Familiar Friend

by Cristina Sumners

  “Thanks a bunch,” said Tracy sourly.

  “Sorry, kid,” he said.

  “You take such good care of me.”

  “Well, there was this really stunning blonde, you see—”

  “Do you think,” Tom interrupted, “I could get you two to get back to the point?”

  “Sorry,” they both said.

  “So, Patrick, you can’t remember if you put any ice into that black Russian?”

  “Sorry, no. What’s all this about ice, anyway?”

  “Never mind. You’ll find out later. Just one more thing. Tracy. Kathryn tells me that when she went out to talk to you on the porch, you said you thought you’d had too much to drink, and when Crystal brought you the black Russian Patrick had mixed for you, you didn’t drink it. What changed your mind? You send Patrick to get you a drink, you stand around for what, five, eight minutes—without drinking anything, and then you make the statement that you’ve had too much to drink. I don’t get it.”

  “Oh, that!” Tracy smiled a small, slightly embarrassed smile. “Have you ever suffered a delayed reaction? Well, black Russians are strong little suckers, and I was knocking them back pretty fast. Too fast. I’d had about four of them, which was definitely one too many, and the one I sent Patrick for was my fifth, and while I was waiting for it they all kinda hit me at once. I knew if I started to look drunk in front of the Spanish faculty, Jamie would kill me, so I”—she stopped, realizing what she had just said, and flinched. She resumed, “Figure of speech. I knew I would be in trouble if I started to look drunk in front of the Spanish faculty, so I figured I’d better stop drinking forthwith. I was going to explain that to Patrick when he showed up with my drink, but it turned out to be Crystal who showed up with it, so I didn’t explain anything. I just took it and stood there with it and didn’t drink it. Then sure enough, here came Jamie to give me hell for drinking too much anyway.” She began to tremble.

  “Did he often take your drinks from you?”

  “He’s been known to finish my drinks, yes. We both like black Russians.”

  “While you were standing there holding the drink but not drinking it, did you happen to notice anything about the ice in the glass? Was there a lot of it? Only a little?”

  Tracy shook her head. “Sorry. I didn’t look.”

  Tom ruminated for a minute. He couldn’t think of any more questions to ask, and it didn’t seem to him that he’d learned anything useful at all. Damn, he thought. He simply had to find out more about the ice.

  “The ice on the dining table,” he said. “The ice the MacDonalds provided for the party; it was in an ice bucket, right?”

  Both Patrick and Tracy nodded and said, “Yes.”

  “What did it look like? Big chunks? Little chunks? Cubes? Crushed?”

  Surprised by his previous ice questions, they appeared to suspect that he had perhaps gone around the bend, but Kathryn had asked them to answer his questions, so they humored him.

  “It was that crushed ice you buy in bags from convenience stores, wasn’t it, Patrick? Irregular size chunks about yea big. At least that’s what was in the bucket when I mixed my first two drinks.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I still don’t remember whether I used any in Tracy’s black Russian, but that’s certainly the kind of ice they were using that night. I know that because I used it other times.”

  Tom nodded. “O.K. Thanks very much. I appreciate your help.” He bid the pair farewell, left the house, acknowledged the sympathetic wave of the man in the squad car, got into his own car, and pulled out his cell phone. He punched Kathryn’s cell phone number, which he had taken the precaution of memorizing once he knew he might be needing to get in touch with her anytime, and prayed that she would answer.

  She was sitting in the Seminary library and had the ringer off, but fortunately for Tom the phone was in her pocket and she had a vibrate function. Feeling the soft purr, she pulled out the phone and looked at the display: HOLDER. Although she had fled the house to avoid meeting him, she thought she could manage a telephone conversation, so she switched the phone on and whispered, “Just a second.”

  Grabbing her purse, she stole off into a corner where she thought she might be able to get away with a bit of low-voiced conversation without being on the receiving end of too many dirty looks.

  “Hey, Tom,” she whispered, “how’d it go with Tracy and Patrick?”

