From This Moment (18 page)

“It seems your father has already claimed the contents of the box,” the bank manager said.

“My
father
?” Stella asked. “But my father didn’t know anything about this box. Surely you must be mistaken.”

The bank manager consulted his notes again, now looking distinctly uncomfortable. “Our records indicate he was here on December 15th, five days after the unfortunate accident. He had a death certificate and a copy of your sister’s will, granting him access. He emptied the box and turned ownership back to the bank.”

Stella looked as if she’d been struck. She staggered a bit as she reached out for balance on the bank counter. Romulus put an arm around her.

“What did he look like?” Stella demanded. “My
father
—what did he look like?”

“I’m sure I don’t remember, ma’am,” the bank manager said, taking a step back and fiddling nervously with the paperwork.

“Try harder,” Stella demanded.

“We deal with hundreds of customers each week—”

“There is only one customer I care about,” Stella bit out. “Her name was Gwendolyn Eloise Westergaard, and she was a beautiful, courageous woman who trusted this bank.” The
agitation in Stella’s voice increased, her temper unraveling. She stepped closer to the hapless bank manager, who drew back in the face of Stella’s mounting temper. “My father didn’t set foot in this bank on December 15th!” she cried out in a voice beginning to crack. “I know because I was with him all day at my mother’s bedside in a mental asylum, where she had been committed because she couldn’t even feed herself.”

Romulus blanched at the image. Stella had alluded to her parents’ difficulties, but he hadn’t realized they were so severe. He didn’t know her parents, but they shouldn’t have the most private details of their life spilled out in a bank lobby. She was going to regret this. Her voice rose in an angry crescendo, causing people to turn and stare.

“My father never left her side! He was never in this bank because we were two hundred miles away, watching my mother starve herself—”

“Stella, come with me,” Romulus said, trying to nudge her toward the door.

“I’m fighting for my sister’s legacy!”

He lowered his voice. “And I’m fighting for your family’s future. Come along. This isn’t the place.”

His words were like cold water thrown on a fire. She froze and swallowed back whatever she’d intended to say. After a moment, she nodded.

He guided her to a streetcar. It was the middle of the day, and the streetcar was half empty, so they found a bench to themselves near the back, where Stella’s hard-fought stability slowly unraveled. Her face crumpled, her shoulders rolled forward.

She wept quietly the entire ride home, tears dropping onto her lap, each breath a shuddering moan. He’d never heard such bleak despair in a woman’s voice. The profound love Stella had for her family was unknown to him. He’d grown up in a home
with a chilly and disapproving father, and his parents’ bitter marriage had poisoned anyone who got too close. Stella’s family was different, and when the bedrock of that idyllic, storybook family had fractured, it had broken her, as well.

He skated through life on the surface, making friends with ease but never letting anyone get too close. And if there was an occasional void—an emptiness—well, that was all right. But Stella’s shuddering sobs reminded him of a callow young man who had once thrown his entire being into the crucible of love and had come away scarred. He remembered. He understood. He put his arm around her and cradled her head against his shoulder.

“Shhh,” he murmured, anything to soothe her pain. “You’ll be okay.”

“I’ll never be okay,” she said on a broken whisper. “Nothing will ever be the same again.”

He believed her. It was why he held himself at arm’s length from such turbulent, unrestrained passions. Casual friendships could never break you or plunge your world into despair.

“Nothing will ever be the same,” he agreed softly. “But you are strong and resilient and still have a grand life ahead of you. I don’t know why God called Gwendolyn so early. We’ll probably never know, but you’ve still got a purpose.”

“He should have taken me,” Stella said. “Gwendolyn was the good sister, I was the bad one. If anyone deserved to die, it should have been me.”

It stunned him that she should think of herself this way. He wasn’t a theologian or a doctor of psychology, but the tortured guilt in Stella’s voice was hard to hear. “You will be okay, Stella. I have a feeling God is still expecting great things from you, and so am I. You are going to survive this and flourish again.”

Stella closed her eyes and sagged. “I wish I were a better
person. If I were, maybe I could find some meaning in Gwendolyn’s death, but all it has done is broken my mother and made me angry and bitter. I don’t like myself very much anymore. I don’t like what I’ve become.”

He didn’t know how to help this suddenly weak, insecure version of Stella. He knew how to spar with the flamboyant woman who bragged about her art and hurled barbed jests for sport. He adored matching wits with
that
Stella, but this one somehow slipped beneath his defenses. She touched the weak, vulnerable part of himself he usually kept locked down and hidden, but he needed to draw upon that part to comfort her.

“Gwendolyn brought a wonderful gift into your family,” he said. “She’s gone now, but those memories will illuminate your world for the rest of your life.”

That much he knew was true. His mind cast back more than a decade to Laura. It was hard to recall the beautiful memories without the bitterness that followed, but yes, he was glad Laura had been a part of his life. She had widened it, strengthened it, given him a little glimpse into a shining world where he wanted to live forever. His happiness had been fleeting, but he could not regret it.

Perhaps that was the nature of joy. There was a poignant sense of yearning that somehow pointed to a deeper spiritual world. It was impossible to appreciate the beauty of it without first knowing loss and yearning. Stella’s grief was still too raw to have that perspective. She was like a bird thrashing in a net, angry and frustrated with the injustice.

He would help her find a way out.

9

S
tella recovered quickly after her pathetic breakdown in the streetcar. It was embarrassing to have blubbered like that in front of Romulus, but the terrible weeks at the mental asylum were a memory she rarely touched. She and her father had stood by helplessly while Eloise stared, broken and vacant, unable to feed herself or even rise from bed. Her mother’s complete mental breakdown had terrified Stella. Could it be possible to lose both Gwendolyn and her mother in the same month?

