That seemed to satisfy Ida. At least she entered her own apartment without further comment. “That was masterful,” I murmured gratefully. “You saved my bacon on that one.”
Anne smiled. “It’ll cost you,” she said.
Safety deposit boxes have never been high on my list of priorities. What few trinkets I’ve kept over the years, I’ve stowed in various nooks and crannies around my house. I left Anne in the living room and rummaged in my bottom dresser drawer. I found the faded velvet box in its place in the left-hand corner. I felt a lump in my throat as I opened it.
My father was a sailor, a wartime enlistee who probably hadn’t learned one end of a ship from the other before he died. The ring he had given to my mother wasn’t much, but I’m sure it was the most he could offer his sixteen-year-old sweetheart. I could imagine him proudly making the purchase at some low-life pawnshop in Bremerton. My mother had kept the ring, treasured it. It came to me when she died, and I kept it too. It was my only link with a father whose face I never saw.
I slipped the tiny box into my pocket and returned to Anne. She was sitting on the couch, her head resting on the back of it. “Tired?” I asked.
“A little,” she said.
I sat down next to her with my hand on her shoulder, rubbing a knot of stiffness from between her shoulder blades. I cleared my throat. “You know, we had a wonderful engagement party. It’s a shame we didn’t have a ring.”
“We don’t need a ring—” she began.
I lay my finger across her lips and silenced her. “Then as we walked, or rather, as we ran home, I remembered that I did have a ring buried among my treasures.” I pulled the box from my pocket and opened it. The tiny chip of diamond caught the light and sparkled gamely. “My mother was never married,” I explained; “she was always engaged. And now, from one of the longest engagements in history, this ring is going to be part of one of the shortest.”
Anne took the ring from the box and held it up to the light. “This was your mother’s?”
“Yes.”
She gave the ring back to me and held out her hand so I could place it on her finger. It slipped on as easily as if it had been made for her. “Thank you,” she said. “You couldn’t have given me anything I would have liked more.”
We sat on the couch for a long time without speaking or moving. It was enough to be together, my arm around her shoulder, her hand touching mine. That night there was no need in the touching, no desire. We sat side by side, together and content.
“Happy?” I asked.
“Ummmhm,” was the answer.
“Let’s go to bed,” I said, “before we both fall asleep on the couch.”
“But it’s early,” she objected. It was a mild protest, easily overruled.
We undressed quickly but without urgency. Our bodies met beneath the sheets, her skin cool against my greater warmth. I eased her onto her side so her body nestled like a stacked saucer in my own, my hand resting comfortably on the curve of her breast. “Just let me hold you,” I murmured into her hair.
It couldn’t have been more than eight o’clock, but the previous days of frenetic activity had worn us, fatigued us. Within minutes we both slept. For all the ease of it, we might have been sleeping together like that for years.
Chapter 19
Maybe I should start reading the newspapers first thing in the morning. That way I wouldn’t get caught flat-footed quite so often. Peters brought me a copy and I read it at my desk with him watching from a few feet away. Maxwell Cole’s column pronounced Anne Corley to be a dilettante copper heiress from Arizona.
Max had done some homework. He had dug up a good deal of information. Had Anne Corley not been linked to J. P. Beaumont, I think she would have been pictured sympathetically. Colored by his antipathy for me, however, she became something quite different. Rich, and consequently suspect, Anne Corley was depicted as a character out of a macabre, second-rate movie.
Cole reported as fact that for eleven years, between the ages of eight and nineteen, Anne Corley had been a patient in a mental institution in Arizona. She had been released, only to marry one of the staff psychiatrists, Dr. Milton Corley, a few weeks later. The marriage had caused a storm of controversy and had resulted in Corley’s losing his job, in his being virtually discredited. He had committed suicide three years later, leaving a fortune in life insurance to his twenty-two-year-old widow.
Corley’s money, combined with that already held in trust for Anne as a result of being her parents’ only surviving child, created a formidable wealth. Cole touched on her book, but focused mainly on her wandering the country dropping roses on the caskets of murdered children. It could have been touching. In Cole’s hands, Anne became a morbid eccentric, one whose continued sanity was very much in question.
Trembling with rage, I set the newspaper aside. Anne Corley was not a public figure. What Max had written seemed clearly an invasion of privacy, libelous journalism at its worst. My first thought was for Anne. What if she had purchased a paper and was even now reading it alone? How would she feel, seeing her painful past dragged out to be viewed and discussed by a scandal-hungry audience? That was what Cole was pandering to. He was selling newspapers with lurid entertainment rather than information, and he was doing it at Anne’s expense.
“How much of it is true?” Peters asked.
It took a couple of seconds to comprehend the implications behind Peters’ question. “How the hell should I know?” Angrily I shoved my chair away from the desk, banging it into the divider behind me. I stalked out the door with Peters hot on my heels. We said nothing in the lobby or in the crowded elevator. A couple of people made comment about the previous day’s engagement party. It was all I could do to give their greeting a polite acknowledgment.
Once on the street I struck out for the waterfront. Peters picked up the conversation exactly where we’d left off. “You mean she hasn’t talked about any of it, at least not to you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? That she told all this to Cole and not to me?”
“Seems to me that she would have told you. After all, you are engaged, remember?”
I stopped and turned on him. “Get off my back, will you? I’m your partner. You’re not my father confessor.”
“But why hasn’t she told you? If you had spent eleven years in a mental institution, wouldn’t you give your bride-to-be a hint about it, so that if it came up later she wouldn’t be surprised?”
“I don’t know why she didn’t tell me, but it doesn’t matter. It’s history, Peters. It has nothing to do with now, with the present or with us. Her past is none of my business.”
“Why the big rush, then?”
“What’s it to you? Why the hell is it any concern of yours?”
“It looks as though she thought if you found out, you’d drop her.” He was silent for a minute, backing off a little. He came back at it from another direction. “Did you know she had that much money?”
We resumed walking, our pace a little less furious. “I knew she had some money,” I allowed, “quite a bit of it. You don’t stay at the Four Seasons on welfare. She said having too much money made it hard to know who her friends were.”
“And you think that’s why she didn’t tell you how much?”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I didn’t ask her how much, Peters. Don’t you understand? I don’t have to know everything about her. She doesn’t know that much about me, either. That takes time. There’ll be time enough for that later.”
“Has she shown you any of her book or have you personally seen her working on it?”
“Well, we’ve discussed it, but…No.”
