door.
Grover walked through to the living room and stood at the window, looking out. Thomas stood to his side, watching not the car m but Grover's expression.
Grover's expression was unyielding for a second or two. Then for an instant the eyes seemed to go wide, as if in rude recognition, and the tight lips seemed to drop slightly. Almost as quickly, Grover gathered himself. But a man wears the face he has earned. Grovees expression now betrayed mystification, not hostility. Yet Thomas sensed that a full and complete story was not yet ready to be told.
'She's a fake ' he said softly and calmly.
'Where'd you find her?'
'She came to my office. Looking for help' Grover took a deep breath, almost a sigh of resignation. He looked up and his puffy eyes glared into Thomas's.
'I'm going to do you a favor,' he declared briskly.
'I'm going to tell you the truth.' From Grover, it seemed a major pronouncement.
'Will it be at odds with everything else you've told me?' asked Thomas with evident sarcasm.
'You know,' said Grover, 'the only thing worse than a smart assed lawyer is a dumb-assed lawyer. Want to hear it or not?'
'Sorry,' said Thomas with conciliation.
'Go ahead' 'Yes, Sandler had a daughter,' Grover said.
'And no,' he added, motioning toward the car, 'that's not her.
Sandler's real daughter is in London. Dead. Buried. And you'll be, too, if you don't get away from that little cutie out there.'
Thomas searched the face of his father's one-time client, a man whose credibility vacillated between total and zero from in' minute to minute. Thomas could picture the rainy cemetery in Earl's Court.
He could picture Whiteside. He could picture the tombstone.
He could picture the scar across Leslie's throat.
'Who's going to kill me?' Thomas asked.
'She is,' said Grover simply.
'Would it surprise you that she's saved my life twice?'
'Not at all' he said.
'Perhaps she's biding her time.'
'Waiting for what?'
'For the right time. For you to reveal some piece of information that she wants. Or for you to lead her to something. Bet. she questions you all the time about your old man's relationship with Sandler,' he suggested with a grin.
Thomas was silent, not wishing to admit that Grovees guess was accurate.
'See?' Grover said.
'Why should I believe you?' Thomas asked.
'You probably shouldn't. But if you're lucky, you will.' He glanced at his watch. He motioned to the time with utter sincerity.
'Now, really, Mr. Daniels. Please believe me. I do run a stationery store and it is Saturday.'
Daniels looked at Grover and looked at the door, thinking of the woman in the car waiting for him. Waiting? For what? He was torn between leaving and staying to badger Grover with further questions, just as he was divided over whom to believe. Him? Or her?
Whiteside or Leslie?
'Why would-?'
'Please ' said Grover quickly, raising a fat palm and shaking his head.
His double chin shook gently, too. 'I've told you everything I can.
Really, I have' I., Their eyes met.
'Please,' said Grover again. He motioned to the door and a tone in his voice suggested that the next request would not be as polite.
Thomas was halfway down the flagstone path when he passed Susan Grover.
The little girl was in a buoyant mood. She'd been talking to the lady in the car, she said, and her daddy could talk just like that.
'What?' asked Thomas, hardly slowing his step. Leslie sat in the car, facing away from the house.
'Daddy can talk just like the Queen,' said Susan.
'The Queen of-' 'Susan!'
Grover stood at his front door and bellowed at his daughter.
'Susan! Get in here!'
The little girl was frightened. She turned and ran toward her father, not knowing what she'd done wrong. She'd never seen him like this. A man of many voices and faces, both voice and face now denoted one emotion: anger.
Grover glowered at Daniels.
'Get off my property, mister,' he said.
'When we meet again it will be on my terms.' The fat man raised his hammy forearm to his face and bit savagely into what appeared to be a muffin. He glared and chewed simultaneously.
Thomas turned and walked to his car. Leslie had witnessed the scene on the flagstone path. She'd heard Grover, but not his daughter.
Thomas slid into the driver's seat. Leslie appeared disappointed.
'Your exit didn't look friendly,' she noted wryly. She had a pad and in her hand and was drawing an oval on it, and oval which, penci 11 as the basis of a sketch, would form a head.
Thomas glanced away from the pad, back to the house where the door was slamming.
'He wouldn't talk,' said Thomas, turning the car key in the ignition slot.
'It's back to New York.'
She nodded.
They drove through miles of wooded forestland in northeastern Pennsylvania. Leslie continued to sketch, even in the moving car.
He marveled that she could do it and occasionally glanced down at her work. A man's face was appearing on the paper. Thomas recognized it.
Grover. De Septio.
'Why are you doing that?' he asked.
As you Americans would say,' she said, ''for the hell of it' She continued. A strange sense was upon Thomas; miles had passed before he recognized it.
He'd been here before. Not in Grover's house, and never within Grover's company. But the section of the country, along the way, he recognized from his early teens.
On bitterly cold autumn mornings, when brown leaves crunched underfoot and formed coiled, hissing whirlwinds with the breeze, his father had taken him deer hunting.
'Bag a buck before Christmas' William Ward Daniels had told his boy rhetorically.
'Hunters built America' Daniels, Senior, had been a lethal shot.
'Learned how to shoot in the war,' he'd always explained. His father had never even seen a combat zone. But he'd taught kis boy how to shoot.
'It could save your life someday,' opined his father.
'Like when?'
Daniels, Senior, thought.
'Like when a buck is charging you,' he suggested.
No buck ever charged them. Most of the bucks had wanted no part of them at all, but some had managed to fall within rifle range.
For his part, Thomas was rooting for the deer and often missed his shot on purpose until quickly his father began to suspect.
'You're as good a shot as I am, maybe better,' the older Daniels concluded one day.
