“Come on,” she urged gently.
Cole saw Seventieth Street flash by. In a few more minutes he would meet his maternal grandparents, and he was nervous for the first time in as long as he could remember. “You’re a good interviewer. I should call you Barbara Walters.” There it was, the instinct to name, as Bennett had noted. The same instinct his father had.
“Thanks a lot.” Tori elbowed him gently.
“It’s a compliment.”
“So talk to me,” she urged.
He hesitated a moment longer before continuing. “They did a great job raising me, even though I wasn’t technically their child. My uncle showed me how to fly-fish and how to catch a football. My aunt constantly drove me down to the lake to fish or to Little League games. They were always there for me, and I never gave them much in return. In fact, I repaid their kindness by causing them a great deal of embarrassment when I was a teenager.”
“How?”
“I was rebellious.”
“All teenagers are rebellious.”
“No other boy in the neighborhood had an earring.” Cole pointed at the holes in his earlobe. “I had three.”
“So what? That doesn’t seem like a big deal.”
“Our middle-class block in Duluth, Minnesota, was a long way from Los Angeles. I know earrings don’t sound like much compared to what you probably saw in Beverly Hills—”
“Santa Monica,” Tori corrected.
“Okay,” Cole continued. “Earrings and cigarettes and wild hair at thirteen didn’t go over well in a strait-laced, working-class, staunchly Lutheran neighborhood in the heartland. I’m sure I caused them more than a little humiliation and embarrassment at church socials. You can’t hide in a small place like that. There is no anonymity.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“One day when I was seventeen, after we won the regional football championship, I—” He swallowed the words.
“You what?”
Cole cleared his throat. “My uncle had just hugged me and told me what a great game I had played. He told me how proud he was of me in front of a bunch of other parents and I looked at him and said he had no right to be proud of me. I told him he had no right to take any credit for, or share in, what I had accomplished. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine a young man saying that to an uncle who had done nothing but take another man’s child into his home and help him grow up the right way?” Cole gazed out the taxi window. “I couldn’t have been more wrong, either. My uncle had every right to share in what I had accomplished, but I said it anyway. I was so damn mad at my father for missing that game, for missing my life.”
“I told my mother the same thing,” Tori said quietly. “She made certain I was accepted to the Columbia School of Journalism and arranged for my job at NBC. I resented her for doing those things.”
The cab veered right onto Eighty-sixth Street, pitching Tori against Cole. “Why did you resent her?” he asked as the cab quickly turned left onto Park Avenue.
“Because I couldn’t do it for myself. I didn’t have the grades to get into Columbia or the experience for the job at NBC. Everyone knew it, but I was accepted at Columbia and given the job at NBC anyway. My mother can accomplish anything. She’s a powerful woman.” Tori shook her head. “I didn’t have the guts to turn down the charity, so I’ve been trying to prove to her I could do things on my own ever since. That’s why I held back on your grandparents’ address yesterday at lunch. I knew if I gave it to you, I wouldn’t be of any use to you afterward. I wouldn’t have had anything to hold over your head. I acted terribly and I knew it, but I want to break a big story on my own so badly.” She paused as if gathering her strength. “I’m sorry. I don’t say that very often. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“Here we are,” the cabbie said gruffly. The taxi coasted to a stop.
Cole removed his wallet from his suit pocket, but Tori grabbed his hand. “Let me.”
“Okay.”
“It’s the least I can do after being such a jerk.” She placed several bills in the slot.
He gazed at her for a moment. Beneath that tough exterior she had a good heart, he decided. “It’s all right. Hey, I’ll never be able to thank you enough for today, really.”
“That’s a nice thing to say.” She smiled, then glanced down. “My God. What happened?” she asked, pointing at the swollen finger Frankie had almost cut off yesterday in the Brooklyn warehouse.
“I caught it in a desk drawer,” Cole explained quickly. “I’m fine.” He opened the door, stepped from the cab, then turned to help her out.
A high-rise building towered over them as they emerged from the cab.
“They live in Apartment 5236,” Tori said. “It’s on the top floor.” She brushed the hair out of her face. The wind had whipped up and the sunny day had turned cloudy during the ride from midtown. “You’ll need a diversion to get in.”
“Why?” Cole asked. “This isn’t some kind of clandestine operation. We’ll just call up to the apartment from the front desk and tell them who we are.”
Tori shook her head. “They might not agree to see you. They didn’t want to talk to me when I came here. Or they might not believe you when you tell them who you are. I think it’s better to knock on their door unannounced.” She gestured at the doorman. “And he isn’t going to let you simply walk in.”
Cole sensed that she had a plan. “So what are you suggesting?”
“I’ll distract him, then you slip into the building.”
“How are you going to distract him?”
Tori smiled provocatively. “Don’t worry, that won’t be a problem.”
How could he have had to ask? Those blue eyes would do the trick. “Silly me.”
Tori held out her hand and they shook. “It was nice meeting you, Cole Egan.”
