Snowflakes on the Sea Read online

  Angry tears were stinging her eyes when she slid back behind the wheel of the car, and it was a moment before she dared start up the engine again and drive. Damn it, she didn’t know what she was going to say to the bimbo, but she had to see her. One look at her and she would know whether the stories were true or not. Just one look.

  I could say I’m the Avon lady, she thought five minutes later when she drew the car to a stop in the crunchy snow rutting the street in front of Renee Parker’s modest house. After drawing one deep breath, Mallory got out of the car and strode toward Renee’s front door, exuding a confidence she didn’t feel.

  There was smoke curling from a chimney in the roof of the small house, and the front door was open, the passage blocked only by a rickety screen door. Inside, a young, female voice was lustily singing along with one of Nathan’s records.

  And in that moment, inexplicably, Mallory froze. Nathan was innocent. She was about to force her rigid muscles to carry her back down the crumbling walk when the screen door opened suddenly and a pretty girl appeared on the porch. “Ray—”

  Mallory assessed Renee Parker—she looked much as she had in the newspaper picture—and mentally kicked herself. The girl was cute, and obviously pregnant, but she was too young to hope for more than passing notice from a man like Nathan. He was far more likely, if he strayed, to choose someone like Diane Vincent.

  Renee paled, then her brown eyes darkened. “Tracy Ballard!” she gasped, reaching wildly for the handle of the screen door behind her. “Mom, Tracy Ballard is out here—”

  Mallory lifted her chin. All this and a fan of the soap in the bargain. She nearly laughed. “I’m not really Tracy Ballard, Renee,” she said, with dignity. “I’m Mrs. Nathan McKendrick.”

  Renee laid one unsteady hand on her protruding stomach. “Oh.”

  “Yes. Could we talk, Renee?”

  The girl’s eyes were suddenly very round. “I’m not taking back any of the things I said!”

  Mallory advanced a step, trying to look ominous, though she hadn’t the vaguest idea what she’d do if Renee called her bluff.

  Fortunately, Renee didn’t. She leapt behind the screen door, pulled it shut and flipped the hook into place, as though fearing for her very life. “This baby belongs to your husband!” Renee cried, “and that’s the truth!”

  “We both know it isn’t, Renee,” Mallory said evenly. “Who paid you to file that lawsuit?”

  “Nobody paid me! Nathan was in love with me, he—”

  “I see. Did you know he’s planning to file a countersuit, Renee? This is slander, you know. His lawyers will make you appear in court, and it will be harder to lie there. You’d be committing perjury, and they can put you in jail for that.”

  “Jail?”

  “Jail,” Mallory confirmed, feeling profoundly sorry for the frightened girl before her. “Who put you up to this?”

  Renee shook her head. “Nobody—nobody!”

  “Very well. Then I’ll see you in court. Goodbye, Renee.”

  With that, Mallory turned regally and walked back to her car. She was starting the engine when Renee appeared at the window on the driver’s side, her face pinched and pale with fear. “C-could you wait a minute? Could we talk?”

  Mallory managed a nonchalant shrug, betraying none of the jumbled nerves that were snapping inside her like shorted electrical wires. “I thought we’d said everything.”

  “J-just wait here—just for a minute—please?”

  “I’ll wait,” Mallory promised, and when Renee had scurried back inside the small pink house, she allowed her forehead to drop to the steering wheel. Good God, what had she done? Nathan had never said anything about filing a countersuit against Renee Parker. What if Renee called Mallory’s bluff?

  Seconds later, when Mallory had composed herself again, Renee reappeared. She was holding a battered TV Guide cover in one hand, and there was a pinhole in the top, as though it had been affixed to a wall.

  Mallory took the cover and was assaulted by her own smiling face. She had forgotten that interview; even though they’d used her picture on the cover, most of the writer’s questions had been about Nathan. She looked up at Renee, truly puzzled. “What—?”

  “Would you autograph it? Would you write, ‘To Renee, from Tracy’?”

