A Soft Place to Fall (19 page)

Sam was honest, and the business disturbed
him, but he had to put aside his own discomfort in favor of his
siblings and their future. There was no other way – at least, none
that was legal – for a college dropout to make the kind of money
Sam needed to keep his family safe and secure.

And now it was over. The kids were grown; the
job was history. He was free to do anything he wanted to do, go
anywhere, maybe even go back to school and get that degree he used
to talk about.

You would think the boy would be happy. Hell,
just being thirty-five again would be enough to put a smile on
Warren's face.

But the feeling that he could have done more,
been more, still lingered with Sam and, no matter how much it
grieved Warren Bancroft, only Sam Butler could make it all come out
right.

#

The man wasn't listening to a word Claudia
said to him. He sat there, flat-eyed as a squid, shoveling in her
world-class meatloaf and thinking about whatever it was rich old
men thought about.

She took a dainty sip of decaf from one of
her favorite porcelain cups – the ones with the damask roses
hand-painted on them – and sighed loudly.

"Oh, put a sock in it," he grumbled
good-naturedly. "I heard every word you said, old woman."

"Hearing and comprehending are not the same
thing, Warren."

"Eileen thinks she's pregnant again, Sean's
opening another store, three of the grands left last week for
college, and you're belly-aching about Annie and Sam."

Claudia shivered. "Annie and Sam! Don't say
it that way. They're not a couple and –" She stopped and looked
toward the window.

"You might as well come out with it, old
woman, because I know just what you're going to say."

She wanted very much to empty the contents of
the coffee pot over his head but good breeding won out over her
baser instincts. "—and they never will be," she finished with a
show of defiance. "If Annie is looking to date again," she said,
barely suppressing the
God forbid
, "there are plenty of fine
available men right here in Shelter Rock Cove." Oh, how she wished
she still smoked but her doctors absolutely forbade it. Nothing
punctuated a woman's anger better than a gesture made with a
lighted cigarette.

Warren snorted his derision. "Men who still
see her as Kevin's wife." He pushed his empty plate aside and
looked straight at her. "Same as you do."

"She is Kevin's wife."

"She's Kevin's widow." He patted her hand.
"Now don't go getting all weepy on me, Claudia. Life goes on. You
don't have to like it but it goes on just the same."

She pulled her hand away from him. "I don't
like it," she snapped. "I don't like it one bit. Not every widow is
looking for a replacement husband, you fool. Annie is like me.
Kevin was the love of her life. You can't replace the love of your
life."

"I know," said Warren Bancroft softly. "I've
been trying for almost fifty years."

Chapter Eight

Sam was fetching a stick for Max the next
morning during low tide when he heard Annie's truck rattle off down
the road toward town. He fought the urge to scramble up the rocks
and try to catch a glimpse of her.

Slow down,
he warned himself as he
flung the stick for a reluctant Max.
Let her set the pace.
She was the one who had been married before. She had made the
commitment to love a man forever and even now, two years after her
husband's death, that commitment still had weight and meaning.

At first he'd blamed Marie's's ill-timed
phone call for everything but in his gut he knew that wasn't true.
Annie had been looking for an opportunity to sprint for the exit
and his sister's call had been just what she needed.

"Don't go ripping my head off because you're
in a foul mood!" Marie had snapped at him. "I don't know what's
going on up there but I think I liked you better when you were a
New Yorker."

How did a man compete with a ghost? He knew
how to compete with living, breathing men like the doctor who had
come calling yesterday morning but how the hell did you shadowbox
with a dead man. She still wore his wedding ring. Her in-laws were
part of her daily life. The entire fabric of her existence was
woven with threads created during her marriage, threads that grew
stronger with time.

What did he have to offer that could come
close to that? The real world didn't stand a chance. He had no job
and no prospects. Hell, if it weren't for Max's hyperactive
bladder, he wouldn't have a reason to get up in the morning. Sooner
or later he was going to have to figure out what came next but
right now he wouldn't even hazard a guess.

Marie's call had been filled with questions
about his apartment. She and Paul and the kids wanted to stay there
while they waited to close on their house in Massapequa. Why didn't
the super return calls? Where was the fuse box? Did he ever
consider ripping up the carpets and going with bare wood? "The
place is empty, Marie," he'd told her. "You'll be sleeping on the
floor."

Tucked in the middle of her domestic concerns
was a quick observation that, no doubt, was the real reason for her
call. "The rumors are flying down on the Street about the trouble
at Mason, Marx and Daniels. Did you hear the SEC might be called
in?" She'd paused to give him time to comment but he said nothing.
"Your timing was pretty good, big brother. I wouldn't want to be
around when the shit hits the fan either."

Marie was a reporter for
Newsday
. She
had been on the financial beat for a few years but had recently
downshifted into softer news. She was married now and had a family,
she had explained to him when she made the decision. She had to put
her husband and children first. She said it almost apologetically,
as if she didn't believe he would understand.

He had come this close to laughing. He had
been putting family first since he was nineteen years old, ahead of
his dreams, his future, and his ethics.

He was glad she was no longer on the Wall
Street beat. Marie was a good reporter and a smart woman. It
wouldn't take her long to put two and two together and come up with
a story that involved her brother. She still retained a strong
curiosity about activities on the Street but she didn't have the
time to pursue them. He could have told her about information he'd
had hidden away in the safety deposit box in Queens: the screen
shots, the contemporaneous notes, the names and dates and numbers
that didn't quite add up. The names of the people whose lives that
had been turned inside out. He could have told her about the suits
who came to call, the mailing address in Arlington, Virginia, the
cell phone that did double duty as his electronic leash. He could
have told her that unless something happened and soon, her brother
might end up taking the fall.

