Peggy Nicholson: Her Bodyguard

The article said the woman had been lucky, unlike others over the years. She’d fallen at half tide, when a few feet of water covered the jagged beach. Luckier still, a lobsterman tending his pots had seen her from his boat, and rowed frantically over in time to save her from drowning.

The woman had a fractured skull, the article went on to note, and broken bones. She’d been rushed to Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, where the most critical cases were sent. Her name was being withheld pending notification of relatives.

Like me? Nobody told me!

Checking the date of the paper and counting backward, Gillian deduced the fall had occurred the morning of her encounter with Lara, probably within minutes after they’d passed each other. “Name withheld” was a dead giveaway. It took money and power to keep a person’s name out of the papers, especially when that person was a celebrity.

The newspaper had been circumspect, but still the rumors had made the rounds. Gillian had heard them from the women in her aerobics classes at the YMCA, heard them murmured over cups of coffee at the Waves. It was Lara Corday—you know, that Lara—who’d fallen—

She glanced up as a humming came from somewhere overhead. The crystal pendants on the chandelier trembled and a shard of rainbow danced across the ceiling.

“The elevator,” the man said at her elbow.

At last! Gillian swallowed and glanced desperately around the room. Her mind had gone utterly blank; all her endlessly rehearsed words had flown through the open doors and out to sea. There was a carriage clock on the mantel, she noticed, showing the time as ten-thirty. Half an hour, she kept me waiting.

But why should that surprise her? A woman who’d discarded her newborn baby like a worn-out shoe, who’d apparently made her climb to the top her highest priority—why should a woman like that worry that she kept others waiting? Whose time but her own would she value?

The door opened behind her and Gillian turned, dimly aware of the man beside her turning, as well.

“Darling,” he said warmly, and went to meet the woman framed in the doorway.

So that was his place in this household, Gillian realized at last with an odd jolt of dismay. The boyfriend. A virile courtier to replace the aging husband Lara had outlived. It explained his supreme confidence, his proprietary air. He put a hand to Lara’s elbow and led her into the room.

She barely spared him a glance. Her silvery eyes locked on Gillian, and it was the Cliff Walk encounter all over again. An awareness like a path of silver light, a moonbeam tunnel down which they both drifted, until only a few final feet divided them. “Do I—” Lara Corday smiled and shook her head. “I don’t know you, do I? My memory these days...” She gave a tiny, rueful shrug.

“Maybe you do,” suggested the man at her side. He’d advanced with her, one hand resting at the small of her back. “Newport’s a small town. You bump into everybody once a week or so.” His voice was tender, almost coaxing. His eyes flicked to Gillian and she could feel them bore into her.

Let him stare. It was Lara’s gaze that held her. “I don’t think so,” she answered cautiously. Oh, do you know me? But how could she? One of the few facts Gillian had pried from the lawyer was that Laura Lee Bailey had signed the relinquishment papers two days after Gillian’s birth. You saw me once or twice, maybe—that was it.

“Oh, well.” Lara smiled, dismissing the notion. “I know your name, of course, from your application, Gillian. I assume you and Trace have introduced yourselves?”

“More or less,” he said dryly. “Trace Sutton.” He clicked the heels of his running shoes and gave her a mock-formal nod.

A charmer when he wanted to be. Gillian didn’t trust charm.

Lara touched her elbow. “Come sit down and tell me all about yourself.”

I’m taller than she, Gillian realized for the first time, as they. moved toward the two couches that formed an L facing the French doors. By five inches or more. It was a measure of Lara’s presence that she hadn’t noticed till now. I’m too tall, with different hair. My eyes are light brown and hers are gray. Why, we’re nothing alike! What if she’d gotten it wrong somehow? A birth date and a photo—what did they prove? She’d wanted more than paper proof. She’d wanted resemblance, a physical explanation of who and what she was manifest in an earlobe, the shape of a chin, something... Instead all she had was this elusive sense of... connection.

“You said on your résumé that you’re working right now at the YMCA, teaching fitness,” Lara said gently, an actress nudging a forgetful understudy back toward her lines.

“Ah. Yes. I’ve been there since May.” She’d applied for the job the same day she learned of Lara’s accident. Somehow the accident-or perhaps their encounter on the cliffs—had changed her plans. She’d meant to stay in Newport no more than a week. After the accident she could not leave. Not till she learned that Lara was out of danger, she’d told herself.

But one month had slid into the next, and here it was September. “I taught aerobics, tai chi, weight-shaping classes while I worked my way through college. It was a good way to earn money and stay fit.” She’d thought it best to stick to the truth wherever possible. “So when I saw the opening here...” She let her words trail away. I grabbed it. A foothold in your town.

“But I’ve also worked as a secretary, through a temp agency,” she hastened to add, not mentioning she’d been less than a rousing success in the clerical world. What else to say? She should be selling herself, not simply staring. Lara had cut her hair since she saw her last, Gillian realized suddenly—or no, perhaps they’d shaved her head in the hospital. It was boy-short, making her lovely eyes seem enormous. Purple shadows smudged the delicate skin beneath. Her gaze also seemed shadowed, with pain or worry.

“That’s excellent,” Lara said. “I’m looking for someone to deal with my mail and other paperwork, but if you’re athletic, as well—I’m so out of shape—we could train together. An exercise buddy would get me off my duff, get me moving. Can you lay on the guilt? I’m hopelessly lazy!”

“Oh, I can guilt-trip with the best of them.” Gillian laughed. “I learned from an expert—my mom.” Her laughter jammed in her throat, turned to a fit of coughing that brought the tears to her eyes. Mom, how could I?

But it was true. Her adoptive mother, Eleanor Scott—her Real Mother any way you counted—had wielded that parental weapon with surgical deftness. Gillian couldn’t recall a single spanking in all her childhood years. A few well-chosen words of reproach, or one look of loving despair, was all it had taken to make her toe the line. She glanced up to find her own sorrow reflected in Lara’s eyes.

“You love your mother,” she said softly.

“Yes.” Gillian rubbed her lashes. “She died two years ago.” Why am I telling you that? Perhaps because that had started it all. After the funeral they’d found the key to the safe-deposit box. And the letter waiting there for Gillian, which had turned the first twenty-six years of her life into a lie. She wasn’t—never had been—who she thought. So who was she?

Only Lara knew, and in one savage letter she’d closed off all possibility of Gillian’s ever asking.

“I’m sorry,” Lara said. “I understand what it’s like to...miss somebody.”

She was nice! Gillian had expected anything but niceness. How could this woman have written that soul-crunching letter?

She’s an actress, she reminded herself. And a fine one, if winning an Emmy signified anything. Give her a role and presumably she could make it live. But still—