A Body to Die For (17 page)

What I didn’t tell him was that I was deliberating going back up there as soon as I had my mass hysteria piece out of the
way.

Over a shared plate of profiteroles, we discussed our super’s new toupee and Landon’s plans to visit Australia with his nephew.

“That’s what
you
need, Bailey—a really good trip. And I don’t mean to someplace where they kill off the staff. Aren’t you due for a nice long
adventure?”

“I know I should do something like that,” I said. “And generally I don’t mind traveling alone. But these days I’m just not
feeling up for a solo excursion.”

“What about all those old friends of yours from Brown? Can’t you find one of them to travel with?”

“They’re all married—with kids. They either don’t go anywhere or they go only to those family resorts where the pool is half
water, half pee. Hey, you wanna come back to my place for a margarita? I believe I have reached complete perfection with my
recipe.”

“Oh, Bailey, I feel awful. I promised my friend Thomas I’d stop by after dinner. He lives near here, and he wanted me to look
at a presentation he’s doing. If I’d known you were going to need me, I wouldn’t have done that.”

“No problem,” I said, though I suddenly felt the oddest urge to cry.

“I’d cancel in a heartbeat, but there’s a lot at stake for him.”

“No, no, don’t worry,” I said. “I should do some work anyway.”

We hugged good-bye and I slumped off, feeling horrible. Was it a hangover from everything awful that had happened during the
weekend, compounded by my weirdly truncated day? Was it from coming up empty-handed in my quest to help Danny? Was it from
talking to Landon and realizing how undefined my future seemed?

I walked all the way home, pulling my jeans jacket tight against the nippy air. As I drew close to my apartment building,
I noticed someone out front, leaning against the wall of the building. To my utter astonishment, it was Jack Herlihy.

I
FROZE ON
the sidewalk, panic-stricken. Last spring I’d spotted a guy I was seeing out on a date with another woman, and with that
humiliating memory still hogging space at the front of my brain, my very first thought was that Jack must be dating someone
in my building. Before I could figure out what to do, he turned his head and spotted me. He smiled and relaxed his body, and
I knew then that he’d been standing there waiting for me.

I walked toward him, my heart thumping. Okay, I thought, he’s here to see me, but what the hell for? His smile broadened and
he took a few steps toward me. He was wearing black slacks, a white dress shirt open at the neck, and a sports jacket in a
small black-and-tan plaid. Kind of dressy, as if he’d been out for dinner north of 14th Street.

“Hi,” he said as he reached me. Leaning toward me, he brushed his lips lightly across my cheek. He smelled good, but it was
a simple smell, maybe just soap and talc rather than cologne. Out of nowhere I felt an ache of longing.

“Fancy meeting you here,” I said. That’s why I write crime stories for
Gloss.
I’d never be allowed within ten feet of topics like “Clever Remarks to Make When You Run into Your Ex so That He Rues the
Day He Ever Dumped You,” because I’m such a miserable failure at moments like this.

“I came up this afternoon for a meeting,” he said. “I walked by earlier tonight on the off chance you’d be here, and the doorman
told me you’d gone out to dinner with Landon. So I got a cup of coffee around the block and came back.”

“Maybe I should deduct ten dollars from the doorman’s Christmas tip this year.”

“Oh, don’t do that. Look, would you be up for grabbing a drink someplace?”

What was this all
about?
He was a shrink. Maybe he’d decided he couldn’t escape the need for
closure.

“Why don’t you just come up?” I suggested. I wanted to know why he’d landed on my doorstep, but if it
was
closure he was after, I didn’t have the slightest interest in being on the negative end of it in a crowded bar. “I’ve got
beer and wine and other stuff.”

“Sure, that’d be great.”

We walked the few steps back to my building and through the lobby, making clunky small talk. I was eager to learn his sister’s
status, but the lobby wasn’t the place to pursue it. Instead I asked about the classes he was teaching this semester. So far,
so good, he said. He asked where Landon was, and I explained. We rode the elevator side by side, only half turned toward each
other, but I had a good enough view of him. I’d always been struck by the whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts quality
to Jack’s looks. There was no single drop-dead feature. His eyes were a nice medium blue. The nose was straight, the mouth
full. But all together it could make your knees wobble. And that’s what mine were doing just then. But I could also sense
something else: Now that I was over the surprise of seeing him, my resentment toward Jack was starting to swell, like a hand
that had been slammed in a door.

It was stuffy and dark inside my apartment, and I quickly turned on lamps and opened the door to the terrace. I considered
lighting a few candles, but I realized how silly and possibly desperate that would look, me buzzing around the room like a
bee with a box of Blue Point kitchen matches.

“So what would you like to drink?” I asked, opening the cabinet where I keep a few bottles of booze. “Like I said, I have
beer and wine, or I could make you a gin and tonic. There’s brandy here, too. And Marsala cooking wine. That would be nice
if you’re looking for something very, very sweet.” I meant to make the last line light, kind of a little joke, but it came
out sounding borderline sarcastic.

“Brandy’s good. What are you going to have?”

“I’ll have some brandy, too,” I said. For one brief moment I’d considered playing it safe and going for a club soda. I’d already
had half a bottle of wine at the restaurant, and a brandy topper might make me say something stupid or do something I’d regret—like
bullwhip him with the strap of my purse. But if I was about to be “officially” dumped, I wanted brandy. Isn’t that what they
gave Civil War soldiers before they amputated their limbs?

I poured each of us a shot of Rémy-Martin into crystal brandy snifters, part of a set of eight I’d received as a wedding gift.
I handed one to Jack as he sat on the sofa. I took the armchair directly across from him, rather than the couch. He slipped
off his sports jacket, folded it in half lengthwise, and laid it on the couch next to him.

