Guilt by Association (24 page)

It was eerie, she thought as she left Post Street for the interior of Gump’s Department Store, but in some ways the fic
tional characters that now kept her company had become more compelling than many of the real people she knew.

Except for the girl in the red coat, that is—the one who had been following her all afternoon. She was certainly compelling enough. Elizabeth glanced over her shoulder, and like the proverbial itch she couldn’t scratch, the girl was still there.

Gump’s of San Francisco was a store unlike any other on earth. A playground for the rich, it boasted an eclectic collection of trinkets from every corner of the world and came within an inch of being a museum—a museum where the entire collection just happened to be for sale. Elizabeth often thought how much fun it would be to work for a while as a Gump’s buyer.

She had nothing particular in mind to purchase on this day, but she walked purposefully to the stairs and started up. It was the red coat that finally got to her. Not so much that it was ridiculously out of season as that it was a color she dearly loved but could never wear because of her hair.

The furniture galleries on the third floor were not usually very busy, but there must have been a sale in progress this day.
Elizabeth passed quickly through room after room until she finally found one, featuring an elegant dining suite, that was out of the way and empty. Then she stopped and whirled around, catching the girl completely off-guard.

“If there’s something you want to say to me, please go ahead and say it,” she suggested kindly enough. “We’re alone here.”

“You’re his wife, aren’t you?” the girl said, after taking a moment to recover her composure.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said, you’re Bobby’s wife.”

Elizabeth winced. She detested the nickname that Amanda had bestowed upon her son during his infancy, and she had always refused to use it herself. How disconcerting it was now to hear it come rolling off the tongue of this unlikely stranger.

“If you mean Robert Willmont,” she said, “yes, I’m his wife.”

“I know,” the girl confirmed. “I’ve seen your picture in the
paper lots of times, and Bobby would kill me if he knew but sometimes I take myself up to Pacific Heights and watch you coming and going.”

Up close, it was clear that the girl was younger than Elizabeth had first thought, probably not even out of her teens, and if it weren’t for the blotches and the unkempt hair, she would have been quite pretty.

“You called my husband Bobby,” she said. “Does that mean you know him well?”

The girl snorted. “You could say that. Three or four nights a week for almost eight months now.”

Elizabeth felt as though someone had punched her in the stomach.

“Why would you say a thing like that?” she asked with difficulty.

“Because it’s true,” the girl declared.

What Elizabeth wanted was to spit in the girl’s face, scratch her eyes out, scream obscenities at her. Only, of course, she couldn’t do any of those things.

“What do you want?” she asked rigidly.

“I want you to let him go.”

Try as she might, Elizabeth was unable to conceal her dismay. “Are you talking about divorce?”

The girl nodded eagerly.

“But that’s absurd.”

“Why?” the girl demanded. “What’s the point of holding on, now that you know?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything,” Elizabeth corrected her.

The girl sighed. “Bobby said you wouldn’t understand. He said you’d fight the divorce. He said you don’t care anything about his happiness, you just married him because he’s a Drayton. I know you don’t sleep in the same room together anymore, and you can’t even give him children.”

It was like a knife thrust into Elizabeth’s heart.

“My husband told you all that?”

“Sure,” the girl replied easily. “Bobby tells me everything.
Sometimes, that’s all we do—just talk, for hours and hours. You see, we love each other.”

“He said that?” Elizabeth murmured.

“I know he wanted to tell you himself,” the girl assured her, “but sometimes men are so slow about things. So I thought if I explained it to you—you know, woman to woman, then you’d see that we were really sincere and that it wasn’t just some casual fling. Please, you’ll let him go now, won’t you— now that you see how it is? We’re just meant to be together. I may not be so smart or so beautiful as you, but I guess I know how to make him happy better than you, and I can give him all the children he wants.”

With that, the girl opened her coat to reveal a swollen belly.

The knife twisted agonizingly. “Are you saying that’s my husband’s child?”

“Well, of course,” the girl said. “What’d you think?”

