Des found herself studying Norma, trying to see her as Teddy obviously still saw her-not as a jowly, gray-haired older woman but as a lively, smooth-cheeked young girl. She couldn’t see it. Hadn’t been there, hadn’t known her. “Did you ever tell Paul how you felt?”
Teddy heaved a sigh of regret. “No, I bowed out very graciously-told him she and I were just good friends and the coast was clear. There was no point in doing otherwise. You can’t stand in the way of such things. Besides, Paul made a better husband than I ever could have. No one ever knew how I really felt. Aside from Norma, that is,” he said, gazing at her lovingly. “She always knew. I’ve never married. Never even had a steady girl. My mother needed taking care of. At least that’s always been my excuse. The real reason was Norma. We had a bond. We were soul mates. No other woman could ever come close to her in my eyes. The two of us…” Teddy’s mouth tightened. “I wouldn’t want this to get back to Les, but she and I had been in touch a lot lately.”
Des kept her face a blank. “I see…”
“We talked on the phone almost every day. Sent each other e-mails. And she came into the city whenever she got a day to herself. We’d spend a few stolen, glorious hours together. She’d listen to me play. I always played “More Than You Know” for her. She loved that song. It was our song. I made a tape of myself playing it and gave it to her so she could listen to it here. She told me she listened to it often.”
“Teddy, how was her state of mind lately?”
“Not good,” he said. “She was unhappy with her marriage. Les had lost interest in her. She put it all on herself, of course. Felt she was no longer desirable, as if such a thing could be possible.”
“Is Les seeing someone else?”
“Apparently. But don’t ask me who the other woman is, because Norma wouldn’t tell me. She wasn’t the type to gossip. Took no pleasure in it. She was too busy looking out for others. She never looked out for herself. That’s the truly tragic part of all of this, Des. You see, last night it was finally, at long last, going to happen.”
“What was, Teddy?”
“We’d never made love together. Beyond a few furtive kisses in taxicabs, we’d never done anything about how we felt. Too damned proper. But we’d talked it through and agreed that she was going to come to my room last night, once Les had fallen asleep.”
Des wondered if Ada knew about this. Wondered if this was what the shrewd old bird wanted to talk to her about.
“She assured me Les would never notice. Once he’s out, he’s out. She told me she often got up in the night without disturbing him. Norma was not a sound sleeper. The responsibility of running this place weighed on her, I think. She often made herself a cup of hot cocoa in the night and sat up in the taproom, reading John O’Hara. Her favorite novel of his was Ten North Frederick. She must have read it twenty times.” Teddy cast a sidelong glance at the book on Norma’s nightstand. It was a rather worn hardcover, missing its dust jacket. “I gave her that copy of it last year. It’s not the least bit valuable, but I’d like it back if you don’t mind. For personal reasons.”
Des studied him. He seemed anxious about this. Exceedingly so. “I’d rather not disturb anything just yet.”
“Of course. As you wish.” Teddy looked back at Norma and said, “I sat up all night waiting for her. I waited and I waited. It was supposed to happen, Des. The one thing Tve yearned for my entire adult life. Norma in my arms. Norma mine, all mine. Only, it never did. She never came to my door. I… I was crushed. Disappointed beyond belief. You can’t even imagine.”
Des looked at this thin, pale man in his topcoat, thinking she felt sorrier for him than she’d felt for anyone in a long time. “What did you think when she didn’t show?”
“That she’d changed her mind about me,” he said morosely. “The only other possibility I could think of was that Les hadn’t fallen into his usual deep slumber, what with this storm and all. Maybe he was up and down, feeding the fireplaces. As it turns out, I was wrong on both counts.”
“Did you know she had heart trouble?”
“I did,” he replied. “Although it was my own feeling that there was nothing physically wrong with her.”
“Les said her doctor wanted to operate.”
“Doctors always want to operate. That doesn’t mean they’re right. It’s simply all they know. I know better. I know that Norma loved me. I know that she died of a broken heart. I will go to my own grave knowing that.”
Outside, the chain saw ceased. Male voices hollered to each other briefly, then it fell silent in the dead woman’s room. Eerily so.
“Teddy, may I ask you something that’s none of my business?”
He looked up at her curiously. “What is it?”
“If you were so in love with Norma, then why did you let Les move in on her after Paul died? Why didn’t you marry her yourself?”
“That’s a fair question,” he admitted. “The simple answer is that she’d already gotten married again-to Astrid’s Castle. And I could never fit in up here. I’m a no-good bum of a piano player. I drink too much, gamble away every penny I make. I could never be an innkeeper, coping day and night with other people’s problems, always keeping a smile on my face. No, Les was the right man for her. And they were right for each other, or at least they were for a time. He’s just a guy who can’t stay married to the same woman for long. Norma was his third wife.”
“Does he have children?”
“I believe so, with his second wife. She lives outside of the city somewhere. Nyack, maybe.” Teddy stared down at the love of his life, his eyes filling with tears. “But the honest answer to your question is that you’re absolutely right-I should have made my move after Paul passed. Grabbed on to this woman and never let her go. But I couldn’t. I… I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what, Teddy?”
“That it would turn out badly. That I couldn’t cut it. I lacked the courage, Des. And that’s my single greatest regret. Because we all die in the end. Everybody dies. It’s the one sure bet we’ve got going. And if you haven’t gone after what you want, who you want, if you haven’t really, really tried…” Teddy trailed off, his chest rising and falling. “Then you’ve never really lived at all.”
CHAPTER 7
“Okay, that makes it official,” Spence Sibley announced, shoving his cell phone back in the pocket of his persimmon-colored Patagonia ski jacket. “This weekend’s gala tribute is now one hundred percent toast. They were fine with the highways and airports being shut down, no heat, no hot water. That stuff never fazes studio people. They just figure they can throw enough money at a problem and it’s solved. But when I told them that there’d been a death in Ada’s family, that was pretty much a deal breaker.”
“Awfully darned inconvenient for the family, too,” Mitch said, breath snorting out of his nostrils as he worked away at a sycamore branch with the heavy-duty pruning saw.
Both of the majestic old sycamores had pitched right over onto their sides, giant root balls and all, leaving craters in the ground big enough to lose a pair of United Parcel Service vans in. Their massive trunks were doing a handsome job of blocking the only way in or out of the castle. A nearby sugar maple had crashed down onto the roof of Choo-Choo Cholly’s depot, crunching its snow-capped roof as if it were made of papier-mache and shaving cream. Farther down the drive, dozens of smaller trees had come down, taking the power lines with them. Once Connecticut Light and Power gave the go-ahead, Jase felt he could horse many of these trees off to the side with the plow blade on his big Dodge Ram 4?4. For now, the three lumberjacks were not going anywhere near them.
“Mitch, I don’t mean to sound like an insensitive prick,” Spence said, his voice raised over the varoom of Jase’s chain saw. “It’s just that I’ve been working eighteen hours a day on this for weeks and weeks-twisting people’s arms, pleading with them. And now they’re not coming. Not Oliver, not Quentin, not anybody.”