Wild About Harry Read online

  Amy was feeling sillier by the moment. "It's so dumb."

  "Right. So tell me anyway."

  "He said I was going to meet—this friend of his— Harry somebody. Who names people Harry in this day and age? I'm supposed to fall in love with this guy, marry him and have two kids."

  "Before nightfall?" Debbie retorted, without missing a beat.

  "Practically. Ty implied that I've been holding up some celestial plan by keeping to myself so much!"

  Debbie sighed. "This is one that could be worked out in a fifteen-minute segment of the Donahue show, Ryan. You're a healthy young woman, and you haven't been with a man since Ty, and you're lonely, physically and emotionally. If you want to talk this out with somebody, I could give you a name—"

  Amy was already shaking her head. "No," she interrupted, "that's all right. I feel foolish enough discussing this with my dearest friend. I don't think I'm up to stretching out on a couch and telling all to some strange doctor."

  "Still—"

  "I'll be all right, Deb," Amy broke in again, this time a little impatiently. She didn't know what she'd wanted her friend to say when she told her about Tyler's "visit," but she felt let down. She hung up quickly and then dashed off to her first meeting of the day.

  Amy often marveled that she'd made such a success of her business, especially since she'd dropped out of school when Tyler passed the bar exam and devoted herself entirely to being a wife and mother. She'd been totally happy doing those things and hadn't even blushed to admit to having no desire to work outside the home.

  After Tyler's death, however, the pain and rage had made her so restless that staying home was impossible. She'd alternated between fits of sobbing and periods of wooden silence, and after a few weeks she'd gone numb inside.

  One night, very late, she'd seen a good-looking, fasttalking man on television, swearing by all that was holy that she, too, could build a career in real estate trading and make a fortune.

  Amy had enough money to last a lifetime, between Tyler's life insurance and savings and her maternal grandmother's trust fund, but the idea of a challenge, of building something, appealed to her. In fact, on some level it resurrected her. Here was something to do, something to keep her from smothering Ashley and Oliver with motherly affection.

  She'd called a toll-free number and ordered a set of tapes and signed up for a seminar, as well.

  The tapes arrived and Amy absorbed them. The voice was pleasant and the topic complicated enough that she had to concentrate, which meant she had brief respites from thinking about Tyler. Under any other circumstances, Amy would not have had the brass to actually do the things suggested by the tapes and seminar, but all her normal inhibitions had been frozen inside her, like small animals trapped in a sudden Ice Age.

  She'd started buying and selling and wheeling and dealing, and she'd been successful at it.

  Still, she thought miserably as she drove toward her meeting, Tyler had been right, she wasn't happy. Now that the numbness had worn off, all those old needs and hurts were back in full force and being a real estate magnate wasn't fulfilling them.

  Harry Griffith smiled grimly to himself as he took off his headphones and handed them to his copilot, Mark Ellis. "Here you are, mate," he said. "Bring her in for me, will you?"

  Mark nodded as he eagerly took over the controls, and Harry left the cockpit and proceeded into the main section of the private jet. Often it was filled with business people, hangers-on and assorted bimbos, but that day Harry and Mark were cutting through the sky alone.

  He went on to the sumptuous bedroom, unknotting his silk tie with one hand as he closed the door with the other. He'd had a meeting in San Francisco, but now he could change into more casual clothes.

  With a sigh Harry pulled open a few drawers and took out a lightweight cable-knit sweater and jeans, still thinking of his friend. He hadn't been present for ly's services two years before. He'd been in the outback, at one of the mines, and by the time he'd returned to Sydney and learned about Tyler's death, it was three weeks after the fact.

  He'd sent flowers to Tyler's parents, who'd been like a second mother and father to him ever since his first visit to the states, and to the pretty widow. Harry had never seen Amy Ryan or her children, except on the front of the Christmas cards he always received from them, and he hadn't known what to say to her.

  It had been a damn shame, a man like Tyler dying in his prime like that, and Harry could find no words of comfort inside himself.

  Now, however, he had business with Tyler's lovely lady, and he would have to open this last door that protected his own grief and endure whatever emotions might be set free in the process.

