The door opened.
A long gray mustache looked into the room, and Galen Jones’s bright eyes above it.
Frank Kelly suddenly smiled. “Jones? Right? Galen Jones. What do you want?” His eyes stayed on Charles. “We’re just talking antiques.”
Mr. Jones hesitated. “I was meeting Beale. I’m making a chess table for him. It’s ten o’clock, right? Thursday? Highberg said you were up here.” His eyes stayed on Frank Kelly. “Something wrong?”
“No, nothing’s wrong,” Mr. Kelly said. “He’ll be done in a few minutes. You could wait downstairs.”
“Okay.” Mr. Jones stood for a moment more. Then he shook his head. “What’s happening?”
“I said nothing.” The smile was gone. “Get lost.”
“Highberg said you were talking about Bastien’s desk.”
Charles nodded slowly, and his eyes stayed on Galen Jones. “I’m just trying to do the right thing.”
Mr. Jones visibly tensed, and his eyes went to Frank Kelly’s hand resting on his lap, but tense and not at rest. “What are you-”
“I said get lost!”
“Nobody talks to me that way!”
The hand twitched. “If you don’t-”
Jones stepped forward. “I’ve had enough of you.”
Mr. Kelly’s hand moved, deliberate and threatening. His eyes were full on Galen Jones.
But another hand moved fast. With all his strength Charles pulled at a box on the bench beside him and hurled it as hard as he could. Its whole weight seemed to hang for an endless moment in the space between them. Then it half caught Frank Kelly’s shoulder but didn’t slow or veer, and an awful, heavy blow hit him full in the face, carrying him and his chair backward, still in the same shattering crash, all the way to the floor.
He only shuddered once, and then was still except for the rattle of his breathing.
“Thank you,” Charles said, his own breath in gasps. “Thank you for coming.”
Galen Jones pulled the box away. A cascade of what had once been a Chinese vase poured out of it. “What was…?”
“No. Don’t ask. Just call the police.”
“You get his gun, I’m not touching it.”
Frank Kelly didn’t stir; a dark bruise was already covering half his face. Charles eased the gun from the holster and set it on the bench behind him.
“Mr. Jones, I had completely forgotten that you and I were meeting here today.”
FRIDAY EVENING
“What do you suggest tonight, Philippe?” Charles said.
“Monsieur.” Philippe bowed low. “For you tonight we have a very special dinner,” he said in his most deferential voice. “All day we have been preparing for you.”
“Charles! Dorothy! Oh!” Henna red hair came flying across the room, with the hostess beneath it. “Oh, how terrible it has been!” She nearly fainted, or did for a moment and recovered, without interrupting the flowing words. “I was in the kitchen when Henri told me you had arrived. We have talked of nothing else since yesterday! Nothing! Such tragedy!”
“I think we’ve recovered, Antoinette,” Dorothy said. “The police were over all day yesterday asking questions, but we’ve finally had some rest today.”
“What will you do?” she asked. “Can you even dream of starting again?”
“I think we can dream,” Charles said.
A thin, beautiful note strung itself from one corner of the room to the other. A wandering violinist planted himself beside them and began to play.
“But for tonight,” the hostess continued, unabated, “you will have no cares. Tonight everything is for you. I will return to the kitchen, so that everything will be perfect for you!” And she left them, perfectly.
“I thought about not calling this morning,” Charles said, “and just showing up like we usually do. Who knows what else they might have in store.”
The violin’s haunting melody wrapped about them like linguini.
“It is perfect,” Dorothy said. “They’re all enjoying themselves so much.”
“Are we recovered?” Charles asked.
“We’ve started to be. I do want to start over.”
“We’ll build a new shop.”
“But then it wouldn’t be old!”
“No, it’s a new start, Dorothy. The old is gone. The past is gone. What do you think of that?”
“Well… I liked our past. Most of it.”
“We still have most of it,” Charles said. “But it’s more than just the building that will be new.”
“What else has been changed? Charles, what would have happened if you’d just taken the papers to the police in the first place?”
“They might have figured out how Derek was killed, and prevented the other deaths. They might not have. I don’t know how my decisions affected John Borchard and Patrick White.”
“There hasn’t been anything in the paper about Karen Liu,” Dorothy said.
“I think she’ll come forward herself. She wants the fight.”
“It would have to be a relief for her.”
“In the end, none of them escaped,” Charles said. “I couldn’t save anyone from their own pasts and their own decisions.”
“Did you think you could?”
“I tried.”
“Angelo escaped,” Dorothy said.
“He’s been through the fire, and I think it was a refiner’s fire. I think we’re going to see gold.”
“And what about you, dear?”
“Me?”
Like the tide, the music and murmur slowly swept against them in waves, foam-crested with their own thoughts. Charles sat quietly staring away, and Dorothy at him. He sighed.
“Do you remember,” he said, finally, “talking about coincidences? In a well written story there shouldn’t be any. I went in to Frank Kelly and I closed every door out, because I wanted…” He had to pause to think. “I knew what he’d done. I knew what he would do. But I couldn’t make myself be the one who brought about his destruction. I only could hope that there was some forgiveness, or something, that I could give him. And at the very moment I needed him, Galen Jones walked in. I hadn’t even thought of him, and there he was.”
“I don’t even want to think about it.”
“But it’s over.”
“It does sound like a coincidence,” Dorothy said.
“No, I think the story is too well written for that.”
“What story, Charles?”
“My story, and we know who it is who’s writing that. And your story, and Angelo’s story, and everyone’s. What a book that must be.”
