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Excerpt

Breach of Trust

Chapter Eleven

When I was much younger I thought that everyone should fall in love in New York at least once and that probably everyone had. I did, or I almost did, once, a long time ago, that sweltering summer I spent in Manhattan, the summer before my last year in law school. I have been in love, seriously in love, only once; that is not to say that there have not been other occasions when I felt on the verge of it, felt that it could happen again, the way it had that one and only time before. I should have known it would never happen, that you only really fall in love once, but there is nothing quite so forgivable as hope and I had the excuse of my youth. There were times I was desperate to recapture that feeling, to find something that would last, times when it lasted all of a single half-drunken night, laughed off in the blue-gray haze of morning with more than a little regret. There were other times, however, when it was more serious and more lasting than that, when for a while at least all I could think about was the girl, the new one I had found, and every thought of her was wrapped in bright ribbon inside a perfect golden glow. That was what it was like, that summer, when it happened in New York, when I met Joanna and began to think it could happen again, that I could for a second time fall in love.

Joanna had high cheekbones and soft brown hair and dark eyes that could fill with fire or ice, moving from one to the other with breathtaking speed. Always kind to strangers, she could sometimes be cruel to friends; though only, so far as I had occasion to observe, when they had misbehaved in a way that suggested they thought the rules that applied to everyone else did not apply to them. It was, or so I thought at the time, the reaction of girls from fine families who danced and rode horses and went to private shady tree schools, girls who had been bred so finely to the knowledge of what was always the right thing to do that by a second instinctsharper, more natural than the firstthey could give the appearance that they were doing it precisely when they were not. In the privileged circles in which Joanna moved with such comfortable ease, appearances were everything and respectability meant mainly not getting caught. It was, I suppose, part of the attraction, one of the things about her that made her irresistible: the sense that behind that faade of polished, irreproachable good manners, that look of studied indifference, someone was waiting to see if you were willing to take a chance.

I am sure it was that, or something like it, because the first time we met I did not like her at all. It was at a small gathering arranged by Thomas Browning for some reason that seemed important at the time, but perhaps had no importance at all and I only think it did because Browning was in New York and wanted me to attend.

We had spent a fair amount of time together in Cambridge while law school was in session, but that was pretty much all. Whether it had been Thanksgiving of my second, or my third, year; whether it was the year before, or the year after, Zachary Stern died, I had been invited to the fabled family estate in Grosse Pointe only once. The summer after our first year, Browning disappeared, to Europe mainly, but other places as well. I would sometimes get postcards from remote locations in Asia or Australia, and once, I think, from S‹o Paulo, Brazil, with short, funny remarks about the burden of learning the foreign part of the auto business in languages he did not always understand. The next summer he was traveling again, but he had a week or two before he left and he was spending it at home, in New York.

When I arrived after work, everyone was already there, sitting around a large table in the back of Maxwell's Plum. Thomas Browning was telling them that the only thing worse than the prospect of having to go into the family business was the thought of practicing law.

"But here comes Antonelli, fashionably late," he announced with a languid grin as I finished twisting my way through crowded tables and settled into the last vacant chair. Browning was the only one I knew. The others were strangers, but obviously friends of his. I felt myself under the appraising glance of people, all about my age, who were clearly wondering exactly where I fit in. I had caught the tail end of his last remark. I returned his slightly irreverent smile.

"For those of us who dont have a family business to go into, its called getting home from work."

They seemed to hold their collective breath, waiting for Browning's reaction before they made the hazard of their own. Browning had an instinct for everything. Without a moment's delay, without that slight hesitation that would have suggested he was masking with politeness what he really felt, he made a grand sweeping gesture and threw back his head.

"Meet Joseph Antonelli, the only son of a bitch with guts enough always to tell me the truth! Somebody get him a drink."

And suddenly everyone wanted to be my friend. Or almost everyone. Sitting directly across from me, Joanna Van Renaessler, introduced by Browning as an old family friend, looked at me with a raised eyebrow and a skeptical smile. She did not believe for a minute what Browning had just said.

"I don't know that I've ever heard of anyone who always tells the truth."

