Rumor had it that Margaret came to the school every Tuesday and Thursday to oversee the accounts and ensure the teachers were on task. He had no warm feelings for his aunt, but he still admired what she had created here. There was dignity to be had in a hard and thankless task like this.
The door squeaked as he entered. It smelled musty inside, and to his right was a large room of women reciting phrases from a McGuffey Reader. On the other side of the hall was a small office. He stepped inside to speak to the secretary manning the front desk.
He startled when the secretary looked up, for it was Aunt Margaret. He’d never seen her dressed in anything but the finest silks, but today she wore a plain black dress with a cameo at her throat.
She burst into laughter when she saw him. Apparently realizing how rude it was, she clamped a hand over her mouth, but her eyes still danced with amusement.
“What happened to you?” she asked with a pointed look at his sling. He tried to give her a good-natured smile, but it made his face hurt, and he didn’t much feel like it anyway.
“I ran into a spot of trouble upstate.”
Her eyes took on a strange gleam. “It looks like more than a spot of trouble. It looks like a pair of strong fists.”
More like four pairs of fists, but he didn’t want to relive the event. He wanted answers about his cousin.
“Fine, whatever you like,” he said. “I came to ask a few questions. Is there someplace we can speak privately?” Accusing his aunt of lying about her only daughter wasn’t something he wanted to do within earshot of her employees, but Aunt Margaret’s shrug was nonchalant.
“Privacy is something that is never in abundance in this neighborhood. This is the best we can do.”
The office had no door and only a large desk in the center. The walls were covered with mismatched filing cabinets and bookshelves loaded down with spelling manuals and basic readers. Despite her callous welcome, he had to remember that Aunt Margaret was doing good work here. He owed her respect.
“I was up at Bruce Garrett’s house last week,” he said, noticing the stiffening around Margaret’s lips but no other change in her expression. She was going to be a tough nut to crack, and he decided to confront the situation head on. “I saw Ellie while I was there.”
Margaret didn’t seem surprised by his statement. She just kept looking at him with that oddly unnerving stare, her face as still as the cameo at her throat.
“She said she’s never been to Rome in her life. She’s working as an accountant, not a pianist.”
The sound of heavily accented women reciting rote verses filled the empty air, and Margaret seemed as composed as a long-stemmed rose.
“What would you like me to say?” she finally asked.
“I just want to find out what happened to my cousin. I don’t know what she’s doing these days or where she lives, but maybe I can help her. I’ve got a lot of connections in the city.”
Margaret’s smile was bitter. “Eloise will land on her feet. You can always count on her for that, if nothing else.”
Obviously there was no love lost between Margaret and her only daughter, but Eloise and Bruce seemed to have some kind of connection. On the few occasions Nick emerged from the fog of a drug-induced slumber, the two of them had seemed quite cozy as they sat at the corner table. They had been laughing together. She had called him Bruce. Perhaps Margaret’s contempt had something to do with an unwholesome relationship. Bruce was an attractive man, still fit and vigorous despite his age, with only a hint of silver threads in his coppery-red hair.
The same color as Ellie’s hair. Both Margaret and her husband had inky black hair, as did their son. Only Ellie had that distinctive russet shade.
Suddenly, a possible reason for Ellie’s shunning became clear.
“Is Bruce Garrett her father?”
It was a wild guess, but it didn’t seem to surprise Margaret as she rose and fixed him with an icy stare.
“Let me make something clear,” she said as she rounded the desk. “Thomas Drake was the love of my life. That man pulled me out of obscurity and gave me a glorious existence. And if there was a time when his interest faded and I did something rash to get his attention . . . well, he stood by me in the end. He took me back, and I loved him with every cell in my body. I will do everything possible to burnish his memory, no matter how long it takes or who it hurts along the way.”
