"Goodbye."
He lowered the receiver thoughtfully and let it slide into
the cradle. She had sounded worried, this Ellen Shaw, this
woman from Boston he'd somehow allowed to become partly his
responsibility for as long as she chose to stay here in
London.
"Hugh," she had called him, quite naturally. "Yes, Hugh, of
course I'll be there this afternoon." Odd how informal
these Americans were. To an Englishwoman whose employer he
was about to become he would automatically have been Mr.
Weston.
He lifted a pile of books from the floor to his desk. The
little office in his flat above the used-book store and
wine bar he owned had become too small. He sat in the
creaky oak chair and rested crossed feet on the desk,
stretching his long legs and locking his hands behind his
head. Ellen Shaw had a nice voice. But he should have
expected that. Her twin sister also had a nice voice. Fiona
Shaw herself was beautiful, too, and persuasive enough to
have made him hire her to work part-time in the wine bar
when he hadn't needed extra help. Not that she wasn't an
asset. She might know nothing about wine โ or books โ but
as an aspiring actress, she did know how to assume a role
and was wonderful with customers.
Fiona. Hugh stared unseeingly at the heap of frayed leather
book spines before him. Fiona, who had walked in from the
street in the middle of a summer's afternoon and asked for
employment. Chance or design?
There had been too much for him to absorb in the past few
days. His mind probably wasn't connecting rationally. But
the thoughts kept clicking over, a day-by-day, blow-by-blow
sequence of events that had happened since Fiona Shaw
breezed into his world. Many of those events had seemed
unimportant โ until now.
After only a few weeks of working for him, Fiona had asked
if he was interested in sponsoring her sister for a work
permit in England. Ellen, Fiona had assured him, was an
expert on antique books, Hugh's own obsession, and Ellen
also had the skills he needed in a bookstore manager. Ellen
would slip easily into the nitty-gritty of running the
business and give him all the time he needed for the main
love of his life โ hunting down the rare volumes his
special clients paid him so well to find. Fiona herself,
who had come to England with a touring theater company, had
chosen to stay on in London and already had a small part in
a new local production. The sisters would live together,
but Ellen needed a sponsor who could offer her employment
in her unusual field. Hugh was the perfect answer to the
Shaws's problem. And they were perfect for him, Fiona had
insisted.
And he'd bought the whole package, been convinced his so-
called act of philanthropy would fill his own needs and
realize the dream of a woman he didn't know but whose
interests he understood because they were his own. Then in
one week, the past seven days, the neat plan had begun to
fall apart. A few minutes ago, when he'd placed the call to
Fiona's flat in St. John's Wood, he hadn't really expected
to discover that Ellen had arrived from America. But she
had. So why couldn't he stuff his unfounded suspicions back
into whatever hole they'd crawled from and be grateful?
Ellen was here. That had to prove that his doubts about
Fiona were hogwash.
The tapping of his cat's claws on polished wooden floors
distracted him. Vladimir leaped onto the desk, climbed on
top of the pile of books and turned her marmalade back on
Hugh. Her tail swung slowly to and fro, chopping the book
titles into moving fragments.
Too many questions. He tried to will his mind into neutral
and failed.
Surely the Shaw sisters would prove to be only minor pieces
in the unwelcome chess game his life had just become.
Currently the game seemed at stalemate.
"What are we going to do, old girl?" Hugh gripped the edge
of the desk and pulled his chair closer until he could
stroke Vladimir's thick fur. Hairs sprayed through a band
of thin sunlight from the window. Winter might have been
approaching, but this purring female who had, as a tiny
kitten, been passed off as a male, managed to shed in all
seasons.
"Do you think I'm making something out of nothing?" God, he
wished someone could convince him he was on the wrong track.
The cat stood precariously on the books and arched her
back. Casting Hugh a disdainful yellow-eyed glare, she
leaped to the floor.
"You've got it, Vladimir," Hugh remarked. "That was a
foolish question on my part. It's up to me to find out if
I'm right. No one else gives a damn โ yet."
* * *
Fiona had always been unpredictable, Ellen thought, but
never this unpredictable. The crowd spewing from Hampstead
underground station jostled her until she reached the steep
High Street sidewalk. How could her sister have urged her
to come to England, helped her to make all the
arrangements, then simply not been there when she arrived
or left any message at the flat they were to share? The
sick dread that had been building approached panic for an
instant. Fiona had made absolutely no contact in the two
days since Ellen's plane touched down at Heathrow airport.
Ellen had taken a cab to St. John's Wood and let herself
into the flat with the key her sister had left under the
doormat. In that two days her mood swang wildly between
fear that something awful had happened to Fiona, and anger
at the probability that her sister was repeating her old
behavior patterns. Since they'd been children, Ellen had
covered for Fiona's bizarre tendency to disappear,
initially for hours and later for days. Usually she
returned penitent, grateful for Ellen's loyalty and full of
excuses for the sudden absence.
This time the excuse would have to be really something.
A chill wind sent a few yellowing leaves scurrying up from
the ground, and she shivered. This threatened to be an
October that single-mindedly heralded winter with no
reminders of the summer past. Ellen took a calming breath
and made her way to the curb to get her bearings. Where was
Fiona? The last time she'd taken off, really taken off, had
been after a scrape with the police. But she hadn't been
guilty of anything, except knowing that her boyfriend was
up to something illegal. Surely this absence wasn't
anything like that one.
Wind, the wind that seemed to blow endlessly in this city
of a thousand races, tossed Ellen's hair across her face
and bore with it the sooty smell from the deep tube train
shaft she'd just left.
Hugh Weston's place was on Flask Walk. "Left from the
station, then first left," he'd said. "And we're on the
left." She'd expected him to laugh at that, but he hadn't.
He'd sounded a little somber on the phone but pleasant
enough, very English in a clipped BBC announcer way. When
he'd first identified himself she had asked tentatively if
he was aware of any plans Fiona might have had to be away
for a few days. He'd come back sharply with, "That was my
main reason for calling. She hasn't been in for a week and
she hasn't contacted me. I don't expect that kind of
behavior from my staff. You're supposed to come to the shop
this afternoon. May I expect you?"
She couldn't afford not to be expected by Hugh Weston.
She'd given up her boring but steady job as a librarian in
Boston, sold what furniture she had and backed out of the
lease on her apartment to come here. And she could only
stay in London if she was employed by this "perfect boss"
Fiona had miraculously produced. But Fiona should be here
to smooth the way, damn it.
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