at least a year. Chatter, chatter, chatter. Every detail of her family drama, her pimply boyfriends, like I was her fucking diary. She slacked off eventually. I kept the ones with new addresses.”
“But left her begging for any sort of reply.”
“I wrote plenty of them,” he said. “When the mood struck me, I’d tie one on and let ’er rip. Christ, I filled pages with excoriating prose, caustic enough to take the paint off that Jeep. Trotted out a whole dictionary of five-dollar words like ‘vapidity.’” His smile was devilish. “You saw that stuff in the bathtub.”
“The ravings of a complete nutter,” she said. “What little I could make out of it.”
“So you see why I never sent them,” he said. “In the cold, semi-sober light of dawn, I didn’t think she was worth the trouble. I only read hers to see if our li-ai-son had had any lasting effect. With me, she glimpsed life’s stunning possibilities, but she tossed it all away. Slid into the unexamined torpor typical of her ilk. Daddy’s little angel, Chip’s little wifey. No reply from me, nasty or not, would have halted her descent once she decided to lie about me.”
“That ring implies you made promises.”
“I gave her my great-aunt’s ruby. Worth almost nothing, apart from sentiment. We had a mock wedding on the golf course at midnight. She wore a white gown from the secondhand shop.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “The campus cops probably could have seen it a mile away in that harvest moon, but it turned out one of the girls was up in a tree watching us, that night and others. Our wedding was the beginning of the end. But that’s true for most couples—end of the romantic illusions, start of festering resentments.”
“Mr. Romantic reveals his cynical soul,” Els said.
He was looking at the bed of birds of paradise. “She put her hair up in this fancy twist and pinned fake gardenias in it.” His smile was ironic, sad. “She’d worn a gardenia wrist corsage to her junior prom. I was a chaperone. She ditched her date long enough to pull me into the field hockey coach’s office. We did it on a pile of pinnies on the floor. She gripped my head when she came. That flower was right next to my ear. She wasn’t a virgin, if you were wondering.” He looked up toward the lounge windows. “That ring you found was her great-great-grandfather’s—supposed to go to the oldest boy, but she had no brother. She believed it had powers. She gave it to me to spite her father. I was one big rebellion against Daddy, until she realized what it could cost her.”
“One seldom anticipates the cost of rebellion,” Els said. A dog barked far away. Susie’s ears pricked. In all her wailing and gnashing about why Mallo had been torn from her, she’d barely considered that his loss might be the price of rebelling against Harald. Nor would she have chosen differently had she known then of her father’s deceit and cruelty.
“I should never have taken that ring,” Jack was saying, “or polluted this place with its evil karma. It’s the cause of a lot of bad stuff.”
“You cannae blame that lump of stone for any of your ill fortune,” she said. A bat flew so close to her arm she could feel the air it stirred. “And you cannae be expecting me to track down this Mrs. Charles Whitman and return the steamy evidence.”
“Burn the letters for all I care,” he said. “The ring is bad juju.”
“Why don’t you just fly up to Cleveland and shove it through her mail slot?”
“I’d never make it. Probably drop it in the ocean, and that’s as bad as taking it to my goddamn grave.” He looked at the sea for a long time. “Look, just give it to Teal, the solicitor.”
She shooed Susie off her lap and stood up. One bat flew between her and Jack, then another. Highly personal items the heir would like returned. She looked at him. “You’re not saying you left her this house after all these years.”
“I assumed Gravy told you her name and you’d pieced it together with that razor sharp brain of yours.”
“He hid every detail of the heir,” she said. “Except that she was no relation of yours, making me wonder which of your many women she might have been.”
“She wasn’t first, best, or last,” he said. “Just consequential.”
“So the fortune I paid for this house went to that wee bitch?”
“Some