Apparently that meant banishing a daughter who had an uncanny resemblance to one of Thomas’s business associates, but he sensed there was more beneath Margaret’s statement. There was a veiled threat in there, even though he’d done nothing but extend the hand of friendship to her since Thomas’s passing.
“I’m not your enemy, Margaret.”
“No?” she asked with a curious smile. “It didn’t feel that way when you were on the opposite side of the courtroom during my son’s trial. You looked triumphant; like it was the best day of your life.”
Tom Jr. deserved everything the judge had thrown at him, but mending fences was going to require both of them to quit looking at the sins of the past and simply move forward. He hadn’t been perfect during those years either.
“I’m ready to let bygones be bygones,” he said.
“That must be easy for a man in your position,” she countered. “Perhaps I’ll be willing to declare a cease-fire when the scales are balanced. I lost my husband and my son. Who will you lose, Nick?”
It was a threat. He heard it as clearly as a warning shot fired across the bow of a ship. He took a step forward so that he bumped into her, knocking her back a few steps.
“What are you implying?” he demanded. He had an innocent daughter and a sister. It was a pitifully short list of people he cherished, but he wouldn’t let Margaret hurt either one. He wouldn’t even let her threaten them.
“I’m pointing out the obvious. You aren’t so pure. You invited yourself to Oakmonte and acted like a high-minded hero, but it was you who ruined my husband. I will hate you until my dying day.” Malice exuded from her voice, matching the glittering anger in her face.
He was poleaxed. Never had he seen such undiluted hate aimed squarely at him, and he hadn’t expected it. The most chilling thing about her statement was that she seemed to enjoy her hatred. She savored it.
Lucy and Colin had been right about Margaret, and he’d been a gullible fool to get anywhere close to her. Even standing in her presence tainted the air and made it hard to breathe. There was something fundamentally flawed in Margaret. She had rejected her daughter. Stabbed him in the back when he tried to offer her friendship. He simply needed to walk away from her.
“I guess we have nothing left to say to each other,” he said without heat.
He felt her gaze trailing him the entire way out the door. All he wanted to do was get home and hold his daughter close. Not that he feared Margaret would really try to harm Sadie, but today had once again reminded him how pitifully small his family had become. After meeting Rosalind, he’d deluded himself into believing that was about to change. He thought he’d soon have a wife and perhaps more children, but Rosalind had let him down too.
When he walked into his apartment, Sadie was sprawled on the floor of the parlor, playing with her dolls. A beautiful smile broke across her face when she saw him. She pushed to her feet, carrying a doll in one hand and trotting as quickly as she could toward him. He ignored the pain in his side as he sank to his knees to hug her.
“Do you want to play with this?” she asked, offering him the doll.
“Oh, sweetheart, I’ve been waiting for this all day.”
And it was true. Sadie offered pure love with every beat of her heart. No matter what, he would love and support Sadie for the rest of her life, even if she disappointed him. Even if her choices veered from his own. He couldn’t imagine how Margaret could reject Eloise, but he would give Sadie whatever she needed to spread her wings and soar.
Rosalind awoke slowly, rolling over on her mattress and squinting
against the sunlight streaming through her filmy white curtains. She rarely slept late enough to be awakened by the glare of morning sunlight, but it felt good. For the first time in months, she’d gone to bed filled with the belief that her endeavors were on the cusp of fruition. She and Dr. Leal had been strategizing for the past two days on how best to present their results at the end of their ninety-day deferment, and she was confident of their work.
She fumbled on the bedside table for her spectacles. Ten o’clock! It was a Saturday, but even so, how embarrassing to waste so much time buried beneath a mound of bedding. She flung back the covers and reached for her gown. She had work to do.
In short order she had dressed, finger-combed her hair, and was ready to face the day. The plan was to finish entering the data from the soil, groundwater, and test sites into a final report, then deliver it all to the printer. They would print two thousand copies, enough to send to every water department and chemistry professor in the nation. They needed additional allies, and by broadcasting their research, surely other scientists would join the crusade. Today was the first day of the rest of her life.
