The White Rose Read Free Page B

Marshall’s gadgets to be fussed over, perplexed by, and ultimately consigned to molder with its gadget cousins in the hall closet. “All right!” she hisses to herself as the house phone blasts anew.
    “I’m here!” She reaches the kitchen and snatches it up. “Sorry, Hector. I was working, didn’t hear the phone.”
    “Mrs. Kahn? It’s Hector downstairs? I try to stop him.”
    Marian goes cold. Her sheet slips in her grip. Irrationally, she thinks of Marshall up there in Nova Scotia. He is up there, isn’t he?
    “What is it, Hector?”
    “He coming up. He say he your cousin. He insist! He say you expecting him, he your cousin! Mr. Barton Ox he say he name is.”
    Ox?
    Oh no. Oh no no no, Marian shakes her head. And it’s her own bloody fault: the idiot said he was coming to town and she’d failed to head him off. And now he’s here, on his way up. And she is in the kitchen holding a sheet over her breasts. And there is a naked man in her bed.
    “Thank you, Hector!” Marian yelps. “That’s fine!” And she hangs up the phone and tears back to the bedroom, letting her sheet fall behind her on the rug. “Oh shit!” she is muttering. “Oh very much shit.”
    “Hmm?” Oliver is in the bathroom. Water runs into the sink.
    “Oliver!” Marian hisses. “You’ve got to get out of here! My cretin of a cousin is coming upstairs. I completely forgot he was coming to the city, and now he’s in the elevator.”
    “Why’s he a cretin?” Oliver asks with interest.
    “Not now!” She is fumbling with her bra strap. It springs from her fingers once, twice. “Shit!”
    “Calm down, sweetheart. I’ll just leave.”
    “You can’t leave. I mean, you have to leave, but you can’t leave. You can’t go out the front door, you have to go out the back door. You have to go now. ”
    “But I have no clothes on,” Oliver says wickedly. “Have you thought how that will look?”
    “Where are your clothes?” Marian asks frantically, but even as she does, two things happen: she knows where his clothes are—they’re where her own clothes of the afternoon are, deposited all over the living room as she and Oliver had moved from chair to rug to sofa hours earlier—and the doorbell rings.
    “Oh shit!”
    “So why’s he a cretin again?” says Oliver.
    “Go!” She swats him and opens a bureau drawer, snatching out a black cashmere sweater. “And be quiet. Get your clothes, go into my office, quietly, and when you’re dressed, go out the back and take the service elevator down. I’ll…I’ll call you when he’s gone. I’ll call you at the shop.”
    “Will you have dinner with me?”
    The doorbell rings again. Twice, this time.
    “Sure, of course. Just…Oliver, please, just scram.”
    But he insists on kissing her once more, catching her head as it emerges from the neck of her sweater, and even amid her panic she feels the briefest rush as he clutches her. Then he pads nakedly away, refusing, like any man, to be hurried. Marian yanks open the drawer of her dresser and takes the top pair of pants. Black, like the sweater. She’ll look funereal, but she is already dressed and moving toward the door. And yet there is something…something nagging her, and not the now-enraged rings of the bell. It’s something about…no, not the clothes. (As she moves past the living room she can see that Oliver has picked up her own as well as his—sweet of him.) Not the doorman, not even her cousin, who is the last person she wishes to see, it’s something about…
    “Hi!”
    Marian flings open the door, and a fleshy index finger is lifted away from the buzzer.
    “Oh, Barton! What a treat!” She gushes. And then it comes to her.
    It’s the service elevator. Which is broken and awaiting repair, and not going anywhere.

CHAPTER TWO
A Ridiculous Man
    T hey didn’t want to let me come up!” he says indignantly. “Can you imagine that?”
    Barton’s face is a veritable purple, Marian thinks. She offers a kiss with