  Harry tossed aside his tie and began unfastening his cuff links. Maybe he'd even go and stand by Tyler's grave for a while, tell his friend he was a cheeky lot for bailing out so early in the game that way.

  He pulled the sweater on over his head, replaced his slacks with jeans, then stood staring at himself in the mirror. Like the bed, chairs and bureau, it was bolted down.

  Where Tyler had been handsome in an altar-boy sort of way, Harry was classically so, with dark hair, indigo-blue eyes and an elegant manner. He regarded his exceptional looks as tools, and he'd used them without compunction, every day of his life, to get what he wanted.

  Or most of what he wanted, that is. He'd never had a real family of his own, the way Tyler had. God knew, Madeline hadn't even tried to disguise herself as a wife, and she'd sent the child she'd borne her first husband to boarding school in Switzerland. Madeline hadn't wanted to trouble herself with a twelve-year-old daughter, and Eireen's letters and phone calls had been ignored more than answered.

  Harry felt sick, remembering. He'd tried to establish a bond with the child on her rare holidays in Australia, but while Madeline hadn't wanted to be bothered with the little girl, she hadn't relished the idea of sharing her, either.

  Then, after another stilted Christmas, Madeline had decided she needed a little time on the "the continent," and would therefore see Eireen as far as Zurich. Their plane had gone down midway between New Zealand and the Fiji Islands, and there had been no survivors.

  Harry had not wept for his wife—the emotion he'd once mistaken for love had died long before she did— but he'd cried for that bewildered child who'd never been permitted to love or be loved.

  Later, when Tyler had died, Harry had gotten drunk—something he had never done before or since— and stayed that way for three nightmarish days. It had been an injustice of cosmic proportions that a man like Tyler Ryan, who had had everything a man could dream of, should be sent spinning off the world that way, like a child from a carnival ride that turned too fast.

  "Mr. Griffith?"

  Mark's voice, coming over the intercom system, startled Harry. "Yes?" he snapped, pressing a button on the instrument affixed to the wall above his bed, a little testy at the prospect of landing in Seattle.

  "We're starting our descent, sir. Would you like to come back and take the controls?"

  "You can handle it," Harry answered, removing his finger from the button. He thought of Tyler's parents and the big house on Mercer Island where he'd spent some of the happiest times of his life. "You can handle it," he repeated gravely, even though Mark couldn't hear him now. "The question is, can I?"

  Amy had had a busy day, but she'd managed to finish work on time to pick up Oliver and Ashley at day camp, and she was turning hot dogs on the grill in her stove when the telephone rang.

  Oliver answered with his customary "Yo!" He listened to the caller with ever-widening eyes and then thrust the receiver in Amy's direction. "I think it's that guy from the movies!" he shouted.

  Amy frowned, crossed the room and took the call. "Hello?"

  "Mrs. Ryan?" The voice was low, melodic and distinctly Australian. "My name is Harry Griffith, and I was a friend of your husband's—"

  The receiver slipped from Amy's hand and clattered against the wall. Harry Griffith? Harry Griffith! The ma
n Tyler had mentioned in her dream the night before.

  "Mom!" Ashley cried, alarmed. She'd learned, at entirely too young an age, that tragedy almost always took a person by surprise.

  "It's okay, sweetheart," Amy said hastily, snatching up the telephone with one hand and pulling her daughter close with the other. "Hello? Mr. Griffith?"

  "Are you all right?" he asked in that marvelous accent.

  Amy leaned against the counter, not entirely trusting her knees to support her, and drew in a deep breath. "I'm fine," she lied.

  "I don't suppose you remember me..."

  Amy didn't remember Harry Griffith, except from old photographs and things Tyler had said, and she couldn't recall seeing him at the funeral. "You knew Tyler," she said, closing her eyes against a wave of dizziness.

  "Yes," he answered. His voice was gentle and somehow encouraging, like a touch. "I'd like to take you out for dinner tomorrow night, if you'll permit."

