Night Swimming by Robin Schwarz Page A

what occupied her mind at the moment: She was in a garden, and it could have been Eden as far as she was concerned.
    Was she imagining things? Had he looked up at her just then? Was that the sun in his eyes, or did he smile at her?
I think he smiled at me just now. I think that was a smile.
She sighed, slowly and expectantly, before turning back toward Sandra Lockley.
    “Do you take cash?” Blossom asked nonchalantly, as if she had just asked the grocer to add a chicken to her order. The agent laughed—that fake laugh that Blossom hated.
    “No, really,” Blossom repeated, “do you take cash?”
    The agent stopped laughing. “Cash?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, ahhh... I’m sure something can be arranged.” She fumbled for her phone in her bag. Blossom could tell that the agent was blindsided. It was as if she had hit a jackpot, the daily double, and Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes. She got on the phone with the seller immediately and began chattering away, nodding her head like a happy woodpecker. But Blossom couldn’t see or hear her. She was miles away again.
    Yes, that is a smile. A beautiful Marcello Brigatino smile.
    And then, from the most inaccessible part of Blossom’s being, she reached down, deep down, and did something she had never done before. Something she thought she’d never do come heaven, hell, or high water. She smiled back.

CHAPTER 17
    B LOSSOM BOUGHT THE FURNISHED apartment for a million dollars that day. To say the transaction was the strangest that Sandra Lockley had ever experienced would be an understatement.
    Blossom brought two large suitcases to the office later that afternoon, stuffed with cash. It took them eight hours to count out the money in fives, tens, twenties, and fifties.
    “I know it’s none of my business, Miss McBeal, but I can’t help but wonder why you’re paying like this.”
    “Well, you can blame it all on Mr. Dow and Mr. Jones.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “I lost a fortune in stocks when the market fell, and at that moment decided to save my money the old-fashioned way. I would not be talked into too-good-to-believe investments after my first million was lost to a stockbroker’s bad judgment. Not me. So I began saving my money where I knew it would be safe. At home.”
    “But why didn’t you put it into a bank?”
    “A bank! Absolutely not. Those bankers are robbers. They’ll take you for every penny you’ve got.” Blossom couldn’t help but be amused by her own mockery. Between MaryAnn and herself, she was always the better storyteller, always the one to get them out of a pinch, but she was still surprised by the tall tales tripping off her tongue.
    “They want you to put your money into CDs, they say, so it will grow. Baloney. You can’t get your money out for six months when you do that. And sometimes it’s a year. No, the mattress was good enough for me.”
    “Clearly!” Sandra Lockley said, her eyes wide with amazement. Any thought of Blossom’s coming by this money illegally had been dispelled; her customer was clearly just eccentric. But how she had actually made the money was still a mystery.
    “If you don’t mind my asking, Miss McBeal, what did you do for work before you moved to California?”
    “Oh, I didn’t work. I played the horses.”
    Blossom didn’t know a lot about horses, but she knew something. Two towns away from Gorham stretched the Wonderland Racetrack, which she had visited with Tom Barzini, her intended. Tom loved the races. As a matter of fact, Tom enjoyed many things that he didn’t share with Blossom. He had often ignored many of her questions about what he did or where he would go.
    There was a part of Tom that felt like a black hole to Blossom, a density of secrets and stories yet untold. But she chalked this up to someone who was simply private, and figured that when the time was right, Tom would open up to her. She wondered if he revealed his secrets to MaryAnn, but she forced herself to stop thinking about this.