a bit.” Anneliese shut the door on Mr. Kolb in the back room, Ruth peering at the broken-spined book he was repairing. “I thought next Saturday we might shop for a wedding dress? I may be able to stitch up a chic sundress, but wedding gowns are beyond me. I saw one in the window at Priscilla of Boston, empire princess silhouette, seed pearls—”
“I think I’ve picked which weekend I’m going to the lake,” Jordan’s father decided. “Suddenly I fancy tramping after some spring turkey.”
“You hunt turkey.” Anneliese gave Jordan a woman-to-woman smile. “We ladies shall hunt French Chantilly and petal-drop caps. I for one know which hunt will be the more ruthless.”
A week later, Jordan was standing in the lavish fitting room at Priscilla of Boston on Boylston Street when the news came. Swathed in ivory satin exploding into a huge bell of a skirt, turning her head to feel the Lalique pearls swinging as Anneliese waved away the salesgirl trying to suggest ruffles: “My stepdaughter is not a ruffles sort of bride.” Turning to tease Anneliese with some mother-of-the-bride joke, thinking how glad she was that the two of them could laugh and tease each other now. That was when Jordan saw Anneliese’s eyes go toward the door, where a man in a dark suit stepped forward.
“Mrs. Daniel McBride?” Waiting for Anneliese’s nod. “The clerk at your shop said you could be found here. It’s about your husband.”
Jordan stepped off the dressmaker’s dais, feeling ivory satin pool around her feet. Her eye was taking pictures in jerky little snaps. The man in the suit, looking uncomfortable—click. Anneliese frozen still, face draining of color, a Chantilly wedding veil dropping from her hands—click.
The man cleared his throat. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”
Chapter 23
Ian
May 1950
Aboard the SS Conte Biancamano
It was the first leisure Ian had known in years. Sitting in the cinema lounge of the great ocean liner, nothing to do but watch the parade of passengers in dinner jackets and sequined evening gowns, cigarette smoke and jazz swirling together in idle seduction, dark water of the Atlantic sliding past outside. Enjoy it, the ship seemed to whisper. A little lotus-eating time before the chase begins in Boston.
“I’m so bloody bored I could jump over the rail,” he said to his companion.
She grinned: a tall lanky woman in her fifties, loose trousers and boar-tusk ivory bracelets, a faint stammer, and mangled-looking hands that drew stares. “Another d-drink?”
Ian inspected his tumbler. “No, thank you.”
“What happened to the stories I heard about you drinking Hemingway under the table?”
“It got rather old.”
“So will you, and then w-what will you have to show for it?”
“Fewer hangovers, Eve. Fewer hangovers.”
Ian frequently reflected that the greatest advantage from a life spent hopping all over the map trying to catch the next war was that he never knew where he’d meet an old friend last seen in a Spanish airdrome or a Tunisian bar or the deck of a French troopship. His last encounter with Eve Gardiner had been during the Blitz in London, seeing her shake glass slivers out of her hair in the middle of a bombed-out pub. Everyone else ran for an air-raid shelter when the alarm went off, but Eve kept right on reading the Dispatches from London column. “‘It’s their good humor that surprises me,’” she read aloud as Ian trailed back in after the raid. “‘How this city can paste a smile on its collective face and still get to work more or less on time—’ Miss Ruby Sutton writes a good column. You’ve got your work c-cut out for you, Graham. Try to live up to all this good press and trundle off to work with a smile, won’t you?”
And now here they were drinking scotch in idle luxury, bound for the United States. Behind him was bleak, bombed Vienna with the temporarily closed-down center; ahead was the new chase. Here there was limbo, and an old friend met by chance.
“It’s been good bumping into you, G-Graham.” Eve finished her drink, rising. “I’d stay, but I’ve got a tall colonel in my c-cabin who keeps me from getting b-bored on ocean crossings.”
“Is that the secret of surviving shipboard travel?” Ian rose, gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I should have packed an army officer.”
“You packed a Russian anarchist.” Eve nodded across the cinema lounge where Nina’s blond head was coming through the crowd. “Is she a p-pilot?”