  “Not nearly as useful as I’d hoped. Look, this is the only thing I can think of now that will be at all useful.” He explained what he wanted her to do.

  “Wait. Let me go back to my books and get some paper to write down names.”

  Fortunately Tom had a good memory, because all his notes were in his files in the police station where he couldn’t get to them. When he was through with the list he asked tentatively, “Is there any chance of a cup of Earl Grey this afternoon?”

  Again Kathryn was smitten with a paroxysm of guilt and embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Tom. Not this afternoon. Kit’s arriving from England.”

  “Kit’s arriving?”

  “Yes, about four.”

  There was a brief pause. “Oh. How long will he be in town?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Another pause. “Well, I guess I’ll see him in church.”

  Oh, brother, will you see him in church. “Yes, of course.”

  “That’ll be nice.”

  No, it won’t. “Sorry about tea.”

  “Oh, no! Forget tea! Forget I mentioned it. Tell Kit I said hello, welcome to America, all that. See you tomorrow. Bye.” He hung up.

  Kathryn turned off her phone and folded her arms across her chest in physical pain. After a moment she started to cry and had to retreat to the ladies’ room. She was there for half an hour.

  Desire, however, is very powerful, and by four o’clock that afternoon there was room in her mind for only one man. She was thanking God that the miraculous weather was still holding, for that meant that she would once more see him with the sun shining on his red-gold hair.

  “Please, God, let him be wearing blue. Let him be wearing navy slacks and a royal blue blazer and a pigeon’s egg blue shirt the color of his eyes and don’t let me be making all this up, don’t let me have magnified in my mind how beautiful he was so that it will all be a terrible anticlimax when I see him; above all, don’t let it be a complete fiction that electromagnetic field he generates, that palpable energy that comes off him in waves…”

  She moved from window to window in the living room from 3:30 onward, and as four o’clock approached she moved into the front yard. At five minutes to four she went into the street.

  She would have been gratified to know that the passenger of the taxi creeping down Alexander Street at 4:12 looking for the right number was every bit as eager as she was. When she saw the cab, she waved both her arms, and was delighted to see an arm clad in royal blue shoot out of the taxi window and wave back at her.

  He had the door open before the cab had rolled to a complete stop, and Kathryn, unwilling to wait until he got in the house, got into the car and fell into his embrace. The cabbie sat patiently while Kathryn completely failed to have any opportunity to evaluate whether Kit was as beautiful as she remembered him, because she was far to close to him to tell.

  After a few minutes they emerged breathless from this greeting, looked at each other, and laughingly said hello.

  “Shall I pay this good fellow?” asked Kit. “Let him be on his way, instead of making him sit ’round watching us making a disgraceful spectacle of ourselves.”

  “I’ve seen worse,” said the cabbie laconically.

  Kit and Kathryn cracked up. Kit paid the driver, tipping him extra for the comic remark. Kathryn got out, Kit picked up his wheelchair from the seat beside him, unfolded it in two seconds, set it on the ground, and hoisted himself into it with a grace born of twenty years’ practice. He wheeled himself up the walk. Kathryn immediately noted that he was wearing exactly what she had hoped
he would be wearing. It was what he had worn on the London to Oxford train when she had first met him. Unlike most men, Kit knew what colors best suited him.

  She looked around. “Where’s your luggage?”

  “Dropped it at the hotel first. This is a beautiful house. I see you managed to find somebody to make me a ramp.”

  Kathryn was enjoying the sunlight on his hair and finding to her delight and relief that her memory had exaggerated his charms not one iota. He was staggeringly attractive. She couldn’t wait to make love to him. She knew that some other women might find him too thin, or object to the freckles that dusted his pale face. And she knew, of course, that some women would take one look at the wheelchair and regard him as an object of pity rather than of desire. Some women were idiots.

  He negotiated the ramp effortlessly and she opened the front door for him.

  “That mirror,” Kathryn said as they passed through the front hall, pointing at a gold baroque concoction the size of half a Ping-Pong table, “was sent to me by my mother from France. Everything else here is me.”

