“Oh, no, they were lovely.” Tracy lied.
She was exhausted from the tension of the evening, but when they reached the door of her apartment, she asked, “Are you going to come in, Charles?” She needed to have him hold her in his arms. She wanted him to say, “I love you, darling. No one in this world will ever keep us apart.”
He said, “Afraid not tonight. I’ve got a heavy morning.”
Tracy concealed her disappointment. “Of course. I understand, darling.”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” He gave her a brief kiss, and she watched him disappear down the hallway.
The apartment was ablaze and the insistent sound of loud fire bells crashed abruptly through the silence. Tracy jerked upright in her bed, groggy with sleep, sniffing for smoke in the darkened room. The ringing continued, and she slowly became aware that it was the telephone. The bedside clock read 2:30 A.M. Her first panicky thought was that something had happened to Charles. She snatched up the phone. “Hello?”
A distant male voice asked, “Tracy Whitney?”
She hesitated. If this was an obscene phone call…“Who is this?”
“This is Lieutenant Miller of the New Orleans Police Department. Is this Tracy Whitney?”
“Yes.” Her heart began to pound.
“I’m afraid I have bad news for you.”
Her hand clenched around the phone.
“It’s about your mother.”
“Has—has Mother been in some kind of accident?”
‘She’s dead, Miss Whitney.”
‘No!” It was a scream. This was an obscene phone call. Some crank trying to frighten her. There was nothing wrong with her mother. Her mother was alive. I love you very, very much, Tracy.
“I hate to break it to you this way,” the voice said.
It was real. It was a nightmare, but it was happening. She could not speak. Her mind and her tongue were frozen.
The lieutenant’s voice was saying, “Hello…? Miss Whitney? Hello…?”
“I’ll be on the first plane.”
She sat in the tiny kitchen of her apartment thinking about her mother. It was impossible that she was dead. She had always been so vibrant, so alive. They had had such a close and loving relationship. From the time Tracy was a small girl, she had been able to go to her mother with her problems, to discuss school and boys and, later, men. When Tracy’s father had died, many overtures had been made by people who wanted to buy the business. They had offered Doris Whitney enough money so that she could have lived well for the rest of her life, but she had stubbornly refused to sell. “Your father built up this business. I can’t throw away all his hard work.” And she had kept the business flourishing.
Oh, Mother, Tracy thought. I love you so much. You’ll never meet Charles, and you’ll never see your grandchild, and she began to weep.
She made a cup of coffee and let it grow cold while she sat in the dark. Tracy wanted desperately to call Charles and tell him what had happened, to have him at her side. She looked at the kitchen clock. It was 3:30 A.M. She did not want to awaken him; she would telephone him from New Orleans. She wondered whether this would affect their wedding plans, and instantly felt guilty at the thought. How could she even think of herself at a time like this? Lieutenant Miller had said, “When you get here, grab a cab and come to police headquarters.” Why police headquarters? Why? What had happened?
Standing in the crowded New Orleans airport waiting for her suitcase, surrounded by pushing, impatient travelers, Tracy felt suffocated. She tried to move close to the baggage carousel, but no one would let her through. She was becoming increasingly nervous, dreading what she would have to face in a little while. She kept trying to tell herself that it was all some kind of mistake, but the words kept reverberating in her head: I’m afraid I have bad news for you…She’s dead, Miss Whitney…I hate to break it to you this way…
When Tracy finally retrieved her suitcase, she got into a taxi and repeated the address the lieutenant had given her: “Seven fifteen South Broad Street, please.”