by April Henry
What others said about
Square in the Face
“Claire's return is chronicled in the engaging ‘Square in the Face.’”
– The Seattle Times
”This highly readable novel combines questions of medical ethics, confidentiality, compassion, greed and fear. Ms. Henry is an accomplished writer who orchestrates her plot with skill. The story moves briskly to a satisfying—and surprising—conclusion.”
– The Dallas Morning News
“April Henry is spoiling us. ... Grab Circles in one hand and Square in the other because this is a character you are going to like.”
– The Washington Times
“The complex plot is a good one.”
– Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
“The second Claire Montrose mystery is excellent. It's well-written, the characters are fully developed, the plot is fast moving and the mystery is satisfactorily resolved. ... a smoothly accomplished escapist confection.”
– The Oregonian
“Henry writes an absorbing and at times moving mystery with a lively heroine.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Agreeable prose, a steadily engaging plot and a few vanity plate puzzlers thrown in for good measure make this a recommended purchase.”
– Library Journal
Square in the Face
by
April Henry
Copyright 2010, 2000 April Henry
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PUZZLD?
At the end of each chapter and sprinkled throughout the book, you will find a vanity license plate puzzler. See if you can decode these hidden messages. Look for the glossary key at the end of the book to check your detective work.
Chapter One
Standing in front of the kitchen sink in Dante’s co-op, Claire slid another plate into the wooden dishrack. The view from his window, eight stories above Fourth Avenue, was still something she had a hard time believing. If she pressed her cheek against the cold pane, she could even see a slice of the Empire State Building.
“I have a feeling we’re not in Portland, any more, Toto,” she murmured to herself. Even without the Empire State Building, a glance across the street would be enough to let her know she wasn’t in Oregon any more. Buildings here were squeezed up against one another, without even an alleyway for breathing room. Directly across the street, two brick buildings bracketed an older one of stone, complete with carved gargoyles on the corners. Behind each window was another life she could scarcely imagine. Actors, editors, students and dancers. Old women who could talk for hours about seventy years before, when the streets bustled with fat Checker cabs and people had streamed into the Horn and Hardart Automat on the corner. Palm readers, chanteuses and cellists, writers of advertising catch phrases. People from every country in the world, because this was New York City, after all. And Claire was just one more person among seven million.
In a way she was glad that she was just visiting. New York demanded the persona she had perfected during years of riding the bus in Portland (and happily discarded as soon as she got a car). No smiling, no chance eye contact, no talking to yourself, no making yourself stand out from the herd. It was the only way to stay safe from the wolves. You walked fast and didn’t let your eyes catch on anything.
Behind her, the CD player switched to another of the discs Dante had loaded before he went to a meeting at the Met, a meeting that was unavoidable even if he was officially on vacation. When he came back, they were going to a photography exhibit at a gallery downtown. To Claire, everything in New York felt like what Portlanders called downtown, i.e., tall office buildings and crowded sidewalks, but to Dante the city lay neatly divided into downtown, midtown and uptown. Afterward they were going out to dinner with some of his old friends. The idea filled Claire with a barely suppressed nervousness that went far beyond wondering which fork she should use. Every time she met an old friend of Dante’s she would wonder again what Dante saw in her. Their conversations were filled with references she barely caught. Like Alice in Wonderland, sometimes in New York Claire felt as if she had to run in place just to keep up. She told herself that dinner would go fine, but the part of her that still thought in the language of license plates added a sarcastic SHR SHR.
As her mind moved from thought to thought, her hips began to move, too, echoing the beat of the music, a hard-to-pin-down mix of folk, Celtic and Middle Eastern sounds. Claire walked over to the empty CD cases and flipped through them until she figured out which one it was. Loreena McKennitt. The singer’s long red curls looked something the way Claire’s hair used to, until she had been forced to cut it all off last fall and dye it black to keep herself from being so easily recognizable.
Claire’s hairdresser sister Susie had done what she could to restore her. She had dyed Claire’s hair back to its original color, and the match was so close that the roots of the new growth couldn’t even be seen. But Susie couldn’t do anything about the length, which now brushed Claire’s shoulders instead of the middle of her back. Claire missed the familiar weight of it. Sometimes after she put on her coat, her hands would automatically reach back to pull her hair free from the collar, and meet only air.
The next song was a ululating melody, a Middle Eastern sound complete with bells and drums. She turned the music up a tick and began to walk back to the sink. Without conscious thought, Claire’s body found the pattern of the camelwalk. The memories of the dance were steeped in her bones, laid down in eighth grade when she had taken a five-dollar beginning belly dance class from Minor’s department of Parks and Rec.
The teacher had not only taught them how to dance, but how to dress the part. After stops at FabricLand and Newberry’s, Claire had made her own bellydancing outfit. The skirt was sheer nylon, layers and layers of black with a final hidden underskirt of scarlet. She sewed silver bells on a heavily padded black bra and then in class she was taught the secret of making them jingle. Surrounded by housewives and secretaries, Claire learned how to snake her arms and shake her hips and even how to hold her curved arms overhead, back of one hand pressed to the back of another, while she slid her head from side to side. For the first time in her life, Claire began to feel that she might be graceful and coordinated.
