talked about it. You don’t think of things like that, not at our age.”
“No,” Tom said. “Of course you don’t.”
“We had wills, of course,” Jacob went on. “We were lawyers. We took care of that. We thought of everything. But we didn’t for a minute think we’d ever need them.”
“No,” Tom said. For an uncomfortable moment, he imagined his own neatly typed will, duly notarized and filed. Everything went to charity. Everything, right down to the pictures on his walls and the ties on his rack. It was the will of a completely unencumbered man.
But here, next to Jacob’s aching grief, in the presence of all these dearly departed, Tom realized how pathetic his will would sound when it was read. Like the antiseptic record of a thoroughly unlived life.
Maybe, he thought impulsively, he’d go back and change it. Maybe he’d leave a few things to Jacob, who was the closest thing to a real friend he’d had since elementary school. Tom also had a painting of a red-haired girl standing on a hillside. It was worth a great deal of money, but he knew he’d bought it only because it reminded him of Kelly. Maybe he’d go back and write in a clause leaving it to her. She’d be pretty shocked, wouldn’t she?
“I wish I had fixed the damn brakes myself,” Jacob said suddenly.
Tom looked over at him. “What?”
“Lillith’s brakes. She needed to have the whole system fixed. Everything was leaking. She had to put brake fluid in every few days. I was always carping at her, telling her to just bite the bullet and get it taken care of.”
“But she didn’t?”
Jacob shook his head. “She hated stuff like that. Boring stuff. I knew she hated it. All that time I spent, bitching about how she was letting it go. Why didn’t I just do it?”
Tom didn’t answer. He knew Jacob didn’t expect him to. There was no answer. Jacob hadn’t fixed Lillith’s brakes, and he was just going to have to live with that.
The fact that Lillith would undoubtedly be happy to forgive him didn’t make much difference. Jacob had to learn to forgive himself. If he could.
Sometimes, Tom knew, you couldn’t. Sometimes life’s lemons just couldn’t be turned into lemonade, no matter how hard you tried to squeeze the facts.
Oh, yeah. Tom knew all about that.
The sound of the girls squealing and laughing was closer now. Apparently they were in the middle of a war, with pinecones for cannonballs. One of them had just ricocheted off the branch above Tom’s head, and suddenly another came sailing over and caught Jacob in the shoulder.
“Oh,” the young, high voices said, still giggling, “oh, shit!”
Two of the children disappeared behind tree trunks, but the girl who had thrown the pinecone came over, dragging her sword behind her. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am Sir Lancelot, and I’m trying to rescue Guinevere. I’m not very accurate.”
Jacob smiled. “That’s okay. You throw good and hard. When you fix your aim, you’ll be lethal.”
She smiled at him, retrieved her pinecone, and ran back down the hill toward her buddies. Their daisy crowns could just be seen peeking around the edges of the massive trees.
Jacob looked at Tom. He almost smiled. Then he looked down at his hands.
“I would have liked to have children,” he said.
“I know.” Tom wondered if he should add the conventional statements, like you would make a terrific father, or you will someday. But all those things sounded hollow. Jacob had lost so much. Tom’s instincts told him not to try to minimize that loss.
“What about you?” Jacob glanced up at Tom briefly, then went back to staring at his hands.
“Me? What about me?”
“Don’t you ever want to get married? Don’t you want to have kids?”