  If you'll permit. The guy talked like Cary Grant in one of those lovely old black-and-white movies on the Nostalgia Channel. "Ah—well—maybe you should just come here. Say seven o'clock?"

  "Seven o'clock," he confirmed. There was brief pause, then, "Mrs. Ryan? I'm very sorry—about Tyler, I mean. He was one of the best friends I ever had."

  Amy's eyes stung, and her throat felt thick. "Yes," she agreed. "I felt pretty much the same way about him. I-I'll see you at seven tomorrow night. Do you have the address?"

  "Yes," he answered, and then the call was over.

  It took Amy so long to hang up the receiver that Oliver finally pulled it from her hand and replaced it on the hook.

  "Who was that?" Ashley asked. "Is something wrong with Grampa or Gramma?"

  "No, sweetheart," Amy said gently, bending to kiss the top of Ashley's head, where her rich brown hair was parted. "It was only a friend of your daddy's. He's coming by for dinner tomorrow night."

  "Okay," Ashley replied, going back to the table.

  Amy took the hot dogs from the grill and served them, but she couldn't eat because her stomach was lumping back and forth between its normal place and her windpipe. She went outside and sat at the picnic table in her expensive suit, watching as the sprinkler turned rhythmically, making its chicka-chicka sound.

  She tried to assemble all the facts in her mind, but they weren't going together very well.

  Last night she'd dreamed—only dreamed—that Tyler had appeared in their bedroom. Amy could ascribe that to the spicy Mexican food she'd eaten for dinner the previous night, but what about the fact that he'd told her his friend Harry Griffith would call and ask to see her? Could it possibly be a wild coincidence and nothing more?

  She pressed her fingers to her temples. The odds against such a thing had to be astronomical, but the only other explanation was that she was psychic or something. And Amy knew that wasn't true.

  If she'd had any sort of powers, she would have foreseen Tyler's death. She would have done something about it, warned the doctors, anything.

  Presently, Amy pulled herself together enough to go back inside the house. She ate one hot dog, for the sake of appearances, then went to her bathroom to shower and put on shorts and a tank top.

  Oliver and Ashley were in the family room, arguing over which program to watch on TV, when Amy joined them. Unless the exchanges threatened to turn violent, she never interfered, believing that children needed to learn to work out their differences without a parent jumping in to referee.

  The built-in mahogany shelves next to the fireplace were lined with photo albums, and Amy took one of the early volumes down and carried it to the couch.

  There she kicked off her shoes and sat cross-legged on the cushion, opening the album slowly, trying to prepare herself for the inevitable jolt of seeing Tyler smiling back at her from some snapshot.

  After flipping the pages for a while, acclimating herself for the millionth time to a world that no longer contained Tyler Ryan, she began to look closely at the pictures.

  2

  * * *

  The next day, on the terrace of a busy waterfront res-taurant, Amy tossed a piece of sourdough bread to one of the foraging sea gulls and sighed. "For all I know," she confided to her best friend, "Harry Griffith is an ax murderer. And I've invited him to dinner."

  Debbie's eyes sparkled with amusement. "How bad can he be?" she asked reasonably. "Tyler liked him a lot, didn't he? And your husband had pretty good judgment when it came to human nature."

  Amy nodded, pushing away what remained of her spinach and almond salad. "Yes," she admitted grudgingly.

  A waitress came and refilled their glasses of iced tea, and Debbie added half a packet of sweetener to hers, stirring vigorously. "So what's really bugging you? That you saw Tyler in a dream and he said a guy named Harry Griffith would come into your life, and now that's about to come true?"

  "Wouldn't that bother you?" Amy countered, exasperated. "Don't look now, Deb, but things like this don't happen every day!"

  Debbie looked thoughtful. "The subconscious mind is a fantastic thing," she mused. '"We don't even begin to comprehend what it can do."

  Amy took a sip of her tea. "You think I projected Tyler from some shadowy part of my brain, don't you?"

  "Yes," Debbie answered matter-of-factly.

  "Okay, fine. I can accept that theory. But how do you account for the fact that Tyler mentioned Harry Griffith, specifically and by name? How could that have come from my subconscious mind, when I never actually knew the man?"

