Sealed with a promise (33 page)

  “How did you fake your IQ?” Emmie’s question came out of the dark. He’d been close to drifting off.

  “Do you get chatty after sex?”

  There was a short pause while she adjusted her pillow.

  “You know, I think I do,” she said in a tone of discovery. “Answer the question.”

  “It’s easy to fake it down. It’s hard to be smarter than you are, but easy to be dumber. And you know, most people find it easier to believe you’re dumber than you look.”

  “That’s not what I meant. The Stanford-Binet scores aren’t supposed to vary more than one standard devia-tion-that’s just fifteen points, right? So here you are with scores all over the map. Didn’t someone smell a rat?”

  “Well, now, that was a problem. A Navy psychologist actually wrote a paper on the effects of intellectual stimulation in late adolescence on the IQ score of an enlisted man.”

  “Meaning he thought joining the Navy made you smarter?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Emmie snorted. “You country-slicker, you. He bought the backwoods hick act.”

  “What can I say? When I could see for myself that the world was round, it changed the way I looked at everything.”

  They had dinner with the Calhouns on Thursday night. A woman identifying herself as Mrs. Calhoun’s secretary had called on Monday to issue the promised invitations.

  Calhoun himself answered the door in corduroy slacks, striped dress shirt, and maroon cardigan sweater. He smelled of tobacco and bourbon.

  “Glad you could come. As I told Charlotte, we are in your debt. A dinner is the least we can do, and I hope if there’s anything else, you will tell us.”

  With only a few lights on, the entry hall seemed even larger than it had on Saturday. Two huge Christmas trees, one at each end, provided the only lights in the huge reception parlor. The effect was dramatic and professionally designed, and to Emmie’s eyes, a little sad.

  “You’re here!” Vicky came pelting down the staircase, her hair drawn up in a ponytail that bobbed and bounced with each step. She wore green jeans and a sweater embroidered with snowmen.

  “Vicky, as you can see,” Calhoun commented tongue in cheek, “has deigned to join us.”

  Calhoun ushered them into the smaller parlor on the other side of the house. Smaller was a relative term, and this room was just as formal as the other. Twin camel-back sofas upholstered in yellow silk flanked a marble fireplace where Charlotte stood conversing with guests who had arrived before them.

  All three turned to face them. “How wonderful you could come.” Charlotte extended her hand to Emmie and Caleb. “Emmie, I’m sure I don’t need to introduce you to these guests. Chief Dulaude, this is Dr. Blount Satterfield and Dr. Sally Armitage.”

  Emmie tried to keep an alert expression while Blount, Sally, and Charlotte discussed the politics within the state university system. Charlotte had graduated magna cum laude and now sat on the board of regents of the university in an appointed, non-voting capacity, but she made it clear she took her position seriously and worked hard at it.

  Everyone, including Emmie, had assumed she would wish to participate in their discussion, since she had the most in common with them. As she listened she made an important discovery. She didn’t lack the ability to handle herself with them. She just didn’t care. She tried to think of a way she could join Vicky and Caleb in a corner. After Vicky had been shushed a couple times, and her mother had apologized twice for allowing her to join the adults, Caleb had drawn Vicky away. Now she listened enrapt as he told her a story that involved a lot of hand motions.

  Emmie might even have liked to talk to Uncle Teague, and since he had known her mother as a girl, ask him questions about her and her grandmother. Since the advent of email, Vicky kept in daily or nearly daily contact with her parents, but of the people here in Wilmington, Calhoun probably knew the most about her family’s past. Edward Fairchild had drawn him out of the room halfway through the meal, saying there was a call he had to take. He hadn’t returned, although Emmie had seen Fairchild pass by in the hall several times.

  “Charlotte, “ she said, “I was wondering if might use your powder room?”

