"Well, how's my black-sheep son?" They always teased him, but they were proud of him too. He was successful, attractive, led an interesting life. The only thing his parents regretted for him was that he had divorced Eloise, they had always hoped the two would stay together and have children. "Keeping yourself out of trouble?"

"Not if I can help it. h.e.l.lo, Charles." He shook hands with his brother and the two men smiled. There was always a certain distance between them, and yet John was fond of him. He was a partner in an important law firm in New York and he had done well. He was forty-six years old, he was powerful in the field of international law, he had an attractive wife who was president of the Junior League, and he had three very nice children. By the standards of John's family, Charles was the major achiever. But John always felt there was something missing from Charles's life, excitement perhaps, or maybe just plain old romance.

And with that, Leslie, his wife, walked out of the house with her mother-in-law, who gave a whoop of delight when she saw John talking to his brother and father.

"The prodigal son has arrived," she intoned in her husky voice, hugging him close to her. She was still a handsome woman at seventy, and even in her plain yellow linen dress, there was an innate elegance about her. She wore her hair in an elegant knot, a string of pearls around her neck that her husband had given her on her wedding day, and the rings that had been in her family for five generations. "Don't you look well, darling! What have you been up to?"

"A little work on the way up. I just started a new investigation." She looked pleased. She enjoyed her sons. They were all handsome and different and intelligent, and she loved them all, but secretly she had always loved John just a little bit more than the others.

"I hear you've gotten involved with the ballet." Leslie said coolly, eyeing John carefully over her b.l.o.o.d.y Mary. There was something mean-spirited about the girl which always irked John, but he was amazed that no one else even seemed to notice. She was one of those women who had everything and should have enjoyed it, two lovely daughters, a charming son, a handsome, successful husband, and yet she seemed to begrudge everyone everything they had, particularly John. She always felt that somehow he had done better than Charles, and it annoyed her. "I had no idea you were interested in the dance, John."

"You never know, do you?" He smiled noncommittally, amazed that she had heard about Sasha, and then he chuckled to himself inwardly, thinking that maybe she had been meeting a lover at the Russian Tea Room.

Moments later, Philip arrived, looking very tan after a European vacation. He and his family lived in Connecticut, and he played tennis constantly. He had a son and a daughter and a wife with blond hair and blue eyes and freckles. She looked exactly like what she was, the childhood sweetheart he had married in college. He was thirty-eight years old, and so was she, and she won all the tennis tournaments in Greenwich. They were truly the perfect family, except for John, who had never quite fit into the mold, and never done what was expected.

And bringing Sasha up here would have complicated things even further. Eloise had been difficult enough. When she wanted to be sociable, she was great, and when she didn't, she would bring a type-writer, and insist on working till lunchtime, which drove Leslie nuts, and made his mother worry that she wasn't having a good time. Eloise was definitely not easy. But Sasha would have really been a shock to them with her leotards and her skintight blue jeans and her fits of petulance and her scenes of defiance. The very thought of her made him grin to himself as he looked at the ocean.

"What's so funny, big brother?" Philip clapped him on the back, and John asked him all about Europe. The hardest thing of all was that they were all such nice people, and he loved them, but they bored him to death, and by Sunday afternoon, it was a relief to be driving to the airport. He felt guilty for thinking it, but they all led such normal, suburban lives. By the end of a weekend, he always felt like a misfit. At least his mother had had a nice time. Each of her sons had given her something special that was important to her. John had bought her a beautiful antique diamond pin with a matching bracelet, and it was just the kind of thing he knew his mother loved. Charles had given her stock, which John thought was an odd gift, but she seemed to be pleased with it, and Philip had given her something she had said she wanted for years, but never bought herself. A grand piano was being delivered to the house in Boston on Monday. It was just like him to do something like that, and John thought it was a terrific gift and wished he'd thought of it himself. But she seemed happy with the pin and bracelet.

He returned the rented car at the airport, and flew back on the commuter with a mob of people returning from the weekend, and by eight o'clock he was back in his apartment making himself a sandwich for dinner, and going through Arthur Patterson's file again. He didn't know anything more than he did before, except the kind of home Hilary had been left in. And he knew exactly what he was going to do the next morning.

But Sasha was far from thrilled when he told her when she came to his apartment later that evening. "What? You're going away again again?" She was furious. "What is it this time?"

