Sigrid was stunned. "And?"
"And nothing. They were partners and your father was killed and this is the first time I've met him since the funeral."
"But you hate him. Why? Was it something to do with Dad's death?" Abruptly, Sigrid realized she'd never been told many of the actual details. "What really happened? Was it the captain's fault?"
"I don't know what really happened," Anne said raggedly. "I wasn't there." Sudden tears misted her thick eyelashes. "All I know is that your father was killed and McKinnon wasn't even wounded." She ran a tired hand through her curls. "Honey, I'm bushed. Home to bed for me."
"What about El Diego?"
"He'll just have to wait. I can't go jetting off with my only child slashed to ribbons."
"Don't be dramatic, Mother. I'm perfectly capable of managing."
"Oh Lord, don't I know it!" Anne sighed. How very apt that old tale of a hen's bafflement when she discovered she'd hatched a duckling…
Since infancy, Anne had known how pretty she was. It was a matter of record and not conceit. All the Lattimore women, sisters, mother, aunts, and cousins were beauties: in that family, mere prettiness was taken for granted. Therefore, when she went north to study photography and almost immediately married a stunningly handsome New Yorker who looked like a direct throwback to Viking forebears, everyone assumed their child would be something special.
Yet even a geneticist couldn't have predicted Sigrid's rearrangement of parental genes. She had Leif's height, nearly six inches taller than her mother, but her skinny angularity lacked his athletic gracefulness. She had also inherited his thin nose and high cheekbones, and her wide eyes were shaped like his blue ones, but their changeable gray color came from Anne. Her hair was dark like Anne's, yet absolutely straight and so silky fine that Sigrid had long ago quit trying to do anything with it. She kept it braided into a severe knot at the nape of her neck and could put it up in two minutes flat without the aid of a mirror.
In fact, Sigrid seldom looked in mirrors. She well knew that her neck was too long, her mouth too wide, her chin too strong. By the age of thirteen she'd decided once and for all that she would never be attractive. From that time on, mirrors had stopped being important.
Of course, thought Anne, none of this would have mattered if only her daughter had caught the Lattimore knack of easy self-assurance. At least half the famous women she photographed every year had serious beauty flaws, but they believed themselves lovely and a willing world accepted their own valuations.
She blamed herself for Sigrid's lack of physical self-confidence. In those first few years after Leif's death, she'd moved around so restlessly, changing apartments the way other women change furniture, too unhappy to see what her frenetic life style was doing to an already introspective child.
"I should never have sent you off to that boarding shool when you were so young," she said mournfully. As if to compensate for past maternal lapses, Anne poured a fresh glass of water from the carafe and held it to Sigrid's lips.
Sigrid sipped obediently and then lay back upon the pillow. "It didn't hurt for you to leave me then and it's not going to hurt now," she said, following the main points of her mother's illogical thought processes with the ease of long practice. "Go home, Mother. Get some sleep and then get on a plane. I'll be fine."
Her arm throbbed and she was too tired for more talk. "If you really want to do something for me just get my car away from that fire hydrant and don't forget to leave a note telling me where you've put it."
"I'm not that disorganized," Anne protested and they both smiled, remembering.
"Good night, honey," Anne said softly and Sigrid smelled the familiar scent of jasmine as her mother bent to kiss her, then left.
Pain stabbed her left arm, her hand burned, and her right arm was beginning to hurt, too, from the intravenous' apparatus. To complicate matters, Sigrid realized that she was going to have to sleep on her back, a thoroughly disagreeable prospect for one who always slept on her stomach.
She delayed the ordeal for a few minutes, replaying in her mind the scene that had just taken place between her mother and her boss.
What an odd coincidence that she should wind up working for her father's onetime partner. That at least explained the tension she'd always sensed with him, his air of undefined expectation. He must have thought it strange that she never mentioned her father to him, but why had he waited for her to bring it up first?
She scrunched her shoulders deeper into the pillow, trying to get comfortable as she considered her relationship with detective Tildon. She was shaken and angered that he'd been hurt tonight, but although they worked well together they knew almost nothing about each other's personal lives. She was sure it would have been different with her father and McKinnon.
Anne never talked about those days, but relatives who enjoyed telling Sigrid what a love match her parents' marriage had been had also described Leif Harald as possessing a genial friendliness as open and spontaneous as his wife's. Those two would surely have made McKinnon a part of their lives; yet she, their daughter, had grown up with no recollection of ever having heard McKinnon's name. Nor, in that handful of snapshots her mother kept, had there been a picture of the two men together, although Sigrid seemed to recall half a picture of her young father laughing into the camera and someone's hand on his shoulder. McKinnon's?
What really happened, she wondered, that day her father died? Why had Anne cut McKinnon out of their lives as neatly as she had scissored him out of that picture?
Both arms hurt badly now and Sigrid began to long for sleep's release. She tried naming the fifty states in alphabetical order and when that failed, she began a chronological listing of presidents and vice-presidents, a proven soporific. She had just reached Ulysses S. Grant and Schuyler Colfax and was drowsily fumbling for Grant's second vice-president when the door to her room whooshed open on pneumatic hinges and a young Asian nurse entered to remove the IV needle from her right arm.
Sigrid gratefully flexed it and the nurse smiled sympathetically. "Feels better, yes?"
"Yes."
"And your other arm, please? Your doctor, he has left pain medicine if it hurts too much."
"Not yet," Sigrid said stoically, easing onto her stomach.
The nurse tucked in the blanket and rolled the IV stand out while Sigrid gave up on Grant's second term and moved on to Rutherford B. Hayes and William Wheeler… James A. Garfield and… Chester A. Arthur. No vice-president for Arthur and then came Grover Cleveland and Henderson? No, Hendricks. Thomas Hendricks…
The throbbing of her arm took on its own metronomic rhythm and she fell into an uneasy sleep.