“Message said it was important. No name, just a number. Massachusetts exchange, I think.”
“Terry Catherine Hayes,” Blaine said, mostly to himself.
“Know her?”
“I used to.”
Ben Metcalf insisted on flying Blaine across the country in an Air Force jet. McCracken sat in the cockpit and tried to remember what piloting a jet was like.
And what Terry Catherine might be like now. They hadn’t seen each other in over eight years, almost nine, after a brief and intense romantic interlude that had been Blaine’s last. It had been quite an item for a month at least. The daughter of a rich Bostonian banker taking up with a mysterious government agent no queries could find any record of. They had met at a cocktail party when Blaine deliberately mistook her for the woman he was there to protect.
T.C…. He was the only one who called her that, and she pretended to hate it for those weeks McCracken had shared with her, shared more than he had with most women. Sustained attachments were impossible in Blaine’s chosen profession. Too easy for the woman to be hurt or used as leverage by an opponent seeking any possible advantage. And just as dangerous, attachments could provide too seductive a picture of what the other side of life was like. Normalcy, settling down, living under your real name and without the fear that anyone’s eyes you met might belong to a person about to kill you.
In this case, though, it hadn’t been McCracken who had broken things off, it had been Terry Catherine. He hadn’t told her much about himself but it was enough to let her know the commitment might last only until the next phone call. T.C. chose to accept the pain on her own terms. She was just twenty-two then, a kid fresh out of Brown University with the whole world before her. McCracken, three months past thirty, knew what the world was really like. Vietnam had interrupted college for him after just one year and he had never gone back. His life was made for him in what Johnny Wareagle called the hellfire, such events as the Phoenix project and the Tet Offensive.
The emotional hellfire came when T.C. broke things off. He probably would have done so himself before too much longer but understanding the strength it had required for her to do it made him love her more. It was impossible for him to forget her. He wanted her so much more once it was certain that he couldn’t have her.
They hadn’t as much as spoken in the eight-and-a-half years since parting, which was all the more reason to believe that something in T.C.’s life must be desperately wrong for her to seek him out. He tried to tell himself the fire of her youth’s beauty would be long gone, but he was destined to be surprised by her yet again.
Their meeting that night was set for the Plaza Bar in Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel, not far from Terry Catherine’s Back Bay townhouse. The Plaza Bar was located off the hotel’s lobby, on the right of the main entrance. On most nights it featured the nimble piano work of the famed Dave McKenna, his fingers sliding across ivory in the bar’s back right corner. Blaine entered through the handcarved archway just as the last chords of a McKenna favorite were greeted by applause. The ceilings were high, and the fresh smell of leather couches and low armchairs mingled with cigarette smoke and perfume. He scanned the room for T.C., but she wasn’t at any of the nearby tables. He headed for the far wall, where more tables were secluded behind a Japanese screen. As he approached, she stepped out to meet him.
She was undoubtedly the most beautiful woman in the bar. Her figure had remained tall and lean. She wore only traces of makeup and a dress that highlighted her model’s body. There was nothing pretentious about her appearance. Blaine immediately felt all the old attraction he had tried to forget. She stood there uneasily, her smile slight and nervous, and Blaine knew more was behind the tension than simply their reunion.
He kissed her lightly on the lips, let his squeeze of her hand linger.
“You promised me you’d stay beautiful,” he said through the lump in his throat. “And you have.”
“Still working the old charm, eh McCracken?”
“Some things don’t change, T.C.”
“Been a long time since anyone called me that. I still hate it.”
“Well, Terry Catherine, that’s why I say it.”
“I see time hasn’t mellowed you in the least. As I always used to tell you, if God had meant us to use initials, he wouldn’t have bothered with names in the first place.”
Blaine let go of her hand and together they walked to her table, set back against the wall where there was nothing to disturb their privacy. Through a nearby window they could see people passing on the sidewalk outside.
“I do plenty of things God probably never meant,” he told her when they were seated.
“And I understand one of those colorful escapades,” she followed without missing a beat, “earned you the title of McCrackenballs. I was offended when I heard about it. They could have come to me for a reference.”
“Your memory that good?”
“Some things you don’t forget.”
“That ring I felt on your finger means you forgot one promise you made to yourself.”
She nodded emotionlessly. “An unfortunate misstep. Lasted three years. The divorce was a much happier day than the wedding. I keep the ring as a reminder to avoid similar missteps in the future.”
“Why bother making one?”
She didn’t answer him right away, and that gave Blaine a chance to gaze into her eyes. She really was beautiful, even more so now than eight years ago. The little her face had aged made it seem fuller, less dominated by the high cheekbones she had always been sensitive about. She wore her hair shorter now, shaggy, neither in fashion nor out — just her.
“Because I was scared,” she said finally. “Twenty-seven years old, all dressed up, and nowhere to go. I panicked. Promised myself I’d say yes to the next man who popped the question. Could’ve been worse. It could have been you, McCracken.”
Blaine winked. “Anything but that.”
“Anyway, I’m now determined to die single.”
“But not a virgin.”
“Thanks to you.”
“If I was the first, I’ll eat your mattress cover.”
“You were the first that mattered, the first who wasn’t a juvenile, or who didn’t come ready packaged from my family, or who wasn’t a horny Brown undergrad. It’s the same thing.”
A waitress came and T.C. ordered a glass of wine by name and vintage. McCracken said he’d take the same.
“Red and white,” he noted with a shrug. “All just colors to me.”
“A man in your position really should pay more attention to such things, McCracken.”
“A man in my position shouldn’t be drinking at all. You should see me. I’m really good at swirling the contents of a glass around so no one can tell I’m not drinking it.”
“The wine you just ordered is twenty dollars a glass.”
“I’ll swirl slower.”
She laughed and looked at ease for the first time. “You’re a hard man to keep track of.”
“You found me.”
“I never stopped keeping tabs, you know. I know all about your trouble in England and your subsequent banishment to the office pool in France. Learning of your resurrection was second only to my divorce as the best day ever.”
“But you didn’t call until now.”
The waitress came with their drinks, saving T.C. the trouble of responding right away. She sipped. McCracken swirled.
“I thought it would be much harder to reach you.”
“I make sure it isn’t for people who know me. It’s what I’m doing these days — paying back old debts, settling scores. Makes me feel I’m worth something.”
“Doing favors for friends …”