But Elizabeth didn’t know what to think. Of all the demons that had populated her worst nightmares, the demon of duplicity had never been among them. Was it possible that for these three and a half years she had been married to a man she didn’t even know?

She looked back on all those evenings she had sat alone, waiting for Robert to come home from work. She remembered how sweet and sympathetic he had been after the miscarriages. She considered how much their Saturday nights and Sunday mornings meant to her. She thought about all their plans for the future. None of it made sense. She wondered if someone were playing a very cruel joke on her, but she couldn’t imagine that anyone would hate her that much.

“Did my husband send you to speak to me?”

“Gosh, no!” the girl exclaimed. “Jeepers, he’d split my lip or worse if he knew I was here.” Seeing Elizabeth’s startled look,
she shrugged. “He did that once, when I made him mad. Sometimes, he hits me around when he’s had too much to drink. Some men are like that, I guess, but I don’t care, because he always comes back. I don’t have anyone else.”

Elizabeth stared at the girl, overwhelmed with elation, be
cause she now knew for certain that this was nothing but a horrible mistake.

“Now I know there’s been a misunderstanding.” She breathed in relief. “You see, my husband doesn’t drink at all the way you describe. More important than that, he’s a gentleman. He would never lay a hand on a woman. So it’s obvious you must be talking about someone else.”

The girl reached up and pushed the hair back off her face, revealing a jagged scar down her cheek.

“It took eleven stitches,” she said, “because he hit me with the back of his right hand, the one he wears that big Harvard ring on.”

The elation, all too fragile, collapsed like a balloon. Elizabeth felt her knees beginning to buckle and then the room started to spin, and she reached out and grabbed hold of the back of a chair to steady herself.

She tried to think what she could possibly say next, but everything was so jumbled up in her brain that the only thing that came to mind was the hope that this whole confrontation wasn’t real, after all, just a horrible scene from one of her television shows, and Marcus Welby was waiting in the wings with a miraculous cure.

Archer Avery had never taken a serious look at anyone other than Elizabeth’s vivacious French mother in their entire thirty years together, and it was that kind of loyalty and devotion that Elizabeth had been raised to expect from her own marriage,
which now made Robert’s betrayal just that much harder to bear.

She wanted to hate the girl as she stood there, blooming with life. She wanted to make her the villain of the piece and blame her for everything. But for some reason, Elizabeth found herself feeling sorry for her instead. Perhaps it was because the girl was so young and vulnerable and because, sooner or later, Elizabeth realized dully, Robert was going to betray her, too.

“I hope you have a healthy baby,” she said in a toneless voice, and then she turned and walked away.

The girl stood stock-still, confusion and uncertainty written
all over her face. She knew the interview was over, but she had not gotten what she had come for and time was running short.

Over the past eight months, Bobby had painted a very vivid picture of his wife, describing her as aloof and unemotional and far more interested in embellishing her wardrobe than in pleasing her husband. He claimed that she had lost all interest in sex once the doctors told her she couldn’t get pregnant, and that she even went so far as to turn him out of her bedroom without a second thought. He confessed that it was her continuing coldness that forced him, in desperation, to look elsewhere for fulfillment.

But the woman who had faced her here today had been anything but cold. In fact, although the girl had prepared herself for icy indifference and brittle rejection, Elizabeth Willmont, had, under the circumstances, been kind and even compassionate.
Still, Bobby insisted that the marriage was a sham, and the only thing the girl cared about was making sure that her baby had a name and a father. After all, however he had been conceived, this child was a Drayton and deserving of his birthright.

She wrapped her coat tightly about her and made her way out of Gump’s. If she hurried, she would get home in time to have dinner on the table when Bobby arrived. That and a bottle of wine would put him in a good mood, and one of her special back rubs would make him amorous, and she would do that thing she knew he liked best.

Then they would talk.

E
lizabeth scrambled out of the taxi that brought her home to Jackson Street and hurried inside. She brushed past reston, the butler, who was waiting with her mail and her messages, and went directly upstairs to her room, avoiding Amanda, declining dinner, refusing to take telephone calls.

