Brass Ring Read online

  And then the call came from Randy.

  He reached her early in the morning at her office and began by thanking her for giving him the opportunity to talk about Margot. He’d found her very easy to open up to, he said, and meeting with her had helped him in a way he hadn’t known he needed. Now he felt ready to hear about his sister’s last moments on the bridge. Would Claire please have lunch with him?

  She felt like screaming, No! I want to be free of your damn sister! Yet she had asked him to share so much painful, personal information. She couldn’t possibly turn down his request for her to do the same.

  Besides, there was a pull to see him she couldn’t quite deny to herself. Listening to that rich, resonant voice over the phone made her remember the odd comfort she’d felt with him, the sense of knowing him well, when in truth she didn’t know him at all.

  She waited until that evening to tell Jon. They were eating pasta at the kitchen table when she finally dared to bring it up. “Randy Donovan called to ask if I’d meet him for lunch.” She poured dressing on her salad, keeping her eyes on the task, but she could feel Jon watching her.

  “Lunch?” he asked. “Why?”

  “He wants to know what Margot said to me on the bridge. I’d rather not have to talk to him again, but he was so nice to me that I feel an obligation.”

  Jon swirled a forkful of linguine in his spoon. “Wouldn’t it be easier to tell him over the phone?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s not the kind of thing you dump on someone.” She felt the eggshells beneath her feet. There was tension in the room, and she didn’t know how to diffuse it. Jon was still swirling the pasta, trancelike. “Are you upset about this?” she asked.

  He sighed and set down his fork. He reached across the corner of the table to hold her hand, and she folded her fingers around his. “I thought you were getting over this whole Margot thing,” he said. “I’m afraid he’s going to open it up for you all over again.”

  “I’m fine, Jon. I can handle it.”

  “I hope so.” He squeezed her fingers before drawing his hand away.

  Again, the tension fell between them, this time in the form of silence. Claire tried to eat but found it hard to swallow.

  Finally, Jon spoke again. “When are you supposed to see him?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  She and Jon usually spent their lunch breaks with each other, either in his office or hers. Occasionally they went out to a restaurant, sometimes alone, sometimes with colleagues. And every once in a while, she would meet Amelia or another friend for lunch and Jon would go out with Pat. But this was different. She felt as if she were breaking some unspoken covenant between them.

  “We have a meeting with Tom Gardner at two tomorrow,” Jon said.

  “I’ll be back in plenty of time.”

  Silence again. Jon took a sip of water, then said, “How about a vacation?”

  She was caught by surprise. “What?”

  He started swirling linguine again. “Someplace warm. Hawaii? The Caribbean? We could get away for a week or so.”

  She was amazed he would suggest going away when they were in the throes of planning the retreat. But the idea of escape was extremely seductive. Hawaii was thousands of miles from Harpers Ferry and Margot and the bridge.

  “God, yes.” She smiled. “I’ll start packing.”

  Jon laughed, and the sound was warm and wonderful and all too rare these days. “Okay,” he said. “Think about where you’d like to go and when we can carve out some time, and let’s do it.”

  TRAFFIC WAS HEAVY AS she drove to the Chain Bridge Theater at noon the following day. She’d suggested they eat at a restaurant midway between her office and the Fishmonger, but Randy said he’d prefer meeting at the theater. No one used it during the day, he said, and he often took his lunch break there. “After working in a restaurant all day, I’d just as soon spend my time off someplace else,” he said. “Tell you what. If you’ll meet me at the theater, I’ll provide the lunch.”

  She stopped at a red light about a mile from the theater and glanced in her sideview mirror to see it completely filled with green. Drawing in a sharp breath, she turned quickly to look out the window. She expected to see someone in a kelly green shirt leaning against her car, but all she could see was the white line in the road, the side of the red sedan stopped behind her, and the pale gray light of the midday sky.

  She looked into the mirror again to see the rear end of a car traveling in the opposite direction. The green was gone. You are losing it, Harte. She checked her rearview mirror. The woman in the red sedan was applying lipstick.

  The light changed, and when she stepped on the accelerator, the muscles in her legs were trembling.

  Randy was in the pew where they had first met. The clear glass of the chapel’s very tall, narrow, arched windows let in the only light. The small building seemed far more a church than a theater today, its stage hidden behind heavy, royal blue curtains.

  Randy turned as she walked down the aisle. He smiled and stood up. “Thanks for meeting me here,” he said, helping her off with her coat.

  She sat down. “You’re welcome.”

  He was wearing a sweater that matched the blue of the curtains. “As I was waiting for you, I realized I couldn’t possibly talk about Margot in a restaurant,” he said. “I need the peacefulness of this place. The privacy.”

  Again she had that sense of knowing him from somewhere else. She wanted to touch his arm, squeeze it, to let him know she understood, but she locked her hands in her lap, telling herself that the odd warmth and affection she felt for him made no sense in light of their one brief meeting.

  “How about lunch?” He lifted a basket from the floor and set it between them on the pew. Claire smelled something smoky that made her mouth water;

  “I have wine or club soda.” Randy reached inside the basket. “Wasn’t sure what you’d prefer.”