John tried to pacify her as best he could, they had been on their way to bed when he mentioned it to her, which was a mistake, he recognized now, but he was still hoping to make love to her that night. It had been days, and with Sasha you had to hit it right, when she wasn't too tired, her muscles weren't too delicate, she didn't have a big performance the next day. It was a real feat getting her to bed at all, and he wasn't about to blow it for Arthur's investigation.

"I told you, baby, I have a big case, and Km handling this one myself."

"I thought you were the boss. The ch.o.r.eographer, as it were." He smiled at the comparison and nodded.

"I am. But this is an exception. I agreed to do the legwork myself, if I could. It's a very important case to my client."

"What's it about?" She looked at him suspiciously, as she stretched out again on his bed, with all her clothes on.

"I'm looking for three girls ... three women actually. He lost track of them thirty years ago, and he has to find them quickly. He's dying." He couldn't tell her more than that, even that was something of a violation of Arthur's confidence, but he wanted to spark Sasha's interest and her allegiance.

"Are they his daughters?" He shook his head as he unb.u.t.toned his shirt. "Ex-wives?" He shook his head again. "Girlfriends?" He smiled and shook his head again. "Then what are they?"

"They're sisters."

"And they're in Florida?" She thought it all sounded very boring.

"One of them was, a long time ago. I have to start way back at the beginning. I thought I had her here in New York, but I didn't. So now we go back to the beginning."

"How long will you be gone?"

"A few days. I should be back by Friday. We can do something nice this weekend."

"No, we can't. I have rehearsals." There was no denying, her schedule was not easy.

"All right, then we'll work around it." He was used to that.

"You're sure you're not just going to Florida on vacation?"

"Hardly. I can think of a lot of places I'd much rather go, with you, my lovely." He slid across the bed, took her by surprise and kissed her, and this time she laughed. She let him undress her, and wound her sinewy legs around his body in a way that drove him mad as they began to make love, and then suddenly she pulled away, and he was afraid he had hurt her. He looked at her through his veil of desire and whispered in a hoa.r.s.e voice, "Are you all right?"

She nodded, but she looked worried. "Do you know what I could do to myself in positions like this?" But she seemed to forget about it as his ardor increased and along with it, her own pa.s.sion. But she was always thinking about herself, her dancing, her muscles, her feet, her body.

"I love you, Sash." He whispered as they lay in each other's arms afterward, but she was oddly silent. Her eyes were open and she was looking at the far wall and she seemed upset as he watched her. "What's the matter, sweetheart?"

"That son of a b.i.t.c.h screamed at me all afternoon today, as though I were doing something wrong ... and I know I wasn't ..." She was obsessed with her dancing, and for a moment it depressed him. He had been there before, only the last time it had been Eloise's G.o.ddam characters and her books, and the plot she couldn't get a grip on. Women like them were exhausting. He wanted Sasha to be different, yet he wanted her to care about him, and in the moments when he was honest with himself, he was not sure that she did. He wasn't even sure she was capable of it. She was totally engrossed in herself. And when he got up to get something to drink from the kitchen, she didn't even seem to notice his absence. He sat on the couch for a long time, in the dark, listening to the noises from the street, and wondered if he would ever find a woman who cared about him, a woman who cared about his work, his life, his friends, his needs, and enjoyed being with him.

"What are you doing in here?" She was standing in the doorway, silhouetted gracefully in the moonlight, her voice a whisper in the darkened room, and she couldn't see the sadness in his eyes as he watched her.

"Thinking."

"What about?" She came to sit beside him and for a moment it almost seemed as though she cared and then she looked down at her feet and groaned. "G.o.d, I should go back to the doctor."

"Why?"

"They hurt all the time now."

"Have you ever thought about giving up dancing, Sash?"

She stared at him as though he were crazy. "Are you mad? I would rather die. If they told me I couldn't dance anymore, I would kill myself." And she sounded as though she meant it.

"What about children? Don't you want kids?" He should have asked her all those things long before, but it had been hard to distract her from her dancing.

"Maybe later." She sounded vague. Eloise used to say the same kind of thing to him. Until she was thirty-six, and decided it would interfere too much with her career, and had her tubes tied while he was away on business. And she was probably right. She was happier alone.

"Sometimes if you put it off, 'later' never happens."

