Brass Ring (7 page)

“Mmm,” he murmured. “I can feel my appetite coming back.”

With a rush of energy, he rolled her onto her back and kissed her, tenderly, nibbling at her lips. Her breathing quickened, keeping pace with his as he lowered his mouth to her throat, her breasts. She felt the warmth of his tongue on her nipple and slipped her fingers into his hair.

“So,” he said, his breath warm against her chest, “what feels good, hmm?”

“That does,” she said, then arched her back as the tug of his lips grew stronger. “Oh, yes.”

They had been lovers for twenty-three years. They didn’t need to ask each other what felt good. Yet they still, on occasion, bantered this way. Talking was an aphrodisiac, they’d discovered. An erogenous zone all its own. Talk alone used to be enough to make Jon hard and ready, but that phenomenon was rare these days. “It’s a normal function of age,” she’d reassured him, although she knew it was the injury at work. She was certain Jon was aware of that fact even more than she was.

Jon touched her with his hands and his mouth, moving down her body, teasing her as he took his time. He kissed the inside of her thighs so delicately and for so long that by the time he turned his head to give his lips and tongue free rein over her, she was already trembling with the early vibrations of an orgasm. She came quickly, but he didn’t stop touching her until she reached down to pull him up for a kiss. He supported himself on his arms above her while she slid her hand down his body to his penis. She stroked him, her touch practiced yet tender—despite his inability to feel it—and when her hand had filled with his firm warmth, she slipped her hips beneath his and guided him inside her.

She clutched his shoulders. The muscles in his arms were like iron, and she felt them tighten and catch beneath her hands as he rocked slowly above her, inside her. His strength excited her, as it always did. It seemed he could hold himself suspended above her that way forever as he watched her. Watched and waited. She had learned to set aside her inhibitions about being on display. He had to watch. For Jon, it was a large part of the pleasure.

She slipped her hand between their bodies, letting her fingers come to rest where his body was joined to hers. The image of Lynn Stanwick’s wide and surprised eyes flitted briefly across her mind as Jon rhythmically pressed his hips against hers. She was aware of the softening of his erection, but it didn’t matter. He was still inside her, still filling her, and she was lifting up, losing the sense of the bed beneath her head, her back. Jon was moving so slowly. Languidly. He knew how to move—oh, the wondrous hours of research that had entailed!—to let her body rise and fall, rise and fall, as it was doing now. He didn’t even pick up his pace as she began gasping for breath, or when she cried out, digging her fingers into his shoulder. And he kept his steady course as she flew into that brilliant shower of light—the light he could experience only through her.

There was peace in the room after a while, a peace that seemed hard-won and badly needed, and Claire lay next to Jon, her cheek against his shoulder. She was almost asleep when he broke the silence.

“Claire,” he said, “I want you to tell me the things you learn about Margot. It might not mean as much to me as to you, but I’ll listen.”

She wrapped her arm around his waist, smiling. “I love you, Mathias,” she said, and she snuggled closer to him, secure in the expectation of a contented night’s sleep.

THE WEATHER HAD TURNED
cold again by the following Monday, and the threat of snow hung low in the morning sky as Claire made the hour-and-a-half drive to Avery Hospital. The old brick building seemed to sag in the gloomy daylight as she pulled into the parking lot, and she felt compassion for Margot, for anyone who had to call this depressing building home.

She’d had to manipulate this meeting with Ginger Stern, the social worker who had worked with Margot. Ginger had been reluctant to talk about her former patient until Claire began connecting to her on a professional level. She was a fellow social worker, Claire said, although that was not quite the truth. She and Jon had both majored in social work at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., not far from where they lived now, but while Jon had graduated with honors, Claire had barely made it out of the program with her degree. She had gained a reputation among her instructors as a young woman with her head too much in the clouds to deal well with reality. In an evaluation of her skills, one of her professors had written, “Miss Harte is not able to accept that, in their day-to-day interactions, people do not always keep one another’s best interests in mind. This attitude may prevent her from offering appropriate help to her clients.” Or, as one of her fellow students put it, more succinctly and to her face, “You’re a terrific person, Claire, but a lousy social worker.” Claire had shrugged off the comments the way she shrugged off anything she didn’t want to hear.