A kind of hard shrewdness glittered in her eyes, like the look of a seasoned gambler who has lost too often not to calculate the odds. I was being patronized, but more than that, challenged to show if I had something of my own to stand on and was not just another one of Thomas Browning's temporary friends. That was the feeling I had, that she found something suspect about anyone she had not known for years --- anyone who was not an "old family friend" --- because anyone Browning met more recently was not someone he should trust. Though she did not know it, I had come to the same conclusion myself. I had seen the way people tried to get close to him because he was Thomas Stern Browning and he could do something for them.

There was noise everywhere, laughter and voices and tinkling glass. The others at the table were leaning one way and the other, starting conversations of their own. We were at the end of the table farthest from where Browning was carrying on what appeared to be separate conversations with the two well-dressed young women sitting on each side. His half-closed eyes kept coming back to us. I had the feeling he had arranged things this way, that I would be sitting across from Joanna and he could watch the fun. He would have done it without malice, without intending the slightest harm, just to see the way things worked when two people of such different backgrounds were thrown together in a situation where at least for a while they could not get apart. Perhaps it was more than curiosity that made him do it; perhaps his interest ran deeper than that; perhaps, though I did not know it then and would not suspect it until a long time later, he thought it held some lesson for himself.

I was going to law school on a scholarship and worked part-time and in the summer for the money I needed to get by. My family was not famous and could not trace itself back more than a generation or two. A hundred years ago we were politely called recent immigrants and, not so politely and rather more often, daigos, wops, and worse. Joanna Van Renaessler came from a family whose ancestors had practically invented America, a family that had been rich for so many generations that they could not quite remember how it had all started, whether from selling what had become Rhode Island or trading some part of New Jersey instead.

"I don't know if I've ever heard of anyone who always tells the truth," repeated Joanna, more amused than annoyed at my silence.

"You seem as though you'd be disappointed if you did. Why?" I asked as she got ready to say something in anger. "Because youre so certain they would have to be boring and uninteresting, without any secrets to hide --- nothing they felt a need to conceal."

Her eyes flashed, then retreated behind a cryptic smile. "Are you suggesting that the only way to hide a secret, the only way to conceal something you don't want to share, is with a lie?" She lifted her chin a bare fraction of an inch, just enough to invite me into the game. With a quick toss of her head, her eyes flashed once more. "Haven't you heard, young Mr. Antonelli, that silence speaks louder than words?"

"Young Mr. Antonelli?" I was older than she, but the way she said it, the soft laughter in her voice, gave a hint of a feminine wisdom that made me feel she knew things about me I was still far from knowing myself.

"You mean the difference between lying and not telling the truth?" I bent farther across the table. "The lie that sounds more convincing because it's never spoken out loud?"

She lowered her eyes to the glass she was stirring, smiling quietly to herself.

"Is that a line you read somewhere in a book, some novel you read --- one of those things you make a point of memorizing because you think it might be useful sometime?" Her eyes lingered over the glass. "Isn't that what young men do, the ones who are trying to make their way in the worldrising from humble beginnings to become something useful and important, famous, and of course rich?"

She raised her eyes. The smile had changed into something uncomfortably close to a smirk. An instant later it was gone, as if she had reconsidered, decided that she had made a mistake, said what she had not really meant. The color in her cheeks deepened. She bit the edge of her smooth polished lip.

"I didn't...I shouldn't..." She was not used to apologizing, and now, when she thought she should, she did not know how. Angry with herself, she turned toward the far end of the table. Browning, leaning first one way then the other while he carried on two conversations at once, was waiting for her, beaming at the disconcerted look in her eyes.

"Are we going somewhere for dinner?" she asked in a voice that immediately stilled the other conversations at the table.

Browning glanced at his watch and then, the smile still thick on his mouth, shook his head at how quickly the time had passed. He waved his arm for the waiter and pushed away from the table.

"That would be wonderful," he announced, gazing at each of his guests; "but I'm afraid the party has to end here. At least for us," he added, glancing at me for a moment before he turned his attention back to the others. "While the rest of you are here --- or wherever else --- having a good time, Antonelli and I are having dinner with a very dull mana lawyer, wouldnt you knowto discuss a small legal matter that Im sure Ill never be able to understand."

The look in Joanna's eyes suggested that she had expected something else, though it seemed less a question of disappointment than convenience: If she had known, she would have made other plans. As Browning and I were leaving, I heard her making her excuses when the others asked her to stay with them.

"She likes you," said Browning with an encouraging look as we left the restaurant and headed up the street. "I know her. I can tell."

