I'll Be Seeing You Read Free Page B

Another Jane Doe.
    At six o’clock that evening, Meghan was just leaving work. As she’d been doing since her father’s disappearance, she was going to spend the weekend in Connecticut with her mother. On Sunday afternoon, she was assigned to cover an event at the Manning Clinic, an assisted reproduction facility located forty minutes from their home in Newtown. The clinic was having its annual reunion of children born as a result of in vitro fertilization carried out there.
    The assignment editor collared her at the elevator.“Steve will handle the camera on Sunday at Manning. I told him to meet you there at three.”
    â€œOkay.”
    During the week, Meghan used a company vehicle. This morning she’d driven her own car uptown. The elevator jolted to a stop at the garage level. She smiled as Bernie spotted her and immediately began trotting to the lower parking level. He brought up her white Mustang and held the door open for her. “Any news about your dad?” he asked solicitously.
    â€œNo, but thanks for asking.”
    He bent over, bringing his face close to hers. “My mother and I are praying.”
    What a nice guy! Meghan thought, as she steered the car up the ramp to the exit.
5
    C atherine Collins’ hair always looked as though she’d just run a hand through it. It was a short, curly mop, now tinted ash blond, that accentuated the pert prettiness of her heart-shaped face. She occasionally reminded Meghan that it was a good thing she’d inherited her own father’s determined jaw. Otherwise, now that she was fifty-three, she’d look like a fading Kewpie doll, an impression enhanced by her diminutive size. Barely five feet tall, she referred to herself as the house midget.
    Meghan’s grandfather Patrick Kelly had come to the United States from Ireland at age nineteen, “with the clothes on my back and one set of underwear rolled under my arm,” as the story went. After working days as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a Fifth Avenue hotel andnights with the cleaning crew of a funeral home, he’d concluded that, while there were a lot of things people could do without, nobody could give up eating or dying. Since it was more cheerful to watch people eat than lie in a casket with carnations scattered over them, Patrick Kelly decided to put all his energies into the food business.
    Twenty-five years later, he built the inn of his dreams in Newtown, Connecticut, and named it Drumdoe after the village of his birth. It had ten guest rooms and a fine restaurant that drew people from a radius of fifty miles. Pat completed the dream by renovating a charming farmhouse on the adjoining property as a home. He then chose a bride, fathered Catherine and ran his inn until his death at eighty-eight.
    His daughter and granddaughter were virtually raised in that inn. Catherine now ran it with the same dedication to excellence that Patrick had instilled in her, and her work there had helped her cope with her husband’s death.
    Yet, in the nine months since the bridge tragedy, she had found it impossible not to believe that someday the door would open and Ed would cheerfully call, “Where are my girls?” Sometimes she still found herself listening for the sound of her husband’s voice.
    Now, in addition to all the shock and grief, her finances had become an urgent problem. Two years earlier, Catherine had closed the inn for six months, mortgaged it and completed a massive renovation and redecoration project.
    The timing could not have been worse. The reopening coincided with the downward trend of the economy. The payments on the new mortgage were not being met by present income, and quarterly taxes were coming due. Her personal account had only a few thousand dollars left in it.
    For weeks after the accident, Catherine had steeled herself for the call that would inform her that her husband’s body had been retrieved from the river. Now she prayed for