Faith tried a new tack. “Your father would never have put up with blackmail, and think how upset he would have been to know he was the cause of so much 54
unhappiness for you.” It was the right button. Emma immediately burst into heartrending sobs that people at neighboring tables professed not to notice. It was New York City, after all. Besides, most of the café’s cus-tomers were weary shoppers close to tears themselves.
“Don’t you think I’ve thought of all this? There’s no choice but to wait and see what happens. I can’t tell Michael and I really can’t tell the police. Oh, I wish Daddy hadn’t died! He’d know what to do.” If Daddy hadn’t died—and it certainly wasn’t Daddy’s idea—Emma would be in only a slightly less awkward position. Faith sat up suddenly. There had been something in Emma’s tone that—
“You did find him, didn’t you!”
Emma took out a handkerchief trimmed with an inch of the kind of lace that took French nuns a year to create. She dabbed her eyes. Her nose didn’t get red when she cried, Faith had noted with some envy, but her whole face was pink now. Emma had never been a good liar.
“Todd took me to him. Before my mother found me and made me return home. My father was living someplace upstate. Neither he nor Todd told me the name of the town. For all our protection. Before that, he’d been out in Oregon, then Minnesota. He moved around a lot, of course. But if I hadn’t found him through Todd, I would have kept looking. I had to see my real father—
and he wanted to see me. It was his dream, he told me.”
“Did you know he’d moved into the city?” Emma nodded.
Faith blew at a strand of hair that had fallen into her eyes when the door to the frigid outside opened. One thing was clear. Whether it had occurred to Emma or not—and possibly not—if she went to the authorities 55
now, she could be charged. Concealing the whereabouts of a wanted felon was itself a crime. In any case, she’d certainly make the headlines. And no one would be happy. Not the Stansteads, not the party—
and, most especially, not Michael.
“He thought he would be safe enough after all this time, and he’d changed his name.”
Yeah, Faith thought, to Fuchs, German for Fox. She began to wonder just how clever a man Fox had been.
One would have thought that number one—or at most, number two—in the Instructions for Going Underground Manual read, “Do not assume a name resembling your own. Avoid the same initials.” So, Nathan Fox decided to become Norman Fuchs. Maybe he had luggage.
“ ‘All old Jewish men look alike,’ Daddy said. He’d grown a beard and cut his hair. It was very gray. I would never have recognized him from the old pictures. He was terribly good-looking back then, don’t you think?”
Outside the large windows, the skaters endlessly circled the rink, leaving sharp trails and occasionally trac-ing intricate figures in the ice. A group of schoolkids sent a spray of chips flying up against the glass as they came to a sudden stop before racing off again.
“Very good-looking. Handsome as all get-out, but Emma, weren’t you afraid someone would see the two of you together?”
“We never went outside. He never did go outside much anyway. He thought too much fresh air was bad for people,” Emma smiled reminiscently. “I used to bring him bialys. There’s a good place near where he lived. He liked to eat them when they were still warm.
His grandmother made the best ones, ones you could 56
really sink your teeth into, he said. That was my great-grandmother.”
Faith wasn’t sure she could stand the pathos. And it was true: Like a real bagel, it was hard to get a good bialy these days.
“I’d have brought him more food, but there were some weeks when I couldn’t come, and I didn’t want him to depend on it. So he stuck to his own shopping.
He went out to shop once or twice a week. Daddy didn’t care about what he ate.”
Faith knew there were people like this, but she preferred not to hear about them.
“I couldn’t call him. He didn’t have a phone. We arranged that he’d be home at three o’clock on Tuesdays. Not that he had other places to go, but this way, we’d be sure. If I could make it, fine; if not, fine.
Daddy was very nonjudgmental.”
Of his daughter, perhaps. Few others, apart from some of the working class, had escaped his scathing view of the world. Fox had once put the entire United States of America on trial in a mock version staged in Central Park. Since they didn’t have a permit, the trial ended before a verdict could be reached.
Emma was buttering a scone. We seem to be developing a pattern here, Faith observed to herself. Emma unburdens herself, feels better, perks up, and I inch closer to prematurely adding Nice ’n Easy to my shopping list.
“They didn’t name the amount of money they wanted in the note,” Emma pointed out. “And my name hasn’t been in any of the papers, or someone would have told me by now, so there really is nothing we can do at the moment.”
She took a bite, swallowed, and added, “The police 57
would certainly have been in touch with me already if they had been going to.” She laughed at her own il-logic—and perhaps the awkwardly dangling infinitive.
“Why are you so sure about that?” Faith asked suspiciously. Grammar or no grammar, she knew what Emma was hinting. She took a bite of the scone on her own plate and put it down. Too much baking powder.
“I always sent Daddy postcards when I was traveling and couldn’t get to see him. Besides, he did so miss leaving the country. He’d hitchhiked all over the world when he was younger.”
“And he saved them?”
“One was on the fridge the last time I was there.” Ignoring the homey image this conjured up—hammer and sickle refrigerator magnets?—Faith pressed.
“But how would the police have known who you were?
Granted, they could check up on people named Emma who’d left the country for those destinations near the postmarked dates, but it wouldn’t be easy.”
“They would have recognized Michael from our wedding picture,” Emma answered matter-of-factly.
Faith’s head began to reel as she envisioned the Spartan studio apartment described in the media filled with nothing but books, an ancient Underwood on a card table, a bed, and a file cabinet—envisioned the apartment complete with an eight-by-ten glossy of Emma and Michael, the bride and groom, in a silver frame from Tiffany’s.
But Emma was right. The police would have been onto her immediately. Fox’s murderer had taken the photo and the cards. Fox’s murderer. Emma’s blackmailer?
Emma stood up. She looked out at the tree and said 58
pensively, “I’m madly behind with my shopping. I’d better go to Saks.”
Faith pulled on her coat. “What about Todd? What happened to him? Don’t tell me you see him at three o’clock on Wednesdays.”
“Don’t be silly. I never saw him again after that, but I did get a card in the mail a couple of years ago from some real estate firm on Long Island. You know the kind. ‘If you’re thinking of buying a house, think of me.’ And it had his picture on it; otherwise, I would never even have read it. It was right after we got married, and he must have seen the announcement in the Times. Maybe he thought we wanted to move out of the city. City—that’s where he was—Garden City.” So, Todd Hartley had not assumed a blue collar—