Wild about Harry. Linda Lael Miller
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“Mr. Griffith?”
Mark’s voice, coming over the intercom system, startled Harry. “Yes?” he snapped, pressing a button on the instrument affixed to the wall above his bed, a little testy at the prospect of landing in Seattle.
“We’re starting our descent, sir. Would you like to come back and take the controls?”
“You can handle it,” Harry answered, removing his finger from the button. He thought of Tyler’s parents and the big house on Mercer Island where he’d spent some of the happiest times of his life. “You can handle it,” he repeated gravely, even though Mark couldn’t hear him now. “The question is, can I?”
Amy had had a busy day, but she’d managed to finish work on time to pick up Oliver and Ashley at day camp, and she was turning hot dogs on the grill in her stove when the telephone rang.
Oliver answered with his customary “Yo!” He listened to the caller with ever-widening eyes and then thrust the receiver in Amy’s direction. “I think it’s that guy from the movies!” he shouted.
Amy frowned, crossed the room and took the call. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Ryan?” The voice was low, melodic and distinctly Australian. “My name is Harry Griffith, and I was a friend of your husband’s—”
The receiver slipped from Amy’s hand and clattered against the wall. Harry Griffith? Harry Griffith! The man Tyler had mentioned in her dream the night before.
“Mom!” Ashley cried, alarmed. She’d learned, at entirely too young an age, that tragedy almost always took a person by surprise.
“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Amy said hastily, snatching up the telephone with one hand and pulling her daughter close with the other. “Hello? Mr. Griffith?”
“Are you all right?” he asked in that marvelous accent.
Amy leaned against the counter, not entirely trusting her knees to support her, and drew in a deep breath. “I’m fine,” she lied.
“I don’t suppose you remember me…”
Amy didn’t remember Harry Griffith, except from old photographs and things Tyler had said, and she couldn’t recall seeing him at the funeral. “You knew Tyler,” she said, closing her eyes against a wave of dizziness.
“Yes,” he answered. His voice was gentle and somehow encouraging, like a touch. “I’d like to take you out for dinner tomorrow night, if you’ll permit.”
If you’ll permit. The guy talked like Cary Grant in one of those lovely old black-and-white movies on the Nostalgia Channel. “Ah—well—maybe you should just come here. Say seven o’clock?”
“Seven o’clock,” he confirmed. There was brief pause, then, “Mrs. Ryan? I’m very sorry—about Tyler, I mean. He was one of the best friends I ever had.”
Amy’s eyes stung, and her throat felt thick. “Yes,” she agreed. “I felt pretty much the same way about him. I-I’ll see you at seven tomorrow night. Do you have the address?”
“Yes,” he answered, and then the call was over.
It took Amy so long to hang up the receiver that Oliver finally pulled it from her hand and replaced it on the hook.
“Who was that?” Ashley asked. “Is something wrong with Grampa or Gramma?”
“No, sweetheart,” Amy said gently, bending to kiss the top of Ashley’s head, where her rich brown hair was parted. “It was only a friend of your daddy’s. He’s coming by for dinner tomorrow night.”
“Okay,” Ashley replied, going back to the table.
Amy took the hot dogs from the grill and served them, but she couldn’t eat because her stomach was jumping back and forth between its normal place and her windpipe. She went outside and sat at the picnic table in her expensive suit, watching as the sprinkler turned rhythmically, making its chicka-chicka sound.
She tried to assemble all the facts in her mind, but they weren’t going together very well.
Last night she’d dreamed—only dreamed—that Tyler had appeared in their bedroom. Amy could ascribe that to the spicy Mexican food she’d eaten for dinner the previous night, but what about the fact that he’d told her his friend Harry Griffith would call and ask to see her? Could it possibly be a wild coincidence and nothing more?
She pressed her fingers to her temples. The odds against such a thing had to be astronomical, but the only other explanation was that she was psychic or something. And Amy knew that wasn’t true.
If she’d had any sort of powers, she would have foreseen Tyler’s death. She would have done something about it, warned the doctors, anything.
Presently, Amy pulled herself together enough to go back inside the house. She ate one hot dog, for the sake of appearances, then went to her bathroom to shower and put on shorts and a tank top.
Oliver and Ashley were in the family room, arguing over which program to watch on TV, when Amy joined them. Unless the exchanges threatened to turn violent, she never interfered, believing that children needed to learn to work out their differences without a parent jumping in to referee.
The built-in mahogany shelves next to the fireplace were lined with photo albums, and Amy took one of the early volumes down and carried it to the couch.
There she kicked off her shoes and sat cross-legged on the cushion, opening the album slowly, trying to prepare herself for the inevitable jolt of seeing Tyler smiling back at her from some snapshot.
After flipping the pages for a while, acclimating herself for the millionth time to a world that no longer contained Tyler Ryan, she began to look closely at the pictures.
2
The next day, on the terrace of a busy waterfront restaurant, Amy tossed a piece of sourdough bread to one of the foraging sea gulls and sighed. “For all I know,” she confided to her best friend, “Harry Griffith is an ax murderer. And I’ve invited him to dinner.”
Debbie’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “How bad can he be?” she asked reasonably. “Tyler liked him a lot, didn’t he? And your husband had pretty good judgment when it came to human nature.”
Amy nodded, pushing away what remained of her spinach and almond salad. “Yes,” she admitted grudgingly.
A waitress came and refilled their glasses of iced tea, and Debbie added half a packet of sweetener to hers, stirring vigorously. “So what’s really bugging you? That you saw Tyler in a dream and he said a guy named Harry Griffith would come into your life, and now that’s about to come true?”
“Wouldn’t that bother you?” Amy countered, exasperated. “Don’t look now, Deb, but things like this don’t happen every day!”
Debbie looked thoughtful. “The subconscious mind is a fantastic thing,” she mused. “We don’t even begin to comprehend what it can do.”
Amy took a sip of her tea. “You think I projected Tyler from some shadowy part of my brain, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Debbie answered matter-of-factly.
“Okay, fine. I can accept that theory. But how do you account for the fact that Tyler mentioned Harry Griffith, specifically and by name? How could that have come from my subconscious mind, when I never actually knew the man?”
Debbie shrugged. “There were pictures in the albums, and I’m sure Tyler probably talked about him often. I suppose his parents must have talked about the guy sometimes, too. We pick up subliminal information from the people around us all the time.”
Her friend’s theory made sense, but Amy was still unconvinced. If she’d only conjured an image of Tyler for her own purposes, she would