From This Moment (9 page)

“If the floor is making you that miserable, I’ll pay off the bill with my own money,” he said. “It’s ridiculous to keep arguing about it.”

A movement through the office window caught his attention. Visitors were rare on the fourth floor, and whenever he met with Evelyn, he kept an eye out in case anyone entered the managerial office. His eyes widened as he recognized the familiar figure walking through the door to loiter in front of Evelyn’s vacant desk.

This was going to be a problem.

“Would you excuse me for a moment?” He stood, fastening his vest and praying Evelyn wouldn’t turn around and notice who had just stepped into their office, for it was probably the last person on the planet she expected or wanted to see.

Evelyn’s glare was stony. “Don’t think I’m going to forget about this.”

“I never for a moment thought you would,” he said tightly as he stepped around his desk, relieved she didn’t turn around to see who was standing a few yards away.

A smile spread across his face the instant he stepped out of his private office and closed the door. “Hello, Clyde,” he said to Evelyn’s estranged husband. “Let’s step out into the hall, shall we?”

It was the first time Clyde had seen their new building, and he seemed amazed as he scanned the spacious office, noting the high coffered ceilings and shaded wall sconces. His head swiveled to take it all in. “Nice office,” he murmured. Clyde’s blue eyes looked pale against his deeply tanned face, but his blond hair had darkened a bit since they’d seen each other last.

When the three of them had been running the magazine, they had done so from the tiny apartment Clyde and Evelyn shared. There had been barely enough room for the three of them, and they’d knocked elbows as they wrote out addresses by hand. They didn’t even have a proper desk, and Evelyn set the typewriter on a sofa table, sitting on the floor as she typed up the articles written by him and Clyde.

“Is Evelyn here?”

Romulus grabbed Clyde’s elbow, turning him toward the door leading back into the hallway. This needed to be handled delicately. “She’s here, but now isn’t a good time. She’s in a bit of a mood.”

They stepped into the relative privacy of the hallway. “Still?” Clyde said. “It seems she’s been in a mood for the past six years.”

Romulus stiffened. He was allowed to tease Evelyn, but no one else could. “Watch it,” he murmured.

Was there anything more awkward than being smack in the middle of a marital dispute? He and Clyde had become enduring friends within five minutes of meeting each other ten years ago. And when Clyde and Evelyn had announced their engagement, he had been overjoyed that his two best friends had found happiness together. Just because Evelyn had kicked
Clyde back out onto the streets didn’t mean Romulus intended to follow her example.

Clyde held up his hands in surrender. “Sorry. It’s a stressful time . . .”

“What are you doing here? The last I heard you were living in New York.” That had been the deal when Clyde and Evelyn had split apart six years ago. Evelyn would live in Boston, and Clyde could live anywhere else in the entire world so long as he stayed entirely out of Boston.

Clyde shifted nervously. “New York has just scuttled their plans for a subway. Again.”

The wind left Romulus’s lungs in a mighty gust. Clyde was one of the lead engineers on the subway that was due to break ground in New York. He’d spent years working on an ambitious plan to tunnel through the bedrock beneath Manhattan, boring beneath historic city streets in a project even more complicated than the subway under construction in Boston.

“I’ve spent the past two years paying draftsmen and surveyors out of my own pocket,” Clyde said. “I was sure to win the contract, but the date to break ground has been set back yet again. The financing has fallen through. I’m flat broke and can’t wait any longer.”

“So what are you doing in Boston?” Romulus asked, although he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

Humor lit Clyde’s suntanned face. “I don’t know if you noticed how ripped up the streets are outside. Rumor has it Boston is building a subway, and I need a job.”

Romulus folded his arms across his chest. “About that little agreement you have with my cousin? About living anywhere in the world so long as you leave her in peace in Boston?”

“I’ve spent the past two years and every dollar to my name designing an electrical grid that can power a subway,” Clyde
said. “I’m one of the few engineers in the country who knows how to do it, so I’m coming to Boston. Meet the lead electrical engineer for the Tremont link.”

