Haunting Jasmine by Anjali Banerjee Page B

that. Three ancient deadbolts, three different keys. Finally I succeed, but when I turn around, Connor is gone. He’s nowhere on the porch, the sidewalk, or the street. He has disappeared again, but my cell phone is beeping.
    “Wow, a signal! That’s strange.” I flip open the phone.
    “Finally,” my best friend, Carol, says. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for two days.”
    “I’m in the remote wilderness,” I say to her distant, crackling voice. “I could lose you at any second. I don’t usually get a signal here at the bookstore.”
    “Hope you’ll be flying back here on time. Bill Youngman wants the Hoffman account. He’s been pestering Scott for it, trying to hint that you’re unreliable.”
    I squeeze my phone so tight, the metal might buckle. “He’s lying. I’m totally reliable.”
    “I know that, and you know that, and Scott won’t give in, yet. You need to make your usual perfect presentation. Are you preparing?”
    “I’ll practice tonight. I’m thinking of flying back early, on standby.”
    “Having that much fun, huh?” I hear her children yelling in the background. “Gotta go. Oh, wait. I meant to tell you. Don and I got a sitter last night. We went to Andante. You know, first Tuesday and all.”
    “And?” My skin prickles. Andante, a romantic Italian waterfront restaurant where Carol and her husband and Robert and I used to go for dinner the first Tuesday night of each month, a tradition. I’d forgotten—or blocked out the memory.
    “You wouldn’t believe it. Robert was there with that woman.”
    The keys fall on the porch with a hollow thud. I bend to pick them up. My fingers are trembling. I drop the keys into my coat pocket. “This isn’t something I want to know.”
    “She was wearing this strapless black thing. She might as well have been naked. The slut.”
    The phone shakes in my hand. “Carol, I—”
    “I wasn’t going to tell you, but Don said I should. He went up to talk to them. Of course I had to go with him or I would’ve looked rude.”
    “Of course,” I say. My lips are going numb. My teeth are chattering. Robert is still destroying me from a distance.
    “They were holding hands across the table, just like you and Robert used to do. I felt like telling him, this is our restaurant. He shouldn’t have brought her there.”
    I’m silent, stunned, the words gone from my mind.
    “Jasmine? Look, I’m sorry for telling you. Robert asked about you—he said he needed to talk to you. He was trying to reach you. I said you were on a wild, fantastic vacation on a beautiful island in the middle of nowhere and for all I knew, you could have fallen in love again.”
    My heart is racing. “Thanks, Carol. You didn’t tell him where I was?”
    “He kept asking me for details, like it was still any of his business. The slut was not happy. She started fidgeting, and she wasn’t smiling anymore. I didn’t tell him a thing, but he had that jealous look. The nerve of him, after he cheated on you and there he was sitting there with her. He wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. Maybe you shouldn’t come back. Let the guy wonder where you are, and serves him right.”
    I lose the signal, and Carol’s voice vanishes into the night. “Serves him right,” I echo. My fragile heart, which had begun to heal, shatters into fine fragments.
    Suddenly I’m not so eager to leave Auntie’s bookstore. Why not stay here, where Robert can’t reach me, no matter how hard he tries? I turn off my phone, unlock the door, and step back into the darkness.

Chapter 19
     
    I can’t believe I’m here, lying in Auntie’s sagging bed in her attic apartment as a midnight windstorm wails across the island. The house groans and shudders. Rain pummels the roof, the roar of its wrath as loud as an airplane engine. A triangular window, set high on the wall beneath the peaked ceiling, trembles and shakes, threatening to break. The bedside lamp, stained glass