A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(81)

They had gone out to dinner and a play in downtown Buffalo, and he had expected that afterward she would be bright and cheerful and talkative. The play had been a revival of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. To him it had been a little stagey and dull, but Chelsea had watched it intently, so he had assumed she’d liked it. She had been quiet on the drive home, but not sullen or withdrawn.

After he pulled the Range Rover into the garage and got out, she had just sat there for a minute. At first he thought she was being a grand lady and waiting for him to walk around the car and open her door for her. That would have been okay—was okay in his mind when he’d come to her door. To him it had been a sign that she was feeling comfortable with him, relishing the fact that he loved her—happy that he was attentive enough to sense what she wanted.

That hadn’t been it. When he had swung her door open she simply sat there looking straight ahead.

“Honey?” he’d said. “Chelsea?”

She had reacted only after he said her name, and then it was as though he’d nudged her from a reverie. She’d looked at him and then got out. As he followed her to the front door he said, “Are you all right?”

She had not answered at first, but then she said, “Yes.” But she had sounded too firm, too assertive.

When he opened the door she went in ahead of him and kept walking, never stopping on her way across the living room and through the gallery toward his bedroom—their bedroom. When he finished locking the door and turning up the lights he looked again and his last sight before she disappeared through the arch to the gallery was her reaching up to grasp the zipper at the back of her dress. When she did that the dress was pulled tighter across her bottom and waist. Her thin, graceful fingers tugged down the zipper a few inches and he saw the bare white skin below her neck for an instant.

He felt his pulse quicken. She was going to the bedroom taking her dress off. Chelsea didn’t usually initiate sex; she acquiesced to it. Crane began to feel good. Maybe his life was about to get even better. He tried to keep his anticipation in control. It was late, and she just might be tired. In a minute she might come back out wearing flannel pajamas and fuzzy slippers and say good-night. He considered. How did he want her to see him when she returned?

He wanted to look confident and relaxed. He opened the bar hidden on the left wall and poured himself a cognac, and set a second glass next to his, with the bottle beside it as an invitation. She had turned down drinks lately. She’d said something about alcohol not agreeing with her. It had occurred to him that it might have been a reaction to the powder he had put in her drink the night they’d first had sex. He hadn’t mentioned that to her, of course. He sipped his cognac and waited, trying not to picture her in the bedroom naked, waiting for him to join her. The house was silent, and he thought he could hear his own heartbeat. Was the cognac a bad idea? He took a cocktail glass off the shelf and poured her a diet ginger ale.

He heard the bedroom door close, and then the flap of rubber on the tile floor of the gallery, and then turned to look at her.

She was wearing the tank top and shorts she’d often worn when he had visited her at her house, and a pair of flip-flops. He tried to stifle his disappointment. Okay. She looks beautiful, and in that outfit she must feel comfortable.

She didn’t. She looked anxious and miserable. Then he noticed the strap on her shoulder. What was that?

“Hi, baby,” he said, and forced a smile. “Have a ginger ale?” He held it up.

“I—” she said, then paused, like a stutterer who had to start over. “Sure.” She stepped closer and took it, then stepped away with it. She slipped the strap off her shoulder and set her overnight bag on the floor. “I need to talk to you.”

“Okay,” he said. His mouth was suddenly dry. He sipped his cognac. “Come and sit down.”

She looked undecided, and he realized that she had made some plan that had not included sitting down. But she turned and walked with him to the semicircular couch coiled around the big polished walnut coffee table. Her expression was serious, troubled. Could she be breaking up with him?

As though she were answering, she said, “This isn’t working out.”

He felt an emptiness in his stomach. He watched her, silent.

She began again. “You’ve been really kind and generous, and a true friend. You were the only one of Nick’s friends who even kept in touch with me. Nobody else gave a crap. Their girlfriends, who were always chatty and supposedly my friends, didn’t bother to call after the funeral. I would have thought you’d be the least likely to care, because you were the boss and older and everything. I’ll always be grateful that you were there for me.”

Maybe this wasn’t as bad as he had first feared. He knew he was walking along the edge of a precipice, but what she’d said made him decide to be bold and honest. “I did it because I love you.” He watched her face, hoping it would show something—if not joy, at least pleasure, however mild. Even surprise would give him a foothold he might be able to use, a chance to save himself. But her head gave a tiny involuntary shake, like a shiver.

Chelsea said, “This is my fault. I didn’t intend it, but I guess I’ve been leading you on. I wanted to give us both a chance to see if we could be happy together, but I should have been smarter about this.”

“You did nothing wrong,” he said. “Don’t think of it that way.” He swallowed hard, then stood. “Jesus, my throat is dry.” He went to the bar, reached into the refrigerator and got another ginger ale, and poured it in a glass. While he was there he reached under the bar to the cardboard box there and took one of the little brown envelopes. As he walked back to the couch he palmed it and held it in his left hand.