And yet her mother rallied. By January, Eloise was ready to return home, but to Stella’s surprise, her father asked her not to accompany them.

“We need to heal, baby girl,” he said, tears filling his eyes as he cupped her face between his hands. “Every time Eloise looks at you, she sees Gwendolyn. Go back to your life and create beautiful pictures. Fill the world with color and joy and splendor. Your mother and I need to be alone now. We need to make new memories together, instead of dwelling on the past.”

It had hurt, but she had gone. The morning her parents es
corted her to the train station, the three of them had clung to one another and wept anew. Sometimes dawn was a long way off, and there was nothing to be done to hasten its return. Her parents needed time, and Stella needed to uncover what had really happened to her sister.

Well, what she’d just learned at the bank was a giant leap toward helping her find A.G., and she needed Romulus’s help even more now. They went to his office to discuss it. He sat behind his desk, rocking in his swivel chair as he watched her pace across the tight confines of his office.

“I think the man who passed himself off as my father was A.G. I’ve been trying to find him on my own, but what if I change tactics and get him to come find me? If he is the honorable man Gwendolyn believed him to be, he will seek me out once he knows I am here.”

“
If
he is an honorable man?” Curiosity and caution were heavy in Romulus’s voice.

“I don’t know what to believe anymore. If A.G. was on the list of people with access to Gwendolyn’s box, he had no reason to impersonate my father. Or maybe the man wasn’t A.G. at all, and it was someone who knew what Gwendolyn was up to and played a part in her death.” In which case, finding A.G. and recruiting him to her side was more important than ever.

“How do you propose we flush him out?”

“Gwendolyn would have told him about me. He would surely know my professional name, and even if he doesn’t, I’ll spell it out for him.”

Over the next five minutes, she outlined her plan. A powerful man like A.G. would read at least one of Boston’s three newspapers. She would agree to work for the magazine if Romulus would lean on his connections in the press to publicize that he
had just hired renowned lithographer Stella West, also known as Stella Westergaard, to produce brilliant full-color lithographs for
Scientific World
.

“It would benefit both of us,” she said. “You will be the first magazine to routinely publish full-color plates, and I get my name publicized throughout Boston. Either A.G. will come forward, or he won’t. And if he doesn’t . . .”

If he didn’t, it became more likely that A.G. had played some nefarious role in Gwendolyn’s demise.

Romulus was intrigued. That quiet flare had lit behind his eyes, and he was holding on to barely leashed excitement. “If I make that announcement, I expect you to honor it.”

“Of course.” Her job at City Hall was gone, and there was nothing to stop her from taking a new opportunity, especially if it might coax A.G. to reveal himself.

Romulus vaulted out of his chair, triumph in his gaze as he reached across the desk to shake her hand. “Then we have a deal, Miss West.”

Romulus sat frozen in his desk chair for five minutes after Stella left. Had he just scored a brilliant coup or done the stupidest thing of his career? He’d been trying for years to get Stella onboard at
Scientific World
, but that was before she’d walked across his line of sight and sparked a flare of attraction unlike anything he’d ever known. Even from Laura. Stella could slip beneath his defenses, and he had no desire to plunge back into the turbulent whirlwind of his youthful mistakes.

A knock on the door dragged him back to the present. Roy Tanner met his eyes through the window and held up a flat wooden box. Roy was the magazine’s chief typesetter, and despite the burns that limited his facial expressions, it was clear
Roy was delighted about something. Romulus nodded, and Roy opened the door.

“Just got the new boldfaced font for the linotype. Here’s a sample.”

Romulus grinned. The new font had cost almost six hundred dollars, but it would help them create better sidebars and enhance the readability of the magazine.

“Is it too late to use it in the next issue?” he asked.

“Jake is already learning how to set the new slugs. We should have enough time to get it done before we start printing.”

“Excellent!” He’d stay up late tonight figuring out which snippets of text to highlight in each of the articles. The diversity of stories appearing in every issue made it unlikely that many people read
Scientific World
cover to cover, so the sidebars would help readers identify stories of interest. Or at least inform them of the salient points in the stories they chose not to read.

“There’s talk on the third floor that you were ranting again about not getting married until forty,” Roy said.

“Some principles need periodic reinforcement.” Even if only to remind himself. Stella wasn’t the sort of woman who would tolerate being strung along for the next eight years. Nor would she be a suitable wife for him, anyway. The irrational attraction he’d felt for her could get out of hand, and he didn’t need or want it.

“You may want to rethink that,” Roy said. “My wife and children are the center of my universe. I thank God for them every day. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than the sixty seconds after I step through my front door at the end of the day, when three little children come racing into my arms and I see my wife’s smiling face across the room.”

Romulus said nothing as he picked up a piece of 16-point font, inspecting it from all angles. He was glad Roy had found
happiness in marriage. Roy Tanner was a black man trying to survive in a largely white city. Having been burned by a grease fire as a child, Roy’s face was a mass of frightening scar tissue that made most people turn away, but he’d found a wonderful woman who saw beneath the scars to the kind, gentle man beneath.

A sudden commotion in the main office grabbed his attention. Evelyn was arguing with two men he’d never seen before. He could see Evelyn only from the back, but her stance was rigid as she shook her head. He rose, prepared to go out and see what was happening, and then Evelyn turned around, her face white and frightened.

He opened the door. “What’s going on?”