There was a taste of something burning in the still, heavy summer air. The broiling heat rolled off the sidewalk, rising up in the shimmering diaphanous shadows of a desert mirage. My mouth was dry; my face had begun to glow under the throbbing light of an enormous reddish sun. All around me the brick buildings looked burned black. The sky had turned to ashes, colored by the fireball behind.

"She's working here in New York. At J. Walter Thompson --- advertising. She has her own place." He chuckled as he began to walk faster, oblivious of the heat. "And she's gorgeous --- don't you think?" he asked, aware that I had not said a word. He stopped and waited until I caught up. "Is something the matter? Why are you going so slow? She say something that depressed you?" asked Browning with that same knowing grin.

He returned my smile with one of injured innocence. "Sometimes I'm just not very good at getting out of things." He shook his head at his own announced incompetence. He seemed genuinely sorry. "I shouldn't have done that, but I did have to go. I had sort of said something about making a night of it, but then the other thing came up and..."

He was staring down at the sidewalk, thinking about what he had done. But it was over, and there was no use dwelling on what could not be changed. He straightened his shoulders and gave me a distant, friendly glance; letting me know, I suppose, that it was all right: that if I knew all the circumstances I would not think him guilty of anything more serious than a small, well-intentioned lie.

"Well, if we're not having dinner," I asked, hurrying to keep up as he renewed his rapid pace, "just where are we going?"

He stopped dead in his tracks. The reddish tint in his cheeks was suddenly redder still.

"God, how stupid of me. I...I have to meet someone in the Village. I didn't think..."

I put my hand on his shoulder and looked into his embarrassed eyes. "It's all right," I assured him, holding back a grin. "I'll have dinner with that lawyer by myself --- just in case I ever see Joanna again and she asks."

He gave me a grateful look and turned to go.

"She hates me, by the way," I called after him. "And to tell you the truth, I don't much like her, either. Did you think I would?" I asked, laughing into the oppressive everywhere heat.

Browning tossed his head and twisted around without slowing a step. "No, you're wrong. About all of it," he added with a laugh as he quickly moved away.

I watched him for a while moving like an eager schoolboy down the street; moving faster, I thought, the farther away he got, as if he were afraid that whomever he was meeting might not wait. There was nothing for me to do but go home. I thought about taking a cab, and even stepped out into the street, ready to raise my hand to signal the first one I saw, but then I remembered the way she had looked at me, that trace of condescension I had been far too sensitive to miss, and I thought without reason or logic that I had something to prove, not to her, but to myself. I did not need anything, certainly nothing she could give. Let her go around with her fast, free-spending friends, riding in dark limousines, silent and aloof, and if they did take a cab ride felt proudly democratic. I did not need money; I could always walk.

The place I lived in in Manhattan had been arranged in a typical tortured New York way. The sister of a friend of mine, another member of our law school class, had a small one-bedroom on Twenty-sixth Street between Lexington and Third that she was willing to let me have for the two months of summer at half the rent she paid if I paid the cleaning lady who came once a week and if I promised to water the plants. My friends sister had graduated from UCLA or USC --- I was never sure which --- and she had a job with one of the auction houses. She had a month's vacation, and she was taking an additional one, unpaid, so she could travel around Europe with an unhappily married artist who was searching for inspiration and thought he might find it with her.

I had been here only two weeks, and it felt like two years. I did not know anyone in New York, and after this evening I was reasonably certain I never would. Browning was leaving, or at least I thought he was; but even if he had changed his plans and decided to stay, I had the feeling I would not see him much. The days in the law firm where I was clerking were endless, a long pilgrimage into questions of law that had no answers other than the kind that were written by angels on the head of a pin. If I had ever had any doubt about becoming a criminal defense lawyer, a summer spent dealing with estates and conveyances was guaranteed to teach me the virtues of murder. The strange part was that the lawyers I worked for actually liked it, and thought I would too after I had spent enough eighty-hour weeks to see the logical precision with which things were properly done. Every day I slaved at the assignments they gave me, which meant, of course, that I was expected to spend nights and weekends, too.

I did not mind so much the brutal, sultry heat; it gave me something to think about beyond whatever I was going to have for dinner before I sat at the table and started to work on the brief that Mr. Dowling wanted by the end of the week. Moving slowly, each step an effort in the debilitating heat, my head bent low to avoid the white blinding glare, I did not notice her until I was half a block from the building.