“It’s really great to see you, Bailey,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. It was sort of a dumb reply, but what
should
I have said—“It’s great to see you,
too”?
Seeing him made me feel sad and mad. Plus I had no idea what bomb he was about to drop. Maybe he
wasn’t
here to officially dump me. Maybe he figured we were long past that and he’d come for something else, like a favor. Maybe
he was still planning to move to the city and wanted me to suggest a freakin’ real estate agent or a decorator.

“Tell me about your sister,” I added, though what I wanted to say was, “Tell me about those twenty-something brats I saw fawning
over you like you were the next Dr. Phil.”

“It looks like she’s totally out of the woods,” he said after a swig of brandy. “She still has some physical therapy ahead
of her, but she’s going back to work in a few weeks.”

I threw out questions about her treatment, some of them borderline inane because I was stalling, dreading wherever the conversation
was headed. I was just about to inquire about the dependability of her insurance carrier when I had the good sense to make
myself shut up and meet my fate.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I was lurking outside your building,” Jack said finally, setting his brandy snifter on my all-wrong-for-Manhattan
pine coffee table and leaning forward, hands on knees. “Though maybe not. Guys probably do that on a regular basis to you.
But there
is
something I wanted to talk about.”

“Okay,” I said. But inside all I was thinking was
not okay.
There was nothing okay about any of it.

“I know I haven’t stayed in touch the way I promised I would,” Jack said. “And I’m really sorry about that. But this thing
with my sister was a lot tougher than I imagined it would be. I haven’t felt I had my head above water until now.”

“Look, Jack, you don’t need to say anything else.” I could have called him on the bullshit right then, but what was the point?
I just wanted to get the whole thing over with.

“Do you mind if I do, though?” he asked.

I shrugged. He ran his hand through his hair, something he did when he was nervous.

“My life finally feels normal again,” he said. “and I’ve realized that I miss you. A lot. I know it’s tricky with me being
back in Washington, but I was hoping we could pick up where we left off.”

It took me about thirty seconds to absorb the gist of his words—and once I did, I felt totally flummoxed.

“You’re not saying anything,” he said as I just sat there. “I can’t tell whether that’s good or bad.”

“It’s just not what I was expecting at all,” I said, fumbling. “I’d figured you’d just totally lost interest in me.”

He shifted his position on the couch. “But I always said it might not be till the end of the summer that things got back to
normal for me,” he said with a trace of impatience in his voice. “You knew the situation.”

“I know,” I said. “But Jack, I haven’t even
heard
from you since the middle of August.”

“Late August is when things got the craziest for me.”

I didn’t say anything, just sipped my brandy.

“Tell me,” he urged. “You’ve got something on your mind, Bailey.”

“I saw you one day, Jack,” I blurted out. “You were walking around the Village with a couple of girls. Happy-go-lucky. I hadn’t
heard from you, but there you were, relishing the day. Obviously you weren’t too busy or too overwhelmed to flirt with a few
coeds.”

He furrowed his brow, thinking, perhaps trying to recall the incident—or perhaps he was disconcerted by the Yes, Bailey
Can
Be a Bitch moment.

“I’m sure I was simply headed in the same direction with people who had been in my class,” he said. “You know, Bailey, it’s
interesting that you never bothered to call
me
during all that time. It would have been good to hear from you—and know that you cared about what I was going through.”

“I—I didn’t call because we’d left the ball in your court,” I said, not containing my anger. “You said you’d call when you
could. And until mid-August you did—every week. And then something changed.”

He leaned all the way back against the couch and lifted his head toward the ceiling, as if something were written there that
would help him know what to say next. When he lowered his head again, I could see in his eyes that something more was coming.

“Look, Bailey,” he said suddenly, “I’m going to be honest with you about something.”

“Nothing good ever follows a sentence like that.”

“Maybe. Maybe I’m about to shoot myself in the foot. But I feel my chances with you will be better if I don’t try to bullshit
you. There was someone in Pittsburgh. Someone I was seeing for a very short while.”

I felt the blood rush to my face and neck, as if I were being dressed down by a boss in front of thirty or forty co-workers.

“Seeing or
sleeping with?
” I asked. It was one of those questions that my pride should have prevented me from asking, but my need to know overrode
all that.

He picked up his brandy and took another swig. “Sleeping with,” he said. “It was an old girlfriend, actually. She’d stayed
close to my parents, and she came back to Pittsburgh a couple of times this summer to be with my family during this whole
crisis. Initially I tried to discourage her from coming, but I could tell my mother really wanted it. One night it just happened.”

It had been weeks since I’d seen Jack, but I was surprised at how much his betrayal stung.

“Well, I’m so pleased you could find someone to help you through a tough time,” I said sarcastically.

“Bailey, I hope you can understand that it really was a terrible time for me. I would have turned to
you
then—but I never sensed you wanted me to.”

“You mean because I didn’t sleep with you?” I asked, still angry. “You always indicated that you were okay with the fact that
I wanted to take it slow.”

“No, not because of that. You just never seemed a hundred percent gung ho.”

I stared at him across the short distance between couch and armchair. He was right. I’d been smitten with him, but at the
same time I’d felt gun-shy. I’d done things to drag down the pace of the relationship—and not just physically. I’d told him—and
myself—that it had to do with being in a tailspin from the murder case I’d been involved in, but the idea of a full commitment
to Jack had made me nervous. It had been almost two years since my divorce, but I still didn’t know if I was really ready
for something serious with another man.