Keeping Company (2 page)

University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana Spring 1977

“Okay, everybody, this is it. The final portrait of the Fearsome Foursome. Make sure your caps are on straight, ladies. I’m setting the timer now.” Bryan Hennessy hunched over the 35-millimeter camera, fussing with buttons and switches, pausing once to push his glasses up on his straight nose.

Alaina Montgomery took a deep breath and slowly released it, trying to will the tension from her body. It would be hours before she would have to confront her mother—and stepfather number
three, Bernie, the wheezing orthodontist. This moment was for her friends.

Decked out in graduation caps and gowns, they stood on the damp grass near the blue expanse of St. Mary’s Lake. The clean, cool air was sweet with the scents of spring flowers, new leaves, and freshly cut grass. Birdsong mingled with Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” blasting from a boom box in a distant dorm.

To her left stood Faith Kincaid, their very own Pollyanna—blond, innocent, and diplomatic. At the other end of the line stood petite Jayne Jordan, all wide eyes and wild auburn hair—their resident flake. Bryan hustled around to stand behind them, his cap askew. He was tall and athletic with a handsome, honest face and shaggy tawny hair. He was sweet and eccentric—their surrogate big brother, their confidant.

These were Alaina’s three best friends in the world. In many respects they were her family, the only people she had ever allowed to get closer than an emotional arm’s length away from her.

They had banded together their freshman year. Four people with nothing in common but a class
in medieval sociology. Over the four years that followed they had seen each other through finals and failures, triumphs and tragedies, and doomed romances. They were friends in the truest, deepest sense of the word.

And today they would graduate and go their separate ways.

The hollow feeling that thought brought on scared the hell out of Alaina, and she frowned at the weakness as she reached up to check the state of her sensibly short chestnut hair.

“Okay, everybody smile,” Bryan ordered, his voice a little huskier than usual. “It’s going to go off any second now. Any second.”

They all grinned engagingly and held their collective breaths.

The camera suddenly tilted downward on its tripod, pointing its lens at one of the white geese that wandered freely around St. Mary’s Lake. The shutter clicked, and the motor advanced the film. The goose honked an outraged protest and waddled away.

“I hope that’s not an omen,” Jayne said, frowning as she nibbled at her thumbnail.

“It’s a loose screw,” Bryan announced, digging a dime out of his pants pocket to repair the tripod with.

“In Jayne or the camera?” Alaina queried, her cool blue eyes sparkling with teasing mischief.

Jayne made a face. “Very funny, Alaina.”

“I think it’s a sign that Bryan needs a new tripod,” said Faith.

“That’s not what Jessica Porter says,” Alaina remarked slyly.

The girls giggled as Bryan’s blush crept up to the roots of his hair. While there had never been any romantic developments within their ranks, outside of his unusual friendship with the three of them, Alaina knew Bryan had an active social life. She was going to miss teasing him about it.

“If you want a sign, look behind you,” Bryan said as he fussed unnecessarily with the aperture setting on the camera.

They turned together and immediately caught sight of the rainbow that arched gracefully across the morning sky above the golden dome of the administration building.

“Oh, how beautiful,” Faith said with a sigh.

“Symbolic,” Jayne whispered.

“It’s the diffusion of light through raindrops,” Alaina said flatly, crossing her arms in front of her. She had always been the practical anchor of the group. It was a role she had no intention of giving up. She proudly vowed there wasn’t a romantic bone in her body.

Bryan looked up from fiddling with the camera to frown at her, his strong jaw jutting forward aggressively. “Rainbows have lots of magic in them,” he said, dead serious. “Ask any leprechaun. It’d do you some good to believe in magic, Alaina.”

Alaina’s lush mouth turned down at the corners. It wasn’t the first time they’d had this argument, but it was probably going to be the last. A sharp pang reverberated throughout the hollowness inside her chest. She swallowed hard. “Take the picture, Hennessy.”

Bryan ignored her, his wise, warm blue eyes taking on a dreamy quality as he gazed up at the soft stripes of color. “We’ll each be chasing our own rainbows after today. I wonder where they’ll lead us.”

They each recited the stock answers they’d
been giving faculty, friends, and family for months. Jayne was leaving to seek fame and fortune in Hollywood as a writer and director. Bryan had been accepted into the graduate program of parapsychology at Purdue. Faith was headed to a managerial position in a business office in Cincinnati. Alaina was staying on at Notre Dame to attend law school.

“That’s where our brains are taking us,” Bryan said, pulling his cap off to comb a hand back through his hair as he always did when he went into one of his “deep thinking modes.” “I wonder where our hearts will take us.”

If anyone knew the answer to that, it was Bryan, Alaina thought. He was the one they told all their secrets to. He was the only person on earth who knew her deepest wish was for security—not just financial security, but emotional security. And he was the only one who knew just how afraid she was to pursue that dream. Hell, she seldom admitted it to herself. Jayne and Faith would probably have been stunned to know strong, self-sufficient Alaina was afraid of anything, but Bryan’s reaction had been understanding. More
than once she had wished he really was her brother, that she could have had his support while she’d been growing up in a house devoid of emotion.

“That’s the question we should all be asking ourselves.” Jayne wagged a slender finger at her friends. “Are we in pursuit of our true bliss, or are we merely following a course charted by the expectations of others?”

“Do we have to get philosophical?” Alaina groaned, rubbing two fingers on each throbbing temple. “I haven’t had my mandatory ten cups of coffee yet this morning.”

“Life is philosophy, honey,” Jayne explained patiently, her voice a slow Kentucky drawl that hadn’t altered one iota during the four years she’d spent in northern Indiana. The expression on her delicately sculpted features was almost comically earnest. “That’s a cosmic reality.”

