Prospect Street (33 page)

“Lyddy, let's not dance around it. We won't resurrect the dead by uttering a name. I did not tell her that you had an affair with Dominik Dubrov. I believe that's for you to tell her. But your daughter suspects there may have been another man in your life.”

“How dare you!”

“No, how dare
you?
You have shared nothing with her. You are a stranger to your own child.”

Lydia sat back. “You know nothing.”

“I know Dominik was more than a handyman. You had an
affair. Yet you never came forward with that information, not even when the poor man was suspected of stealing your baby.”

“You are delusional.”

“I know the facts, Lyddy.”

“You're testing a pet theory.”

“I'm repeating the truth. And you are trying to lie your way out of it, just the way you did when you were a winsome child of four.”

Dottie Lee set the Chihuahua on the sofa beside her, and the dog snuggled into a pillow and fell asleep before Lydia spoke again.

“I was unhappy. The affair was brief and doomed. I'm the one who ended it. It was impossible.”

Dottie Lee nodded, waiting.

“I always wondered if you knew,” Lydia said at last.

“I always wondered why you didn't come forward when Dominik was under suspicion. Would you have, if they had accused him and taken him off to jail?”

“What good would the truth have done? Never mind what harm.”

“He spent untold hours at your house, more than seemed necessary. A personal relationship would have explained some of them. He seemed particularly emotional after Hope's disappearance, more so than a stranger should have. That concerned the authorities.”

“You know why I didn't tell. I would have been tying the noose around his neck. He was the strongest suspect they had. He had access to the house. He had opportunity. He was familiar with the layout. He had a key!”

“But he didn't have a motive,” Dottie Lee said.

“A jealous lover is a motive for any crime. I knew what the police would say. Dominik was angry that I had broken off our affair, so he kidnapped Hope in retaliation. Or he took her because he was a crazy Slavic immigrant who felt entitled to some of my happiness, or because he wanted ransom money to ease his personal suffering.”

“There was no ransom note.”

“Because she died, or because he got frightened. Don't you see? I knew the way the authorities would view this. My announcement would have provided them with the one thing they lacked. And for what? To explain his presence in my house? His work explained it well enough. The rest was simply speculation.”

“So once I made up an alibi for Dominik, you felt free to remain silent?”

“
Made up
an alibi?”

“All these years, Lyddy, have you believed that nonsense?”

Lydia couldn't look away from Dottie Lee's face. “You lied? He wasn't here with you that afternoon?”

“I knew the FBI and that monster in charge of it. Hoover was willing to do nearly anything to close the case quickly. An hour after Hope was reported missing, I suddenly realized poor Dominik was in danger of being railroaded. It was only a matter of time, and I saw no reason to allow that.”

“If you were going to lie, why not go all the way? Why did you make up that part about the hardware store? Because of that, he was still under suspicion until the day he died. Afterward, too.”

“I couldn't say he was here the entire afternoon because a friend stopped by to see me, and of course he didn't see Dominik in the house. So I made up the story about the hardware store because Dominik had gone there earlier that day on an errand for me. I told him to use the story if he was questioned. Dominik, bless him, had trouble understanding why we should lie. But he'd spent enough years under Communism to be persuaded that innocent men are easily convicted. Even in America.”

“Then where was he, if he wasn't with you?”

Dottie Lee sat back. “Do you suspect him even now, Lyddy?”

“Where was he!”

“Walking. Trying to make sense of his life. Trying to decide
what to do with the rest of it. No witnesses, of course. Only his word.”

Lydia couldn't think about Dominik now, not about his whereabouts on the day her child was stolen or the feelings she'd had for him. “How many more people would have been destroyed if I had admitted to the affair?”

“In retrospect?”

“Joe's career would have suffered. I would never have been able to hold up my head in Washington again. Dominik had a wife and child who needed him. I would have destroyed everything. And for what end? Honesty?” Lydia gave a bitter laugh.

“And yet you must have wondered if, by keeping even this one detail a secret, you hindered the search for your daughter.”

“Just as you wondered if a false alibi for the strongest suspect might have hindered the search, too?”

“And now your daughter's digging away at the truth, one speck at a time.”

“I want you to stay away from Faith.”

“She'll discover what she needs to know without me. I'm merely a conduit.
You
would be a better one.”

“Me? Do you really think I'm going to sit her down and tell her I was an unhappy bride who had an affair with my handyman? That somehow that will set things right between us?”

“I've always believed I would still be alive when the truth about all of this finally came out. I've depended on it.”

Lydia got to her feet. “Or have you believed that someday you would force your version of the truth into the open? Is that it, Dottie Lee? You sit in this house day after day, looking for ways to enrich your life because you have nothing else. And now that Faith's fallen into your path, you're using her to enliven your miserable isolation.”

Dottie Lee rose. Slowly, Lydia noted, as if she were suddenly weary to the bone. “I can stay away from Faith, of course. But it won't do any good. There are forces at work here that are beyond our control.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that sometimes, dear, there's very little we can do except watch. And tell the truth as we know it.”

Lydia started toward the door. Clearly there was nothing else to be said. Too much had been revealed already.

“Lyddy?”

She turned in the doorway and found Dottie Lee just behind her.

“We're family here on Prospect Street,” Dottie Lee said. “Oh, there aren't so many of us left now. There are strangers in too many of our houses. They move in and out, and leave nothing of themselves behind. But you and I…the ties that bind us are strong. I won't be the one to sever them. But I can't stop outside forces from ripping them to shreds.”

“You're an old woman, Dottie Lee. And old women imagine things.”

“Come and visit again. We can be old women together, old women talking of old times.”