  “Wine,” she said, although she never drank wine at lunch.

  He poured them each a glass of wine, then drew two large, elegantly prepared plates from the basket. Each plate was weighted down with big clumps of tuna resting on leaves of romaine and nestled beside red grapes and sourdough rolls.

  “Smoked tuna all right?” he asked, handing her one of the plates.

  “That sounds wonderful.”

  He gave her a fork, along with a cream-colored linen napkin, and Claire pulled the plastic wrap from the plate and took a bite of tuna.

  “This is delicious,” she said. She thought guiltily of Jon eating his tuna salad at the desk in his office.

  “Thanks.” Randy leaned back against the pew and rested his plate on his knees. “Well, can you eat and talk at the same time?”

  She nodded. “What is it you’d like to know?”

  He took a sip of his wine. “I want to know exactly what happened that night in Harpers Ferry.”

  Claire looked across the theater at the heavy blue curtains, thinking back to the snowstorm on the bridge. She didn’t have to reach too deeply into her memory, despite the energy she had put into blocking that night from her mind. Every movement of Margot’s body, every word she had spoken, was as clear as if it had occurred only minutes before.

  She spoke quietly, telling him about her first glimpse of Margot. “Once I realized it was a person I was looking at—a woman who was undoubtedly in some sort of distress—I had to go out to her.”

  “Why didn’t your husband go with you?”

  “He uses a wheelchair. He wouldn’t have been able to get out of the car with the snow and all.”

  “Oh,” Randy said. “I didn’t know.”

  Claire described walking across the bridge to reach Margot and not being able to make herself heard until she stepped out onto the platform.

  “I still can’t believe you did that.” Randy shook his head. “I don’t know anyone that brave.”

  Claire ate a few grapes before responding. “I didn’t think about what I was doing,” she sa
id. “Besides, the platform was fairly wide. I knew that as long as I held on to the railing, I’d be fine.”

  “If you say so. Go on. How did she look? How was she dressed?”

  Claire described the tattered clothing, the too-short pants, the wet tennis shoes, the coat suited more for spring than winter, and Randy grew agitated next to her, rubbing his hand back and forth across his beard.

  “Damn.” He looked away from her. “I never even thought of that. Of clothes. I should have gotten her things. It never crossed my mind. I’d bring her food when I’d go to visit. She wouldn’t eat it, but that seems to be the only thing I know how to do—feed people. I never thought of clothes. Shit.”

  She felt the pain in him, as she had the last time they’d met. This time, though, he wasn’t trying to hide from it. He was letting himself step into it, surround himself with it.

  “Maybe she had more suitable things, but she just didn’t care what she wore,” Claire offered, wanting to relieve his suffering. “I’m sure they would have told you if her lack of clothing was a problem.”

  Randy looked unconvinced. “Go on, please. What did she say to you?”

  “At first, nothing. She seemed to be in a world of her own, although I’m certain she knew I was there.” She remembered how Margot had reminded her of an ice sculpture, she had been so completely covered by snow. She couldn’t tell him that. “There was a peacefulness to her,” she said instead. “Really, there was.”

  He nodded but didn’t look at her.

  “She kept asking me to leave her alone. At one point, she said she had died on that bridge years ago.”

  Randy looked at her sharply.

  “After you told me about the accident, I realized that she must have been referring to that night. She must have felt like she died when Charles died.”

  Randy nodded. “Yes, I think she did. Margot’s life—the life that had any quality to it—ended that day, too. After that, she might as well have been dead.”

  “She said she could hear music. Chopin, she said. Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, which is very beautiful. I listened to it for a few days after…I met her.”

  Randy said nothing.

  “And she said something weird. Something about how he couldn’t hear the music.”

  He frowned. “Who couldn’t? Chopin?”

  Claire shrugged.

  “She must have her composers mixed up,” Randy said. “Beethoven’s the one that went deaf, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “She must have really been losing it to get them mixed up.”

  “Or maybe she meant Charles? Since he was no longer alive to hear it?”

  “Maybe,” Randy agreed.

  “I tried to hold on to her, and for a while, she let me.”

  “Hold on to her? How?”

  “Just my hand on her arm.” She circled her hand around Randy’s arm, through his sweater, then let go quickly.

  He leaned away from her, his eyes wide. “Damn, lady, you are nuts, you know it?”

  “Jon called the police from the car. Maybe that was a mistake, because that’s when she panicked. When she heard the sirens. Maybe I could have talked her out of it if the police hadn’t come.”

  “Yeah, and maybe you’d have ended up in the river along with her.”

  She didn’t try to argue the point with him. She thought about what had happened next and found that she didn’t want to talk about those minutes of negotiation between herself and Margot. She didn’t want to talk about letting go and not letting go.

  “So, she got scared when the police came,” she said, “and that’s when she jumped.”

  The crystal angel, flying, in slow motion. Claire’s stomach lurched. She grabbed for the back of the pew, knocking her fork and most of her grapes to the floor.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” She couldn’t bend over to retrieve the fork. The chapel was spinning enough as it was.

