A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(119)

“That isn’t it,” Deborah protested quickly. “You mustn’t...You’ll meet him. He’s eager to...He’s heard so much about you over the years.”

“Yeah?” China looked up from the sauce to regard her evenly. Deborah felt herself growing sticky under her gaze. China said, “It’s okay. You were going on with your life. There’s nothing wrong with that. California wasn’t your best three years. I can see why you wouldn’t want to remember if you could help it. And keeping in touch...It would have been a form of remembering, huh? Anyway, sometimes that happens with friendships. People are close for a while and then they’re not. Things change. Needs change. People move on. That’s just how it is. I’ve missed you, though.”

“We should have stayed close,” Deborah said.

“Tough to manage when someone doesn’t write. Or call. Or anything.” China shot her a smile. It was sad, though, and Deborah could feel it.

“I’m sorry, China. I don’t know why I didn’t write. I meant to, but time starting passing and then...I should have written. E-mailed. Phoned.”

“Beat a tom-tom.”

“Anything. You must have felt...I don’t know...You probably thought I forgot you. But I didn’t. How could I? After everything?”

“I did get the wedding announcement.” But no invitation to the weddingitself was unsaid.

Deborah heard it, nonetheless. She sought a way to explain. “I suppose I thought you’d find it odd. After Tommy. All of a sudden after everything that happened, I’m marrying someone else. I suppose I didn’t know how to explain.”

“You thought you had to? Why?”

“Because it looked...” Deborah wanted a good word to describe how her shift from Tommy Lynley to Simon St. James might have appeared to someone who hadn’t known the whole story of her love for Simon and her estrangement from him. It had all been too painful to speak of to anyone while she was in America. And then Tommy had been there, stepping into a void that even he had not known at the time existed. It was all too complicated. It always had been. Perhaps that was why she’d kept China as part of an American experience that included Tommy and thus had to be relegated to the past when her time with Tommy ended. She said, “I never did speak much about Simon, did I?”

“Never mentioned his name. You watched for the mail a whole lot and you looked like a puppy whenever the phone rang. When the letter you were waiting for never came and the phone call didn’t either, you’d disappear for a couple of hours. I figured there was someone back home you were putting behind you, but I didn’t want to ask. I figured you would tell me when you were ready. You never did.” China emptied the cooked pasta into a colander. She turned from the sink, steam rising behind her. “It was something we could have shared,” she said. “I’m sorry you didn’t trust me enough.”

“That’s not how it was. Think of everything that happened, all the things that show I trusted you completely.”

“The abortion, sure. But that was physical. The emotional part you never trusted with anyone. Even when you married Simon. Even now when you’ve been hassling with him. Girlfriends are for sharing, Debs. They’re not just conveniences, like Kleenex when you need to blow.”

“Is that what you think you were to me? What you are to me now?”

China shrugged. “I guess I’m not sure.”

In Candie Gardens now, Deborah reflected upon her evening with China. Cherokee had put in no appearance while she was there—“He said he was going to a movie, but he’s probably scamming on some woman in a bar”—so there was no distraction and no way to avoid looking at what had happened to their friendship.

On Guernsey they were in an odd reversal of roles, and that created an uncertainty between them. China, long the nurturing partner in their relationship, ever caring for a foreigner who’d come to California wounded by a love unacknowledged, had been forced by her current circumstances to become China the supplicant dependent upon the kindness of others. Deborah, always at the receiving end of China’s ministrations, had taken up the mantle of Samaritan. This alteration in the way they interacted with each other put them out of sorts, further out of sorts than they might have been had there existed between them only the hurt caused by the years during which they had not communicated. So neither quite knew the right thing to do or say. But both of them, Deborah believed, did actually feel the same at heart, no matter how inarticulate was her effort to express it: Each was concerned for the other’s welfare, and each was a bit defensive about herself. They were in the process of finding their way with each other, a way forward that was also a way out of the past. Deborah rose from her bench as milky sunlight struck the cinder path leading to the garden’s gate. She followed this path between lawn and shrubbery and skirted a pond where goldfish swam, delicate miniatures of the fish in Le Reposoir’s Japanese garden.

Outside in the street, morning traffic was building, and pedestrians were hurrying on their way into the centre of town. Most of them crossed over the road into Ann’s Place. Deborah followed them round the gentle curve that exposed the hotel.

Outside, she saw, Cherokee was leaning his hips against the low wall that marked the boundary of the sunken garden. He was eating something wrapped in a paper napkin and drinking from a steaming take-away cup. All the time, he kept his attention on the hotel fa?ade. She went up to him. So intent was he upon his observation of the building across the street that he didn’t notice her, and he started when she said his name. Then he grinned. “It actually works,” he said. “I was sending you a telepathic message to come outside.”