She gasped, and he began to wish
he had not mentioned it. “It was?” Then she said, “At
least I missed that What a relief.” He knew he was supposed to
laugh at that too, and he was sure he would have, if she were
standing here in the kitchen, where he knew she was safe.
“Yep,” he said. “You
lucked out again.”
“Did Marian Fleming ask
about me?”
“Of course,” he
said. “So did a lot of other people. I told them you were in
Morocco taking a belly-dancing course.”
“Oh, no. I used that
excuse last time. Now I’ll have to do penance with committee
work for the next thirty years.”
“Maybe not,” he said
cheerfully. “But if you don’t know how to belly dance,
you’re going to have to fake a hip injury.”
Jane said, “I’ll
work on it.” She said quietly, “I’d better go.”
He said, “Do you have to?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Just let me know if you
need anything.” He knew he had said it that way out of
self-pity. She had never needed anything from him, and he was
positive that she would never have asked if she had.
“I love you,” she
said.
“Me too.” He hung up
the telephone and walked to the counter. He saw the champagne glass
and it reminded him that he had a guest. He picked up the champagne
and walked toward the living room, but she hadn’t reappeared.
He set the champagne bottle on the mantel and stared into the
fireplace.
In the den off the bathroom,
Linda heard the click and dialed the operator. “Can I have the
time and charges on that call, please?”
The operator said, “Two
minutes and seventeen seconds, billed at three minutes. That’s
four dollars and eighty-eight cents.”
“For three minutes? That
can’t be right.”
“There’s a two
ninety-five surcharge for an operator-assisted collect call, ma’am.”
“Okay, but it wasn’t
international or something. What are the night rates from Billings?”
“That might be your
mistake. The call wasn’t from Billings.”
“That might be your
mistake. She thinks she’s in Billings, and I’d bet on
her. How could she be wrong about that?”
“It was Salmon Prairie,
Montana. It’s the same area code, but it’s a different
calling zone, and the pay phone is owned by another carrier.”
“Oh, I see,” said
Linda. “My mistake after all. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
The voice was imperturbable, but chilly.
Linda hung up and hurried down
the hallway into the living room. She found Carey sitting on the
couch looking at a magazine. He tossed it onto the coffee table.
“Sorry. That was my wife.”
“You didn’t tell
her, did you?”
“Tell her what?”
“About me. Sister Mary
Boniface.”
It caught him by surprise.
“Oops. You’re right. Forgot. Well, I’ll have to
tell her tomorrow.” He had been wrenched from a sad
contemplation of how close Jane had sounded, and how far away she
was. Now he felt reluctant to let this stranger see that he was
annoyed at himself for forgetting to tell Jane about her. He hated it
when Jane called from a pay phone. It was impossible for a person to
remember everything he had to say in a couple of minutes.
“You aren’t going to
tell her,” said Susan. The smile was mysterious and amused now.
He was startled, and it
irritated him. “Why do you say that?”
“Because this was the time
to tell her, and now you won’t be able to, because it will look
as though you were hiding me.”
The smile had a trace of
sympathy now, the full lips pursed. Then there was mischief in the
eyes. “If you try to tell her tomorrow, she’ll think that
you didn’t tell her now because you were hoping to get lucky
tonight.”
“That’s ridiculous,”
he said. “She’s not that way at all.”
“That’s how women
think,” she said. “You shouldn’t have decided to
take one on full-time if you don’t know how they work.”
He suspected that she would have
seemed bright and witty at about eight o’clock, but right now,
he was not in the mood to be the butt of any more feminine teasing.
“Well, I’d better show you where your room is. It’s
getting late.”
She stood, but she took her
glass with her and sipped from it as she headed for the stairs. “Just
what I was thinking.”
He led the way up the stairs and
turned right to take her down the hallway. “This is the best of
the guest rooms,” he said. He flipped the light on and walked
her into the room.
She sat on the bed, bounced a
little, looked at the walls, the curtains over the big window. “It’s
very pretty.”
He pointed to the door on the
side wall. “Your bathroom is right there. Everything you need
should be in the drawers – clean towels, shampoo, soap, even
toothbrushes.”
Susan glanced in that direction
with little interest. She set her champagne glass on the nightstand,
stood up, turned her back on him, and bent her neck forward. “Unzip
me.”
Carey stepped forward. He tried
to lift her long hair out of the way without touching her neck, and
carefully grasped the zipper without touching her back. He tugged the
zipper down eight inches, to where he judged she could reach it, and
stepped back. “There. If there’s anything you can’t
find, I’ll be in the room at the other end of the hall. Good
night.”
He began his retreat, but she
said, “Not so fast.” He stopped and turned. She was
holding her hair up off her neck. “What do you think I am –
a contortionist? I can’t reach that.”
“Sorry.” He stepped
forward, stopped three feet from her, reached out, and pulled the
zipper down a few more inches. There was an instant – perhaps
two seconds – when several things seemed to happen at once. She
was still holding her hair up when she turned a little to say over
her shoulder, “That’s more like it.” But her slight
turn inside the dress seemed to spread the two unzipped sides of it
apart. There was a tantalizing view of the white skin of the lower
part of her back, where it softened and curved inward toward her
hips. But worse, the front of the dress had nothing to hold it up.
She quickly released her hair and hugged the dress to cover herself,
but not before Carey had been presented with a glimpse of her left
breast in profile.