"What happens to the clients?" Marie had
asked him in full reportorial mode, her instinct for news guiding
her uncomfortably close to the real story. "We both know the big
guys will land on their feet but what about the people who trusted
them."

He had no answers for her. Hell, he had no
answers for himself. You did what you had to do when you needed to
do it and then hoped you'd be able to live with the results.

He didn't know if he had a week there in
Shelter Rock Cove or a month or maybe a year. For all he knew the
phone could ring tomorrow morning and he'd be on his way down to
New York to face the music.

For the last sixteen years, every move he'd
made, every decision, every dollar spent, had been evaluated with
his siblings' welfare in mind. He had made compromises in almost
every area of his life – working at a job he hated just so he
wouldn't have to ask them to do the same. Friends and neighbors had
called him a hero, applauded the fact that he hadn't taken off and
left the kids to the State to worry about. "Nobody keeps promises
anymore," Mrs. Ruggiero had said. Jesus, how he'd wanted to run.
The dreams he had about hitching a ride to JFK and boarding a plane
for anywhere, leaving the lot of them behind. A few times he'd
thought of asking Warren Bancroft for help, swallowing his pride
like bad medicine and asking for the money that would make his life
easier but each time he caught himself before he took that final
step. No, he wasn't a hero. Heroes didn't rail against fate or look
for escape hatches. Heroes did what had to be done and found a way
to like it. He loved his brothers and sisters but he'd never wanted
to be their parent and the fact that he was had changed his outlook
on life forever.

No wonder he'd never married. He'd been in
his share of relationships but, almost instinctively, he had found
himself drawn toward women whose attitudes toward him were casual
and temporary.

Until now.

There was nothing casual or temporary about
Annie or his feelings toward her. She was lovely and grave and
serious and she carried with her every bit as much baggage as he
did. She had lived an entire life before he'd come into the picture
and those experiences had made her the woman she was. A kitchen
table and four chairs might not put him in the romance hall of fame
but you wouldn't have known it by the glow on her face when she
thanked him. And what about the sofa and end tables? It wasn't a
dozen roses but hell, the woman owned a flower shop. Bringing Annie
roses was like lugging coals to Newcastle or lobster to Maine. The
gesture was well-meant but essentially meaningless. A woman without
furniture couldn't ignore a sofa. A sofa said a man meant
business.

Better think again, hotshot, because she
walked out on you last night.

He could still hear the sound of the front
door closing behind her. He'd hung up on his sister and walked back
into the living room to find her gone. His clothes were neatly
folded on the sofa and the air still smelled faintly of her perfume
but, other than that, it was as if the whole thing had never
happened. In her heart she was still married to a man named Kevin
Galloway and Sam had no remedy for that.

He took Max on a forced march along the
shoreline then headed back to the house. The tide was rolling in
and it wouldn't be long before it was lapping up against the base
of the rocky cliff that divided Mother Nature's property from
humanity's. Max was glad to call it a morning. The dog sprawled in
the middle of the kitchen floor and panted while Sam filled his
bowl with chow.

"You're a lazy one," Sam observed as Max
began to eat from a supine position. He bent down and scratched the
dog behind the right ear. "Good thing I remember you when you were
young and fearless."

He used to see Max and Max's first owner
heading off on weekend camping trips up in the Adirondack. He'd
only known Phil to say hello to on the elevator and he'd been
shocked the day the guy asked him if he knew anyone who wanted an
aging yellow Lab with bad breath and a penchant for
destruction.

"I'm getting married in September," Phil had
said, "and she hates dogs. It's find a home for him or have him put
down."

Out with the old. In with the new.

Before he knew what he was doing, Sam said,
"I'll take him," and Phil was handing over the leash, the water
bowl, and half a box of Milk Bone.

What the hell ever happened to sticking it
out for the long haul? Dogs. Girlfriends. Jobs. Families. It was
all the same. First rough patch to come along and they bailed out
faster than the first-class passengers on the
Titanic
. Annie
had said she would have been married twenty years this year.
Nothing lasted twenty years any more, sure as hell not most
marriages, and he found himself wondering again about the man she'd
married and the life she had led. It must have been a good life or
she wouldn't be holding it so close to her heart.

He still didn't know if she had kids. He
hadn't asked and she hadn't volunteered the information. It was
hard to imagine being married almost twenty years and not having
children. He had always wanted kids of his own. He found himself
hoping she had a daughter away at college somewhere, a young woman
with her smile. Or maybe a strapping son with a football
scholarship, a lovable kid who wanted the best for her.

The thought that she might be alone struck
him as too unfair to even consider. Some women were meant to be
surrounded by kids and cats and dogs and lots of loving commotion
and Annie Galloway was one of them.

Get real, Butler. You don't know a damn
thing about her. You're making this up as you go along.

He couldn't argue that but a man had to start
somewhere. He wanted to know everything there was to know about
her, the good and the bad and the painful. He wanted to see the
empty places in her life where she could make room for him.

Forty-eight hours ago he hadn't known Annie
Galloway existed. Now he couldn't imagine his world without her in
it.

She thought he was a hero. All he did was put
out that fire before it had a chance to do any real damage and now
he could do no wrong. He had seen it in her eyes when she looked at
him, something he had never seen before in a woman's eyes, and he
didn't deserve it. Max was more of a hero than he was. Ask any of
the clients he'd left behind, the ones whose futures were no longer
quite so secure. They could tell her a thing or two about the
heroic Sam Butler.

Maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that she'd
put some space between them.

He was reaching for a box of corn flakes when
the phone rang somewhere in the house. Damn cell phones. He finally
found it wedged between the sofa cushions.

"Took you long enough," Warren Bancroft said.
"Seven rings. I was about to hang up."

"Are you back in town or still down in
Boston?"

"I got back last night. I have to go back to
Boston tomorrow afternoon but it's good to be home."