Day of Confession by Allan Folsom Page B

know…”
    “Harry, I love you and I know you’re pained, but this is going to have to be your call.”
    Harry had agreed and thanked him and then gone out. Walking, thinking, troubled, even embarrassed. Byron Willis was the closest friend he had, yet Harry had never once spoken to him of his family in more than a passing way. All Byron knew was that Harry and Danny had grown up in a small seacoast town in Maine, that their father had been a dockworker, and that Harry had received an academic scholarship to Harvard when he was seventeen.
    The fact was, Harry never talked about the details of his family at all. Not to Byron, not to his roommates in college, not to women, not to anyone. No one knew about the tragic death of their sister, Madeline. Or that their father had been killed in a shipyard accident barely a year later. Or that their mother, lost and confused, had remarried in less than ten months, moving them all into a dark Victorian house with a widowed frozen-food salesman who had five other children, who was never home, and whose only reason to marry had been to get a housekeeper and baby-sitter. Or that later, as a young teenager, Danny had been in one scrape after another with the police.
    Or, that both brothers had made a pact to get out of there as soon as they were able, to make the long grimness of those years a thing of their past, to leave and never come back—and promised to help each other do it. And, how, by different routes, both had done so.
    With that in mind, how in hell could Harry take Byron Willis’s suggestion and bury Danny in the family plot? If he wasn’t dead it would kill him! Either that or he’d come up out of the grave, grab Harry by the throat, and throw him in instead! So what was Harry supposed to tell the funeral director tomorrow when he asked him where the remains should be sent after they and Harry arrived in New York? Under different circumstances it might have been amusing, even funny. But it wasn’t. He had until tomorrow to find an answer. And at the moment, he hadn’t a clue.
    HALF AN HOUR LATER Harry was back at the Hassler, hot and sweaty from his walk, stopping at the concierge desk to get his room key, and still with no solution. All he wanted was to go up, get into bed, and drop into the total escape of deep, mindless sleep.
    “A woman is here to see you, Mr. Addison.”
    Woman? The only people Harry knew in Rome were police. “Are you sure?”
    The concierge smiled. “Yes, sir. Very attractive, in a green evening dress. She’s waiting in the garden bar.”
    “Thank you.” Harry walked off. Someone in the office must have had an actress client visiting Rome and told her to look Harry up, maybe to help take his mind off things. It was the last thing he wanted at the end of a day like this. He didn’t care who she was or what she looked like.
    SHE WAS SITTING alone at the bar when he came in. For a moment the long auburn hair and emerald green evening dress threw him off. But he knew the face; he’d seen her a hundred times on television, wearing her trademark baseball cap and L. L. Bean-type field jacket, reporting under artillery fire from Bosnia, the aftermath of a terrorist bomb blast in Paris, refugee camps in Africa. She was no actress. She was Adrianna Hall, top European correspondent for WNN, World News Network.
    Under almost any other circumstance Harry would have gone out of his way to meet her. She was Harry’s age or a little older, bold, adventuresome, and, as the concierge said, very attractive. But Adrianna Hall was also media, and that was the last thing he wanted to confront now. How she found him he didn’t know, but she had, and he had to figure out what to do about it. Or maybe he didn’t. All he had to do was turn and leave, which was what he did, glancing around, acting as if he were looking for someone who wasn’t there.
    He was almost to the lobby when she caught up with him.
    “Harry Addison?”
    He stopped and turned.