Romulus sighed. Unlike most major engineering projects, which were under the leadership of a single contractor, Boston had elected to award the contracts to twelve different engineers, each of whom would have responsibility for a unique segment of the subway.

“Did you have to win the
Tremont
line?” Romulus grumbled. “It’s right outside our window.”

“I’ll be underground most of the time, so Evelyn won’t even have to look at me if she doesn’t want.”

Try as he might, Clyde couldn’t disguise the pain in his voice. For most of their marriage, Clyde and Evelyn had done little but hurt each other. There had been a couple years of bliss when the two of them had been so deliriously happy that they could light up any room they entered, but those times were eventually overshadowed by the bad. There was plenty of blame to go around, and Romulus was tired of being a go-between. It had been four years since he and Evelyn had last seen Clyde, but Romulus still remembered what an ugly scene it was.

Clyde had been working at the Menlo Park Laboratory with Thomas Edison, but Edison was famously difficult to work with, as was Clyde. The two of them had locked horns, and Clyde had ended up on the street. He sold a few of his successful patents, but when the money ran dry, Clyde came to Boston, looking to sell his share of
Scientific World
. Clyde and Evelyn were still married, which meant Clyde shared Evelyn’s fifty-percent stake in the magazine. He thought an easy solution for his money problems would be to have Evelyn and Romulus buy him out.

Clyde’s request wasn’t unreasonable. In all the years he had been separated from Evelyn, he hadn’t collected a dime from the
magazine, letting Evelyn live off the earnings while he traveled the country, a brilliant engineer with a habit of clashing with his employers. Four years ago when Clyde had come to them, he had been broke, desperate for money, and wanted to sell his share of the magazine.

Evelyn had panicked, as had Romulus. The paltry newsletter they’d bought had grown into a world-class operation, but most of the money had been reinvested into the magazine. They bought expensive equipment, paid a monthly lease on a spectacular office building, and spent almost everything else on the salaries of forty employees. He and Evelyn each pocketed a generous salary, but they didn’t have a spare thirty thousand dollars to buy Clyde out.

For weeks, Romulus had been unable to sleep. He’d been forced to hire a lawyer to fight his best friend, whose ugly marital difficulties were now reaching out to taint his only professional accomplishment. Evelyn had been so sick at heart she couldn’t eat. She lost weight and arrived at the office looking like a stiff wind could blow her over. A court date loomed, and they both knew Clyde would win, which would force them to sell the magazine.

In the end, Romulus asked Evelyn and the lawyers to leave the room so he and Clyde could try to salvage something of the friendship that had never died. Romulus agreed to pull out every stop to get Clyde hired to teach at the newly established engineering program at Dartmouth. Over the years, Romulus had been collecting favors from scientists and academics, and he cashed them in to get Clyde that lucrative job. In exchange, Clyde had signed his rights to the magazine over to Evelyn, and he’d agreed to leave her in peace in Boston.

It seemed most brilliant engineers shared the same Achilles’ heel. No matter how kind or easygoing they were in their
personal life, when it came to scientific invention, they were fierce and inflexible. Clyde’s tenure at Dartmouth hadn’t lasted long, and he moved on to the challenge of the subway in New York. This time Clyde’s unemployment wasn’t his fault. Projects this monumental often took decades before they finally got underway, and Clyde had been caught in the turbulence of the launch.

“Aren’t there any other subways in need of a good engineer?” Romulus asked.

“Berlin is the only other city in the world currently building a subway. I don’t speak German, and I need this job.”

Romulus nodded. “I’ll deal with Evelyn. She won’t like it, but I’ll talk her around.”

Clyde looked away, the echo of remembered pain on his face. “How is she?”

“She’s fine. I sometimes wonder if—”

The elevator doors opened, and a group of typesetters poured into the hallway, heading toward the front office to collect their weekly paychecks. Clyde’s brows snapped together, his lips tensed in frustration. By the time the gaggle of typesetters had funneled into the office, an old memory had surfaced in Romulus’s mind.

“In one of the first issues of the magazine, you translated a passage from Otto Lilienthal on his design for a glider.”

“So?”

