The Saberdene Variations by Thomas Gifford

Author:Thomas Gifford [Gifford, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781453269275
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2012-08-14T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

ONE

IT WAS A RELIEF, WHEN I checked the messages on the machine back at the house, to hear Caro telling me that she’d be spending the evening at the hospital with her father. She’d get a sandwich in the coffee shop. Then she and Andy were planning to watch Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. She laughed and said they had a chair for me if I felt like attending. “If you come,” she said, “bring the popcorn.”

I stood by the desk smiling at the sound Of her voice, half-thinking I might join them. But no, Samantha Barber had put me in a rotten mood and I was relieved that I didn’t have to inflict it on Caro. She was very sensitive to my moods. She would have asked me what was wrong and the last thing I wanted to do was haul out the specter of Victor’s old girlfriend. Whatever had happened between them, if indeed Caro had ever gone to the Barber place at all, it was bound to bring up unpleasant and unnecessary associations.

Samantha Barber’s motivation continued to elude me. The more I thought about it the more the woman’s performance tended to splinter. If I hadn’t known Caro I might have believed the story. Which only went to show you the value of the objective outsider’s opinion: it could be so easily pushed and pulled into an unwarranted monstrosity. Thank God I did know her, could protect her from a character assassin.

In the latter part of the evening I needed to get out of the house. It had begun to rain and the heat had eased into the midseventies. The rain was coming down hard, bouncing in a blur off the pavement, reflecting the headlights of the cars sending up furls of water from the paving. I stood at the top of the steps feeling the first cooling breeze in a long time. I opened Victor’s umbrella with its ash handle, had a momentary flashback, to Victor standing in the rain in Harvard Square more than twenty years before, felt the twinge that came when I realized I would never see him again, that now the times we had shared were truly fading into oblivion where they would finally disappear as if they had never happened, as if Victor and I had never existed.

I pulled myself out of that, looked across the street to where I’d once seen Varada from a window in Victor’s study. Varada, Varada …

Where the hell was he? What was he doing now? Had he left New York, left our lives? And how would we know whether he had or not? How long would he linger in our minds, threatening us? How desperately insignificant Samantha Barber seemed when you had even the memory of Varada. I thought how many heart-stopping memories of him I had gathered in so short a time. And the gallery of those snapshots of time Caro must have stored inside her …

I was still contemplating Carl Varada when

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