Every Breath You Take Read online

  “Hi, Frank,” Kate said to the balding bartender, who’d worked for Donovan’s for twenty years. “Who’s supposed to be on duty with you today?”

  “Jimmy,” he replied, flicking her a noncommittal look.

  “I thought Jimmy was working the evening shift.”

  “He switched with Pete Fellows.”

  “Where’s Jimmy, then?”

  “Dunno, Mary Kate.”

  Scheduling the staff was Louis Kellard’s job as the restaurant manager. “I guess Louis is taking care of getting you some help,” Kate said, turning to leave.

  “Mary Kate, I need to tell you somethin’.”

  She turned back, suddenly uneasy about his tone. “Yes?” she said, walking over to him. He had a sheen of perspiration on his forehead, presumably from trying to rush.

  “I’m gonna have to quit.”

  Kate’s eyes widened in alarm at the thought of another familiar face disappearing from her life. “Are you sick, Frank?”

  Lifting his head, he looked her straight in the eye. “Yeah, I am. I’m sick of watchin’ this place slide downhill. I’ve always been real proud of workin’ at Donovan’s. There’s not a customer who comes in here more than a few times that I don’t make it a point to remember his name and what he likes. Your dad, God rest his soul, was the same way about the dining room customers.”

  “I know that—” Kate said, cringing inwardly from the indirect criticism of her stewardship.

  “Donovan’s has always been special. Even when your dad decided to make this place real classy, he kept it real personal, too. He gave it his special touch, and that’s what’s made Donovan’s the popular place that it is. I’m gonna be honest with you, Mary Kate, and tell you what all of us think who’ve worked here for a few years: You don’t have your dad’s touch. We thought you might, but you don’t.”

  Kate put up a valiant struggle against a sudden rush of tears. “I spend as much time here as my father did,” she argued.

  “Your heart isn’t in it,” he countered. “Your father wouldn’t have seen me alone in here and shrugged and said, ‘I guess Louis is taking care of getting you some help.’ He’d have made damned sure I had help, and then he’d have made damned sure he knew why Louis hadn’t already taken care of it.”

  Heated tears were burning the backs of Kate’s eyes now, threatening to spill over, and she turned, starting toward the doorway into the dining room. “Tell Marjorie to give you an extra two months’ pay in your final check,” she said, referring to the trusted bookkeeper who’d worked for her father for more than a decade.

  To her shock, the Irishman called angrily after her, “You tell Marjorie to do it, Mary Kate Donovan! That’s your job—you’re the boss, not me, and not Marjorie.”

  Kate nodded, trying to breathe steadily and slowly so she wouldn’t have to run for the bathroom to either throw up or cry.

  “And another thing—” Frank shouted after her. “Why are you lettin’ me get away with talkin’ to you like that? I wouldn’t have gotten away with talkin’ to your dad that way!”

  “Go to hell,” Kate whispered.

  “And one more thing besides,” he called.

  Fists clenched, Kate turned and saw him leaning over the bar, his face red with anger. “What’s wrong with your eyes that you didn’t notice that the lemons and limes I’m puttin’ out are old? Why aren’t you storming outta here on your way to the kitchen to see who the hell is letting that produce company get away with giving us this crap?”

  Kate refused to reply, but she did notice that the maître d’, Kevin Sandovski, still wasn’t at his post at 11:25, when she walked by his desk at the entrance. In the kitchen, she found him, Louis Kellard, and several waiters who should have been busy with last-minute details in the dining room, standing around joking with the kitchen staff. “What’s going on in here?” she asked in what she hoped was an authoritative, disapproving voice.

  Sandovski levered himself up from a stool, but she thought he rolled his eyes at the waiters. Louis Kellard looked at the bulge in her abdomen, smiled sympathetically, and said, “Kate, I’ve been through two pregnancies with my wife, and I know how hard it is on a woman emotionally and physically to deal with that, along with the stress of holding down a job. Try not to upset yourself.”

  “I’m not upsetting myself,” Kate said, unsure whether he was genuinely trying to help her or patronizing her. “Frank O’Halloran said we’re getting inferior produce. Is that true?”

  “Of course it isn’t,” Louis said, shaking his head in affront. “We’re just not using as many lemons and limes as we used to in the lounge, so they stand around a little longer.”

  “Why aren’t we using as many as we used to?”

  “Ask Marjorie,” Louis said. “She has all the figures on how much business we’re doing. We’re down a little from what we used to do, but not by much.”

  Kate nodded and backed out of the kitchen. “I’ll be in the office if you need me.”

  Her father’s office—her office now—had been relocated years before to an area off the main dining room, separated from it by a paneled hallway with doors opening into the bookkeeper’s office and the manager’s office as well. The staircase leading up from the old pub to the apartment above had been closed off and a new staircase created that was located next to her father’s office. The apartment itself was still there, but her father had used it only rarely, either when the weather was too bad to drive home or when he’d worked unusually late.

  Marjorie was sitting at her desk, her fingers racing over a calculator keyboard, her ledger books spread out over nearly every available surface. “Frank O’Halloran is going to quit,” Kate said. “Will you please give him two months’ extra pay in his final check?”

  The gray-haired bookkeeper looked up. “Are you going to let Frank quit?”

  “How am I supposed to stop him?” Kate demanded, her fingernails biting into her palms.

  “I don’t know. I guess I thought maybe you’d have an idea.”

  “I do have one idea,” Kate shot back. “What’s that, Kate?”

  “We ought to be using a computerized cash-flow system. Those ledger books are as antiquated as—”

  “As me?” Marjorie suggested ironically.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Marjorie.”

  “We are computerized,” Marjorie said, taking pity on her. “Food orders, reservations, everything. Haven’t you noticed that before?”

  “Of course I have!” Kate said, already feeling drained after being there less than half an hour. “I was talking about the ledgers you’re using right now. Why isn’t that information on computer?”

  “It is, actually. Your father liked the consistency of tracking everything using the same method we’ve always used, so I transfer certain information into the ledgers off the computer.” She waited expectantly for Kate to say something, and when Kate didn’t she dropped her gaze to her calculator and began inputting figures. “Kate,” she said without looking up, “you’re not really invested in running this business. You need to think about selling it.”

  Wounded to the core now, Kate said nothing and backed out of yet another room, retreating again, because she’d lost complete faith in herself. A few months ago—before Mitchell Wyatt—she would have had enough faith in her own judgment to take a firm stand in the kitchen with Louis, and with Frank, and with Marjorie. But not now. Now she’d lost faith in herself, and on top of that, everyone else was losing faith in her, too.

  Because of Mitchell, and because of her pregnancy with his child, she’d been reduced to an exhausted mass of raw emotions and uncertainties. Worse yet, she couldn’t think of the child she was carrying without immediately thinking of what a gullible fool she’d been about his father. For weeks, she’d been waiting to feel some sort of maternal bond with her baby, but it wasn’t happening, and she was starting to fear that her feelings about Mitchell were going to prevent her from loving her baby.

  Kat