  Kit surveyed the unpretentious living room as he rolled to a halt. “Ah. I begin to see what I’m up against. Well, you could redecorate the entire family wing, you know. I’m not excessively attached to all that Elizabethan stuff, you know.”

  “You’re excessively attached to the title.”

  “Not attached in that sense,” Kit protested.

  “Attached in a worse sense. Attached like a Siamese twin. Ah! Mrs. Warburton! You’ve brought tea. I’d like you to meet Kit, whom I would introduce properly but if I use his title he’d be cross with me for a week so I won’t. Kit, this is the magnificent Mrs. Warburton, without whom life in this house would be unthinkable if not impossible.”

  Mrs. Warburton put the tea tray down on the coffee table and serenely extended a hand saying, “How do you do, Kit. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  Kit took Mrs. Warburton’s hand and replied very solemnly, “How do you do, Mrs. Warburton. I hope you’ll pardon me if I don’t get up.”

  Mrs. Warburton laughed.

  Kit smiled.

  Kathryn gawked.

  Mrs. Warburton went back to the kitchen, and Kathryn said to Kit, “You made her laugh! She never goes beyond a Mona Lisa smile!”

  “That’s what you’ve always told me, so I thought I’d see if I couldn’t produce a warmer response. By the way, how did you manage to become more beautiful in the six weeks since I last saw you?”

  “I practice a lot.”

  Kit rolled himself over to the sofa and skillfully flipped himself onto it. “Come here,” he ordered.

  “The tea will get cold.”

  “Damn the tea.”

  Kathryn went to the sofa and sat beside him.

  After several minutes she said, “Kit, I don’t mean to complain but you seem to have something large and uncomfortable in your left pocket. And that is not a sly reference to a certain Mae West line.”

  “I do beg your pardon. That’s something I’ve brought for you. It’s a loan. For now, anyway.” He disentangled himself from her and pulled from the pocket of his blazer, not without difficulty, a parcel wrapped in brown paper tied with string. “In the fullness of time, I hope these will be yours, together with a great many more such baubles from the family vaults. You see, it struck me that if we’re going to play out this little charade of ours convincingly tomorrow morning, it might help if you were decked in some of the family paraphernalia, so to speak. It would make our relationship look more serious. By the way, it was a real picnic talking these through customs. I had to swear on the souls of my ancestors that they were going back to England with me.”

  As he spoke, he was removing the paper and string from a box about twelve inches long, four inches wide, and an inch deep. Out of this unprepossessing packaging emerged a glorious velvet box of faded burgundy trimmed at the corners with what Kathryn suspected was real gold.

  Kit opened it and Kathryn gasped.

  Inside, on a burgundy silk cushion, was a necklace of gold and emeralds. The stones were rectangular, and they were almost the size of postage stamps. They were set in ornate gold frames, and strung together with clunky gold links. The necklace was so spectacular that it was a moment before Kathryn noticed the matching ring sitting in the middle of the cushion.

  When she caught her breath she said, “Well I don’t know, Kit. Couldn’t you have found something more noticeable?”

  Kit laughed until the tears ran down his face, and then he caught her in a firm hug and commanded, “Marry me. You must marry me. I cannot live without you. You are the most divine woman I have ever met in my entire life. Please, Kathryn. I promise you, being a marchioness isn’t so bad. We can work it out. Whatever you object to, we can get around it.”

  “Kit, I keep telling you, it’s being a marchioness I object to. And a few other things. But let’s not have those arguments again now. You just got here. I love you. To tell you the truth, I’d love to marry you, and I’m afraid you’re going to wear me down, you know, one of these days, title or no, and—”

  “Do you mean it?” Kit’s face lit up like a child at Christmas.

  “It’s just that I can’t imagine ever giving you up.”

  Conversation ceased for a while.

  When they had stopped kissing and finished exchanging vows of undying love, Kathryn remembered the burgundy box.

  “Kit, about these so-called family baubles of yours. They will certainly accomplish the purpose. If I wear that necklace, everyone will know in an instant it’s not mine. How old is it, by the way?”

