Deadly Beloved(16)

“My reputation is the best in the business,” Karla said automatically, but she was looking over the letter from the University of Pennsylvania, half mesmerized by the engraved college seal at the top of the page. “Ambitious,” like “successful,” was not a word she would have applied to herself. It evoked images of blue-suited armies marching out the door of the Harvard Business School, each of the women wearing two-and-a-half-inch stack-heeled pumps. What else was this, though, if not ambition? She could see herself, standing at the front of a classroom full of teenagers, talking about a slide she had projected high up on a classroom wall. She felt Evan’s eyes on her and looked up to find him staring. She blushed hot red and handed the letter back.

“You’ll like doing it,” Evan said. “You’ll see. You’ll be a natural at this kind of thing.”

“I expect to like doing it,” Karla said truthfully.

“And I thought Philadelphia would be a good place.” Evan was going on as if he hadn’t heard her. “I thought you said you had friends there once, women you knew at college—”

“Julianne Corbett and Liza Verity,” Karla said promptly. “They were in my class. I don’t know if they were exactly friends.”

“It’s even better if they’re enemies,” Evan said. “You can come back the conquering hero. Heroine. You can come back and show them all what you’ve done with your life.”

“Is that what I want to do?”

“The problem with you is that you’ve never had any time to organize your life. You’ve been too busy working. You can’t leave things to chance like that these days. You have to go out and work for yourself.”

“I work all the time.”

“That’s different.”

“I like what I do.”

“I like to think I’m bringing you something nobody else could,” Evan said, sounding suddenly passionate, suddenly angry. “I like to think I have something unique to contribute to your life.”

The bellhop had brought Karla’s backpack and Evan’s suitcase to the elevator bank. The main elevator was an ornate thing framed in curling brass, its doors patterned to look as if the metal on them had been quilted. Evan wasn’t looking at her. There were two young South American women in the lobby, their hair knotted into elaborate wreaths that ended in high swinging ponytails. The heels on their shoes were much too high. They wobbled and stumbled when they tried to walk. Their pocketbooks were too big and too heavy. They both looked like they were about to tip over.

“Evan?” Karla said.

Evan started walking toward the elevators. “We have to go upstairs,” he told her. “I booked us a two-bedroom suite.”

“It must have cost a lot of money.”

“It cost less than it would have. Because you’re the famous Karla Parrish. Because your name is in Paris-Match. Because it’s an asset to the hotel to have you staying here.”

Karla was hurrying to keep up. Usually she thought of Evan as smaller than she was. What she really meant was that he was younger than she was, less experienced, with much less authority. In spite of the fact that he was slight, though, he was actually much taller than she was—at least six feet, while she was barely five five. He had stopped next to the bellhop at the elevator doors. Karla hurried a little faster and caught up with him.

“Evan,” she said again.

The elevator doors opened. An American couple came out, sounding very Texas and looking like an ad in GQ. The bellhop put their bags in the elevator cage and Evan followed them.

“I’m just trying to be of use around here,” he said when Karla came to stand beside him. “Don’t you ever feel useless, doing what you do? All those people dying. All those people starving. And you just stand around and take pictures.”

“You don’t want me to take pictures,” Karla said.

“You can take all the pictures you want,” Evan said. “It’s not the pictures. That’s not the point. You’re a genius at pictures.”

“What is the point?”

“Look at all this scrollwork,” Evan said, staring at the ceiling of the elevator cab. “The French are really incredible. Less is more. More is more. More is less.”

The elevator bounced to a stop. The doors opened and the bellhop got out, carrying their bags. They were in a long, carpeted hallway with ceilings a dozen feet high. Karla thought Evan was right about the scrollwork.

“Did you always know that you wanted to take pictures?” Evan asked her, looking at the wall above her head. “Even when you were at Vassar?”