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

“I thought you were the boss. The choreographer, 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 unbuttoned 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 hoarse 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 passion. 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 bitch 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 goddam 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. “God, 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 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 passed, and the girl would be thirty-nine years old. There could be no harm in looking back into the past now. And John assured them of his total discretion.

The signature of the judge assigned 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 space 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.