Free Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_01 by Dead Man's Island

tomorrow—had turned down the silken covers. A mauve card propped on the pillow contained information in elegant calligraphy about other amenities available in the room: an alcove contained a coffee or tea maker and a small refrigerator plus a cupboard with snacks. I checked the pink refrigerator. A fluted crystal dish contained chocolate mousse laced with raspberry. The enticing dessert was at once both pleasing and disconcerting. It indicated how thoroughly had Chase investigated my likes and dislikes. I shrugged, resisted the temptation, and settled at the desk.
    I thumbed through the stack of folders until I found my own.
    I didn’t want to read it first because of ego. I’ve long since slaked that hunger. But I had to find out what Chase knew about me and my life.
    Nothing in the first few lines conveyed the color and substance and feel of my youth. It merely reported that my father was Douglas O’Dwyer, a foreign correspondent, and my mother, Eileen Cameron, was a poet.
    That was enough to trigger memory, of course. Early memories swirled and blended: the rumble of railroad wheels, the thick smell of coal, the lusty whistle of a steam engine. Movement, always movement. I suppose it was a slapdash, uncertain, unstructured growing up, but I knew how to haggle in Arabic and sing roundelays in French and read a railway timetable before I was ten.
    I also learned about loss early when Mother went to a sanitarium for tuberculosis and never came home.
    I learned to go to a different school every fewmonths and keep a clean apartment for my father and me. The file didn’t mention the day I met a very young foreign correspondent, Richard Corley Collins.
    I learned to run and hide when the Germans goose-stepped into Paris. My father was in the south of France, caught up by the invasion. I never saw him again.
    I wasn’t yet seventeen when I managed to get out of France and into Spain. The file made it sound easy. It wasn’t. The Pyrenees in winter claimed the lives of many refugees. I found my way to Portugal and a freighter home to America.
    The dossier gave my next address as Lawrence, Kansas. And it began the long list of newspapers I worked for.
    Because what else in life would I want to do?
    The clatter of a typewriter; the scent of melted lead; the desperately difficult task of mastering words, making them sing; the unending challenge of seeking truth, balancing viewpoints.
    Conventional wisdom is right: There are two sides to almost every story. That poses the task for the honest reporter.
    Almost every story.
    I’ve never been impressed that Hitler loved little blond children.
    That isn’t enough.
    But generally it’s hard to find white or black hats. Villains are seldom easy to spot. They know how to smile, too. Truth is harder to grasp than an eel and always as quick to slip away.
    By the time the war was over, I was welllaunched on the only career I’d ever wanted. The dossier summed it up in a dry, unrevealing list of newspapers and place names.
    It charted me to Washington, D.C.
    I met Richard Collins again. For the first time I met Chase Prescott.
    I read the next few lines carefully, but, once again, it was simply bare bones: place names, the newspaper, the date Richard and I married, Emily’s birth.
    I scanned the rest of it and found it all accurate and absolutely uninformative. If the rest of the folders were this spare with information—real information, like the loves and hates of lives, the traumas and mistakes and triumphs—they would be of little help.
    I put my own aside and picked up Chase’s. I was grinning by the time I finished it. I wondered what young hopeful on Chase’s staff had prepared it. Although it still didn’t give me meat, real meat, it was a great deal more forthcoming than my own.
    All served up, of course, in the most laudatory of terms. I was interested to see that it addressed Chase’s current financial crunch. That meant Lavinia’s information was accurate. It even