In graduate school, she majored in rehabilitation therapy, where her positive attitude toward life was better appreciated, while Jon worked on a double master’s in social work and health administration. It was the mention of Jon’s name that finally got her the appointment with Ginger Stern.

“Jon Harte-Mathias?” Ginger had exclaimed. Apparently the Harte-Mathias name hadn’t registered when she’d heard it attached to Claire. “From the foundation?”

As it turned out, Ginger’s brother had gone through a rehab program funded by the foundation. She knew the story of the foundation’s birth: A young man working in a rehab center inherited millions of dollars on his twenty-fifth birthday—money that had been left in trust for him when his parents were killed in a plane crash. He spent little of the money on himself and his wife and baby, instead pouring the millions into the development of the Harte-Mathias Foundation. There were no inaccuracies in Ginger’s recitation of the story, but in the telling, she made Jon sound like some sort of folk hero. It didn’t matter. Here she was, in the parking lot of Avery Hospital, about to meet with the person who probably knew Margot St. Pierre as well as anyone could.

Ginger was waiting for her inside the hospital. She was an energetic blonde and much younger than Claire had expected—probably younger than Margot had been by several years. Despite her youth, though, she had an air of self-confidence. Claire followed her into a small, windowless office. Ginger sat down behind a stubby desk, and Claire took the only other chair in the room—a small wooden rocker that looked as though it had been discovered in a garage sale.

Claire rested her hands on her knees. “Now that I’m here, I’m really not certain what I’m looking for,” she said, an apology in her voice. “I just can’t seem to stop thinking about her.”

“That’s understandable,” Ginger said with a smile. “I’d heard you went out on the bridge with her. I couldn’t believe anyone would do that.”

“It was one of those things you do without thinking.”

Ginger looked at her with curiosity. “You know that what happened is not your fault, don’t you?”

Claire sighed. “On some level, I know that’s true. I just wish I could have gotten her to wait a few more seconds. The police were so close.”

“You tried. That’s more than ninety-nine percent of the population would have done. And Margot”—she shook her head—”Margot had a mind of her own.” Ginger let out a sigh and moved to the edge of her seat as if she were about to stand up. “Would you like to see her room?” she asked.

Claire nodded. She left her coat on the rocker and followed Ginger out of the office. They walked down a long, dim hallway, the walls painted a pale, dingy green. She remembered something she’d learned in college, something about psychiatric institutions using color to alter the moods of the patients. She wondered what this green was supposed to do. Certainly not lift anyone out of depression. Claire felt herself sinking lower with each step.

“Margot had been ill for a very long time,” Ginger said as they walked. “Ever since losing her brother on the bridge. Her mother cared for her after that, but when her mother died, her father had her committed. He simply couldn’t handle her. He visited her once in a while, but he died a year ago.” She opened one of the doors that lined the hallway and stepped back to let Claire pass through. “This was her room.”

The room was a small rectangle furnished with two twin beds, two night tables, and two small, squat dressers. The faded green walls on the near side of the room were covered with posters of Elvis Presley, and the three embroidered pillows on the bed all bore his likeness.

“She was an Elvis fan?” Claire said, incredulous.

“No.” Ginger laughed. “That’s Nonnie’s half of the room. Nonnie was Margot’s roommate.”

Claire shifted her focus to Margot’s side. The walls were bare, the bed neatly made with a thin green spread. “Margot’s things have already been cleared out, then.”

“Well, actually, no.” Ginger walked across the room to Margot’s bed, where she smoothed her hand across the bedspread. “Margot wasn’t much of a decorator. She never put a thing on the walls, at least not during the couple of years I’ve worked here. She had exactly one picture.” She opened the drawer of the night table to pull out a framed photograph, which she handed to Claire across Nonnie’s bed.

It was a family portrait, a faded, five-by-seven black-and-white, obviously taken by an amateur photographer. A man and woman stood on the steps of a white house, the size and shape of which couldn’t be determined from the close-up angle of the camera. Three children stood in front of the couple: a blond girl and boy of about equal height and a taller, dark-haired boy.

