Gregory’s face did not lose its hardness. “Are you going to cook or drink?” he asked coldly. “I’d like to know so I can inform our guests.” He made it sound as though Kady had a drinking problem and he was begging her to lay off the booze just for tonight.
Kady didn’t flinch. After one had faced a hanging party, an angry fiancé didn’t seem too dangerous. “Perhaps I shall do both,” she said, her eyes never leaving Gregory’s.
At that he backed down, his face softening as he took a step toward her, but Kady turned her back on him. “Perhaps you should join your mother in the office and leave my kitchen to me,” she said over her shoulder.
For a moment Gregory looked as though he was going to go into a rage, but, with a glance at the employees, who were now openly staring, he gave a little shrug. “Sure, honey, whatever you say.” Then he winked in conspiracy at a couple of the men, as though to say, Women! and left the kitchen.
* * *
For a few moments after Gregory left, Kady felt shaky and frightened. She had an almost overwhelming urge to run after him and apologize, but then the feeling began to be replaced with a sort of buoyancy she’d never felt before.
“Someone want to slice me three potatoes?” she said into the silence in the kitchen.
“Me!” one of the men said loudly.
“No! Me!” another yelled; then all four men, in an excellent imitation of the Three Stooges, ran smack into each other, and Kady laughed until she had tears in her eyes. After that the feeding of the customers went faster and more smoothly and certainly more pleasantly than she had ever before experienced at Onions. During the evening, one of her assistants kissed her cheek and whispered, “Thank you.” He didn’t have to say what he was thanking her for. The absence of Mrs. Norman’s constant complaining was like hearing the music of heaven.
After the last meal was served, one of the waiters called out that “the boss” was waiting to see Kady.
“By ‘the boss’ do you mean Mr. Norman?” one of the cooks asked. “I think that the guard may have changed tonight. You are looking at ‘the boss,’ right here,” he said, pointing both hands at Kady.
The waiter guffawed. “Yeah, right,” he said, then went back to the dining room.
Does everyone see me as a wimp? Kady wondered. Does no one think I can stand up to anyone? No one had thought that of her in Legend.
“And I was the same woman then as I am now,” she whispered to herself as she headed for Gregory’s office.
One look at his face and she knew that he was not going to let her off with a few sentences. As she sat down on the chair he silently pointed to, she knew she was in for a Serious Lecture.
“Kady,” he said in a voice heavy with disappointment and “duty.” “I found your behavior tonight intolerable. I can bear the way you humiliated me in front of the help, but I cannot allow you to talk to my mother in the way you did. Right now she is upstairs lying down. I had to give her a sedative to calm her.”
He was standing, his hands clasped behind his back, then he leaned over the desk toward Kady. “She was crying.”
Kady knew this was her cue to say she was sorry, but for the life of her, her mouth would not open. She just sat there looking up at Gregory, waiting for him to continue.
“My mother and I have been good to you; we have given you free rein in this restaurant. My mother—who is not a strong woman—worked very hard to bring Onions back to its former glory, which was difficult for her to do without a husband. But somehow she did it, and she has included you in every aspect of the rebirth of this restaurant.”
His statement was so absurd that Kady almost laughed aloud. She, Kady Long, was responsible for the rebirth of the run-down old steak house, and what she’d managed to do she had done in spite of Mrs. Norman’s constant interference.
Gregory seemed to be waiting for Kady’s apology, but she just continued to look at him, so he sighed heavily, then withdrew a thick file folder from an open desk drawer. “I wanted this to be a surprise.” He glared at her in reproach. “A surprise for our wedding night, but your conduct tonight is forcing me to forgo that lovely surprise.”
At this Kady did feel the tiniest bit of guilt. What was it? Jewelry? Keys to a new car? Maybe he had put her name on the deed to the house. Or given her a third share in the restaurant that she had made into a success.
With a gesture of disgust, he tossed the file folder onto Kady’s lap, and she opened it, but, truthfully, the papers inside made no sense to her. It looked as though Gregory and his mother were buying into something along with a lot of other people. But look as she might, Kady didn’t see her name anywhere on any of the papers.
“Kady,” Gregory said in a heavy voice. “I have never told you this, but I have made great plans for us after we are married. Just recently you ridiculed me when I was hesitant about your welfare scheme. You assumed that I was a snob and a bigot, but you never asked me if the reason I was hesitant was because I had other plans for us.”
Pausing for a moment, he pointed at the folder on her lap. “I am going to take some of your best recipes, especially the ones you’ve served the President, and mass produce them.”
Kady blinked at him, having no idea what he meant. “Mass produce my recipes?”
“Yes. But you have now ruined the surprise,” he said, not able to resist another dig. “I have been working with investors, all of whom have eaten here, and they are willing to put some big money into the Norman House Restaurants that will open all over the country. My surprise was to tell you on our wedding night that I was going to allow you to develop recipes that could be produced on a large scale and very cheaply.”
It took Kady a moment to digest this information. “You were planning to franchise me?”