  Debbie shrugged. "There were pictures in the albums, and I'm sure Tyler probably talked about him often. I suppose his parents must have talked about the guy sometimes, too. We pick up subliminal information from the people around us all the time."

  Her friend's theory made sense, but Amy was still unconvinced. If she'd only conjured an image of Tyler for her own purposes, she would have had him hold her, kiss her, tell her the answers to cosmic mysteries. She would never have spent those few precious moments together talking about some stranger from Australia.

  Amy shook her head and said nothing.

  Debbie reached out to take her hand. "Listen, Amy, what you need is a vacation. You're under a lot of stress and you haven't resolved your conflicts over Tyler's death. Park the kids with Tyler's parents and go somewhere where the sun's shining. Sunbathe, spend money with reckless abandon, live a little."

  Amy recalled briefly that she'd always wanted to visit Australia, then pushed the thought from her mind. A trip like that wouldn't be much fun all by herself. "I have work to do," she hedged.

  "Right," Debbie answered. "You really need the money, don't you? Tyler had a whopping insurance policy, and then there was the trust fund from your grandmother. Add to that the pile you've made on your own with this real estate thing—"

  "All right," Amy interrupted. "You're right. I'm lucky, I have plenty of money. But work fills more than just financial needs, you know."

  Debbie's look was wryly indulgent, and she didn't speak at all. She just tapped the be-ringed fingers of her right hand against the upper part of her left arm, waiting for Amy to dig herself in deeper.

  "Listen," Amy whispered hoarsely, not wanting diners at the neighboring tables to overhear, "I know what you're really saying, okay? I'm young. I'm healthy. I should be.. .having sex with some guy. Well, in case you haven't noticed, the smart money is on celibacy these days!"

  "I'm not telling you to go out and seduce the first man you meet, Amy," Debbie said frankly, making no apparent effort to moderate her tone. "What I'm really saying is that you need to stop mourning Tyler and get on with your life."

  Amy snatched up her check, reached for her purse and pushed back her chair. "Thanks," she snapped, hot color pooling in her cheeks. "You've been a real help!"

  "Amy..."

  "I have a meeting," Amy broke in. And then she walked away from the table without even looking back.

  Debbie caught up to her at the cash register. "My brother has a condo at Lake Tahoe
," she persisted gently. "You could go there for a few days and just walk along the shore and look at the trees and stuff. You could visit the house they used in Bonanza."

  Despite her nervous and irritable mood, Amy had to smile. "You make it sound like a pilgrimage," she replied, picking up her credit card receipt and placing it . neatly in a pocket of her brown leather purse. "Shall I burn candles and say, 'Spirits of Hoss, Adam and Little Joe, show me the way'?"

  Now it was Debbie who laughed. "Your original hypothesis was correct, Ryan. You are indeed crazy."

  It was an uncommonly sunny day, even for late June, and the sidewalks were crowded with tourists. Amy spoke softly, "I'm sorry, Deb. I was really a witch in there."

  Debbie grinned. "True, but being a friend means knowing somebody's faults and liking them anyway. And to show you I do have some confidence in your reasoning processes, expect my cousin Max over tonight." She paused to think a moment, then her pretty face was bright with inspiration. "Max will wear coveralls and pretend to be fixing the dishwasher or something. That way, there'll be a man in the house, in case this Griffith guy really is an ax murderer, but Mr. Australia will never guess you were nervous about having him over."

  Amy wasn't crazy about the idea, but she had neither the time nor the energy to try to talk Debbie out of it. She had an important meeting scheduled and, after that, some shopping to do at the Pike Place Market.

  "I'll call you tomorrow," Amy promised, as the two women went in their separate directions.

  Because she didn't know whether to go with elegant or simple and typically American, Amy settled on a combination of the two and bought fresh salmon steaks to be seasoned, wrapped in foil and cooked on the backyard barbecue. She made a potato salad as well, and set out chocolate eclairs from an upscale bakery for dessert.

  She was setting the picnic table with good silver when a jolting sensation in the pit of her stomach alerted her to the fact that she wasn't alone.