Mr. X

    'Stewart's going to ruin as many people as he can. He'll try to bring down everyone who ever had anything to do with him.' Laurie slid out the chair from which Captain Mullan had begun our progress toward a believable fiction and sat down almost heavily. 'He's going to smash up everything he can.'

    'Like the Hatch trust,' I said.

    The sketchy smile brought to her face by the thought of her husband's destructive passions disappeared. She crossed her legs and waited for what I was going to say. Her face looked as transparent as a mountain stream.

    'He called Parker Gillespie,' I said. 'He couldn't have known that I was talking to a cop named Mullan about Cordwainer Hatch. He just wanted to smash things up.'

    'He wanted to smash me up,' Laurie said.

    'He said he was relinquishing his claim to the trust. He told Gillespie that he had discovered the existence of the rightful heir, Ned Dunstan, who was the illegitimate son of his father's older brother. Too bad for Cobden Carpenter Hatch, but he could not suppress the truth. It would have gone something like that.'

    Laurie shifted sideways in the chair and noticed the tidy graffiti on the edge of the table. She lifted a hand and glided her fingers along it, as Mullan had done. In the inner ear of my inner ear, Star said,He kept moving deeper and deeper into that melody until it opened up like a flower and spilled out a hundred other melodies that got richer and richer. . .

    “I never heard very much about Cordwainer,' Laurie said. 'Wasn't he arrested for something, ages and ages ago?'

    . . .and there I was, with you growing inside me, and I thought it was like one beautiful birth after another.

    'The part about arrests and convictions doesn't apply to Cordwainer. Cobden Hatch added it in the late sixties.'

    “I hardly know what to say.'

    'You don't sound too surprised.'

    'You gave me a big, fat hint about thirty seconds ago,' Laurie said. 'That doesn't mean I'm not surprised. Mr. Creech talked this over with Gillespie? There isn't any doubt?'

    'Stewart knew what he was doing,' I said. 'Was any of this on your mind when we talked about you moving to New York?'

    Her composure saw her through a long moment of silence. 'That was nasty.'

    “I couldn't blame you for wanting Cobbie to get what he was always supposed to have.'

    'He should get it.' She faced me with a direct appeal. 'Ned, I'm still adjusting to your news, and I haven't had time to think about how it will affect you and me, but you must see that this isn't right. Don't you agree? Twenty-four hours ago, you had no idea that Stewart's uncle was your biological father.He didn't want to inherit the trust. He wasn't even a real Hatch!'

    'Legally, he was,' I said.

    'But you—you,Ned Dunstan—you're not that kind of person. You're not like Stewart. I want us to have a life together in New York. You'd be a better father to Cobbie than Stewart ever was or could have been. That'strue. And I love you. There's no reason for the two of us not to have a wonderful life together. But Cobbie's right to the trust is more valid than yours. You see that, don't you?'

    'What I see doesn't make any difference,' I said. 'According to the law, Cobbie has no right to it at all. Before we can start talking about the rest of our lives, you have to deal with the real situation, not what you want it to be.'

    She continued to focus her utter transparency upon me. 'What would have happened if Grennie hadn't killed himself? If Stewart hadn't called Parker Gillespie?'

    'You know the answer to that,' I said. “I would have gone back to New York and waited for you. I thought that sounded great.'

    “It still sounds great to me,' she said.

    'But if Stewart hadn't called him, Parker Gillespie would be about to find himself in a terrible dilemma. This afternoon, everyone in Edgerton is going to learn that Sawyer was Cordwainer Hatch, and that I was his son. What do you think Gillespie would have done?'

    'Spoken up,' she said. 'Obviously. I don't know if he would have done it right away, but it wouldn't have taken him more than a couple of hours. And then we would have celebrated at Le Madrigal.'

    'Like a happy family.'

    “Isn't that what you want most of all?'

    'Even Stewart had me figured out better than I did,' I said. 'You saw through me right away.'

    “I saw the most interesting man I had met in years,' Laurie said. “I started falling for you when we had dinner with Ashleigh. You know what you did? You told Grennie he was a jerk, you understood my sense of humor, and you wereall there, Ned, you looked at me with those incredible brown eyes and you werethere. You weren't judging me, you were looking at my face instead of my breasts, and you weren't trying to figure out how fast you could talk me into bed. The last thing I wanted to do was get interested in some new guy, but I couldn't help it. Ashleigh knew what was happening in about ten seconds. If you don't believe what I'm saying, you're a fool.'

    “I started falling for you in the hospital gift shop,' I said. 'After Creech told me about the trust, he asked how much I wanted to give away. He could see through me, too, but C. Clayton Creech sees through everybody.' I told her about the division of the money and the new trust to be set up for her son. “In the meantime, you'll have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, paid from his share.'

    Nothing had changed in the bright shield of her face, 'You don't think we should have talked about these arrangements?'

    “I was in a cell at Police Headquarters, Laurie. Creech came in for about fifteen minutes before they let me out. I did what I thought was right.'

    'Creech convinced you of what he thought was right. It isn't too late to change things.' Shining with the utter, straightforward sanity of twenty-twenty foresight, she opened her hand before her as if the world lay in her palm.

    'Creech doesn't know about us. And he doesn't understand New York. How could he? The kind of apartment I'm going to need costs about two million. I'll have to have dinner parties, meet the right people, and do the right things. We'll need teachers and tutors and lessons in Europe. How much do you need to be set for life? Three million? Five? The rest could be made over to Cobbie, with a provision that I have something between five and eight hundred thousand a year. We would be together. If we got married, it would he as though you never gave anything up.'

    'Would you want a prenuptial agreement?'

    Laurie leaned back and regarded me in a steady, unflinching manner that seemed less measuring than conducted in the light of previous measurements and considerations held up for revision. None of this was even close to being cold or calculating. The quality of her steady regard spoke for her—it declared the terms of her immense attraction. What I saw in her face was sadness suffused with irony, and it struck me that until then I had never so much as imagined the existence of ironic sadness. I felt the pull of a future open to nuances beyond my own reach: at that moment I could not have denied what seemed the central principle of her life, that in the realm of adult emotion range meant more than depth. Like great, cool wings, Laurie's range extended for miles on both sides. I had taken this capacity for a shield, but it did not fend off or deflect, it took in, and all that it took in increased it. She sat before me, blazing with consciousness.

    “I hate the whole idea of prenups,' she said. 'What a way to begin a marriage. You might as well buy a Coca-Cola franchise.' Her face settled into a smile of unreadable privacy. 'Philadelphia might be good for us. It's less expensive than Manhattan, and the Curtis Institute is a great music school. Lennie Bernstein went there.'

    Like C. Clayton Creech, Laurie reassembled herself without altering her posture or moving any part of her body, then smiled at me and stood up.

    Her next words clarified whom she had included in 'us.' 'You'd visit Philadelphia, wouldn't you?'

    'Better tell Posy to apply to Temple or U. Penn,' I said.

    “I can always find another Posy.' Laurie knew that she had shocked me. The administration of the shock