If you won’t leave me, I’ll find somebody who will.
Only later did Mary Andrea discover that Tom had lifted the line from a Warren Zevon song, an irritating detail that merely fortified her resolve to stay married.
As for the last time she’d actually laid eyes on her husband, what he’d said to her, his mood, the clothes he’d been wearing—none of this could Mary Andrea remember.
She did recall what she’d been doing on the afternoon the lawyer phoned, that asshole Turnquist. She’d been reading Daily Variety and running through her vocal exercises; octaves and whatnot. She remembered Turnquist saying Tom wanted to give her one more chance to sit down and work out the details, before he filed the papers. She remembered manufacturing a giggle and telling the lawyer he’d been the victim of an elaborate practical joke her husband arranged every year, on their anniversary. And she remembered hanging up the telephone and breaking into tears and wolfing three Dove bars.
Compared to other newsworthy breakups it seemed mundane, and Mary Andrea saw no benefit in launching her public widowhood by boring the media. So, gazing from the window of the plane at the scooped-out cliffs of the Rocky Mountains, she invented a suitable parting scene that she could share with the press. It had happened, say, six months ago. Tom had surprised her in, say, Lansing, where she’d landed a small part in a road tour of Sunset Boulevard. He’d slipped in late and sat in the rear of the theater, and surprised her with pink roses backstage after the show. He’d said he missed her and was having second thoughts about the separation. They’d even made plans to get together for dinner, say, next month, when she was scheduled to come back east with the production of Lambs.
Sounds pretty good, Mary Andrea thought. And who’s to say it didn’t happen? Or wouldn’t have happened, if Tom hadn’t died.
As the flight attendant freshened her Diet Coke, Mary Andrea thought: Crying won’t be a problem. When the cameras show up, I’ll have gallons of tears. Heck, I could cry right now.
Because it was terribly sad, the senseless death of a young and moderately talented and basically goodhearted man.
So what if she didn’t lie awake at nights, missing him. She’d really never known him well enough to miss him. That was sort of sad, too. Imagining the intimacy and caring that might have been; the kind of closeness only years of separation could bring.
Mary Andrea Finley Krome dug through her handbag until she located the rosary heads she’d found at a Catholic thrift shop in Missoula. She would clutch them in her left hand as she got off the plane in Orlando, and mention in a choked voice that they’d been a gift from Tom.
Which they might have been, someday, if the poor guy hadn’t been murdered.
20
JoLayne Lucks sat up so abruptly she made the boat rock. “Lord, what an awful dream.”
Krome put a finger to his lips. He’d killed the engine, and they were drifting in the dark toward the island. “Get this,” she said. “We’re in the hot-air balloon, the yellow one from before, and all of a sudden you ask for half the lottery money.”
“Only half?”
“This is after we get the stolen ticket back. Out of nowhere you’re demanding a fifty-fifty split!”
Krome said: “Thank you, Agent Moffitt, wherever you are.”
“What?”
“He put that idea in your head.”
“No, Tom. As a matter of fact, he said you didn’t strike him as a typical moneygrubbing scumbag.”
“Stop. I’m blushing.”
It was a windy night, wispy clouds skating overhead. A cold front was moving in from the north. The starlight came and went in patches. They’d approached the island on a wide arc. The tree-lined shore looked black and lifeless—the robbers were nowhere in sight, having disappeared up a creek on the lee side. Krome surmised it was too soon for the group to send a lookout; the men would be busy unloading their gear.
JoLayne said, “You’re sure they didn’t see us following them?”
“I’m not sure of anything.”
She thought: That makes two of us.