  For a moment, Mallory could not believe what she was hearing. Was it possible that this girl would ruin her life, shake the very foundations of a marriage she treasured and then blithely ask her for an autograph? “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Renee looked hurt. “I watch your show all the time—”

  Mallory drew a deep breath, then fumbled through her purse for a pen. “Tell you what, Renee. I’m going to write a phone number on the back. If you decide to tell the truth about your baby, you call me.”

  “D-did you leave Nathan?”

  Mallory lifted her chin. In the lurch, she thought. Like a fool. “I love him, Renee, and he loves me.”

  One tear glistened in the corner of Renee’s eye as Mallory handed her the worn TV Guide cover, now boasting Tracy Ballard’s signature and several phone numbers on the back. “I didn’t mean to—it was so much money—”

  Mallory’s throat ached so badly that she couldn’t speak. She could only look into this young woman’s face and hope.

  The girl bit her lower lip and stepped back. “I might call you soon, okay?”

  “Okay,” Mallory managed.

  Renee looked down at the magazine cover in her hands and beamed. “Oh, boy, just wait till I show this to my mom—”

  Mallory stopped herself from offering the girl a check that would exceed whatever she’d been paid to lie about Nathan and calmly drove away.

  When she came to the gas station, however, she pulled up beside the rest rooms, ran inside the appropriate chamber and was violently ill. Afterward, she splashed her face with the tepid water that trickled from the spigot marked Cold and returned to her car. Again, she considered paying Renee.

  She shuddered. If she did that, people would say she’d bought the girl off, and believe ever after that Nathan had indeed fathered Renee Parker’s child. Nathan.

  The name was like a plea, torn from her heart. Forgive me, she thought. Oh, forgive me—

  He’d tried to tell her, and she hadn’t listened to him—she hadn’t listened. She picked up the newspaper, still resting on the seat, and read the article again, objectively.

  And the last line quivered, jagged, in her mind like a wounding spear. Mr. McKendrick was unavailable for comment, according to his press agent, Diane Vincent.

  “Fool,” she whispered brokenly. “Oh, Mallory, you fool!”

  With that, Mrs. Nathan McKendrick started the journey back to Seattle, and self-recriminations dogged her every inch of the way. Again and again, she heard Nathan recite that last line of the article, heard him say, “Mallory, does that tell you anything?”

  She was crying when she surrendered the Mazda to a worried-looking George and rushed into the one elevator that would take her all the way to the penthouse.

  Her hands trembled as she unlocked the door and stepped into the entry hall, and she knew that Nathan wasn’t there long before she called his name and got no answer at all.

  Pacing the study in his house at Angel Cove, Nathan was drawn to the telephone again and again. Where was Mallory now? What was she thinking? Feeling?

  God knew what kind of reception she’d gotten from Renee Parker, whoever the hell she was. What if there had been some kind of ugly scene and Mallory was shaken up and driving? What if she’d been hurt? What if, even now, she was in some ditch along the road, bleeding—?

  He caught himself on one raspy swearword, and started when the telephone rang.

  “She’s back,” Pat said coolly. “I just talked to her, so why haven’t you?”

  Nathan sighed, sank into his desk chair and twisted the phone cord in his fingers. “She knows where I am,” he bit out, his relief at knowing that Mallory was all right compl
etely hidden by his tone.

  “Nathan, you ass. Will you call the woman, please?”

  “Hell, no. She wanted time—she gets time. I, as it happens, want time.”

  “For what?”

  “To think.”

  “About what?”

  “About whether or not I want to stay married to a woman who obviously has such a low opinion of my morals.”

  “It’s your brain that I hold in question. Nathan, do you love your wife or not?”

  He sighed as a savage headache gripped the nape of his neck. “You know I do.”

  “Then why don’t you act like it?”

  “Because I’m mad as hell right now, that’s why.”

  “Poor baby,” Pat crooned in an obnoxious manner that conveyed all her scorn. “Damn you, Nathan, grow up!”

  Having imparted this message, Pat hung up with a resounding crash. Nathan glared at the receiver in his hand for a moment, and then chuckled ruefully. The hell of it was, he reflected as he replaced it in its cradle, that she was right. He was sulking.