Lydia reached for the doorknob to let herself out. Dottie Lee stood tall, her white hair twisted back from her face with mother-of-pearl combs. For a moment Lydia saw the young Dottie Lee, a black-haired vixen with enough allure to fascinate the high and mighty.

Lydia could not come this close to her past again. She shook her head. “I'll come to your wake.”

 

Lydia didn't go home. She went back to Faith's, because she wasn't sure if she had turned off the coffeemaker. She was increasingly absentminded these days, although she knew it was preoccupation and not the onset of dementia. Heaven help her if she ever did lapse into Alzheimers. Joe would sweep her under the carpet like an afternoon's worth of dust. Then, once she was safely out of the way, he would wax eloquent on the need for better health care for seniors—while he voted down every attempt his own party made to institute it.

Joe Huston, the worst mistake of the many she had made.

In the kitchen she saw that the coffeemaker was indeed on,
and she poured one last cup before she switched it off. She wasn't sure why she didn't just leave, or rather, she
was
sure and hated to admit it. She was here because this house still echoed with the voice of Dominik Dubrov. And even though Dottie Lee had insisted that talking about him wouldn't resurrect the dead, of course it had. Thirty-nine years later his face was as clear to her as if she were staring at him.

They had been standing in this kitchen the first time he kissed her. They hadn't planned it, of course. She had been so far above him in status, a fact that had mattered more to her than to Dominik, who believed himself any man's equal. They had been married, and both of them had taken their marriages seriously, although for different reasons. He from a deep sense of responsibility to his wife and child, she because…

Lydia set down her cup and put her head in her hands. She because her father was a powerful man, and power was everything to her. She had grown up with privilege and a sense of entitlement. She
deserved
marriage to a man who could ensure both. So she married Joe, but she fell in love with Dominik.

She had never grown tired of him, never dreaded his appearance at her door or the feel of his body in her bed. He asked for nothing except those all-too-brief hours together. If she had fantasies of asking for more, she eradicated them before the words were formed. It was enough just to share their forbidden, ecstatic pleasure. She hadn't envisioned the future, because she had known what she would see.

She just hadn't known exactly
how
it would end.

 

Dominik was a passionate man, at home in his body—and in hers. There were no neutrals in Dominik's world. Wild, glorious color splashed everything he saw and saturated each moment. For a man with little education, he knew something about everything. He understood the real heart of politics, the flickers of idealism, the compromises that often extinguished them. He could sing entire arias in credible Italian, and once he
bought her a cheap print of Botticelli's
Birth of Venus
just to show her the shade of green he envisioned for her living room.

He wept over dew on a rose petal, raged over a candy wrapper in the street. Each time he invited her into his heart, she fell in love more deeply. She lived for the moments they shared and refused to think of the day when they would cease.

Until the day they did.

Dominik was late that afternoon. She knew his son was often ill and required medical intervention. Dominik's wife was angry at fate. She was a good mother, he claimed, but since fate was unavailable, she blamed Dominik for the boy's asthma. He didn't work hard enough, fast enough, long enough, and their relative poverty meant hours in clinic waiting rooms. She couldn't work, because the wheezing Pasha couldn't be left with a babysitter. Her only recourse was to rail at her husband.

Lydia didn't want to hear about Dominik's marriage, although she understood his need to talk. When they were together, she tried not to mention Joe. She wanted their time to be private, without the shadows of their marriages intruding. Joe traveled so frequently and invited her to join him so infrequently that she had days, sometimes weeks, when she could pretend she wasn't married at all.

Now the fantasy was over.

Dominik arrived nearly an hour after she had expected him. His dark hair was ruffled, as if he had been digging his fingers through it all morning. His face was drawn.

“I'm sorry, this could not be helped.”

She nodded and held the door wide, although he had a key and could let himself in. He entered, removed knit gloves and stuffed them in the pocket of his threadbare overcoat before he removed that, too, and slung it over his arm.

“You are alone?” he asked.

“Joe's out of town again.”

He didn't move to embrace her. He was always hesitant, as if he needed confirmation that she really wanted him.

Today she couldn't give it to him. She crossed her arms
over her breasts, a posture she had taken up since her marriage. The young woman who had been alive and open to anything was learning to close herself away.

“Your son is ill again?” she asked.

“The doctor, he says perhaps the Christmas tree makes him sick. We had to take it to the side of the road for the garbage men. He cried so hard.” Dominik looked as if he had destroyed his son's childhood. “Sandor, he promised Pasha a new tree, a little one all shiny and gold. But this is not a Christmas tree.”

Lydia understood why Dominik was unhappy, but nothing about the situation moved her today. She had too much to think about, and too much to tell him.

And no words.

She fell back on training. “I'm sorry. I hope he'll grow out of this.”

“Time is our best hope.” He reached out tentatively and traced a fingertip along Lydia's cheekbone. “You are all right?”

“No, I'm not, Dominik.” She stood very still, afraid that if she moved, she might launch herself into his arms.

“You are ill?”

“I am pregnant.”

He dropped his hand.

She could see the thoughts running through his head. He had been wise to leave the Soviet Union, for if Dominik had been compelled to hide secrets from the Communist authorities, he would have failed.

“It's Joe's baby,” she said. “You and I have been careful.” They had, in fact, used Joe's own condoms, kept beside their bed but never used by him. Several months ago Joe had decided it was time to have a child. Lydia, far less sure, had secretly been fitted for a diaphragm, which she used whenever she had adequate notice to prepare.

But there had been times when there was no notice, times when Joe mounted her and found his release without so much as a loving word of warning. He found this sexy, she thought,
controlling their lovemaking as he controlled the rest of their lives, making sure she understood who made the decisions.

“
We
have been careful, yes,” Dominik said, “but
he
has been gone. How is it that he could get you with child?”