Oh God, I thought as I hung up, and then I was inside Rose’s office.
“I have to go to New York this afternoon,” I explained in a tone that invited no questions. “It has to do with Beryl Madison’s case, and I’ll be out of the office at least through tomorrow.”
I evaded her eyes. Though my secretary knew nothing about Mark, I feared that my motivation was as obvious as a billboard.
“Is there a number where you can be reached?” Rose asked.
“No.”
Opening the calendar, she immediately began scanning for the appointments she would need to cancel as she informed me, “The Times called earlier, something about doing a features article, a profile of you.”
“Forget it,” I answered irritably. “They just want to corner me about Beryl Madison’s case. It never fails. Whenever there’s a particularly brutal case I refuse to discuss, suddenly every reporter in town wants to know where I went to college, if I have a dog or ambivalence about capital punishment, and what my favorite color, food, movie, and mode of death are.”
“I’ll decline,” she muttered, reaching for the phone.
I left the office in time to make it home, throw a few things into a suit bag, and beat the rush-hour traffic. As Mark promised, my ticket was waiting for me at the airport. He had booked me in first class, and within the hour I was settled in a row all to myself. For the next hour I sipped Chivas on the rocks and tried to read as my thoughts shifted like the clouds in the darkening sky beyond my oval window.
I wanted to see Mark. I realized it wasn’t professional necessity, but a weakness that I had believed I had completely overcome. I was alternately thrilled and disgusted with myself. I did not trust him, but I wanted to desperately. He’s not the Mark you once knew, and even if he was, remember what he did to you. And no matter what my mind said, my emotions would not listen.
I went through twenty pages of a novel written by Beryl Madison as Adair Wilds and had no earthly idea what I had read. Historical romances are not my favorite, and this one, in truth, wouldn’t win any prizes. Beryl wrote well, her prose sometimes breaking into song, but the story limped along on wooden feet. It was the sort of pulp that was written almost to formula, and I wondered if she might have succeeded at the literature she aspired to write had she lived.
The pilot’s voice suddenly announced we would be landing in ten minutes. Below, the city was a dazzling circuit board with tiny lights moving along highways and tower lights winking red from the tops of skyscrapers.
Minutes later, I pulled my suit bag out of the storage compartment and passed through the boarding bridge into the madness of La Guardia. I turned, rather startled, at the pressure of a hand on my elbow. Mark was behind me, smiling.
“Thank God,” I said with relief.
“What? You thought I was a purse snatcher?” he asked dryly.
“If you had been, you wouldn’t be standing,” I said.
“I don’t doubt that.”
He began steering me through the terminal. “Your only bag?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Out front, we got a cab piloted by a bearded Sikh in a maroon turban whose name was Munjar, according to the ID clamped to his visor. He and Mark shouted at each other until Munjar appeared to understand our destination.
“You haven’t eaten, I hope,” Mark said to me.
“Nothing but smoked almonds …” I fell against his shoulder as we screeched from lane to lane.
“There’s a good steak house not far from the hotel,” Mark said loudly. “Figured we’d just eat there since I don’t know a damn thing about getting around in this city.”
Just getting to the hotel would do, I thought, as Munjar began an unsolicited monologue about how he had come to this country to get married, and had a December wedding planned even though he had no prospects for a wife at the moment. He went on to inform us that he had been driving a cab for only three weeks, and had learned how to drive in the Punjab, where he had started driving a tractor at the age of seven.