She scampered down the steps, a helpless grin on her face.
Ingrid flung a folded newspaper squarely at her chest.
“It looks like we must move to Mexico or to Russia to escape your scandals!” she screeched.
Rosalind managed to clutch the newspaper before it dropped to the floor. “What are you talking about?”
But heaven help her, she feared she knew. There had been reporters in court the other day to hear the shouting match between her and Nick. She clasped the newspaper to her chest, afraid to look at it.
Gus sat at the dining table, bouncing little Jonah over his shoulder. His face was pale. “It’s pretty bad, Rosalind,” he said. “It’s on pages four and five.”
She sank onto the bottom stair and took a deep breath. Whatever was in this paper, she would handle it. She had beat cholera when she was ten years old and had been waging battles ever since. Whatever was in these pages was just another hurdle she would cope with. It was only on pages four and five, so how bad could it be?
She opened the newspaper and was confronted with a photograph of her and Nick in the alley behind the orphanage. The caption was damning. Nick Drake and the infamous Rosalind Werner in happier times.
Her mouth went dry as she glanced through the headlines on the two-page spread. There were three separate stories. One covered Thursday’s hearing about the chlorination test, and a separate story covered the shouting match between Nick and General O’Donnell. The third story was the worst. Rosalind Werner Is No Stranger to Scandal.
She blanched, too appalled to even read the story. All she could see was damning words in the first paragraph. Heidelberg. Divorce. Alienation of affections.
Mortification kept her frozen on the steps. She didn’t know what to do. When her world collapsed in Heidelberg, she had fled to America. Where could she run this time?
“I’m so sorry,” she said on a shattered breath. Gus was training to be a lawyer. Would this ruin his chance to be accepted into the bar? It had ruined his ability to find work in Heidelberg. He and Ingrid had to uproot their entire lives once before because of her, and now it was happening again.
“Rosalind, we’ll get through this.” Gus sounded tired, and she couldn’t even bear to look at him.
It was the same thing he’d said in Heidelberg, all because he was still grateful to her for saving him from cholera. He hadn’t complained when she went to college and stirred up a hornet’s nest of disapproval in their rural village because she dared to enter a man’s field. Gus never complained because even after all these years, he felt indebted to her for saving his life.
No more. This wasn’t his fault, and Ingrid had a right to be furious. Rosalind was going to solve this mess on her own.
It took effort to push to her feet and meet his eyes. “I’m sorry to be an embarrassment to you yet again.”
“Rosalind, you aren’t an embarrassment to—”
“Yes, I am.” In the corner of her vision, she saw Ingrid vigorously nodding, but this wasn’t about her hostile sister-in-law. This was about salvaging her own reputation so that Gus wouldn’t take another blow to his career by standing alongside her. It was time to free Gus of his debt to her.
She went back upstairs for her walking boots. Instead of going to the lab, she was headed to Manhattan today. The subway was the quickest way to get there, and she tried not to think about how terrified she’d been the first time she rode it. Nick had sat alongside her, holding her hand, teasing her, coaxing her to breathe each time she inadvertently started holding her breath. She’d been so in love with him that night.
Well, that was obviously in her past.
After arriving in Manhattan, she took a cable car to Nick’s building, then rode the elevator to his sixth-floor apartment.
A plump housekeeper answered her knock. “Can I help you, ma’am?” she asked in a heavy Irish accent.
“I’m here to see Nick Drake,” Rosalind replied firmly.
“Is he expecting you?”
“He ought to be.”
Rosalind stepped around the housekeeper and pushed her way into the spacious main room that had surprisingly tall ceilings topped with walnut crown molding. The bones of the room were a rich man’s apartment, but the furnishings were on the ordinary side. From somewhere in the rear of the apartment, she could hear Nick reading a nursery rhyme, his fine baritone struggling to emulate the exaggerated voice of a fairy godmother. She followed the voice until she came to a room fitted out like a schoolroom, with miniature tables, chests of toys, and a blackboard. Nick sat on a child-sized bench, his knees practically drawn up to his chest as he read to Sadie.