“Her brother brought this to her when she first came to the hospital,” Ginger said.

“The tall boy?”

“Yes. Randy. He owns a restaurant in Virginia. In Arlington. That’s near where you live, right?”

“Yes. Not far.”

“The Fishmonger. Have you heard of it?”

Claire nodded. She had heard of it but had never eaten there.

“Apparently he visited Margot pretty regularly that first year or so, trying to get through to her somehow,” Ginger said. “That was before I came here, so I don’t know for sure. But she paid as little attention to him as she did to everyone else, and by the time I started working with her, he was only visiting once every couple of months or so. He gave up, I guess. Can’t really blame the guy.”

“What was their relationship like?”

“Margot didn’t have much of a relationship with anyone, I’m afraid. I called to tell Randy about her committing suicide. He was very quiet. Just thanked me, told me to donate her things to Goodwill, and that was it.” She took the framed photograph back from Claire’s hands. “I’ve been meaning to send this to him, though.” She looked down at the picture. “He felt helpless, I think. I did, too, sometimes. It’s hard to work with someone you just can’t reach.”

Helpless
. The word described well how Claire had felt in her few brief minutes with Margot. She could imagine the depth of helplessness her brother had felt.

Ginger nodded toward the door. “I’ll show you where she spent most of her time.”

Claire followed the younger woman down another long, green hallway until they reached a large, open room. Windows lined three walls, and Claire imagined that on a sunny day, the room would be awash with light. She felt as though she’d walked into the fresh air after being trapped in a closet.

Nearly a dozen patients were in the room, some watching the TV in the corner, a few playing cards at a small table. Only a couple of them looked up when she and Ginger walked in, and they quickly returned their attention to the cards and TV.

Ginger pointed to the upright piano against the far wall. “That was Margot’s hangout. Everyone misses the music. Always classical, although one time—” Ginger smiled. “This was so weird. One time, when Nonnie walked into the room, Margot started playing ‘Love Me Tender.’”

Claire laughed.

“It was positively the only show of humor I’d ever seen from her, though.” Ginger looked thoughtful. “She never spoke to anyone. Not the staff, not her fellow patients.”

“But she spoke to me on the bridge,” Claire said. “It didn’t make much sense, but she was talking.”

Ginger nodded. “Oh, she’d utter a few scattered words here and there, but nothing of substance. I know she was
able
to talk. I always got the feeling she didn’t feel like it was worth the bother. She was bright, though.”

“How do you know she was bright if she didn’t speak?”

“She read constantly. We have a little library here, mostly paperbacks, and I bet she read every one of them. Fiction, nonfiction, it didn’t matter. And she wrote, too.”

“Really?” Claire was intrigued. “Stories?”

“No, or if she did write stories I didn’t know about them. She wrote letters to other patients. They were often quite long and well written, although her handwriting wasn’t very good. Lack of practice, maybe, or it might have been the medication she was on. She’d usually give advice in the letters. She was the Dear Abby of ward C. During group therapy, she’d hear someone talk about a problem they were having, and of course she’d offer nothing during the group, but later she’d write out her thoughts to the person.”

“Wow. Was her advice on target?”

Ginger grinned. “Surprisingly insightful. Except for the fact that she’d say that God had told her what to write, or sometimes it would be her dead brother, Charles.”

“Oh.” Claire smiled. For a moment she had forgotten why Margot had been a resident in this sad place. “If you like, I could take the picture to Margot’s older brother,” she offered impulsively. She pointed to the photograph, still in Ginger’s hand. “Save you mailing it. I’d like to talk with him.”

Ginger hesitated. She looked at the picture again. “I suppose that would be all right,” she said, handing it to Claire. “I’ll call him to let him know you have it.”

Once she’d stepped outside the hospital again, Claire gulped in the cold, clean air with relief.

She should have called Jon to let him know she was on her way home, she thought as she got into her car. He was worried about her these days. She could hardly blame him. She would stop somewhere on the road to call him.