She was standing in the shade of the awning, looking idly down the street the other way. By herself, without anyone to talk to, her face had lost that animation by which the mask we show the world changes with our need. She was lovely, pure and simple, with fine fresh skin and eyes that seemed vulnerable and even, I thought, a little lost. It was as if beneath the rapid glance and the sharp-eyed stare; beneath the quick, dismissive smile, the sudden toss of her head; beneath all the masks and gestures, it was all an act, an act that at least sometimes she wished she did not have to play. I crossed the street, hoping to take her by surprise.

Joanna saw me coming out of the corner of her eye. A smile crossed her mouth like a fugitive running away. She turned and faced me with a cool, appraising glance. My collar was wrung with sweat; my white dress shirt slithered around my chest. My eyes were tired and filled with harsh particles of dust; my hair, sopping wet, was crawling down my head. She started to laugh.

"Would not spend a dollar on a cab. Doesnt surprise me. Not after what I've heard," she said, leaning her shoulder against one of the black metal awning supports. She crossed her ankles and held her hands together in front of her, watching me with gentle, teasing eyes. "I've heard all about you, you know. How you work all the time; how you never go out; how the way to get you to do anything is to suggest that its something that maybe, just maybe, you can't do. And so because it's too hot to breathe, you decided you had to walk." She bent her head to the side, a whimsical look of utter certainty in her eyes. "Is that about right? Is that what you decided to do and why? And remember," she added, lowering her chin in a way that told me she was about to invoke something from our very brief past, "the only allowable lie is the one you don't tell out loud."

I suddenly remembered where I was supposed to have gone. It must have shown, because when I started to speak, she placed her fingers over my mouth and said, "Better not."

"Better not?"

She tossed her head, but not like before, with that lightning quick, measured contempt, but with an easy careless laugh. "Tell the first lie of your young life."

It was there again, that same suggestion of something somehow foretold, written out without my knowing, but already read from start to finish by her.

"I knew you weren't having dinner with Thomas and some lawyer; I know he was just using you as a convenient excuse. He does that --- he's always done that: invented excuses that don't exist. He does it so well I think sometimes when he says it he actually believes it's true. It's not his fault, really. In a way, I suppose it's even nice. He has such trouble telling anyone something he thinks they don't want to hear. So who is he off with this time --- some girl he met at school?"

She said it casually, but she could not quite conceal an interest and a hope that I might tell her what I knew. I did not know anything, really; but I did not tell her that. I did not tell her anything, and she seemed perfectly content to let the matter drop.

"And because I knew you werent going to dinner with him, I thought you might like to go to dinner with me."

I wondered where I could take her. If I took her to the kind of place she was used to I would be broke for a month.

"I'm having dinner at home, and I thought you might like to join me," she went on as if she had an answer for each hesitation she read in my still-too-guileless eyes. "No, I'm not cooking," she added with a cautionary laugh. "My parents' place. I'm always expected," she explained with a deliberately enigmatic look. "Especially when they don't expect me at all."

She brushed a strand of light brown hair away from her eye and stepped away from the pole. She stood in front of me, her feet close together.

"Don't you think it's the proper thing to do --- meet my parents --- before you try to get me into bed?" She was laughing with her eyes, but at me or with me, I could not tell. "You know how awkward it can be when you wait and do it later --- I mean meet the parents after you have already known the girl --- that way, I mean. You know what I mean. Wouldn't you feel strange and guilty, as if you were lying about something, though of course that something would never come up?" She put her hand on my shoulder, teasing me, taunting me, trying to find that first sign of embarrassment as if it were some prize she had to win. "This way you meet them with a clear conscience, knowing that you never have, and maybe," she said, drawing back just enough so I could see the full extent of her proud, provocative smile, "just maybe, never will. Now why don't you shower and change and then we can go."

The Van Renaesslers lived in one of those fine old gray stone buildings somewhere in the sixties or seventies on Central Park West. They were older than I expected, in their mid to late fifties from what I gathered; though her mother looked younger, and her father older, than that. They had the look of people comfortably settled, without ambition for anything more than they had. The walls were covered with gold-framed paintings of artists famous and dead, going back from the French Impressionists to the Italian Renaissance, and even further back than that. There was the absence of pretension, an easy familiarity that made me feel like someone they had known for years, an invited guest, instead of a stranger brought unexpectedly to their door.