He looked up in surprise, setting the book down before scrambling to his feet. “Rosalind?”
She hit him in the chest with the newspaper. “You caused this. You fix it,” she commanded.
Nick caught the newspaper. He hadn’t yet looked at either of the papers delivered to his house each morning. It was Saturday, the only day of the week he had free of obligations, and Sadie knew it. She savored the chance to come running into his bedroom on Saturday mornings and pounce on the mattress, waking him up and demanding his complete attention. It was his favorite morning of the week.
“What does it say?” he asked Rosalind, dreading the answer. He’d never seen white-hot anger on her face, but there it was, blazing out of her porcelain-blue eyes like she was about to combust.
“I’ll wait until we can speak in private,” she bit out after a quick glance at Sadie. “I have more self-control than to hurl dirt in front of people best left out of it.”
The arrow found its mark. Whatever this was, it must be bad. He called the housekeeper and asked for Sadie’s bath, and then he led Rosalind into the dining room, where he could spread the newspaper out before the wide bay window.
Nick skimmed the three stories, his anger turning hotter with each paragraph, for this was much worse than a rehash of the courthouse spat. It was a treasure trove of salacious gossip from Germany, a blow-by-blow account of Frau Dittmar’s accusations against Rosalind. It recounted gossip from the maids at the remote mountain research station, where Rosalind supposedly met her married lover for trysts in the woods.
This story had been in the works for a while. The necessity of sending to Germany for details of the court case had probably taken weeks, but it was Wednesday’s explosion at the courthouse that made it newsworthy. Until Wednesday, Rosalind had been just another of dozens of people involved in the Boonton Reservoir case. After Nick’s rotten behavior at the courthouse, he had linked her name with two powerful men in New York City. Now the newspaper had an excuse to run a story they’d obviously been sitting on for a while.
“Aw, Rosalind, I’m so sorry about this.”
“Not as sorry as I am.”
That was surely true. He and General O’Donnell would endure a few days of ribbing,
but then life would go on. Not so with Rosalind. She was forever damaged because he came storming into her life.
“What would you like me to say? I’m sorry. A thousand times, I’m sorry.”
Her smile was bitter. “I don’t remember much about my parents, but one of the things my father always said was to ignore what men say and pay attention to what they do. I want you to do something, Nick. Fix this.”
He stared helplessly at the damning newspaper, noting the bylines on the stories. The two covering the courthouse confrontation were signed, but the one about Germany was an anonymous article.
But Nick knew who had taken the photograph. It was Frank McLean from the New York World, and Nick had promised him an exclusive story about his work with the orphanage in exchange for not publishing the photograph.
He didn’t know how he could fix this, but he owed it to Rosalind to try, and he knew where to start.
Frank McLean was nonchalant about his sale of the photograph. “Some lady offered me two hundred dollars for it. That was worth a lot more than the exclusive interview about the orphanage you offered.”
“What lady?”
“She didn’t give me her name. She came to our office right after we printed that story about you in the orphanage. She wanted to know all sorts of details. When she learned about the photograph, she offered to buy it.”
Nick had a good suspicion of who it was. “Middle-aged woman? Dark hair, blue eyes? Cold as ice?”
“That’s her.”
Fury clouded Nick’s vision. If Margaret had been in the room, he’d be tempted to strangle her. But wasn’t that the sort of senseless revenge that had gotten them all into this mess? Their family feud began almost fifty years ago, but for Margaret, it was alive and simmering.
“I hope the two hundred dollars serves you well, for you’ve just lost my trust, and plenty of contacts are about to dry up for you.”
Frank sent him an exasperated look. “Take it easy, Nick. It’s just a photograph, nothing you can’t—”
A Daring Venture Page 22