  Ten minutes later, Nathan was on board the ferry and on his way to Seattle.

  After imbibing two glasses of white wine and stalking back and forth across the penthouse living room until she thought she’d shout with frustration, Mallory fell on the telephone that waited beside Nathan’s chair and forced herself to dial his number. One ring, two, three—no one was there, not even Mrs. Jeffries.

  Tears smarted in Mallory’s eyes as she hung up and then tried the other number in desperation—the one that would ring in her own house on the other side of the island. There was no answer there either.

  Mallory ached inside. Good Lord, she thought hugging herself in her anxiety. If I don’t talk to somebody, I’ll die.

  Just then she heard a key in the lock and stiffened in sudden panic. As desperate as she’d been to reach Nathan, she didn’t know what she would say to him now. She hurried to the bar and refilled her wineglass, and when she turned around, he was there, his dark eyes piercing her. But were they accusing or pleading?

  His name caught in her throat and came out as an unrecognizable sound.

  He came to her in long strides, removed the glass from her hand and set it on the bar with an authoritative thump. “Take it from one who knows, pumpkin—that stuff won’t solve your problems.”

  “I—I saw her today—I talked to her,” Mallory faltered miserably, needing to speak rationally with this man standing so disturbingly close. “Renee, I mean.”

  Nathan raised one dark eyebrow, his expression unreadable. “Does she have two heads?”

  “Sh-she’s a child, really. Scared—”

  He was being stubbornly silent; refusing to make the conversation easier, to reach out. He stood still, his arms folded over his chest, waiting.

  Mallory lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

  “Are you?” he drawled, and there was no love in the words, no warmth. “What, exactly, transpired in Eagle River?”

  “Eagle Falls,” Mallory corrected him, still unable to meet his eyes. “Nothing much happened. She insisted the baby was yours to the end. She also hinted that someone had paid her to say so.”

  “A contradiction in terms,” Nathan observed blandly, still keeping his distance.

  Mallory made a sound that might have been a chuckle or a sob, and dashed at the tears burning her eyes with the back of one hand. “Renee is nothing if not a walking contradiction. Would you believe she asked me to autograph that old TV Guide cover? She wanted me to write, ‘To Renee, from Tracy.’”

  Nathan placed his hands gently on her shoulders, drawing her close. His lips were warm in her hair. “Did you?”

  Mallory began to tremble violently, and hysteria bubbled up into her throat and escaped in a series of racking sobs. Nathan lifted her into his arms, carried her to a chair and sat down, holding her in his lap like a shattered child. He continued to hold her until long after the sobs had subsided and the trembling had stopped.

  “We’re in a lot of trouble, you and I,” he said, at length.

  “I know,” Mallory responded, her head resting against his shoulder. And she knew he wasn’t talking about the paternity suit or Renee Parker, but about the chasm that had grown between them.

  As the sun went down, they agreed to separate.

  6

  Even though the initial stir had died down, there were a few press people posted in the lobby that evening when Nathan and Mallory set out for the island. Nathan was coldly uncommunicative; he had never, under the best of circumstances, been overly fond of reporters. But Mallory recognized a number of these people, and considered them friends. There wasn’t much she could say without betraying things that were necessarily private, but she did manage a few polite, if inane, words, and she kept her chin high and her shoulders square.

  On board the ferry, Mallory and Nathan remained in the Porsche, dealing in silence with their thoughts and feelings. Mallory’s car would be delivered in the morning.

  The silence looming between them had reached ominous levels by the time Nathan drew the luxurious, high-powered automobile to a stop in front of the house they both thought of as Mallory’s.

  Was there nothing that was not specifically his or hers, but theirs? Mallory wondered brokenly.

  Still at the wheel of his car, Nathan flexed his hands and sighed, his eyes carefully avoiding his wife’s. “I still love you,” he said, his voice so low that it was almost inaudible.

  “And I love you,” Mallory replied.

  He turned his head slightly to study her with eyes that were both wounded and angry. “Then what the hell are we doing?”

  Mallory couldn’t answer. She got out of the car, thus forcing Nathan to do so, too, and her gaze locked with his over the black vinyl expanse of the vehicle’s roof. Her throat worked painfully, and she swallowed.