“So you
do
speak German. At least enough to communicate with a construction team.”

Clyde’s shoulders sagged. The spark of energy drained from his eyes, and he looked beaten and sad. “I can’t give up on her. I’ve tried, Rom. I know she can’t stand the sight of me, and when she asked me to stay away, I tried to do as she asked.” He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing as his eyes filled
with reluctant humor. “They say that when a zebra is born, the mother won’t let her calf look at any other zebra until her pattern of stripes is indelibly imprinted on the baby, never to be forgotten. That’s what Evelyn is for me. She was the first and only woman I’ve ever loved. When I think of the meaning of that word, hers is the face I see. No matter how many years pass, no matter how far I travel, Evelyn White is the only woman I’ll ever love.”

The door opened, and a pair of typesetters left with their paychecks in hand. Clyde watched them with solemn eyes. The typesetters were young and pretty, but they could have been a troop of army rangers for all the attention Clyde showed them.

He pushed away from the wall. “I wanted to let you and Evelyn know I was in town. I’ll try to stay out of her way.”

Clyde was halfway down the hall toward the elevator when Romulus called out, “Clyde? Her name is still Evelyn Brixton. Don’t let her forget it.”

And for the first time, a bit of hope lightened Clyde’s face as he nodded and turned away.

5

C
hilly rain pelted Stella as she left City Hall, a perfectly awful end to a miserable Monday. Her shoulders ached from stooping over the stenotype machine, a headache throbbed from the clatter of typing in the office, and she’d gone nearly blind transcribing notes from a dreary meeting about the subway contracts. And she’d found no additional men who might be Gwendolyn’s enigmatic A.G.

The folded newspaper over her head was a poor substitute for a proper umbrella, and she was soaked by the time she boarded a packed streetcar filled with other damp, irritated travelers.

It had been six days since her meeting with Romulus at the pub, which began with such promise but ended so badly. Given what she’d learned from the waterman, she was more convinced than ever that Gwendolyn’s death had not been an accidental drowning. All her attempts to contact the medical examiner had failed, and she was about to embark on her last resort.

An exhumation of Gwendolyn’s body for a second autopsy.

She had the funds to pay for a private examination, but it had to be done in such a way that her parents never learned of it. Her mother’s mental stability was already tenuous, and her father flat out insisted that Gwendolyn’s death was an accident.

She clenched the handstrap as the streetcar bumped and jostled, the stink of wet woolen clothing making her feel ill. She didn’t want a second autopsy. She didn’t want her sister’s body exhumed and prodded and cut open once again, but how else could she be certain Dr. Lentz had been wrong?

She’d lost her best shot at winning an appointment with him when she’d bungled her meeting with Romulus. It seemed everywhere she went in Boston she was making enemies rather than friends. Even her landlord resented her following that incident with the bees’ nest in her mailbox. She still had no explanation for the bizarre event, but at least the agony in her hand was finally beginning to ease.

The rain had trickled to a drizzle by the time she arrived at her boardinghouse, but she was still cold, damp, and itchy. She held her breath each time she opened the mailbox, bending over to peer inside before reaching in. There was another letter today. Her breath caught when she recognized the bold scrawl on the outside of the envelope. What did Romulus want?

She ripped open the letter, and a smile curved her mouth as she read the formal proposal.

Miss West,

I am searching for an artist to design a challenging series of advertisements for my magazine. In exchange for your cooperation in such a project, I am willing to use my influence to smooth your way at the medical examiner’s office, provided you agree to the standard rules of etiquette. To date you have displayed the manners of a common wood tick, but I live in hope.

Sincerely,
Romulus White
Publisher, Scientific World

A wood tick? She grinned as a surge of anticipation shot through her. Romulus could insult her all he wanted so long as he delivered on his promise. How was she to contact him to accept his offer? His note made no mention of a meeting, but the return address on the envelope was to the office of
Scientific World
on Tremont Street.

She set off to see him the first thing the following morning. She was not required to be at City Hall until ten o’clock, so she ought to have plenty of time to meet with Romulus before her workday began.