"Then it was never meant to be. I don't need children to be fulfilled." She said it proudly.

"What do you need, Sash? Do you need a husband?" Or did she only need the ballet? That was the real question.

"I've never thought I was old enough to worry about being married." She said it honestly, looking up at him in the moonlight. But he was forty-two years old, and he was thinking of all those things, he had been for a long time now. He didn't want to be alone forever. He wanted someone to love him, and whom he could love, not just between books and ballets and rehearsals.

"You're twenty-eight. You should start to think about your future."

"I think about it every day, with that old maniac screaming at me."

"I don't mean your professional future, I mean your real life."

"That is is my real life, John." But that was precisely what he was afraid of. my real life, John." But that was precisely what he was afraid of.

"And where do I fit into all that?" It was a night for soul-searching, and he wasn't sure if he should have started it. But it couldn't be helped. Sooner or later they'd have to talk about something other than her feet and her rehearsals.

"That's up to you. I can't offer you more than this for the moment. If it's enough, wonderful. And if it's not ..." She shrugged. At least she was honest. And he wondered if he could change her mind, if he could induce her to marry him ... to want a child ... but it was crazy to do that again. He seemed to have this incredible penchant for challenges and lost causes. "You ought to try climbing Everest sometime," his younger brother had told him once, "it might relieve some of the tension." He had met Sasha twice and thought John was crazy. "Do you want me to stay tonight?" she was asking him now. She was perfectly willing to go. She didn't mind the chaos of her apartment on the West Side with the eight million roommates and fourteen million dance bags.

"I'd like you to stay." In truth, he wanted a great deal more from her. More even than she had to give, and he was only beginning to understand that.

"Then I'll go to bed now." She got up matter-of-factly and went back to his bedroom. "I have an early rehearsal tomorrow." And he had to fly to Jacksonville. And more than that, he wanted to make love to her again, but she said she was too tired and her muscles were sore when he got back into bed with her and tried it.

Chapter 18.

The flight to Jacksonville was brief and gave Chapman time to read some of his papers. He signed half a dozen things he had to read, but his mind always drifted back to Hilary ... and the life she must have led with Eileen and Jack Jones, according to the description of the old man in Charlestown.

In Jacksonville, he went directly to the juvenile hall, asked for the senior administrator, and explained his investigation. It was unusual in cases like that to lay files open to anyone, but so many years had pa.s.sed, and the girl would be thirty-nine years old. There could be no harm in looking back into the past now. And John a.s.sured them of his total discretion.

The signature of the judge a.s.signed to the juvenile court had to be obtained, and John was told to come back the following morning. In the meantime, he checked into a motel downtown, and wandered the streets aimlessly. He spent some time going through the phone book and found five Jack Joneses, and then on a whim, he decided to call them. Three of them were black, and the fourth one didn't answer. But the fifth said his father had grown up in Boston and he thought he'd been married to a woman named Eileen who died before his dad married his mother. He said he was eighteen years old, and his dad had died of cirrhosis ten years before, but he'd be happy to tell him anything he could. John asked him if he knew where his father used to live, say twenty-five years before, if maybe his mother knew, but the answer to that was simple.

"He's always lived in the same house. We still live here." Chapman's interest rose sharply and he asked if he could come out and see it.

"Sure." He gave him the address, and John was not surprised to discover that it had much the same feeling of their neighborhood in Charlestown, the same seedy, depressing kind of area, near a naval yard, only this one was mostly black, and there were young boys on motorcycles cruising the area, which made Chapman nervous.

It was not a nice place to be, and like the Charlestown place, it looked as though it never had been.

Jack Jones Jr. was waiting for him, with a motorcycle parked in his own front yard, and he looked as though Chapman's visit made him feel important. He rattled on briefly about his dad, showed him some pictures, and invited him inside to meet his mother. Inside the house there was a terrible stench, of stale urine, old booze, and the filth of a lifetime. The house was beyond grim, and the woman Jack Jr. introduced as his mother was pathetic. She was probably only in her late forties, but toothless, and she looked thirty years older, and it was impossible for John to determine if her infirmities were due to abuse or an illness. She smiled vaguely at him, and stared into s.p.a.ce beyond him, while Jack Jr. made excuses for her, but she remembered nothing about a niece of Jack's previous wife. In fact, several times she seemed not to know who her own son was. Eventually, John gave up, and was on his way out, when Jack Jr. suggested he might want to talk to the neighbors. They had lived there for years, and even knew Jack Sr. when he was married to his late wife. John thanked him and knocked on the door, and an elderly woman came to the screen door with caution.