Gregory didn’t seem to hear the horror in her voice. “Women all over America are complaining that men think of them only as someone to stay home and take care of the kids, but I have never thought of you that way, Kady,” he said with pride. “To me you are . . .” His face brightened. “Big business. Yes, to me you are big business.” The way he said it was as though it was the highest compliment he had ever given anyone.
“You never loved me, did you?” she said softly.
Gregory rolled his eyes as though to say that was unimportant, and his voice sounded bored with the whole concept. “Of course I did. I do love you. I love what we are going to do together, what we can achieve together.”
“But what about passion? What about sex?”
“Kady, really! In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I am a very practical man. Oh, I know that my extraordinary good looks make women see me as a romantic figure, but I can assure you that I have a brain behind these eyes. And, let’s get real here, Kady, if I wanted a wife for passion and sex, I would have chosen a woman who is less . . .” He looked her up and down.
“Fat? Is that the word you’re looking for?” she asked.
“I don’t think we need to go into this now or at any time in the future, for that matter. Marriages based on passion end in acrimonious and expensive divorce. Our marriage will have a foundation of concrete.”
Suddenly, it was as though a great weight lifted from Kady. She knew she should be devastated by what Gregory was telling her. After all, she was hearing that the man she loved, the man she planned to marry, had never really loved her. He’d only wanted to get her under contract so he would have the power to bully her into helping him force yet more greasy, nonnutritional food down the throats of the American people. And he was going to call them Norman House Restaurants. Wonder if he planned to give me even a slice of the action? she thought.
But Kady wasn’t devastated. Instead, she had never felt lighter—or happier—in her life. She didn’t have to go through with her marriage with Gregory! Maybe she had known it wouldn’t work since that first day when she’d walked into the restaurant so glad to see him, only to be told not to kiss him. Maybe she’d even known while she was in Legend that she didn’t
love Gregory. Maybe telling herself that she was in love with another man made her believe she couldn’t love Cole.
From inside her pocket, she withdrew her key ring, then removed the two keys to the restaurant and put them on Gregory’s desk. “Good-bye, Gregory,” she said, then turned on her heel and started out the door.
He caught her arm before she reached the door. “Just what do you think you’re doing?” he asked, but when he saw her face, he dropped her arm and his face softened.
“Kady, I love you. I asked you to marry me because I love you. Out of all the women I could have had, I—”
Kady’s face reflected her amusement. “You chose me. You with your ‘extraordinary good looks’ chose fat, frumpy little Kady, the poor little mouse who was so grateful for attention from someone like you that she asked for nothing in return. You didn’t have to send me flowers, or take me out to fairs or on picnics. You didn’t have to buy me an engagement ring. You didn’t even have to take me out to dinner.”
“Kady, it wasn’t like that. Look, I’ve just bought us two tickets to the ice show next Thursday night,” he said as he pulled the tickets out of his coat pocket and thrust them into her hand.
“I work on Thursday nights, did you forget that?” she said as she looked down at the tickets, then saw that someone had written on one of them. “Can’t wait to see you, Greggy. Bunches of love, Bambi.” All the i’s were dotted with little hearts.
Kady looked up at Gregory and laughed. “Tell Bambi hello for me,” she said as she walked out the door, leaving Gregory sputtering behind her.
Chapter 19
“DONE!” KADY SAID WITH A SMILE AS SHE LOOKED AT THE PILE of neatly addressed and stamped envelopes. Thirty-one of them, all ready to go to restaurants and hotels all over America.
It had been three days now since she had walked out of Onions and left Gregory standing there with his tickets and his Bambi. That night she had felt free and ready to take on the world, but by morning, she was thinking, What in the world have I done? She had $6,212.32 in the bank, not much to live on until she found a job. And besides that, how did one find a job? Or at least one that Kady wanted. She had been her own boss for too long to try to work as an under chef for some bad-tempered head cook.
But maybe having been through what she’d experienced in Legend had given her courage, because Kady didn’t waste time fretting over her unknown future. Instead, she made a few calls to former classmates, asked some questions, then tried to make a list of the places she thought she could work. It had taken her a while to prepare a résumé, get it copied, then find the addresses of the hotels and restaurants. But now she had everything ready, and with a confident smile, she dropped the letters into a small shopping bag to carry them to the mailbox.
As there were every day, flowers from Gregory were outside her door. She stepped out, picked them up, put them inside the door, took the card, and locked the door behind her. “Wonder what he has to say today?” she murmured, opening the card as she walked out of her building, smiling as she scanned the note. “Love you . . . miss you . . . come for a visit? . . . sending Mother to Florida . . .” Smiling even more broadly, Kady dropped the note into a trash receptacle as she passed. She wasn’t tempted by Gregory’s pleas or his talk of love and sending-Mother-to-Florida. Maybe if he sent the deed to Onions, she might be tempted, but, then again, she might not.
By the time she neared the mailbox, she was almost skipping, and it seemed part of her euphoria that the display inside the big window of a bookstore she was passing should be draped in gold lamé. Is there a gold mine in your future? was written on a banner above the several books displayed below.
Thinking of Legend, Kady drew nearer and began to read the descriptions on the covers of the books. “Find the mine of the Flying Dutchman,” one read. “New information on the Triple Star Mine,” said another. “The Lost Maiden Mine could be yours,” said another.