Alaina blinked. Jayne was her opposite in nearly every way. It was amazing they had become such close friends. Finally Alaina said, “We don’t have to worry about you. You’ll fit right in in California.”

Jayne smiled. “Why, thank you.”

Faith chuckled. “Give up, Alaina. You can’t win.”

Alaina winced and held her hands up as if to ward off the words. “Don’t say that. I
abhor
losing.”

“Anastasia,” Bryan declared loudly. He gave a decisive nod that set the tassel on his cap dancing. The statement would have seemed straight out of left field to anyone who didn’t know Bryan Hennessy and the workings of his unconventional mind.

Anastasia was the small town on California’s rugged northern coast where the four of them had spent spring break. Alaina’s lips tilted in a rueful smile at the memory of the fantasy plans they had made to move there and pursue idealistic existences. Jayne’s dream had been to have her own farm. Bryan had wanted to play the role of local mad scientist. An inn with a view of the ocean had been Faith’s wish. They had somehow gotten Alaina to admit to a secret desire to paint.

“That’s right,” Faith said with a misty smile. “We’d all move to Anastasia.”

“And live happily ever after.” Alaina’s tone lacked the sarcasm she had intended. She sounded wistful instead.

“Even if we never end up there, it’s a nice dream,” Jayne said softly.

A nice dream. Something to hang on to, like their memories of Notre Dame and each other. Warm, golden images they could hold in a secret place in their hearts to be taken out from time to time when they were feeling lonely or blue.

The hollowness seemed to grow within Alaina at the thought, and she had to blink back the embarrassing beginnings of tears. She
wasn’t
nostalgic, and she
wouldn’t
cry.

Bryan set the timer on the camera once again and jogged around to stand behind Faith. “Who knows? Life is full of crossroads. You can never tell where a path might lead to.”

And the camera buzzed and clicked, capturing the Fearsome Foursome—wishful smiles canting their mouths, dreams of the future and tears of parting shining in their eyes as a rainbow arched in the sky behind them—on film for all time.

It was a dark and stormy night.

Only Jayne Jordan had a flair for the dramatic so strong that she could somehow manage to get Mother Nature to cooperate with her party plans, Alaina thought. She stared through the windshield of her BMW at the clouds scudding across the face of the full moon. It seemed a perfect night for a science fiction theme party.

Not that Alaina knew the first thing about science fiction. She couldn’t think of the last time she’d read something that wasn’t written in legalese. Of course, she wouldn’t have read science fiction if she’d been stranded on a desert island
with nothing but a carton of those novels. She was far too sensible for that sort of thing.

She piloted her car down the road that snaked along the coastal cliffs north of Anastasia, California. If it weren’t for the fact that she was absolutely practical and levelheaded, she might have been feeling a little nervous. She was alone on a dark stretch of road, dressed up in a ridiculous costume on her way to a theme party. If this were a movie, she thought, now would be the time for the car to break down.

“Don’t be silly, Alaina,” she muttered as her elegant, meticulously manicured hands unconsciously clenched the leather-padded steering wheel.

She was never silly. Maybe once—okay, twice—in her entire life had she been silly. The first time had involved earthworms and she had been only five years old. The second time had been recently, and as the handsome face of A. Clayton Collier flashed through her memory, Alaina gritted her even white teeth and resolutely shoved the incident from her mind.

She wasn’t going to be silly now. She was going
to go to Jayne’s party and put in her required appearance because Jayne was a dear friend despite the fact that she had sent Alaina this absurd costume and insisted she wear it. Occasionally one had to humor Jayne Jordan’s sense of whimsy or be nagged about it for the rest of one’s life. Since they were now living in the same area, it seemed only prudent to indulge her. But if any potential clients saw her in this getup …

Not much chance of that, she decided. The majority of Jayne’s friends were not likely to seek legal counsel. They were more apt to consult psychics and palmists.

She would put in her appearance, stay the minimum time that could be considered socially acceptable, and drive back into Anastasia to her new home—a renovated Victorian duplex that sat on a hill with a lovely view of the marina. She would put a Mozart disc in the CD player, pour herself a glass of Chivas Regal, and maybe work a little on the painting she had begun that morning. It would be a very relaxing evening.

That had been the whole idea behind her move from Chicago to California five months before.
To get away from the whirlwind pace she had maintained at the prestigious law offices of Abercrombie, Turtletaub, and Flinch, to regain some perspective on what she really wanted in life, to forget—

The thought slammed into the granite wall of her will before it could completely form. A. Clayton Collier had done a really crummy thing, stringing her along, letting her believe his divorce was all but finalized when he hadn’t so much as broached the topic with his wife. But that didn’t mean she had to think about it. No. The incident meant less than nothing to her. Clayton had been a dalliance, a fling. What he’d done hadn’t broken her heart. Absolutely not, Alaina vowed, ignoring the wrenching ache in her chest.

She was a sophisticated woman, a career woman, a woman of the nineties. She cherished her freedom. She didn’t have a care in the world.

The words had no sooner crossed her mind than her car abruptly died. Alaina pumped the accelerator furiously, but the BMW only slowed until she was forced to steer it off the road onto a graveled scenic-overlook area. The car rolled to a
halt, and Alaina sat in the gloom, staring in stunned disbelief at the lighted instrument panel, feeling utterly betrayed.

This was one of the finest cars money could buy. It had every option, every luxury, everything including the love and adoration of its owner. And it had just stranded her in the middle of bloody nowhere.

“Lovely,” Alaina grumbled. “Just lovely.”

Sitting back against the plush leather seat, she took a deep breath and released it slowly, schooling her temper. This sort of thing required a cool head. She would simply have to walk back to Anastasia and call a tow truck.