One Way or Another(39)

Martha thought her sister would never learn; she would just go through life as ingenuous as she was now, believing a man took pity on her and paid for her dinner without any thought of any kind of repayment, which would certainly not be in money.

“Sometimes, Lucy,” she said coldly, “I have to think you are a silly bitch.”

“It was only a glass of champagne. Martha, I was at the Ritz! What else could I do?”

“You could have called me, I would have given them my credit card.”

“Ohh, well, he got there first with his.” Lucy grinned. She was bewitching when she grinned, her tousled blond hair falling into her eyes, her unmade-up face all shiny and clean. She looked about fifteen years old at that moment and Martha sighed and took pity.

“So, are you going to take the job as my assistant on this project, or not?”

“You betcha,” Lucy said, grinning again.





27

The next day, Martha flew to Paris to be with Marco. Later she fixed dinner at his apartment and since each liked different foods it was a varied assortment. For her: salad greens, braised tomatoes with Parmesan, and fresh shrimp with a good garlicky mayonnaise. For him: grilled sirloin and a baked potato with butter on the side. Nothing she could do could turn Marco away from the food of his youth. It was okay, though she did wish he would go easier on the butter. But she had other things to talk about tonight, more important than butter, something she had caught, by chance, earlier that evening in the newspaper:

MISSING BROOKLYN WOMAN it said in large black letters above the photo of an attractive girl whose hair clouded round her head in a fizz of energy. As though she could fly away with that hair, Martha thought. She remembered Marco’s description of the red-haired girl who had “gone missing.” Now here that girl was, officially missing—in print—in the newspaper. There could not be two women of that description, with that hair, who had suddenly disappeared. Marco was right after all.

Marco was leaning against the kitchen sink watching the preparations, a glass of chilled rosé in hand, his mind on other matters.

“So?” he said finally.

Martha threw him a glance. “So—what?” she asked, tearless, even though she was chopping onions.

Marco thought it was amazing that Martha never cried when she chopped onions. Just another of her special talents.

Marco’s kitchen had been done over by Martha. The polished concrete counters were her only concession to his aesthetics. Personally, she would have preferred a silvery granite. The view beyond the counter, though, was unmatchable: the classic Paris skyline of rooftops and chimneys. Below, paulownia trees were budding in the square while tiny cars in bright colors skidded round corners, brakes squealing, in a never-ending search for parking spots, of which there were none.

“So? Whaddya think?” Marco said.

“Think about what?”

“About who?”

“Whom.”

He sighed. “Martha! You know what I mean. Who and what I mean is the red-haired girl.”

Martha stopped cutting. She wiped her hands on her blue-and-white-striped butcher’s apron and took the newspaper clipping from the pocket. “I saw this in today’s Herald Tribune. I was saving it to give to you after dinner, hoping to have some time to ourselves first, but I can tell you’re not totally into it. Into me. You have another woman on your mind.” She handed it to Marco. “Read that, why don’t you.”

Wineglass in one hand, the clipping in the other, Marco glanced casually at it, then read it.

“Shit.” He slammed his glass onto the concrete countertop. “Martha! Do you realize what this is?”

“Of course I do.” It was Martha’s turn to lean nonchalantly against the counter. First, though, she turned off the heat under his steak. She was wearing a white short-sleeve tee and white jeans under her apron. She was barefoot and her blond hair was tied back with a green wire twist from the supermarket bag that had held the vegetables.

“It’s a picture of the girl you said you saw. It says she’s missing, that she never showed up for her job at the restaurant where she worked as a greeter. Her landlady reported to the police that she had not seen her around and got no response when she knocked on her door, nor from her telephone.”

Marco read the clipping again. “No one seems to have a cell number for her. Don’t you think that unusual, these days? Everybody communicates by cell phone.”

“What’s her name?”

“Angela Morse. Age twenty-one. ‘Home’ is a two-room apartment in an old building in Brooklyn.” He checked the address again. “Not a very good part of Brooklyn, I’d say. A young woman who looks like that, she’d have to keep her wits about her, coming home late at night, have street smarts and eyes in the back of her head.”

“So what was a Brooklyn girl doing all alone in a small Turkish seaside town?”

“More important, what was a Brooklyn girl doing on a yacht in the Aegean?”

“Falling off it,” Martha said, with a sudden lurch of her heart as she contemplated the thought that it was probably true and the red-haired girl had drowned, right before Marco’s eyes.

“I’m so sorry.” She put out a hand, touched Marco tenderly, leaning her head against his shoulder. She had no doubt now, and neither did Marco, that Angie Morse was the girl Marco had seen drown.