"I wanted you to meet him right away," said Joanna with a mischievous look in her eye. "I've fallen completely in love with him. We're going to be married day after tomorrow," she announced breezily as she plucked a piece of chocolate candy from a dish; "and we'd like you to be there if you can. City Hall at ten."

Her father nodded wisely, and then, shaking his head at this, her latest antic, turned to me. "I can say with a certain authority because Ive known her all her life --- which isn't to say I've ever understood her --- that marriage to my daughter would be the greatest mistake of any man's life."

"You don't believe me!" she pretended to protest. "But I am in love, madly in love with Joseph --- Do they call you Joe? --- and I can't live without him and I'm going to marry him in two days whether he bothers to ask or not. Now, can we eat? I'm starving."

I was a frequent guest that summer in the spacious Central Park West apartment of Arthur and Millicent Van Renaessler. At least once a week, usually on the spur of the moment, Joanna would decide we ought to drop by. They were always glad to see us, and I think that after a while they began to assume that Joanna was actually serious, perhaps not about marriage, but about me. I had the odd sensation that not only did they not disapprove but that they felt for some reason a certain relief. Her father in particular seemed to go out of his way to offer encouragement by showing me that there were not any serious obstacles that would prevent his daughter and me from taking things as far as we wanted them to go. It was all very subtle, but even I could not fail to understand what he was driving at when he would remark in that wonderfully understated way of his that an old friend, someone with whom he had gone to school, had mentioned just the other day how difficult it was becoming to find any talented, eager young men. And, oh, yes, did he mention that this friend of his was one of the senior partners in one of the two or three most important law firms in town? When I told him finally that I was pretty certain I was going to return to Oregon when I finished law school and open a practice of my own, his gray eyes fairly glistened as he told me how much he had enjoyed his only visit to the Northwest years before and that he could not think of a better place to live.

"My father is always trying to marry me off," remarked Joanna in her breezy fashion when I tried to kid her that her father seemed to think she would be much happier in Portland than she had ever been in New York. She watched me with a teasing smile that was less teasing than it looked. "I told them the first night we met --- remember? --- that I had fallen madly in love with you. I didn't tell them --- and I still haven't told them --- that you've fallen madly in love with me."

If we had been in a restaurant, or sitting on one of the benches in the park, somewhere quiet where time belonged to us and questions came with answers and the only thing spoken was the truth, I am not sure what would have happened, what I would have said, but I would have said something and our lives might have turned out much differently than they did. It was the end of August and we had spent some part of every day together, and every time we said good-bye I could not wait until I saw her again. I did not know if I was in love with her, and for that I was a fool; because the only reason I did not know was that I had been in love before. It did not feel the same way: It was not nearly so all-pervasive, so all-consuming. I thought of her, looked forward to her, but I thought of other things as well. I was not smart enough to understand that what I felt about Joanna was closer to what you should, and that it was different when you were grown up than what it was like when you were still really just a boy. If I had had to tell her what I thought, things might have surfaced that, because I had not had to talk my way through them, were not yet clear in my mind. I started to say something, though I am not sure what it was, when Joanna's eyes grew wide with excitement and she grabbed me by the arm.

"There he is!" she shouted into the deafening noise that had suddenly taken possession of the room. Moving through the crowd of the basement ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel like some shining golden eagle, John Lindsay, running for mayor, was on his way to the podium to greet a thousand new volunteers.

"Isn't he gorgeous!" cried Joanna with a starstruck look. "Isn't it wonderful! Isn't New York the greatest place there is?" She was clutching my arm, smiling into my eyes. "Tell me you'll come. Tell me that after next year, after you graduate, you'll come here, to New York, to Manhattan. You'll love it here --- I know you will. It's the only place there is."

And then she turned and shouted with the others, her eyes sparkling and alive, cheering for the next great new beginning for the city that lived not just all around you but inside you, part of who you were. I stood there, watching all of them chanting, knowing as well as I had ever known anything that Joanna would never leave.

It was one of the last times I saw her, in the middle of September, before I left to go back to school, that Mr. Van Renaessler explained, or tried to explain --- because he was, after all, only guessing --- the relationship between Joanna and Thomas Browning. They were, as Browning had told me that evening I first met her, old friends, connected through certain family ties. That was the phrase he used: "certain family ties." He said it with the thoughtful precision of someone who, when he had to, could be very careful in his speech.