  “Is it okay if I come in for a little while?” Nathan asked gruffly, again avoiding her eyes.

  Mallory nodded, despairing, and wondered why she couldn’t talk to this man, why things couldn’t be straightened out with a few rational words.

  The next half hour was a tense time, and Mallory was grateful for the mechanics of reopening the house. While Nathan started a fire in the stove, she unpacked her clothes.

  Though her back was to the door, Mallory knew immediately when Nathan entered the bedroom. She stood very still and did not turn around to face him.

  He said nothing, and the silence again seemed infinite and eternal.

  Mallory was both stricken and relieved when Nathan withdrew and busied himself in the living room. She could not bear to follow, but she knew that he was dismantling the January Christmas tree.

  Long after the unpacking was finished, Mallory ventured as far as the kitchen. She was grateful that Nathan hadn’t made coffee; it gave her something to do. All the same, an unbearable sadness clutched at her heart as she grappled with the small task.

  Beyond the window, the dwarf cherry trees looked grim without their lacy trimming of snow, and the sky was a bleak and threatening gray. Mallory was sure that she would carry a jagged and hurting piece of that sky in her heart forever.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, sipping coffee, when Nathan came in. Without a word, he set the gifts he’d given Mallory on the far end of the counter and folded his arms.

  Since even a screaming fight would be better than this blasted silence, Mallory said the first thing that came into her mind, and her voice was brittle. “Why do you suppose Diane didn’t try to head off those reporters?”

  Nathan went to the stove, poured himself a cup of coffee. “I fired Diane.”

  Mallory closed her eyes. So he did lay Renee Parker’s lawsuit at Diane’s feet. She wondered why that knowledge didn’t make her feel better. “Oh,” she said woodenly, when she wanted to scream, Don’t leave me, don’t let this happen, I love you.

  “No cries of joy?” he pressed, without apparent bitterness, but Mallory was angered
all the same.

  For a moment, she forgot her anguish, her desperate need to make peace. “What you do with your employees is your business,” she parried coldly.

  Nathan came to sit at the table across from her, his hands cupped around his coffee mug, his dark, accusing eyes fixed on Mallory’s face. “How long are we going to keep this up, Mallory?”

  Mallory looked down at her own coffee; it was half-gone and she hadn’t tasted it at all, had no conscious memory of drinking it. “How long are we going to keep what up?” she retorted.

  Nathan spat a swearword, tilted his head back, closed his eyes. “Mallory, I didn’t fire Diane for the reason you’re thinking,” he offered, in the tones of one offering sanity to a raving maniac. “I don’t need her anymore.”

  “Define ‘need,’ if you don’t mind,” Mallory ventured, aware of the caustic note in her voice but unable to alter it.

  The dark eyes were suddenly riveted to her face, hurting where they touched. “Damn it, talking to you is like sparring with a shadow! And kindly stop trying to switch this conversation off into all my imagined transgressions!”

  Mallory sat back in her chair, folded her arms stubbornly across her chest and waited.

  Nathan gave an irritated sigh and shook his head. “I’m trying to tell you that I don’t need Diane because I don’t need a press agent. I’m retiring, Mallory.”

  Nothing he could have said would have startled her more. Mallory’s coffee spilled onto the tablecloth as she put it down with a jolt. “Retiring?” she choked. “Nathan, why didn’t you tell me?”

  He scowled, his gaze fierce, challenging. “If you hadn’t rushed out of here in a huff, I would have. And then at the penthouse, if you’ll remember, we weren’t into heavy discussions.”

  Mallory remembered all right, and she yearned for that stolen, glorious time. Perhaps, even if their marriage somehow survived this agreed separation, they would never soar like that again, never share souls and bodies quite so fully. She was mourning when she spoke again. “Aren’t you a little young to retire?”

  “Why shouldn’t I retire?” he shot back sharply. “Do we need the money?”

  Mallory might have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so serious. Nathan had been wealthy long before their marriage, and money had never been an issue. “What do you intend to do with your time?” she hedged.