  “Emmie, what are you doing with a man like that?” Edward Fairchild’s voice was pitched low. Fairchild had accosted her in the hall as she returned from the powder room. She had seen him twice that evening although he hadn’t joined them at dinner. Charlotte had explained that Fairchild had an office on the ground floor and that he “kept his own hours.” Apparently, that meant that he had the run of the house. She had the feeling he had been lying in wait for her, determined to talk to her out of the others’ hearing. “Emmie, do you know what he
is?
”

  Emmie paused to think over the question carefully, knowing there might be subtle power plays at work here. At the university she was used to the lecturer’s trick of rhetorical questions, set up to reveal personal brilliance or prove the listener stupid. In this case, she suspected the latter. “A SEAL?”

  “Don’t you know about SEALs?” he demanded. “They’re trained killers-assassins.”

  “Are you under the impression that anyone in the armed forces
isn’t
trained to kill?”

  “That’s not my point.”

  “Oh.”

  Fairchild blinked at the deliberately dropped conversational ball, but quickly recovered. “My point is that you can’t trust him.”

  “Trust him to what?”

  Fairchild waved that away. “Emmie, I’m trying to warn you. Your grandmother was a dear friend. I’m trying to give you the same advice she would have: stay away from him. If you know what’s good for you, stay away from him.”

  “I can’t tell whether you are warning me or threatening me.”

  “My dear- ” Fairchild shook his head sadly. “I’m
warning
you, of course. But being seen with a SEAL won’t improve your standing in the academic community.”

  Emmie studied the senator’s advisor. He was no more than an inch or two taller than she, and wearing heels, Emmie could look straight into his pale blue, but still sharp eyes. He kept claiming a need to look after her based on deep friendship with her grandmother. She couldn’t remember her grandmother speaking as fondly about Fairchild. Emmie wished she had paid more attention to who was who in her grandmother’s activities. All she knew was he’d never tried to counsel her before.

  “You’re smart, Emmie. Your research credentials are noteworthy, and you have the right connections. You can choose where you want to go in the university system. All I’m saying is don’t shoot yourself in the foot by allying yourself with someone who will be a liability.”

  Emmie’s jaw tightened. She might have no gift for politics, but she knew she’d just been told if she went along, she could write her own ticket. If she didn’t, her career was likely to stall. Charlotte and Teague had the clout to accomplish all Fairchild promised with no more than a word dropped here or there. Most universities had far fewer tenured positions than they used to. Just like big business, they had figured out that hiring short-term contract employees who didn’t have to be given benefits, who weren’t earning seniority, and who didn’t even have to be fired-they simply weren’t renewed the next quarter-saved a lot of money. Tenure-track positions, such as Emmie’s, were halfway between no job security at all and the holy grail of tenure. The competition for them was fierce.

  Once in line for a tenured position, the competition turned fiercer. No matter what anyone said about rigorous scholarship, the name of the game was money. Who could bring the most money into the department by obtaining grants for research. And who had powerful connections with the legislature and policymakers.

  This was heavy, and cutting Caleb out must be vitally important to someone.

  There was the implication that Fairchild was carrying out someone’s directions, but he might be acting on his own. He obviously had a lot of autonomy in the Calhoun household and the Calhoun organization. She couldn’t believe Calhoun and Charlotte would invite her and Caleb to dinner and then sic Fairchild on her to do a hatchet job-but it was the sort of backstabbing she had seen before.

  It was a situation she hated and had avoided as much as possible. She had no idea what to say next. She was almost relieved when Blount, stylishly professorial in a chocolate leather sport coat and turtleneck, came into the hall. “Emmie,” he squeezed her shoulder in a one-armed hug, while extending his right hand to Fairchild. “Good evening, sir. I’m Blount Satterfield. Emmie and I are colleagues.”

  Cripes, this evening had gotten strange all of a sudden. Blount was touching her in public and acting like they were the best of friends and maybe more. She laughed out loud when she got it. Emmie removed his hand from her arm. “Blount, if you’re hoping to make points with Mr. Fairchild by claiming close association with me, your timing couldn’t possibly be worse. He thinks I have poor taste in the company I keep.”

  Emmie turned on her side so she could run her hand across Caleb’s bare chest. “You know what I liked best about tonight?”

  Caleb captured her hand and twined his fingers with hers. He smiled out of the corner of his eyes. “Chatty, are we?”