It was a bright, clean day, one of those days that seem to carry with them something of fall and summer both. Joanna was helping her mother with something and at his suggestion we had gone across the street, wandering for a while in the park until we found an empty bench.

"The families were never friends, never as close as that. It was business, mainly. For Stern, of course --- the old man --- that was his whole life, that company of his. The only reason he talked to us --- maybe the only reason he talked to anyone --- was that we had something he needed. In the years when things did not go well --- he needed a source of money. That's why he came to us --- because of the bank. A lot of banks went under back then, but there was never any danger of that for us. Whatever we loaned him, Stern always paid it back, right on time if not earlier. But I must say, he did it with as much ill grace as I've ever seen."

Mr. Van Renaessler wrinkled his nose. A moment later, he emitted a slight chuckle.

"In all the years he did business with us, first with my father, then with me, he never once said thank you. We carried him through the Depression. Without us, all those plants of his would have closed --- and never once could he bring himself to thank us for what we had done. We got our money back. He seemed to think we ought to have thanked him. And who knows? Perhaps we should have. It took more than money," he said, quick to acknowledge merit where he saw it, even, or perhaps especially, in someone it was plain he could barely tolerate. "It took a kind of ruthless genius to keep something going that was that big, that complex, with hundreds of thousands of people doing hundreds of thousands of things."

Mr. Van Renaessler sniffed the air. He pulled his far shoulder forward and grasped one hand with the other. As he stared down at the bench, the lines in his forehead deepened.

"I want to be very careful about the way I say this. Thomas Browning is as fine, and as intelligent, a young man as I've ever known. But he's all wrong for my daughter." He studied me for a moment with a strange intensity, as if he were searching for an answer to a question he knew he could not ask. "There is a point at which a father can't get involved in his daughter's life. That doesn't mean, you understand, that he isn't --- it just means he has to wrestle with things alone and never to any real purpose, because, in the end, all he can do is hope that things turn out for the best." He paused, and with as kind a smile as I have ever seen, said with a sadness that surprised and touched me, "I understand that next spring, when you finish Harvard, you won't be coming back."

I started to mumble something, and I think if he had not stopped me I would have changed my mind about what I was planning to do.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "You're right to do what you think you have to. It's the only way to live. Believe me: If I haven't learned anything else in my life, I've learned that. You'd be the best thing that could happen to her for the same reason Thomas would be the worst.

"They've known each other since they were children. Joanna couldn't have been more than eight or nine when Stern started bringing his grandson with him when he made his trips to New York. Thomas has two fine parents, but you wouldn't have known he had any from the way that old man took over his life. Thomas didnt have a childhood --- perhaps he's told you some of that himself --- but you had to see it to believe it: the way Stern took away all the spontaneity, all the life, and burdened him with a sense of responsibility that men my age would find too much to bear. He had no friends; he did not go to school --- he had nothing but private tutors until the day he left for Princeton; he did not know how to talk to anyone who wasn't dressed in a suit. That's why from I think the first time he saw her, Joanna became the one person with whom he thought he could ever be himself.

"It's gone on for years now. They're like brother and sister; except, of course, they're not. Whenever he has a problem, whenever something has gone wrong, he turns to her because she's the only one he trusts. And that's what worries me: They're too close --- and they're not close enough. When she's with you, Joanna is natural and alive; around Thomas it's as if she thinks she has to protect him not only from the world, but also in some sense from himself. There's something else. Something I really should not say. He has spent so much time trying to get away from his grandfather's influence, trying to be something different than what the old man wanted him to be, that sometimes I think that underneath all his outward charm he has become, not what Zachary Stern wanted, but what Zachary Stern was: a man driven to do something no one has done before."

The sun had sunk below the horizon. There was a chill in the air. Joanna's father stood up, buttoned his gray cardigan sweater and plunged his hands deep into his pants pockets. In the distance, a child cried out as she tumbled down a grass embankment into her mother's arms.

"When the old man died two weeks ago, the first call Thomas made was to Joanna. He's coming here next week. Did you know?"

Excerpted from BREACH OF TRUST: A Joseph Antonelli Novel © Copyright 2004 by D.W. Buffa. Reprinted with permission by Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All rights reserved.

Breach of Trust
by by D.W. Buffa

  • Genres: Fiction, Thriller
  • paperback: 416 pages
  • Publisher: Onyx
  • ISBN-10: 0451411803
  • ISBN-13: 9780451411808