She couldn’t bear the thought of having to speak to anyone, and she couldn’t wait to get her clothes off. Her fingers clawed at the buttons and yanked at the zippers and ripped at the hooks in her haste. Her teeth were chattering, she was shivering all over and she felt so horribly dirty and defiled. But when her clothes lay in tatters at her feet, she realized that simply undressing wasn’t enough, so she ran a hot bath and scrubbed at herself with a stiff brush until her skin was as red as her hair.

Then she put on a fresh nightgown and crawled into bed, pulling the crisp clean sheets right up to her chin—sheets that Robert hadn’t yet had a chance to sully. The steaming bath had soothed her only momentarily. As reality slowly crowded in, the shivering resumed, her head began to throb, and it became increasingly painful for her to breathe. She felt like crying but her eyes remained dry.

Outside her windows, daylight was fading. Elizabeth lay in
the half-dark and listened to the sounds of the house. A closing door, a creaking floorboard, a muffled voice—proof of life going on around her. She had never really cared much for this house of her husband’s, but now she found a peculiar comfort in its endurance.

Sometime around eight o’clock, she rang for a pot of tea and some aspirin and waved aside the concerned inquiries of the maid who brought up the tray. She quickly washed down two of the aspirin with the hot liquid and then, on second thought, another two. But she knew she would need something much stronger than Bayer to get her through this crisis.

Despite her cosseted upbringing, Archer and Denise Avery’s daughter was a realist. She understood that there were things to be done and decisions to be made, but not tonight, not when her emotions were so hopelessly muddled. Tomorrow would be time enough to sort it all out. Elizabeth shut her eyes and prayed for the numbing, healing, dreamless sleep that could always make intolerable burdens seem lighter in the morning.

It was not quite ten o’clock when she heard Robert come in. It was the earliest he had arrived home on a Tuesday night in six months. He slammed the front door and barked something at one of the servants, and then he was charging up the stairs and down the hallway.

Elizabeth sighed deeply and reached over to snap on her bedside lamp. She had hoped that he would spend the entire evening out so she would not have to face him so soon. But in a matter of seconds he would be at her door and that meant she had to decide right now how she was going to treat his treachery.

She examined her options. While it would certainly be cathartic to lash out with the full force of her outrage, it might perhaps be more prudent to hide the hurt and preserve what was left of her dignity. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how devastated she was, but neither did she wish to leave him with even the slightest impression that she condoned any part of his behavior. Above all, she had to steel herself against any attempt he might make to sweet-talk
her into forgiveness. She was still weighing her options when he entered the bedroom.

“Preston said you weren’t feeling well,” he said with genuine concern in his voice.

The shivers had subsided beneath the covers and the aspirin had eased the throbbing, but the pain inside was as sharp as ever.

“It’s just a headache,” she answered.

He came close and bent down to kiss her, but at the last moment she turned to plump her pillow and his lips brushed her ear.
His hair was mussed, his face was flushed, and his clothes were all askew as though they had been put on in a hurry. A spot of red wine marred the front of his shirt. Elizabeth felt her stomach grind.

“Is there something I can do for you?” he asked. “Rub your head, perhaps?”

Elizabeth could think of a number of succinct responses to that particular question, but none of them were appropriate for a young lady of her upbringing.

“No, there’s nothing you can do,” she replied in a flat voice. “Nothing at all.”

Robert shifted from one foot to the other. Despite her anguish, Elizabeth had to suppress a smile. She could not recall ever having seen him quite so ill at ease before, and she took a perverse pleasure in that.

“Okay, I think I know what this is about,” he said with a harsh chuckle, realizing this was not a matter that she was going to shrug off. “But believe me, the whole thing is utter nonsense.”

“There’s a spot of wine on your shirt.”

Robert glanced hastily down at his front. “I didn’t notice,” he said. “It must have happened at lunch.”

“No,” she reminded him. “We didn’t have red wine with lunch.”