“Should I take that to mean you and I won’t be seeing each other again?” he asked.
Tori laughed as their hands parted. “I assumed you wouldn’t want much to do with me after my behavior at lunch yesterday.”
“We all need to be a little forgiving in life sometimes.” He gestured at the building. “And you did bring me up here.”
“I did, at that.”
Cole reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out the message slips and handed them to Tori. “Do you know any of these people?”
Tori studied the names on the papers. “Yeah, they’re competitors of mine.”
“They must have seen my father’s obituary too and had a contact at the Times who told them who paid for the space. Or maybe your contact makes a business out of telling everyone.”
“Maybe I pay the contact a little better, and all that’s worth is one day. But one day is usually enough in this business.”
Cole glanced at the doorman, who was listlessly scanning a magazine. “Tori, what if I told you your instincts were right? That maybe there is a story here?”
Tori caught her breath. “Why would you do that?”
Because I need your help, he thought to himself. But he didn’t say the words. He needed someone’s help, but he hadn’t decided yet if she should be the one. “After you distract the doorman, wait for me up at that coffee shop across the street.” He pointed back over his shoulder.
“Okay.”
“I might be a while.”
“That’s fine.” She would stay in the coffee shop until Christmas if necessary. “I have plenty of time.” She held out the message slips. “Here.”
“You take those.” Cole closed her fingers around the slips. “Do whatever you want with them.” Cole was starting to trust her.
He had to trust someone, for Christ’s sake. It would have been Nicki but she wasn’t speaking to him. The only other person he could think of was Bennett—who must have pushed the anonymous note under the hotel room
door last night. Cole had left a message on the answering machine at the Washington number after finding the note, but Bennett hadn’t returned the call yet. He had called Bennett again from a Gilchrist conference room this morning and left another message, one that he hoped would keep them close.
“Wait for me at the coffee shop,” he said again.
“I will. I hope it goes well with your grandparents.” She waved and moved casually toward the apartment building’s front door.
He watched her walk away. He was definitely starting to like her.
The distraction went quickly and smoothly. Tori explained to the doorman that her car doors wouldn’t open—that every so often the doors jammed and she didn’t have the strength to pry them open and would he mind trying? She smiled as she explained, then patted his forearm as she finished talking, and he was putty in her hands. She waved subtly at Cole as she led the doorman out of the building and down Eighty-seventh Street away from the front door, and Cole slipped into the now empty lobby and moved to the elevators.
* * *
—
The man sitting on the brick wall across the street who had followed Cole and Tori from Gilchrist’s front door shook his head. Tori Brown was a smooth operator.
* * *
—
Cole felt perspiration covering his palms as he pressed the elevator button for the fifty-second floor. He wiped his palms on his suit pants, but his hands were damp again by the time he reached the top floor. The elevator doors opened and he followed the arrow indicating that apartments 5220 through 5240 were located to the right. He tried to concentrate on the wallpaper pattern to distract himself from the pounding in his chest, but it was no use. Thirty years and this meeting was finally going to happen.
He hesitated before the door for several moments, suddenly uncertain of whether he really wanted to go through with this, uncertain of whether it was worth making himself so vulnerable and allowing the walls to crumble slightly. Maybe these people wouldn’t believe him when he told them who he was. Worse, maybe they would, but still wouldn’t want to talk to him. That was something he hadn’t considered. Maybe it was better not to know. Perhaps the best thing would be to leave the building, leave Tori at the coffee shop, leave New York and get to the business at hand. He glanced at his watch. There was still time to make the noon flight to Minneapolis out of La Guardia. He turned to go, then stopped. He didn’t dodge difficult situations. He never had and he never would. This was something he needed to do. He took a deep breath, clenched his right hand, raised it and knocked.
Almost instantly, footsteps moved across the floor inside the apartment. “Who is it?” an elderly female voice called from behind the door.
“Maintenance.”
The chain fell away, the knob turned and the door opened. For several moments grandmother and grandson stared at each other for the first time. Then the elderly woman put her hands to her mouth. So clearly were her daughter’s features etched on the face of the handsome young man standing before her that she believed she was staring at an apparition. Then she fainted and fell to the Oriental rug.
15
The photograph shook slightly in Cole’s hands. There was his mother, Mary Thomas—or Andrea Sage—smiling back at him. She was exactly as Bennett Smith had said, a “real stunner.”
“I just can’t get over it,” Cole’s grandmother murmured. “The resemblance is uncanny.” She sat next to Cole on the sofa, clutching his arm tightly in her wrinkled hands. It had taken Cole and his grandfather almost five minutes to fully revive her after she had fainted to the floor. “Don’t you think, Henry?” she asked the elderly man across the room.
Henry sat in a large armchair smoking his pipe. “Yes.” His grandfather, Cole had already found, was a man of few words.
Cole smiled down at the diminutive woman sitting next to him. “Do you really think so?”
