Bluer Than Velvet - Mary McBride

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mother had laughed and suggested a seemly eighteen or twenty years might be good, her answer should have been forever.

      Sam felt that too-familiar constriction in his throat now and the hot sheen of moisture in his eyes that always came when he allowed himself to think about Jenny for more than a passing moment. Swearing softly, he reached up to double the pillow under his head, then he closed his eyes, for all the good that would do in blocking out nearly three decades of images that seemed almost permanently etched on his brain. Jenny here. Jenny there. Jenny everywhere.

      Since he couldn’t marry her in kindergarten, he’d waited until their graduation from high school to ask her. She’d put him off, and then put him off again when they graduated from college. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to marry him. She did. She swore she did. But Jenny had her own itinerary. She wanted to go as far as she could as a concert pianist before settling in as Sam’s wife. And she thought she had all the time in the world. They both did.

      His gaze lit on the Divisional boxing trophy he’d won in the Corps. When Jenny moved to Los Angeles to study with the renowned pianist, Hermoine Stahl, it made perfect sense for Sam to enlist in the Marine Corps because Camp Pendleton was just a few hours away from L.A. Later, when Jenny moved to Paris, he pulled a string or two in order to be assigned embassy duty there. Wherever Jenny went, he followed. It had been whither thou goest in reverse.

      When Jenny acquired a rampant case of stage fright that prevented her from performing, he’d resigned from the Corps and followed her back here where he’d run for county sheriff, winning in a surprising landslide. But even then, Jenny wouldn’t marry him. She needed to prove she could play on stage, if only one more time.

      And then, on an icy stretch of Highway A-14, Jenny’s time had run out.

      It was light enough now for Sam’s eyes to trace all the hairline cracks in the ceiling. He wondered how many men his age had only loved one woman in their lives, and of those how many had only made love to one woman. Damned few, he decided.

      While Jenny was alive, he’d been oblivious to other women. In the two years since her death, he’d been both oblivious and numb. Then suddenly Laura McNeal had waltzed out of the Yellow Pages and into his office in her little blue velvet scrap of a dress, and had lit a fire in him that Sam didn’t like one bit.

      He sat up now, rubbing nonexistent sleep out of his eyes. He should’ve known better than to offer to help the woman. But, since he had, he was going to help her with a vengeance. Help her right out of his life.

      Chapter 4

      The next morning, for lack of a garbage truck to grind and groan outside her window at the crack of dawn, Laura didn’t wake up until nine-thirty. There was a note taped to the bathroom mirror. Back soon. Make yourself at home.

      Then, once again in her pathetic search for something to wear, Laura wandered across the hall to stand in the center of the faded, circular rag rug in Sam’s bedroom, looking around, shaking her head in dismay and disbelief. And people called her weird for clinging to the past, she thought.

      Being in Sam’s room, with its maple bunk bed and boyish plaid wallpaper and sturdy hopsacking café curtains, was like time traveling back two or three, maybe even four, decades. It was a bit like suddenly finding herself smack in the middle of an episode of Leave It to Beaver.

      There were felt pennants tacked here and there on the wall, all of them thickly furred with dust. The bookshelves were dusty, too, and crammed with old textbooks and chunky 8-track tapes and ancient, faded copies of National Geographic. She inspected the desktop with its assortment of trophies, half expecting to find a prom ticket and an assignment notebook hidden among them. Boxing. Baseball. Football. Hmm.

      And who, pray tell, was this waif-like brunette in the sterling silver frame? Laura ran a finger across the top of the frame, finding it to be just about the only dustless surface in the room.

      Very interesting. Very interesting. Sam, you devil, you.

      It wasn’t that she was snooping, exactly, even though she was incredibly curious about Zachary, S. U., especially after he’d decked those two thugs, Jerome and Swat, last night without even blinking or breaking a sweat. The guy had turned into Superman right before her very eyes on that rooftop. Bam! Blam! Then, just as quickly, he’d reverted to his quiet, self-effacing alter ego, Clark Kent.

      If Clark Kent had a bedroom, Laura thought now, this is exactly the way it would look.

      Well, maybe she was snooping a little, she admitted to herself, but it was just an honest by-product of trying to find something to wear. Having awakened in her bra and panties, she’d taken one look at the blue velvet dress and decided she couldn’t bear to put it on again. Not just because it was pretty bizarre out here in West Overshoes, but also because it was merchandise intended for the shop and she didn’t want to wear it out. Bad enough she’d have to pay to have it dry-cleaned now before she put it on the rack at Nana’s Attic.

      Having already rejected Sam’s mother’s clothes because of their fragrance, she was hoping to find a T-shirt and perhaps a pair of pants with a drawstring to adjust them from Sam’s size to her own.

      Then, instead of searching for something to wear, she’d been distracted by this time warped room and its ancient contents. With the exception of one or two current news magazines and paperbacks, it looked as if nothing had changed here since the seventies. Certainly nothing had been dusted in months and months. Well, except for Lois Lane over there in her shiny silver frame.

      She was going to take a much closer look at the photograph when a car door slammed in the driveway. All of a sudden Laura felt horribly furtive, like a thief in the night, or worse, like a snoopy woman poking around where it was none of her business. A half-naked snoop at that, she thought, glimpsing herself in the oval mirror above the knotty pine dresser.

      Deciding it was too late to find a top and a bottom, Laura opened the closet and yanked a blue oxford cloth shirt off a hanger. The cuffs cascaded past her fingertips and the shirttails hit her at the knees, but at least she was decently covered, she thought, as she trotted down the stairs to greet Sam.

      The key was already scritching in the lock on the back door when Laura entered the kitchen. The knob rattled to no avail, then the key scritched and scraped again. Sam, it seemed, was back in full Clark Kent mode, unable to even get in his own back door. For some silly reason, that made Laura smile.

      “Wait a minute, Sam,” she called, rolling up the too-long sleeves on her way to throw the stubborn bolt and open the door for him. “There. I hope you don’t mind the shirt. I…”

      It wasn’t Sam.

      It was a woman who looked just as astonished to see Laura as Laura was to see her. The woman blinked as she jerked the key out of the lock, and for a second her mouth moved, but no words came out. Then she stuttered, “I…I’m so sorry. I had no idea that Sam…”

      Her gaze skittered down the front of the big shirt, to Laura’s bare feet, and then back to her face. “I…I didn’t know Sam had…that he…that he was seeing someone.”

      “Seeing?”

      It took a second for the woman’s meaning to register, and when it did, Laura started to laugh, thinking she probably did look like she had just slipped out of Sam’s bed and into his shirt. “It’s really not what it looks like. Believe me. I’m just a client.”

      The woman had stopped blinking. Now she just stared, pretty suspiciously, too, in Laura’s opinion. She was wearing a sleeveless cotton dress, Laura noted, and more than an everyday application of makeup. Lipstick, eyeshadow, liner, mascara, blush. The whole nine yards. Not a single brunette hair was out of place on the woman’s head, either. Somehow she looked vaguely familiar, and then it suddenly occurred to Laura that this was none other than Lois Lane, the face in the dustless silver frame upstairs in Sam’s room.

      Uh-oh.

      “You’re Sam’s client?” Lois asked now, although it was really more of a nasty accusation than a question.

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