“I was hoping to.”
“So was I.”
Thomson turned from the mirror and looked at her, a hand motionless on the knot of his maroon tie. “What’d Mallon say to you?” he said.
“Nothing.” Natalie smiled carefully. “It was something I heard at dinner, I guess.”
Thomson’s concentration had been splintered by what Dom Lorso had told him.
If Earl had joined him yesterday, played golf and gone to dinner... they might have had a brandy, listened to the dance music and talked about things that interested Earl... his cars, the time in London with the Correll Group, the summers he’d worked at Summitt. Now he was at headquarters in Wilmington, the student prince routine, rotating from one department to another with his supervisors reporting directly to George Thomson. This allowed him to live at home, which a doctor suggested was good both for Earl and his mother, the closeness...
It was difficult to talk to Earl, but maybe if he’d had the time and opportunity the night before he wouldn’t be standing here now tight with worry and Natalie So-and-So’s expensive perfume on everything around him.
She had written a phone number on a paper napkin. She smiled and held it out to him. “I hope you’ll call,” she said. “Would you kiss a girl goodbye?”
He put his bag down and walked to her side of the bed. “So it was a deal, right?”
“I enjoyed it, Mr. Thomson. That wasn’t part of the deal. I mean that.”
“I asked you, was it a deal?”
She smiled nervously. “Yes, it was a deal, Mr. Thomson. Mr. Mallon said you’d be alone, that your wife wouldn’t be with you.”
“Where do you usually work, Natalie?”
“In Philadelphia. I only take a few jobs a month. Mr. Mallon said you didn’t like things arranged, that you liked them just to happen.”
“He’s right, I’m romantic. My wife’s a cripple, her name’s Adele. Did Mallon mention that?”
“He didn’t tell me anything personal.”
“She was hurt fifteen years ago, it was an accident, but I was responsible,” Thomson said. “Did Mallon tell you all about that?” He was close to shouting. “Did he tell you she’s still a goddamn beautiful woman?”
She moved quickly back from him, a smile straining her face. “Mr. Thomson. It was business, nothing else.”
Thomson struck her twice with a full swing of his arm, and when she rolled on her side, covering her face, making no sound at all, he picked up his bag and left the room.
In the lobby of the clubhouse he bought a morning paper and told the manager that someone in his condo had slipped in the shower and needed a doctor. Franklin Mallon should be informed immediately, and he would take care of it. If Mr. Mallon had any questions whatsoever, he was to contact Dom Lorso at Harlequin headquarters.
Thomson joined his chauffeur, who stood beside a Mercedes Benz 600. On the way home he flipped through the bulky paper until he found the story, a single paragraph in the suburban section.
Under a Muhlenburg, Pennsylvania, dateline, it read:
A fourteen-year-old Chester Township girl was kidnapped at dusk yesterday while riding a bicycle near her home. She was later beaten and raped, according to Detective Captain Walter Slocum of the East Chester Police Department. Slocum said the girl was struck by a car on Fairlee Road, five miles north of Route One, and then driven to an isolated farm where she was sexually assulted. The driver of the vehicle was described by police as a male Caucasian in his twenties or thirties. The girl’s name is being withheld by police because of her age.
Two hours after reading this, Thomson was at his home in Wahasset, Pennsylvania. At least the surface of his life was serene, he thought, as a maid brought him orange juice and coffee and a tray of hot rolls. Somewhere beyond the windows of his study a power mower sounded faintly, a last autumn trim of the hedges.
Returning here was always an emotionally ambivalent experience. The grounds were manicured and elegant, a small estate given over to lawns and greenhouses and carefully kept woods with brick-bottomed streams running through them. But after the first glimpse of the driveway and gray manor house, after that first stir of pride would come the dispiriting thought of Adele waiting there for him, alone in her upstairs suite.
Thomson tried to organize his thoughts. The maid told him that Mr. Earl was with his mother and that Mr. Lorso had just joined them.
His phone rang. It was Summitt City, Clem Stoltzer. Thomson made a note of the time and pressed the record button on his desk console.
Stoltzer told him they had no news of Jarrell Selby as yet. He had not returned to his house at Summitt City. Everything else was proceeding on schedule.
Thomson said, “Do you know anything about the girl who was with him?”
“No, sir, just that he said she was a friend of his.”
“Did Harry Selby know her?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“That’s right, sir. But I called Harry Selby this morning. He told me he didn’t even know her last name and didn’t have any idea where to get in touch with her.”
“He could have been lying. But you think their meeting at Summitt was a coincidence?”
“That’s the impression I got.”
Thomson was distracted by voices from the hall. “Keep in touch, Stoltzer.” He broke the connection.
Earl and Dom Lorso were coming down the stairs from Adele’s suite. Earl laughed and called something to Santos, his mother’s therapist.
George Thomson hated the tension gripping him. It reflected worries that Adele couldn’t understand or tolerate. Criticism of Earl, to her, was the equivalent of a treacherous disloyalty. He was more than her only son, more than flesh and blood, he was an instrument of God, her savior after the accident. Earl had given his life to her then — his legs were hers, his laughter sounded when hers choked away into sobs; he had made a world worth living for. His fierce love had kept her from finding a solution in the bottle of capsules hidden beneath her pillow.
Adele had in time achieved a steely resignation to her fate and a will to live rooted in the mystical conviction that her life had been spared, at whatever cost in personal anguish, for some preternatural purpose which was beyond her grasp to understand but not her capacity to accept and submit to.
Dom Lorso entered the study with Earl, who wore a blue robe and pajamas.
“Coffee smells good,” Thomson’s son said.
“Help yourself. You, too, Dom. There’s orange juice and fresh rolls.”
Earl poured himself coffee and settled into a deep chair, propping his slippered feet against an ottoman. “Coffee’s fine,” he said. “I’m having breakfast with mother. Santos is making what he calls ‘a Cuban credit card.’ You take it on faith, I guess.”
Dom Lorso sat in a leather chair and stared at his shoes. Small and tidily dressed — white shirt, blue tie, dark jacket — Lorso was several years younger than Thomson, but his face was old, gray and deeply lined. His eyes were tired, heavily lidded, always about to close, it seemed. But at times they could become suddenly and disconcertingly sharp. His thick hair, a cluster of white curls, struck an incongruously cherubic note above the weary face and eyes.
The big room was silent, except for the crackle of the fireplace and the occasional clink as Earl put his cup down.
This silence was deliberate, as Thomson knew. It was a testing game Earl played. He knew his father had questions to ask, but he wouldn’t cooperate in even a token fashion with anything resembling an interrogation.
Earl disliked being questioned; in fact he refused to tolerate it. Even as a child, a casual query about what he was doing might tip him into dangerous rages. A doctor had explained to Thomson that this stemmed from the trauma of role reversal. Earl the son was playing the mother to the crippled “child,” reading stories to Adele, helping her in and out of the wheelchair, operating the controls of her whirlpool bath, coaxing her to eat and giving her smiles and hugs for rewards. “In the boy’s mind, at this stage, his ministrations are perfect, even Godlike, perhaps, and therefore they can’t even be questioned or criticized,” the doctor had told Thomson.