Chapter Fourteen Mr. Caleb Graham #2
And why, she asked herself, with sudden, startled honesty, should that thought frighten me at all?
Two days ago this same man's power over her had made death itself seem a mercy by comparison.
What had changed? A few wild flowers. A poem shared under a willow tree.
Hair that curled where it should have lain flat and oily.
Was that truly enough to undo three months of justified hatred?
He said he could prove he never wrote them. Foolish, surely — of course he'd written them, hadn't he signed his own name? And yet the memory of his face reading that letter — white with real fury, not shame — would not leave her be. Could a man truly act such fury, if the crime were his own?
A darker thought followed close behind: what if he's gone to find Gregory Hostetler himself — to settle accounts?
The thought should have pleased her, she told herself.
It did not. It frightened her badly, and she could not pretend otherwise.
Who is he, if not Gregory — and how did he come to stand in Gregory's place at my wedding?
A vivid, unwanted picture rose before her — him carried back to her, laid out on the dark leather couch across the room exactly as he'd lain sleeping on the train, one hand still fallen protectively across his chest, his warm brown hair spread against a forehead gone suddenly, terribly white and still.
Henry's returning footsteps broke the vision, and she managed a smile as he came in to take her breakfast order, though afterward she couldn't have said what she'd actually chosen — the vision on the couch would not entirely release her, however she tried.
?
She managed a little coffee, a bite of roll, some of the steak Henry had brought, though her mind kept working the same impossible knot the whole while.
He'd left without breakfast himself, after a supper the night before that had amounted to a candy bar and an orange handed to her instead.
He gave me everything he could find, and kept nothing for himself.
The thought sat uncomfortably alongside all her careful, hard-won distrust.
She rose and wandered the room, trying to outwalk her own anxiety.
The walls were painted a soft sage green, blending near the ceiling into a hand-painted landscape of trees and water that reminded her, with a small pang, of the little village where they'd spent yesterday morning.
What a day that had been. How completely it had changed everything she thought she knew about the man she'd married.
A few fine paintings hung in careful, well-lit positions — chosen, she could tell at a glance, by someone with real taste.
On the open mahogany desk by the window, a small painted miniature caught her eye: a young woman with soft brown hair and eyes that reminded her, with a small jolt, of the man who'd just left.
The dress in the portrait belonged to another generation entirely — twenty-five years past, at least — though the face itself looked hardly older than Calie's own.
Whose home is this, truly? Some relative's, perhaps, if this isn't his room at all.
She set the miniature back with careful, almost reverent hands, wishing, absurdly, that the sweet-eyed woman in the portrait were here now, someone to tell all her fears to.
Her eye drifted next to a stack of letters on the desk — official-looking envelopes mixed among a few square, perfumed ones in a tall, slanting hand. Every single one addressed to Mr. Caleb Graham.
Caleb Graham. The name meant nothing to her at all. Who was he? What did any of this have to do with the man she'd married — or with her?
The telephone rang.
Her heart leapt as though the ringing itself were a voice demanding an answer she didn't have. Should she pick it up? Wait for someone else? What if it was him, in some kind of trouble? That thought alone sent her flying to answer it.
"Hello?" Her own voice sounded strange and far away to her.
"Is this Mr. Graham's apartment?"
"Yes," she said, her eyes still resting on that stack of letters.
"Is Mr. Graham in?"
"No, he isn't," she said, growing steadier, though already regretting having picked up at all.
"That's odd — his office told me he'd just gotten back. Are you certain?"
"Quite certain."
"Who is this, please?"
Calie hesitated. Who was she, exactly? Not Miss Hawthorne any longer. Mrs. Hostetler? The name curdled in her chest even unspoken. "I'm sorry — who's calling, please?"
"I asked you first," the voice snapped, imperious and thoroughly unused to being questioned. "Is this the housekeeper? Because if it is, I'd like you to go and check very carefully that Mr. Graham truly isn't there. This is important."
Something in the woman's tone pulled a small, unexpected smile from Calie despite everything. "I promise you, I'm not the housekeeper, and I promise you, Mr. Graham is genuinely not here."
"When will he be back?"
"I couldn't say. I only just arrived myself."
"And who, exactly, are you?"
"A friend," Calie offered, unsure if that was remotely the right thing to say.
A long, considering pause followed. "Well. Could you give him a message when he arrives?"
"Of course. May I ask who's calling?"
"Judy Bristol. He'll know the name." The voice brightened, businesslike again.
"Tell him he's expected here for dinner tonight — we need him to round out the table, and he simply cannot fail me again.
I'll forgive him running off the way he did if he comes early and explains himself properly.
You won't forget? Bristol — B-R-I-S-T-O-L. "
"I won't forget."
"Thank you. And your name was—?"
Calie set the receiver down without answering.
The whole exchange sat uneasily in her chest, though she couldn't quite say why.
Who was Caleb Graham, and what would she possibly do if he simply walked in the door?
And this Miss Bristol, and her message — Calie found she had no wish at all to be the one delivering it in person.
She wrote it out instead and set it beside the perfumed letters on the desk, glad of anything, however small, to occupy the slow, dreadful crawl of the minutes.
She drifted to the back windows next, then the side ones.
Across the rooftops she caught the gold-and-white gleam of the Library of Congress, ordinarily one of her favorite views in the whole city — today she looked straight through it, unseeing.
Further along, a glimpse of the Potomac caught the morning sun.
At the front windows, she finally stopped.
Two men stood on the opposite side of the street, pacing a short, deliberate stretch between one corner and the next, never straying further.
They glanced up at the building now and then, exchanging some silent signal when their paths crossed, and once, briefly, one of them drew something from his coat and flashed it low against his side before tucking it away again — the same dull gleam of metal she'd glimpsed in Graham's hand not an hour before.
She could not make herself look away from the window after that. Every few minutes she'd check the back for some sign of the returning car, then hurry to the front again to confirm the two men were still there, still watching, still waiting for something she was fairly certain was him.
Once she sank back into the leather chair and closed her eyes, letting the whole sweetness of yesterday wash back over her — the walk, the willow, the forget-me-nots — up through the moment on the train when she'd first felt the sting of disloyalty to her father's memory.
But her heart had shifted sides entirely since then, and she understood now, with a clarity that frightened her a little, that something had gone terribly wrong somewhere in this whole tangled story — some mistake, some deception, that had nothing at all to do with the man who'd held her hand through a burning Pittsburgh night and torn a window open with his bare hands to give her air.
Whatever the truth of it was, she meant to have it, the moment he walked back through that door.