Although she was by far the youngest person in the class, for once she didn’t mind feeling different. The other women fussed over her as if she were exotic and special. No one teased her for being too skinny or too tall. Instead, they touched her curls, marveled at her pale skin, exclaimed over her flexibility. When the talk turned to men and babies and blood, as it always seemed to do, they hadn’t shooed her away, but let her listen.
The dishes forgotten, Claire thought about all this as she camelwalked across the faded scarlet of Dante’s Oriental rug. The camelwalk was a dance that required coordination. As you walked forward heel-toe, your breasts and hips moved in opposition, going towards each other and then away, in a movement that reminded Claire of a clamshell opening and closing. It was the bellydancing version of a strut.
Claire’s mind was in the past and her body was lost in the music. She didn’t know Dante had come in until she felt his hands on her hips.
“Slow down there, Slim.”
A hot flush ran up her neck, but Dante had already turned Claire around and pulled her to him, his lips seeking hers. In her mind’s
eye, she saw how ridiculous she must have looked, gyrating spastically in yellow dishwashing gloves. But maybe Dante hadn’t seen her in the same way, because he leaned down, swung her into his arms, and carried her into the bedroom.
10SNE1
###
Shrunken and somehow pathetic, the yellow dishwashing gloves now lay inside out on the white oak floor. The floors had been built with Siberian oak before the turn of the century, Dante had told Claire, nailed into place by men who were little more than Siberian serfs.
Dante lay stretched out on the white cotton sheets, his body turned toward Claire, his head propped up on one elbow. With his olive skin, black goatee and a gold hoop in his left ear, he looked like a gypsy or a pirate, certainly not like a Met curator who specialized in Old Masters. There was an amused gleam in his black eyes.
“How many other tricks do you have up your sleeve? Can you do jujitsu? Three-dimensional calculus? A triple axel? How come you never told me you knew how to belly dance?”
“When was that ever supposed to come up? It’s not like I get a lot of opportunity to practice. But you never forget how to camelwalk. It’s like riding a bicycle.” Still lying on the bed, Claire raised her hands above her and began clicking imaginary finger cymbals in time to the music. “And you also never forget how to do belly rolls.” She took Dante free hand and put it on her stomach. Cheating, because you really weren’t supposed to use breathing to accentuate the movements, she sucked in her abdomen, then rolled it up and over with a kick that made Dante’s hand jump. He jerked it back.
“Wow! That felt just like when my sister was pregnant. How’d you do that?” He lay back, eyeing his perfectly flat abdomen, and tried to duplicate her maneuver. He only succeeded in sucking his stomach in and out, without any hint of a rolling motion. Defeated, he turned back toward her. “I was going to tell you I saw a good plate today.”
“What was it?” Sometimes Claire still couldn’t believe how much her life had changed. Only six months before, she would have been in her gray burlap cubicle at Oregon’s Specialty License Plate Department, REJECTED stamp poised over yet another application for 6ULDV8, submitted by someone who thought a government bureaucrat would be too stupid to understand his clever substitution of the number 6 for the word “sex.”
Dante spelled it out. “K-I-D space K-R-8. On the back of a minivan.”
She smiled. “That’s pretty good.”
“Do you ever hear that clock they talk about?”
Claire was staring thirty-six in the face, so she knew what clock Dante meant. “That biological one? I don’t know. Sometimes. Maybe when I look at Eric.” Eric was her sister’s son. “He was resting his head on my stomach the other day and he asked me what the sound he heard was. It turned out he was hearing my heart.”
“That’s a good idea.” Dante scooted over so that his head lay on her stomach. He closed his eyes. When he spoke next, his voice was so soft Claire could barely hear him. “Do you ever think about us getting married?” He must have felt her tense, because he waved one hand. “Rewind. Forget I said anything.”
“It’s not - I don’t think - no.” So many thoughts crowded into her mind that Claire couldn’t complete any of them. Dante rolled away and put his feet on the floor. By the hunch of his shoulders, she could tell that he was upset. “It’s not like I don’t want to be with you. It’s just that I don’t know if I believe in marriage. The only marriage I know that works is J.B. and Susie’s, and they aren’t even married. I come from a long line of people who either don’t get married - like my mom - or get married five times - like my grandmother. Neither one’s the greatest role model. Don’t you like what we have now?”
“Of course I do. But it’s hard for me to enjoy it, knowing that you’re going back to Portland in two days.”
“You know I don’t like to leave Charlie alone for too long. She’s nearly eighty.” Claire noticed that neither one of them had brought up the real sticking point in their relationship - that they both had families and settled lives in cities three thousand miles apart.
Dante scrubbed his face with his hands, then got up and walked to the bathroom in silence.
