A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(2)

Her cell phone was the phone that finally did the ringing towards the end of her drive home to the beach. Not five minutes away from the uneven lump of sidewalk that marked the concrete path to her own front door, it chimed on the passenger seat and China grabbed it up to hear Matt’s voice.

“Hey, good-looking.” He sounded cheerful.

“Hey yourself.” She hated the instant relief she felt, like she’d been uncorked of carbonated anxiety. She said nothing else. He read that easily. “Pissed?”

Nothing from her end. Let him hang, she thought.

“I guess I’ve blown my wad with this one.”

“Where’ve you been?” she demanded. “I thought you were calling this morning. I waited at the house. I hate it when you do that, Matt. Why don’t you get it? If you’re not going to call, just say that in the first place and I can deal with it, okay? Why didn’t you call?”

“Sorry. I meant to. I kept reminding myself all day.”

“And...?”

“It’s not going to sound good, China.”

“Try me.”

“Okay. A real bitch of a cold front moved in last night. I had to spend half the morning trying to find a decent coat.”

“You couldn’t call from your cell while you were out?”

“Forgot to take it. I’m sorry. Like I said.”

She could hear the ubiquitous background noises of Manhattan, the same noises she heard whenever he called from New York. The blare of horns reverberating through architectural canyons, jack hammers firing like heavy armaments against cement. But if he’d left his cell phone in the hotel, what was he doing on the street with it now?

“On my way to dinner,” he told her. “Last meeting. Of the day, that is.”

She’d pulled to the sidewalk at a vacant spot about thirty yards down the street from her house. She hated stopping because the air conditioning in her car was too weak to make much of a dent in the stifling interior so she was desperate to get out, but Matt’s last remark made the heat suddenly less important and certainly far less noticeable. All her attention shifted to his meaning.

If nothing else, she’d learned to keep her mouth shut when he dropped one of his small verbal incendiary bombs. There’d been a time when she’d jump all over him at a remark like “Of the day, that is,” to weed specifics out of his implications. But the years had taught her that silence served just as well as demands or accusations. It also gave her the upper hand once he finally admitted what he was trying to avoid saying. It came in a rush. “Here’s the situation. I’ve got to stay here another week. I’ve got a chance to talk to some people about a grant, and I need to see them.”

“Matt. Come on.”

“Wait, babe. Listen. These guys dumped a fortune on a filmmaker from NYU last year. They’re looking for a project. Hear that? They’re actually looking. ”

“How do you know?”

“That’s what I was told.”

“By who?”

“So I called them and I managed to get an appointment. But not till next Thursday. So I’ve got to stay.”

“Goodbye Cambria, then.”

“No, we’ll do it. We just can’t next week.”

“Sure. Then when?”

“That’s just it.” The street sounds on the other end of the cell phone seemed to grow louder for a moment, as if he were throwing himself into the midst of them, forced off the sidewalk by the congestion of the city at the end of a workday.

She said, “Matt? Matt?” and knew a moment of irrational panic when she thought she’d lost him. Damn phones and damn signals, always fading in and out.

But he came back on the line and it was quieter. He’d ducked inside a restaurant, he said. “This is make or break for the film. China, this one’s a festival winner. Sundance for sure, and you know what that can mean. I hate letting you down like this, but if I don’t make a pitch to these people, I’m not going to be worth taking you anywhere. To Cambria. To Paris. Or to Kalamazoo. That’s just how it is.”

“Fine,” she told him, but it was not and he would know that by the flat sound of her voice. It had been a month since he’d managed to carve two days away from pitch-meetings in LA and funding-scavenges across the rest of the country, and before that it had been six weeks while she coldcalled potential clients for herself and he continued to pursue the horizon of his dream. “Sometimes,” she said, “I wonder if you’ll ever be able to put it together, Matt.”

“I know. It seems like it takes forever to get a film going. And sometimes it does. You know the stories. Years in development and then —wham! — instant box office. But I want to do this. I need to do it. I’m just sorry it seems like we end up apart more than we’re together.”

China heard all this as she watched a toddler trundle along the sidewalk on his tricycle, trailed by his watchful mother and even more watchful German shepherd. The child came to a spot where the cement was uneven, lifted on an angle by the root of a tree, and his wheel rammed into the resulting eruption. He tried to move his pedals against it, but he could do nothing till Mom came to his aid. The sight of this filled China with unaccountable sadness.

Matt was waiting for her response. She tried to think of some new variation on expressing disappointment, but she could come up with nothing. So she said, “I wasn’t really talking about putting together a film, Matt.”