  “You know how I get.” “Okay, what did you like best about tonight?” “Watching you with Vicky. You’re so good with her.” “I like kids. As much as I can I volunteer with SEAL Pups. The children of SEALs don’t spend a lot of time with their fathers. Other SEALs try to be a male presence in their lives.”

  “And you know what else? I thought I could see a family resemblance between you. It’s funny, neither of you looks like Teague.”

  “Do you do that to turn me on?” Emmie asked, not looking up from the ecology text she was halfway through.

  Caleb
did
look up from his book. Except for reading, the only thing he had been
doing
was lying beside Emmie in bed, oh, and he had his hand on her shoulder.

  Most people had an agenda when they asked a question. They were trying to plan their next move or they needed you to agree to something. Not Emmie. Emmie asked because she wanted to know. As near as he could tell, she liked to know everything, but particularly how this bit connected to that bit. Probably what led her into a study of ecology.

  The fact that she didn’t have an agenda-she simply liked to acquire information-shouldn’t blind him to the fact that she looked for connections all the time, and she might have asked the question because she saw a possible connection. Remembering this salient detail was the only way it was possible to keep up with her.

  He drew a circle on her satiny skin with his finger. “I do it because I like to. He closed his book and set it in the small bookrack on the nightstand. These days there was a matching bookrack on Emmie’s side of the bed too. “
Does
it turn you on?”

  “Yes.”

  He stroked the top of her arm over the feminine swell of the deltoid. “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” He slid down the bed to get a better angle on her mouth. Just before his lips closed on hers he thought he detected a cream-pot glimmer. No agenda, hell!

  She’d been running an experiment. He’d been had!

  There is nothing more contagious than chuckles when you’re in contact with the diaphragm of the person chuckling.

  “Emmie, this is Charlotte Calhoun.” Charlotte had a voice like the center of a Three Musketeers bar. It was sweet, soft, soothing, just substantial enough to say you could always depend upon her, but need never fear she would be difficult. Like a Three Musketeers it was always exactly the same. Emmie had been dragged to Charlotte’s wedding by her grandmother. Charlotte and Teague had attended her grandmother’s funeral, where Teague had delivered the eulogy. Nevertheless, until this morning, Charlotte had never called Emmie. “How are you this morning?”

  “I’m fine, thank you. How are you?”

  “Fine, thank you. I hope you’ll forgive me for calling so early. I called because I was hoping you’d know how to contact Chief Dulaude.”

  Emmie chuckled inwardly and filed the exquisitely tactful phrasing of Charlotte’s request for future study. Now that she had accepted that she shaded the truth from time to time, she had decided she should become more skilled at it. Nothing about her choice of words suggested Charlotte had called her because she figured Caleb had spent the night at Emmie’s house. In her bed.

  “He’s not here right now, Charlotte, but I am expecting him.” Emmie was rather proud of her answer. She wasn’t in Charlotte’s class, but she was making progress. Both statements were true. He had kissed her thirty minutes ago before his morning run and promised to return. Neither sentence admitted he
had
spent the night. In her bed. “Can I give him a message?” Emmie reached for a pencil to jot down a telephone number.

  Charlotte hesitated. Emmie could hear a man talking in the background. “I need… I need to talk to him. Will he be there soon?”

  Emmie took back everything she had thought about Charlotte’s perfectly controlled voice. Charlotte was just barely hanging on.

  “Probably not too long, maybe half an hour. Is something wrong, Charlotte? Can I help?”

  “I’m at the doctor’s office with Vicky. He wants her to go to the hospital to run some tests, but she’s… she’s hysterical. She knows ‘tests’ mean more blood draws.” Again, Emmie thought she heard a man’s voice. Though Emmie couldn’t make out what he said, Charlotte apparently answered whoever it was. “She’s
not
a spoiled child! She tries to be brave, but she’s so scared of needles. She’s had four blood draws in the last two weeks, and it’s horrible for her. Every time is worse than the last.”

  Not sure if Charlotte had been speaking to her, Emmie made a sympathetic sound. “I’m so sorry. Does the doctor suspect something serious? Silly question. Of course, he does. What can I do?”