Pretend You Don't See Her Read Free Page B

home.”
                 From
the time Todd was five, Lacey had started taking him, and later the other
children, into Manhattan to teach the city to them the way her father had
taught it to her. They called the outings their Jack Farrell days—days which
included anything from Broadway matinees (she had now seen Cats five times) to
museums (the Museum of Natural History and its dinosaur bones being easily
their favorite). They explored Greenwich Village, took the tram to Roosevelt
Island, the ferry to Ellis Island, had lunch at the top of the World Trade
Center, and skated at Rockefeller Plaza.
                 The
boys greeted Lacey with their usual exuberance. Bonnie, shy as always, snuggled
up to her. “I missed you very much,” she confided. Jay told Lacey she was
looking very well indeed, adding that the month in East Hampton obviously had
been beneficial.
                 “In
fact, I had a ball,” Lacey said, delighted to see him wince. Jay had an
aversion to slang that bordered on pretension.
                 At
dinner, Todd, who was showing an interest in real estate and his aunt’s job,
asked Lacey about the market in New York.
                 “Picking
up,” she answered. “In fact I took on a promising new listing today.” She told
them about Isabelle Waring, then noticed that Alex
Carbine showed sudden interest. “Do you know her?” Lacey asked.
                 “No,”
he said, “but I know Jimmy Landi, and I’d met their daughter, Heather. Beautiful young woman. That was a terrible tragedy. Jay,
you’ve done business with Landi. You must have met Heather too. She was around
the restaurant a lot.”
                 Lacey
watched in astonishment as her brother-in-law’s face turned a dark red.
                 “No.
Never met her,” he said, his tone clipped and carrying an edge of anger. “I used
to do business with Jimmy Landi. Who’s ready for another slice of lamb?”
                 It
was seven o’clock. The bar was crowded, and the dinner crowd was starting to
arrive. Jimmy Landi knew he should go downstairs and greet people but he just
didn’t feel like it. This had been one of the bad days, a depression brought on
by a call from Isabelle, evoking the image of Heather trapped and burning to
death in the overturned car that haunted him still, long after he had gotten
off the phone.
                 The
slanting light from the setting sun flickered through the tall windows of his
paneled office in the brownstone on West Fifty-Sixth Street, the home of Venezia , the restaurant Jimmy had opened
thirty years ago.
                 He
had taken over the space where three successive restaurants had failed. He and
Isabelle, newly married, lived in what was then a rental apartment on the
second floor. Now he owned the building, and Venezia was one of the most popular places to dine in Manhattan.
                 Jimmy
sat at his massive antique Wells Fargo desk, thinking about the reasons he
found it so difficult to go downstairs. It wasn’t just the phone call from his
ex-wife. The restaurant was decorated with murals, an idea he had copied from
his competition, La Côte Basque. They were paintings of Venice, and from the
beginning had included scenes in which Heather appeared. When she was two, he
had the artist paint her in as a toddler whose face appeared in a window of the
Doge’s Palace. As a young girl she was seen being serenaded by a gondolier;
when she was twenty, she’d been painted in as a young woman strolling across
the Bridge of Sighs, a song sheet in her hand.
                 Jimmy
knew that for his own peace of mind he would have to have her painted out of
the murals, but just as Isabelle had not been able to let go of the idea that
Heather’s death must be someone else’s fault, he could not let go of the
constant need for his daughter’s presence, the sense of