“Oh, Lord, yes. When I saw you standing outside our door, it was like seeing a ghost.” She put her hands to her chest as if the feeling that had caused her to lose consciousness was coming back all over again.
“Easy, Margaret,” Henry warned. “Cole and I don’t want to have to revive you again.” He winked at his grandson.
Henry was a man of few words, yes, but he was quickly warming to the idea of having a grandson. They had spent the last hour catching up. Cole learned that his grandfather had spent almost forty years at Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street’s most venerable firms, and that they had much common ground.
“No, we don’t want—” Cole hesitated in the middle of repeating Henry’s warning.
“What is it, dear?” Margaret asked, a concerned expression coming to her face.
A dimple appeared in Cole’s left cheek. “I’m embarrassed to say this, but I don’t know what to call you.”
“Henry and Margaret,” Henry interjected quickly. “None of this grandma and grandpa crap. God, then we really will feel our ages.”
Margaret nodded in agreement.
Cole laughed. “Okay.” He glanced back and forth at them, then shook his head. It was a strange thing, to have members of your family you hadn’t known for your entire life, then suddenly meet them. It was like being in a time machine. “I want to ask you two a question. Well, actually,” he interrupted himself, “I want to ask you lots of questions, but this one first. I ran into a young woman in the news business who claims she tried to speak to you one day a while back, but you didn’t want to see her. Her name is Victoria Brown. She goes by Tori.”
“I remember her,” Margaret said.
“She was the one who led me here,” Cole explained. “Why didn’t you want to talk to her?”
“We didn’t want to drag up old memories,” Henry replied.
“But she might have been able to give you information about my mother. I would think you’d want to hear about her.”
“We knew Mary had died.” Henry inhaled from the pipe. “That was all we needed to know. We didn’t tell the newswoman because we didn’t think it was any of her business. Having you here is a different story.”
“Wait a minute.” Cole’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, you knew she was dead?” Tori said they claimed they had never heard anything about Mary after she left in the spring of 1963.
Henry and Margaret exchanged uncomfortable glances.
“You didn’t know she was dead, dear?” Margaret asked tentatively.
“Yes, I did, but I didn’t think you would know.”
“Why not?” Henry asked.
“I’m not sure.” He didn’t want to say that he had assumed his father just hadn’t bothered ever to contact them.
“We found out in 1970.” Henry’s voice was barely audible. It had been a long time since his daughter’s death, but he had never made it past the pain. “That was the year your father sent us a long letter telling us of Mary’s demise, along with a box of her things and a death certificate I checked on in the New Jersey jurisdiction in which it was signed. At least, we assumed it was your father who sent us the letter. It was signed by a man claiming to be her husband, although we had never met him.”
Cole was spellbound.
“Cole, do you want to see her room?” Margaret asked.
“Yes.”
An eerie feeling overtook Cole as he moved into the bedroom. It was as if his mother were out running an errand and would return soon. A cotton nightgown hung from a hook on the back of the open closet door. Dresses dangled from hangers, one pulled out slightly as if she had considered wearing it that morning. Pairs of shoes lined the floor of the closet and another pair lay on the floor next to the bed. Stuffed animals were spread across the bed’s quilt. College textbooks lined the desk beside the bed and a notebook lay open atop the desk, a ballpoint pen on the open page.
Margaret pulled an envelope from the top drawer of the desk and walked to where Cole s
tood in the doorway. “Here’s your father’s letter to us.”
Cole took the faded envelope from her, extracted the handwritten letter and began to read. His eyes flashed across the pages. The letter said Mary had died at the hands of two drug-crazed intruders, exactly as Bennett had said.
He stared at the pages for a long time after he had finished reading the words. There was something else here, a connection of some sort that he couldn’t quite make.
“It’s such a shame.” Margaret moved to her daughter’s dressing table, picked up a silver hairbrush and touched it lovingly. “Not a day goes by that I don’t come in here and think about her.”
Cole replaced the letter in the envelope. “I’m sure you do,” he said softly. “Margaret, you mentioned that my father sent a box of things along with the letter.”
“Yes. It was full of personal items like jewelry and papers.” She nodded at the hairbrush. “This was in the box. We gave this and a silver comb to Mary for her sixteenth birthday. That’s how we knew the letter was authentic.” Tears began to well in the elderly woman’s eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Cole looked away from Margaret’s eyes and down to the hairbrush. Strands of his mother’s hair were still embedded in the bristles.
He let out a long slow breath. Perhaps it would have been better if he hadn’t come after all. This was causing Margaret so much pain. And not just Margaret.
* * *
—
“Are you ready?” Maybe he was wrong to come around on her so quickly, but he had a good feeling about Tori. More to the point, he needed her cash and her willingness to use it. Trusting that airlines and motels would simply accept his maxed-out credit cards wasn’t a viable plan.
Tori looked up from the paper she had been reading for the last two hours. “Ready for what?”
“We’re going on a trip,” Cole replied.
“Where to?”
The Legacy Page 18