Five months had passed since Keegan had learned of Jenny’s death in Dachau. Vanessa had sensed the subtle changes in him almost immediately: the sense of relief that came with the end of the waiting; the gradual end to the guilt that had affected his feelings toward her. Freed by divorce, she, too, had been an emotional bomb waiting to explode. Together, they slowly healed each other and as the months passed, they became as impassioned as they had been years before during their brief flirtation in Berlin.
They had celebrated her thirtieth birthday earlier that night with dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Bronx, then had spent the rest of the evening dancing at the Cafe Rouge where Glenn Miller was playing. It had been a perfect night.
Keegan got up suddenly and padded naked into the kitchen, taking a bottle of champagne from the wine closet.
“Kee,” she called to him.
“Yeah?”
“Daddy wants to know if you want to spend Thanksgiving with us this year?”
“Hell, I don’t know where I’ll even be on Thanksgiving,” he answered, searching for a corkscrew. “Do you really want to go to Boston for the day?”
“They’re not going to be in Boston, they’re going to the island.”
“What island?” He called back, digging the corkscrew out of a kitchen drawer.
“Down in Georgia.”
“You mean that rich boys’ hangout?’’ he answered, taking two champagne glasses from a cabinet. “Do you want to spend Thanksgiving playing croquet with a bunch of snobby, crotchety old millionaires?”
“I’ll tell him you said that,” she joked.
“He knows how I feel about that bunch,” he said, returning to the bedroom.
“We’ve been going there for years but it isn’t the same as it used to be. Most of the old gang has drifted away. I don’t want to go either, but I promised I’d ask.”
“How does he feel about us?” Keegan asked, sitting on the edge of the bed and working the cork out of the bottle.
“He never says. Actually, he likes you a lot, otherwise he wouldn’t have asked us to go to Jekyll with them.”
“Go ahead and tell him what I said,” Keegan said and laughed. “We’ll eat here. I’ll cook dinner.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll set the table.”
He handed her a glass of champagne, then reached in the drawer of the night table and took out a small box wrapped in silver and bound in black ribbon.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
“Oh, Kee, thank you!” she cried with delight.
The card read:
She unwrapped it slowly. It was a small but elegant brooch in the shape of a shamrock, the four leaves made of emeralds outlined in diamonds with a cluster of diamonds at the stem.
“Oh, God, Kee, it’s absolutely gorgeous.”
“Too bad you can’t try it on,” he said with a grin and putting his arms around her, he fell backward on the bed with her on top. The phone rang.
“Ignore it,” he whispered.
But it persisted. Finally Vanessa reached over, lifted the receiver and held it against his ear.
“Hello?” he said, trying to sound sleepy.
“Mr. Keegan?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Mr. Smith.”
“I recognize the voice,” Keegan said.
“Have you been listening to the radio?”
“It’s the middle of the night, Mr. Smith. No, I’m not listening to the radio.”
“Maybe you better,” Smith said. “The Germans are mobilizing along the Polish border. If they invade Poland, England and France will declare war immediately. If you expect to find this Twenty-seven, you better hurry. I don’t think we can keep the FBI out of the case much longer.
“We’re almost through all the case records,” Keegan said forlornly. “Give me another couple of days. If that doesn’t work, I’m out of ideas anyway.”
He hung up.