"Yeah?"

"May I speak to you for a moment, ma'am?" It had been years since he had done this himself, and he suddenly remembered how difficult it was to win people's trust. He suddenly recalled how many doors had slammed in his face in the old days.

"You a cop?" It was a familiar question.

"No, I'm not. I'm looking for a woman named Hilary Walker. She lived here a long time ago; when she was a little girl. Would you have any idea where she might be today?"

The woman shook her head and seemed to be looking John over. "What you want with her?"

"A friend of her parents wants to find her."

"They shouldda looked for her twenty-five years ago. Poor kid ..." She shook her head, remembering, and John knew he'd struck pay dirt. She was still talking to him through the screen door, but slowly it swung open, and she stood there in a house dress and slippers, staring at John, but not inviting him in. "That so-called uncle of hers beat her to within an inch of her life. She crawled out of that place in the pouring rain and d.a.m.n near died on my doorstep. My husband and I, we took her to the hospital, and she almost didn't make it. They said he'd tried to rape her."

"Did anyone bring charges against him?" Chapman stared at her, horrified. The story was getting worse. Hilary's fate had truly been a nightmare.

But she only shook her head. "She was too scared ... little Hilary." She shook her head. "I'd forgotten her all this time."

"What happened after that?"

"She went to a couple of foster homes, and eventually I think she just stayed in juvie. We went to see her twice, I think it was, but it was like ... well, there was somethin' missin' outta that girl, not that you could blame her. She didn't warm up to no one." It was easy to understand that, in the face of what he was hearing.

"Thank you. Thank you very much." So that was the reason for juvenile hall, not that she had broken the law herself. Or maybe she'd done that too eventually. Sometimes that was the way it happened.

But in her case, it hadn't. They handed the files to him the first thing the next morning. The judge had signed the order without a problem. But the file of Hilary Walker was far from exciting. She had been a model student, had given no problems to the State, had been in two foster homes, whose addresses were given, and had then spent three years in juvenile hall without event. She had been given two hundred and eighty-seven dollars upon completion of her last year of high school, and five days later, she had left, never to be heard from again. It was a slim file, and told him precious little about the girl, except that her caseworkers' reports said that she was withdrawn, had no known friends, but posed no disciplinary problem either. The caseworkers who had known her then were all long since gone, and he imagined that both foster homes had disappeared too, but just to be sure, he went to the addresses listed in her file. The first woman was, amazingly, still alive and at the same address, and she thought she remembered her although she wasn't sure.

"She was the one who was so high and mighty. Didn't stay long neither. Can't remember how she worked. She started pining, and they sent her back to the hall. That's all I remember 'bout her now." But it was enough, the woman's harsh words about other girls, the home itself told its own tale. And the second foster home had been torn down for a development years before. No wonder the woman at CBA knew nothing about her. The girl who had been here had gone G.o.d knows where to finish her life in the same kind of misery and squalor it had started, or been condemned to at the age of eight, when her father killed her mother, and then committed suicide and their best friend had abandoned her, after taking her sisters from her. In some ways, John felt as though Arthur had led her to slaughter. And it was easy to understand why she had come to Arthur's office twenty-two years before to vent her hatred. The question was, where had she gone from there? The trail was as cold as death, and he had no idea where to go from here. Where did one begin looking for a girl who had known so much pain and misery at such an early age? He had run her rap sheet through various states and the FBI, and nothing had turned up, but that didn't mean anything. She could have changed her name, gotten married several times. She could have died in the past twenty-two years. She could have done a number of things. But if she was still in New York, John promised himself he would find her.

He left Jacksonville without regret, and with a sense of relief to be escaping the humidity and the squalor he had seen there. He could only imagine how Hilary felt on her way to New York to find her sisters, only to find that Arthur had not kept track of them, any more than he had of her. What a bitter disappointment it must have been for her.

He got home on Thursday night, and left a message on Sasha's answering machine. He knew it was the night of her big performance, but it was ten o'clock when he finally got home, and he was exhausted.

