The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,66
reached the front door, Thalia was beside her. The odd expression was gone, and Thalia opened the door for her with a flourish and a half-bow.
Inside, there was a modern bar off to their right, and ahead, an older woman with a sleek bun stood at a hostess stand. Laurel hardly glanced at them. She was staring up at the dome. The whole ceiling was a mosaic of the ocean floor, with shells and starfish and red crabs scuttling. Mermaids lounged down low, near the walls, and Triton himself coiled on a sea serpent’s tail in the center. On the deep blue walls, bright fish swam, shimmering and quick-looking. Laurel’s feet were planted on a sky-blue floor.
“Holy cats,” she whispered to Thalia.
The hostess was asking Thalia for the name on the reservation, but Thalia said to her, “Oh, I see the rest of our party.” She took Laurel’s elbow and marched her past the stand.
Laurel, still looking up at the ceiling, let herself be led, but then she stopped and said, “What rest of our party?”
Thalia said, “I’m sorry, Bug.” She sounded like she meant it. She tilted her head, indicating the diners.
“You didn’t,” Laurel said, all at once sure that Thalia had called Mother. Somehow, Thalia had read the Ouija’s small and ugly words out of Laurel’s mind, and she’d made Mother bring Shelby here for crab legs and interrogation.
The restaurant had two levels, with a circle of sky-blue stairs leading down to a round dining area directly under the dome. Upstairs, businesspeople lined the walls, a blurry border of black and gray and navy, the men in ties, the women in sensibly chic pumps. Laurel dismissed them and searched the lower circle. It was filled with women sitting in brightly colored pairs and trios and whole gaggles, chatting and drinking chardonnay or Pellegrino. Laurel looked from table to table, seeking Mother’s fluffy topknot, Shelby’s bright braids. “I don’t see them,” she said.
She realized she was gripping Thalia’s arm hard. Too hard. It probably hurt. She hoped it hurt, a little. Today was supposed to have been a reprieve.
“There,” Thalia said. She thrust her chin to the right.
Laurel looked again, all the way to the far-right wall this time, to the dull-colored edge of business diners. Her gaze caught. It was David.
He was sitting at a two-top, wearing his usual khakis and a blue chambray button-down shirt. Scampi’s had loaned him a jacket. It was an awful checked rusty thing, no doubt crawling with the filth of a thousand sweaty-necked businessmen. There was a woman with him, a brunette, but Laurel hardly glanced at her.
“Oh, for the love of Pete,” Laurel said, turning to her sister, not sure if she was irritated or simply relieved. “You brought me here to see this?”
No doubt Thalia expected her to snatch a steak knife off a passing surf-and-turf plate and go scrabbling toward David, leaping over other diners, going for his throat. Thalia would have already stabbed him by now. But Thalia didn’t know David. He couldn’t manage an affair unless Laurel dressed him for it and made the hotel reservations and put all his assignations into the BlackBerry he toted around in his pocket and called Dr. Theophilus.
But Thalia was nodding, looking at Laurel with that same strange expression, her lips thinned and pressed. This time Laurel recognized it. It was simple pity, a tourist of an emotion; it hadn’t ever lived on Thalia’s face long enough for Laurel to know it when she saw it there.
“Are you insane?” Laurel asked. “David wouldn’t do that to me and Shelby. He couldn’t. He never has.”
Thalia said, “You don’t know what I—”
“Yes, I do,” Laurel interrupted. “When you took the brownie down, you heard them planning lunch over that TeamSpeak thing in the computer. Redhead in the basement, my aunt Fanny. It’s a business lunch for the game he’s making.” She glanced at the woman at David’s table again, then back at her sister. “She’s not even wearing lipstick, Thalia. Who has an affair without lipstick?”
“Laurel,” Thalia said, and the sound of her sister saying her real name was enough to make Laurel pause. “Stop looking at me. Look at them.”
So Laurel did. She turned and watched them across the room. The sleeves on David’s borrowed jacket were too short for his long, spidery arms, and his wrists jutted out as he gestured. He was gesturing a lot, Laurel noticed, and that was because he was talking to the woman. David. Talking.