“The Lost Maiden Mine?” Kady said aloud. “Boy! those books are out of date!”
Turning away from the window, she started down the street toward the mailbox but stopped when she reached the door of the bookstore. On impulse, she went inside. Near the door was a table spread with at least twenty different books, all on the same theme of lost treasure. There were books on mines, ghost towns, ships that had sunk, curses, hauntings; the variety seemed endless.
Idly, as though it meant nothing to her, Kady picked up a book about lost mines in the western U.S. and looked up the Lost Maiden Mine. Expecting to see a recounting of what had been found in the mine back in 1982, she was puzzled to see that every book on the table read as though the mine had yet to be found. Surely, they couldn’t all be out-of-date, could they? she wondered.
She stopped a clerk and asked where she could find books on the Lost Maiden Mine by itself. Kady seemed to remember that when the mine had been found, the stands were covered with produced-in-a-minute books about every aspect imaginable about the mine. Impatiently, the clerk said, “What we have is on the table,” and moved on, too busy to bother with something as unimportant as a customer.
Still puzzled, Kady walked back to her apartment. Maybe those books on the mine had a short life span and were only of interest for a few months, she thought, and that’s why there were no more copies of them. Not noticing that she hadn’t mailed her résumés, she dropped the bag on the floor by the door, put Gregory’s flowers next to the other six arrangements on the dining table, then called Jane.
It was the first time Kady had called her friend since they had parted with so much coolness between them a few weeks before. Kady knew she should have called her friend earlier and told her of her breakup with Gregory, but Kady had postponed it because she knew what every woman knows when she breaks up with her boyfriend: she was going to have to hear how horrible he was.
Jane’s tirade lasted a full fifteen minutes, but Kady thought she got off cheaply. “You should have seen how he came on to Debbie after you went to bed that night! He was really too handsome for his own good, and I never trusted him. And furthermore—”
“Jane,” Kady said sharply, “what do you remember about the Lost Maiden Mine?”
“What’s to remember? I’ve heard of it, I think, but I don’t remember much. Kady, what are you going to do now? I know Gregory and that mother of his never paid you much, so you couldn’t have much to live on, so—”
“Don’t you remember when the Lost Maiden Mine was found and the whole country went wild about the romance and the court case and everything else?”
Jane’s silent pause was Kady’s answer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jane said suspiciously, “but I’d like to be told what’s going on.”
At that Kady got off the phone fast. There was no one on earth more perceptive than Jane, and Kady wasn’t about to start talking and maybe mention things she didn’t want to tell anyone about.
With the phone still in her hand, Kady turned and looked at the flowers on the table. If the Lost Maiden Mine had never been found, then maybe Cole found it. And if Cole found it, it was because she had told him where it was. And if Kady had told him, that meant Cole had lived past nine years old.
Grabbing her keys, Kady ran out of the apartment and into the nearest library.
Leaning back against the ugly couch in her apartment, Kady rubbed her eyes. What time was it now? Three A.M.? Turning, she saw that the clock read five; it would soon be daylight.
It had been a week since she started out to the mailbox with those résumés, and now they still sat in the little shopping bag on the floor by the door. The flowers that had covered the dining room table were on the floor, dying, dried up, unnoticed. The dining table and every other surface in the apartment was covered with books, faxed sheets, photocopies, and pages covered in Kady’s handwriting. For a week now she had been researching what had happened in Legend, Colorado.
The first thing she had done was research the Lost Maiden Mine. She had looked at three years of covers
of back issues of Time magazine because she distinctly remembered seeing the mine on the cover of that magazine. But there was no mention of the finding of the mine in that magazine or in any other. Nor was it in any newspaper or in the memory of anyone Kady asked.
As far as she could tell, she was the only person on the face of the earth who remembered something that had swept across America like a tornado. The get-rich-quick idea always appealed to Americans, and the idea of finding millions in gold just lying there for the taking was an American fairy tale. There had been Maiden clothes, Maiden shoes, Maiden hair. And the TV was full of specials, one-, two-, and four-hour reenactments of the romantic story of a man who loved a ghost and had died holding her hand.
A year later, after the romance had faded, came another kind of show Americans love: exploding myths. It wasn’t love that had caused the miner to stay with the woman’s skeleton; both his legs had been crushed when gold fell on them and he had been trapped. As for holding the hand of the other skeleton, it was speculated that the dying miner had been reaching for the knife by her side. What was he going to do with the knife? Kill himself to put himself out of his misery? He had died of thirst within days, surrounded by millions in gold. As with every other such story, it was concluded that the gold was cursed, and this was proven by the bad luck of everyone who had touched the money. “Caused by their greed,” Kady had said at the time and still believed.
After Kady had proven to herself that the Lost Maiden Mine had not been found, she started to look into what she could find out about Legend itself. This had been more difficult, and she’d had to take the Metro into DC to haunt the Library of Congress to plow through miles of microfilmed newspapers.
Everything she found showed that Ruth had told the truth. There was a short but poignant article about the tragedy in Legend that had left so many adults and children dead. However, there was no mention that the residents of Legend had been the killers, not the bank robbers.
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