  “Eighteenth century. It belonged to the first marchioness.”

  “I can believe it. It’s a museum piece. Tell you what. How about I just wear the necklace? The ring would imply we’re engaged, and that’s just too much of a lie.”

  After a bit of good-natured argument she managed to make Kit agree with her.

  Dear God, she thought, closing the box. This is going to be so hard on Tom.

  CHAPTER 21

  Tom was always an early riser, so he was already awake when the phone rang two hours before he would normally have left his house for church. At this unreasonable hour on a Sunday morning, it could only have something to do with either his double homicide or his missing wife, so he pounced on the phone with alacrity.

  “Hello?”

  “Tom? Mark Randall.”

  Disappointment mingled with surprise. “Father Mark! Good morning. Is something wrong?”

  “No, nothing’s wrong. I just wondered if you could come have a talk with me before the eleven o’clock service. It’s rather important. Say, ten-thirty?”

  “Sure, I could do that.”

  “Fine. In my office at ten-thirty, then. Thanks, Tom.”

  Now, what the hell is this going to be about? Tom wondered.

  Meanwhile, over on Alexander Street, Kathryn had returned from Kit’s hotel and was ransacking her wardrobe for something suitable to wear with the emerald necklace. She certainly wasn’t going to wear it with her clergy collar. Finally she decided upon what she called her funeral dress: an unadorned navy wool sheath with long sleeves and a high collar. When she hung the necklace on it she had to admit that the effect was enough to stop traffic.

  “Now, what earrings shall I wear with this monstrosity?” she asked herself. “Answer: the smallest ones I own.” She opened her jewelry box and took out some modest pearl studs and put them on and surveyed herself in the mirror. She wrinkled her nose in dissatisfaction and took them off. She went into the spare guestroom (the one Tracy wasn’t using), opened a drawer in the dresser, took out another jewelry box, and rummaged around in the clutter inside it. Eventually she located the tiny gold studs she had worn for the first two weeks after she had had her ears pierced. She went back to her room, put these on, examined the result, and nodded.

  She then went down to breakfast and put on an apron for fear of spilling anything on her finery. She had to t
ake it off again to show Tracy, who nearly swooned.

  “Tell me again why you don’t want to marry this man?”

  “I might have to wear things like this.”

  “Get serious.”

  “I am serious. Tracy, you don’t like this thing, do you?”

  Tracy opened her mouth, hesitated, then said, “I guess I might like it to hang on my wall and stare at it, but I couldn’t wear it. It would wear me.”

  “Yes, as a piece of personal adornment it has all the subtlety of a Sherman tank. Don’t you think so, Warby?”

  “I think I have better sense than to offer an opinion on this subject. Orange juice, Tracy?”

  When Tom walked into the Rector’s office promptly at 10:30 he was a bit on his guard. Father Mark had sounded perfectly friendly, but Tom had not forgotten their last face-to-face encounter.

  Father Mark, however, greeted him with an enormous smile and a hearty handshake and a clap on the shoulder. “Tom! Come in, come in. Have a seat.” The Rector closed the door and seated himself behind his desk. “Thanks for coming. Now, I know you’re wondering what this is all about, so I’ll get straight to the point.

  “First I want to apologize unreservedly for my behavior the other day. It was inexcusable. You were only doing your job, and I was completely out of line, and I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  This was unexpected and very welcome. Tom felt as though oil had been poured into an open wound. “Why, thank you, Rector. That’s nice of you. I appreciate that. Apology accepted. Of course.”

  “Thank you, Tom. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to the main reason I called you here. I know that you must have been very wounded by the fact that eight people on the vestry of this church told the District Attorney that they thought it was possible that you killed Louise.”

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “Kathryn told me. She came bursting in here calling me a son of a bitch and told me it was all my fault because I called an emergency vestry meeting and complained about the police presence on the church grounds. She said I turned the vestry against you. I thought she was going to kill me. That’s a very loyal friend you have there, Tom.”