As she left the room she heard Mark say, "I'll stay on one condition. If you call Tony Cardoza and tell him to rush over because baby brother has been damaged, I'll tear you limb from limb."
Karen did not hear Cheryl's reply. She got to the top of the stairs before she broke down. It wasn't a serious collapse, only a fit of trembling and a few hard, hot tears. Then she heard them in the hall below, and hurried to find sheets in the linen closet.
Later, after the house was quiet and she lay staring into the darkness, it was easier to come to grips with the truth she had denied so long. She was still in love with him; had never really stopped loving him. If spite had been Jack's reason for asking her to marry him, her motive for accepting him had been no less contemptible. Mark had never told her he loved her, never asked for a deeper commitment. Perhaps he never would have asked. But that was no reason to fall into the arms of the first man who offered her the conventional safety of marriage, who more or less demanded her acquiescence as something to which he was entitled.
Mark had saved her life, risking his own. He would have done the same for a stray dog or cat. But that did not lessen the value of what he had done.
THE hot new listing in Gaithersburg was in a shopping mall, a fact the realtor had not bothered to mention.
"I told her, no malls," Cheryl sputtered. "That's not the type of clientele we're looking for. Besides, the rents are too high, and the so-and-sos want a percentage of the gross, can you imagine such nerve?"
They were having coffee at a fast-food restaurant while they discussed their next move. Cheryl's eyes were heavy, and even her curls had lost their usual bounce.
They had not talked about the previous night. Karen had overslept; when she came downstairs, Mark had already left and Cheryl was eating breakfast. Karen had had to rush in order to avoid being late for their appointment.
"What time did you finally get to sleep?" she asked.
"Late. That damned brother of mine slept like a baby," Cheryl added bitterly. "Did you hear him snoring?"
"I closed my door."
"I left mine open so I could tend to the sufferer if he needed me. He was asleep the minute his head hit the pillow, and he never stirred." A ghost of her old dimple showed at the corner of her mouth, and she added, "I was tempted to go in there and give him a kick, along about three a.m., but my better nature prevailed, as they say."
"Then he was all right this morning?" Karen concentrated on adding sugar to her coffee.
"Oh, sure. He looked like he'd been in a fight, though. Black eye and everything. I asked him if he was going to tell people he ran into a door and he said, yes, he was, because that's what hit him. A car door."
"I'm glad you can both laugh about it," Karen said.
"What else can you do? Life is full of narrow escapes. Some drunk-"
"I don't believe that, and neither do you."
"What do you believe?"
Karen shrugged. "It wouldn't surprise me to learn it was Jack driving that car. He hadn't been gone but a few minutes. If he happened to see me crossing the street he might have yielded to a sudden impulse-not meaning to hurt me, just scare me."
"He hates you, all right," Cheryl said soberly. "You should have seen his face after you walked out on him."
"I'm not afraid of him. Not physically, at any rate. He's too cautious to take direct action. But he can do a lot of damage in other ways… Oh, damn it, Cheryl, I wish you hadn't been exposed to that-and so many other horrible things."
"I enjoyed that part of it," Cheryl said with a grin. "Watching you slap him down-that was wonderful. It wasn't worry that kept me awake, actually, it was that damned book. I started reading it and I couldn't stop. Then I was afraid to turn off the light."
"Georgetown ghosts?" Karen smiled, accepting the change of subject.
"And murders. I don't know which was worse. There was one awful story about some house that's haunted by a girl who was killed by her own father during some long-ago war, because she wanted to elope with a dashing captain from the wrong side. When a girl the same age moves into that house she is possessed by the ghost and tries to murder her father!"
Cheryl's eyes were round as pennies. "Bah, humbug," Karen said. "Sounds like a novel I read once. But I wouldn't blame the owner of the house for wanting to sue the author. Such a story wouldn't improve his chances of selling, especially to a family with a young daughter. Some people," she added cuttingly, "are hopelessly superstitious."
"It's the way the book is written," Cheryl said sheepishly. "Half serious and half kidding, like a gossip column. Then there was another one, about-"
"For heaven's sake, Cheryl!"
"… about a father and mother getting stabbed to death on the day of their daughter's graduation. Stabbed a dozen times-just cut to pieces. Now that really happened. It was in the newspapers. And they never found the homicidal maniac that did it-"
"If you don't shut up, I'm going to throw this coffee at you," Karen threatened. "I'm surprised you didn't wake me up screaming about witches at the window."
"Mrs. Grossmuller drives a big car," Cheryl said. "A Mercedes."
"A dark-blue Mercedes. That's enough of that. Where are we going next?" She pushed her coffee cup aside and unfolded the map.
Their search had been simplified by their decision to concentrate on areas that already had a number of antique and craft shops. One place in Bethesda, just off a main commuter route, boasted a small antiques mall that offered possibilities. A number of dealers shared the space, each with his own cubicle. There was space available, and the rent was within their means. They debated the pros and cons as they ate lunch at one of the many restaurants in the area-another positive point, as Cheryl reminded Karen.
"Going into a previously established place is a kind of short cut," she added. "People are already in the habit of shopping there."
"The space is awfully small, though. And it definitely lacks pizzazz-those awful cardboard dividers."
"The space limitation is a negative, I admit. We're going to have to sell other things, you know, not just clothes. What they call 'alternative selling areas.'"
"Like accessories-fans, shoes, shawls?"
"Jewelry, too. But I think we'll need more than that."
"Textiles and linens," Karen mused. "Laces and ribbons, buttons…"
"Boxes. Hat boxes, jewel boxes, button boxes…"
"Books on costume. Prints from Godey's Lady's Book, frames…"
"We definitely need more space," Cheryl said. "Let's go to Kensington."
Kensington also had a concentration of antique shops, with several malls like the one they had seen in Bethesda. Unlike the latter, which was in a purely commercial area, the Kensington center was surrounded by shady side streets and beautiful turn-of-the-century houses. The realtor they consulted was pleasant and helpful; they left with another handful of possibilities, but without a definite decision.
"We're going to have to settle on something soon," Karen said. "We could go on looking for the perfect place for months. Suppose we set ourselves a deadline. Two weeks?"
"Fine by me." It was Karen's turn to drive; Cheryl slid down and rested her head against the back of the seat. "I'm enjoying this, though. It seems impossible that we've done so much in only a few days."
"Especially considering the distractions. Maybe they are finished. Maybe that was a drunk driver last night."
Cheryl sat up and knocked on the dashboard.
"That's plastic," Karen said.
"It's the thought that counts," said Cheryl.
Cheryl insisted on approaching the house from an oblique angle, but there was no one squatting on the doorstep and Mr. DeVoto did not emerge to tell them about peculiar visitors.