  “I’ve got it.” Randy reached down and picked up the fork and three grapes. He set them on his own plate. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, just…embarrassed.” She could feel the heat in her face. “I keep getting this dizziness,” she admitted. “I know it’s linked somehow to being on the bridge. I really didn’t feel dizzy up there at the time, but now every once in a while, I remember being there, and suddenly I feel as though I’m falling.”

  There was sympathy in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I made you think about it.”

  She looked away from the warm blue of his eyes. She thought she might cry.

  He took her empty plate from her lap and put it in the basket along with his own. Then he pulled out the thermos. “Are you ready to switch to some very weak coffee?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I should have made it black and brought some milk along for myself,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “I like it this way. Honest.”

  He poured the milky coffee from the thermos into a Styrofoam cup. “I fell down some stairs a few years ago,” he said, handing the cup to her. “I missed the top step and—” He made a plane with his hand and sent it into a nosedive, and she shuddered. “Broke a couple of bones in one foot, and for weeks afterward, every time I’d close my eyes, I’d feel like I was falling again.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what it’s like.”

  He smiled at her, a little sadly. “You were really very kind to talk with me about her when it shakes you up so much.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t easy for you to tell me about the night Charles fell from the bridge, either.”

  “No. It wasn’t.” Randy looked into his cup. There was a long silence. Somewhere outside the theater a car horn honked, and the sound seemed to float just below the beamed ceiling for a few seconds before fading away.

  “All right,” he said finally, drawing in a long breath. “She seemed to be at peace. That’s what I’ll try to remember.”

  “Good,” Claire said. “That’s what I’m trying to keep in my mind, too.”

  Randy stroked his meticulously trimmed beard again, his eyes on the high arched windows. “You mentioned your own sister last time,” he said suddenly.

  She was surprised he remembered her talking about Vanessa. He’d seemed so distracted at the time.

  “Yes, and I wrote to her after we spoke.” She had written Vanessa a short letter, telling her how much she wanted to talk with her. “I realized after you and I spoke that I wanted to try to get in touch with her. I haven’t heard anything back, but it’s really too soon to expect a response.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “When I was ten.”

  “Wow. What do you remember about her?”

  Claire smiled and took a sip of coffee. “I remember that we shared the most idyllic childhood imaginable.”

  “But you said something about your parents getting divorced and your father taking your sister away and you never getting to see her again.”

  Claire shrugged. “In spite of all that, it was wonderful.” She saw the doubt in his eyes. “Honest. It was.”

  “Convince me.” He blotted his clean lips with a corner of the napkin. “I’m a skeptic about the existence of happy childhoods.”

  “Well, my great-grandfather was Joseph Siparo,” she said. “Have you ever heard of him?”

  “No. Should I have?”

  “He was one of the top carousel horse carvers in the country in the early nineteen hundreds.” She could feel herself lighting up as she spoke, and she saw her smile reflected in Randy’s eyes.

  “Really?” He seemed intrigued.

  “Uh-huh. He died long before I was born, but he taught his son—my grandfather, Vincent Siparo—how to carve, and my grandfather built a carousel in his backyard.”

  “No kidding! Wasn’t the era of carousel horse carving over by the time your grandfather got into it?”

  “Yes, but he was”—Claire hesitated, then smiled at the memor
y of her grandfather—”an eccentric. He’d been a farmer all his life, but the older he got, the more he wanted to carve, and finally he just stopped farming and started carving. People would come from all over to see his carousel. And that’s what I grew up with. At least in the summers. During the school year, I lived here in Virginia. In Falls Church, with Vanessa and Mellie—that’s my mother—and my father. But I barely remember those nine or ten months of the year. All I really remember is Pennsylvania and the farm and the carousel.”

  Blood on porcelain.

  She ran her hand across her eyes as if to wipe away the image and was relieved when it quickly faded.

  “That does sound like a pretty seductive way of life for a child,” Randy said. “Cary—my son—is ten, and I can just picture how he’d feel having an amusement-park ride in his backyard. Not sure a carousel would do it for him. Sidewinder, maybe.” Randy seemed lost in thought for a moment.

  “You have a family,” Claire said, surprised. For some reason, she’d pictured him single and was pleased to know he was taken care of, that after this difficult discussion he would have someone to go home to.

  “I’m divorced,” Randy said, quickly dashing her fantasy. “It’s been almost a year now. My son lives with my ex-wife, but I see him quite a bit.”

  “Well, I’m glad you have some time with him.”

  “So.” Randy was quick to change the subject. He brushed a crumb from his gray wool slacks, then stretched out, his back propped up against the end of the pew. “Did you ride on this carousel a lot?”

  “Yes.” Claire smiled. “My childhood was one long, wonderful carousel ride.”

  His own smile was slow in coming, and indulgent, she thought. “Well,” he said, “if that’s the case, then you’ve been very lucky. I’m glad for you, and I envy you. But I still don’t believe you. The words ‘happy’ and ‘childhood’ don’t belong in the same sentence.”

  She shook her head at him. “I think it’s a matter of what you focus on,” she said. “Of course there are bad times in a child’s life, and if you limit your thinking to those times, the whole picture will be distorted. What about your own son? Can you honestly say he’s having an unhappy childhood?”