Emma was paler than Faith had ever seen her. The faint sprinkling of freckles across her nose had emerged and her hair was more red than gold, in con-trast to the flat white of her skin.
Faith took off her coat, hat, and gloves, then sat down, extending her hand across the table. “Let me see the card.”
Emma had it ready in her lap and silently gave it to Faith. Once more Faith had a vague feeling that she shouldn’t be touching it. That it should be dusted for prints. She shook her head. The whole situation was insane, and the way Emma and Faith herself were handling it was even crazier. What did they know about crime?
It was another card from the same pack, a Currier & Ives snow-covered barn this time, and like the first missive, it got right to the point. But this one was scarier. Much scarier.
You see we know where you live. We’re getting closer.
We have very expensive tastes and we’ll be needing some more cash. Don’t worry. W
.
e’ll be in touch
“When is Michael getting back?” It was abundantly clear why Emma didn’t want to stay in the apartment alone now. There was no mistaking the threat implied by underlining the word
“Tonight. He just has time to change before we have to go to some fund-raiser.”
The waiter came with the rest of the order and fussed about with the scones and sandwiches. The delay was maddening. Finally, he left, but not until both women had thanked him profusely and falsely.
“You do see that they’ll just keep upping the ante.
Blackmailers don’t stop, especially when they get what they want. This could go on for the rest of your life —
or until you run out of money. And how
Emma looked down at her untouched plate. “Well, I do have rather a lot.” She sounded apologetic. If giving into these demands was some sort of perverse rich girl’s guilt over her assets, Faith could think of any number of better recipients for her largesse. “Poppy was worried that Jason would figure out a way to cut me off without her finding out, so she set up a trust for me out of her own money. It’s supposed to be a secret.” Emma looked even more mortified, if that was possible.
“Don’t worry. I’m not sure I would even recognize your stepfather if I saw him, let alone tell him anything at all. You know that.”
Emma nodded absently, smiling slightly. “Then when I was twenty-one, I came into the money left by my grandparents. A good bit of it is real estate. They thought Poppy had enough—and so did she—so everything went to Lucy and me.”
Real estate. Nothing like putting your money into
land. Especially on the island of Manhattan. Faith dimly recalled hearing from her own mother, who could tell you the owner and price of virtually every building in the city, that Poppy had been born not with a silver spoon in her mouth, but a platinum one. By the time her two daughters were shoveling in the Pablum, the utensil had apparently become encrusted with dia-monds.
But back to the issue at hand. It was nice for Emma that she had such bushel baskets of money, yet there was no reason for her to watch it all get dumped out.
“Even so, you can’t keep paying,” Faith said firmly.
“And what about your safety? They were able to get into your building, past the doormen, and up to your floor!”
Tears came into Emma’s eyes and she poured the tea with an unsteady hand. “Yes, I’m scared. Terribly frightened, in fact, but I’d rather die than betray my husband, and that’s what it amounts to.” She offered Faith the cup.
Faith took it, noting that Emma had been worrying the cuticles on her thumbs. Reflexively, she began to pick at her own, then stopped in annoyance. There was really nothing she could say after Emma’s impassioned declaration, but Faith gave it a try. “You can’t live like this. It’s only going to get worse. Think about it! You have got to do
was still all over the front pages and the press had been pulling up file photos from Nate’s radical salad days.
In one of today’s papers, there had been a large blowup of Fox leading chanting demonstrators in front of the Federal Building. A young woman linked to his arm, someone who could have been Emma’s twin, was obviously Poppy Morris. So far, however, there hadn’t been a word connecting either Poppy or Emma to Fox.
“I’m learning all sorts of things about my father from the articles,” Emma said wistfully. “Mother would never talk about him. But I’ve read all his books.”
If ever anyone wanted proof of filial devotion, here it was. Faith well knew that Emma’s favorite book had always been
Faith had been learning things from the papers, too.
She’d wondered how Fox had gotten his books published without either revealing his whereabouts or im- plicating his publisher. An extensive interview in Sunday’s
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
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 cafe’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
“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
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