And the next day at the office, he reported to Arthur Patterson what he'd found, and there was a long, sad silence at the other end. John Chapman couldn't see the silent tears rolling down Arthur's cheeks as he listened.

"After she visited you, the trail's cold. I have no idea where she went from there, but I'm working on it." He had already given one of his a.s.sistants a list of things he wanted, he wanted him to check out schools, hospitals, employment agencies, youth hostels, hotels, all the way back to 1966. It was no small task, but somewhere something would turn up, and they could go on from there. Meanwhile, he was going to start looking for Alexandra. "I'll need to come down to your office on Monday. I want to go through the files on George Gorham's estate. I want to see if they contacted his widow recently." Arthur nodded his head, and brushed away the tears he had shed for Hilary. John Chapman was certainly thorough.

It was a terrible thought to realize what had been Hilary's fate ... but how could he have known ... if only ... he began coughing terribly as he thought of it, and eventually had to hang up the phone. And John went back to work. There was a mountain of files waiting for him on his desk, after being in Florida all week, and he stayed in the office until seven-thirty, and then stopped for a hamburger at the Auto Pub on the way home. It was nine o'clock when he got home, and the phone was ringing. It was Sasha.

"Where've you been all night long?" She sounded suspicious and angry.

"At my office. And I stopped and had something to eat on the way home. And how are you, Miss Riva?" There had been no preamble, no inquiry as to how he was, and she hadn't called him in Florida all week, even though he'd left his number on her machine, but he knew she'd been busy with rehearsals.

"I'm all right. I thought I'd done something to one of my tendons yesterday, but thank G.o.d I didn't." Nothing had changed in his absence.

"I'm glad. Want to come over for a drink?." He half wanted to see her and half didn't. The week in Florida had been incredibly depressing and he needed cheering up, but on the other hand he didn't want to listen to the familiar litany about her ligaments and her tendons.

"I'm exhausted. I'm already at the apartment. But I'm free this weekend. We could do something tomorrow."

"Why don't we go somewhere? How about the Hamptons or Fire Island?" The summer had already set in, and it was hot everywhere. It was going to be a beautiful weekend.

"Dominique Montaigne is having a birthday party on Sunday. I promised him I'd be there, and I can't let him down. I'm really sorry." Ballet, ballerinas, dancers, rehearsals, performances. It was endless.

"That's all right. We could go for the day. I'd love to get out of town and lie on a beach somewhere."

"So would I." But he knew she would lie down for exactly half an hour and then she would start prancing around and flexing muscles, so nothing got stiff while she was relaxing. And there were times when it was extremely unnerving.

"I'll pick you up at nine o'clock. Okay?" She agreed, and he hung up, feeling suddenly sad, and indescribably lonely. She was never there for him when he needed her, and instead he found himself thinking about a girl he didn't know, who had been bounced between foster homes and juvenile hall more than twenty years before. It was crazy to be thinking about her now. He felt like Eloise with her imaginary characters. It made about as much sense, but she had become so real to him in the last week. Much more than he wanted.

The next day he and Sasha went to the beach. In the end they just went to Montauk, on Long Island, and it was relaxing and nice. He jogged along the beach while she exercised, and they stopped for a lobster dinner on the way home. It was eleven-thirty that night before they got back to his apartment, and fell into bed like two kids. She was in a good mood, and they made love without Sasha's complaining once that his pa.s.sion was going to do her great bodily harm or permanent damage. And wrapped around each other, they slept until ten o'clock the next morning, when she bounded out of bed, looked at her watch, and gave a shriek that woke him.

"What's wrong? ... where are you? ..." He squinted in the sunlight streaming across his room, and saw her rushing into the bathroom, and heard her turn on the shower. He threw back the sheets, and lumbered slowly in to see what she was up to. "What are you doing in there?" The bathroom was full of steam, she had her hair tied in a knot on top of her head, and her face was turned full into the shower.

"What does it look like?"

"What are you doing up so early?"

"I promised Dominique I'd be there by eleven-thirty."

"Oh for chrissake. What's the hurry?"

"I'm making lunch for everyone." She announced as she turned off the shower and started to dry herself off.

"That's interesting. You never cook here." He was annoyed. They had had such a nice day the day before, and now she was in such a hurry to leave him. He had wanted to make love to her again before she left, but she was all business.