Claire watched him go. Her gaze fell on the painting that faced the bed, a large oil created with swift, sure brushstrokes. It showed a nude woman, or rather just her torso, beginning just below her bent knees and ending just above her breasts. She straddled a wooden chair turned backward. One arm rested on the top of the chair, the fingers thick strokes of color that suggested rather than articulated. Her body was half-turned, one shoulder twisted back, as she leaned back onto her right palm resting on the seat behind her. A nipple peeked between the wooden slats, and the other breast was seen in profile. Her figure was nearly perfect - that of a young woman as yet unmarked by time, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or years spent slumped in an office chair.
It was entitled “Passing Through,” and Claire had never asked Dante if the title he had chosen referred to the model herself, or the brief window of perfection that she inhabited.
The bathroom door opened. “Claire, I “ - .
The ringing of the phone interrupted them. Dante looked at the Caller ID box next to the phone. “It’s a Portland number - do you want to get it?”
Fear swamped Claire’s heart. Something must be wrong with Charlie. In two strides, she was at the phone. “This is Claire.”
“Claire - it’s Lori. Charlie gave me Dante’s number.” Lori and Claire had spent eight years working in adjoining cubicles at Specialty Plates. “I’m sorry for intruding.”
“No, you’re not intruding, Lori.” Claire used her friend’s name to let Dante know the call wasn’t about Charlie. Still, she could already tell by the tremble in her friend’s voice that it was bad, whatever it was. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Zach. He’s really sick. I’m calling from the hospital. They say he’s got leukemia.”
“Oh, no, Lori. No. I’m sorry.” It was hard to imagine Zach, a dark-haired child who sang and hopped through life, sick. “Tell me what I can do for you. I’ll be home in a couple of days.”
“I’ve been thinking and thinking.” Her next words were so soft they were nearly drowned out by a crackly background voice paging a doctor. “If Zach doesn’t go into remission soon, or if he does go into remission and it fails, then he’s going to need a bone marrow transplant. And they’ve already told us there’s no match in our family, no match on the donor registry. But remember how I told you about,” Lori hesitated, her voice so soft it was nearly inaudible, “about his sister?”
Claire remembered. They had gone out to eat Mexican food at Alcupulco Gold’s one Saturday, a “girl’s night out” while Havi watched the couple’s two boys. Lori had ended up crying into her empty margarita glass. “I remember.”
“I need you to help me find her. In case she’s a match.”
“But Lori, I” - . This was ridiculous. Claire wasn’t a private investigator. What did she know about tracking down a child from a ten-year-old private adoption?
“Don’t say no to me, Claire. Not now.” Lori’s voice was near tears. “Just promise you’ll talk to me about it when you get home.”
What choice did she have? “I promise.”
“Good. Call me as soon as you get home.” Lori sighed as if a boulder had been rolled off her chest. “And thanks, Claire.”
Claire hung up the phone, wondering what she had gotten herself into.
“What’s wrong with Lori?” Dante asked. The winter daylight was already fading, turning Dante into a dark shape against the white sheets.
“Her three-year-old son has leukemia. He might need a bone marrow transplant, but there isn’t a match available.” Claire put her hands over her eyes and sighed. “She wants to talk to me about finding his sister to see if the girl is a match.”
Dante looked confused. “I thought she just had two boys.”
“When Lori was in college, she got pregnant and gave the baby up for adoption. The guy she�
��s married to now was the father, but they had broken before she knew she was pregnant. Later they got back together and got married, but Lori never told him what happened.”
“And she didn’t want to have an abortion?”
“No. She and Havi had always been like this,” Claire held up two fingers wrapped around each other, “so she felt really connected with the child. Connected and angry at the same time, because she had broken up with Havi and didn’t want to be reminded of him. That’s why she decided to give it up for adoption rather then keep it.”
“What kind of a name is Havi?”
“He’s Mexican-American, so his real name is Xavier. But no one here knows how to say it right, with an H sound at the beginning and an A sound at the end. They always say Ex-ave-ee-air. So he tells people to call him Havi, and he spells it with an H.”
“So how come this Havi guy didn’t ever know Lori was pregnant? Even if they weren’t going out any more, wouldn’t he have seen her during that nine months?”
Claire shook her head. “After they broke up, Havi joined the army. He only looked her up when he got out four years later. They got back together, ended up getting married. They had Max right away. He’s six now, and Zach is three. Lori was always afraid to tell him about their other child, so she kept it a secret.” Claire thought that Lori must be frightened indeed, to think of trading her secret for her son’s life. She leaned over and kissed Dante, then they both got up and began to get ready to go out.
###
“And you’ll have” -. The waiter paused expectantly. He was all capped teeth, artfully streaked blond hair and too-good-to-be true turquoise eyes. He was probably one of those waiters-slash-models. Everyone in New York seemed to be a hyphenated blend of what they were doing temporarily and what they were meant to be.