“Good night,” Carey
muttered. As he backed quickly out the door and closed it, the last
thing he saw was Susan Haynes facing him, holding the front of her
dress up, her big green eyes looking into his with that knowing,
amused stare. When he reached his own room at the end of the hall, he
closed the door and leaned against it for a moment. The stare was
still with him. “Taking her to a hotel wouldn’t have been
such a bad idea,” he muttered. He locked his bedroom door, then
undressed and got into bed. He lay in the dark with his eyes closed,
but what he had seen came back to him again and again. “That,”
he thought, “is what the end of a marriage looks like.”
At three o’clock, he
awoke, lying on the bed on his back. He imagined for a moment that he
could feel Jane’s soft, silky hair on his arm. He turned to
touch her, then remembered. He lay for a moment feeling sad and
empty, and then he realized he could hear a voice. Someone was
talking.
Carey sat up quickly and looked
around him, but he saw nothing. He switched on the lamp beside the
bed and squinted against the searing light to see the door. It was
still closed, and the room was empty. It must have been a dream. As
he reached for the lamp, he heard the voice again. It had to be Susan
Haynes. It didn’t seem possible that there could be somebody
here with her. He got to his feet and walked into the hallway. As he
reached the second-floor landing, he followed her voice and looked
over the railing. She was facing away, sitting on the couch near the
fireplace. The sight of her obliterated the lingering clouds of
sleep. She appeared to be wearing only a bed-sheet, her legs folded
under her and her purse beside her. She turned to look up and the
green eyes focused on him, and then she hung up the telephone.
She put a plastic card back into
her purse, fastened the white sheet under her arm, and stood up. As
he looked at her from a distance like this, the thought that
overwhelmed all others was her perfection – the long shiny
hair, the smooth, white shoulders and arms, the graceful veiled curve
of hip and thigh. When she turned toward him, he saw she was aware
that he had been staring at her intently. In order to look up at him
she tossed her hair in a gesture that should not have been intriguing
because it was self-conscious and calculated, but it was mesmerizing
because she was posing for him, trying to look more beautiful. “I
was just calling my machine in San Francisco. I didn’t want to
use the phone upstairs and wake you up. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” he
said. “I just wondered – ”
“Don’t worry,
though. I used a credit card, so it won’t be printed on your
phone bill.”
He felt a sick chill. It had not
occurred to him before that he had somehow become a man who was in
the business of hiding evidence from his wife: first the champagne,
and now the telephone bill.
Susan seemed to forget about him
for a moment. She hitched her shoulder uncomfortably, then did a poor
job of retucking the bedsheet she was using as a sarong. She frowned,
unwrapped a little of it, and tried again. It was as though she had
unaccountably forgotten she was not alone. But then she abruptly
looked up into his eyes, pretended to follow his line of sight and be
surprised to find her own eyes looking down at the translucent sheet
that covered her body. As she tucked the sheet under her arm she
looked up again with the knowing, amused expression.
“Something else on your
mind?” The smile was still on her face as she moved up the
stairs toward him. She walked so lightly that her feet seemed not to
touch, as though she were floating.
He shook his head, as much to
clear it as to communicate with her. “No,” he said,
already backing away. “No. I was afraid it was a burglar or
something. But it was just you. See you in the morning.” As he
walked back to his room and closed his door, he wondered why it was
that virtue had to be so clumsy and inept.
Earl
sat up and looked out his hotel window at Pete Hatcher’s car.
He was through staring at its dusty finish, each day picking out new
spots of birdshit on the windshield with his binoculars, never seeing
a human being go near it. Now he needed to think ahead. He unfolded
his road map and studied it, then picked up the telephone again and
dialed.
He heard the sleep in Lenny’s
voice. “Yeah?”
“It’s me,”
said Earl. “Listen. I want you to close the place up and get on
a plane right away. Get a suite at the Rocky Mountain Lodge in
Kalispell, Montana. Stay there until I call. It could be two weeks,
or the phone could be ringing when you walk in the door.”
Earl could hear rustling noises
and groaning. Lenny must be sitting up in bed. Lenny coughed to clear
his throat. “The place already is closed up. I went to bed an
hour ago. What’s up?”
“Did you understand what I
said? This isn’t a dream.”
“Rocky Mountain Lodge in
Kalispell, Montana. Wait there for you. Right.” Earl could
almost hear him thinking. “Hey – Rusty and T-Bone. What
do I do with the dogs?”
“Bring them.”
Earl hung up before Lenny could
start protesting about the difficulty of flying dogs around. If
people did it with fancy show dogs, then it certainly wouldn’t
harm two big, muscular beasts like the Rottweilers, and he didn’t
care what it did to Lenny.
He walked into the bathroom and
turned the water on cold, then stepped under the icy stream. He
gasped, then slowly let the water warm up. He was fully awake now,
confident that he was thinking clearly. It would take ten minutes to
dress, pack, and clean his prints off everything he had touched. It
might take another ten minutes to check out and get on the road.
It had not escaped Earl that
Linda had been talking in a whispery voice over the telephone at one
in the morning. That was three a.m. in Buffalo. Linda would have
called with Hatcher’s location as soon as she could – the
first minute when she could reach a telephone. If she was with this
Carey Mc-Kinnon at three o’clock in the morning, worried that
he would overhear her, then there wasn’t much question what
they were doing. She had been doing it with him for hours, letting
him put it to her until he had used himself up and fallen asleep.
This was not a simple flirtation where she got a fact out of him that
he wouldn’t remember saying and probably didn’t even know
was a secret. This was a full night of it, her hair probably wet with
sweat and his sperm still dripping out of her, sticky and warm when
she called to tell Earl.
He was enraged. He hated this
man, and he felt a mixture of awe and disgust at Linda. She had said
she would do anything to find Pete Hatcher. But what she had done was
not brave or cunning. It was pathetic, requiring only a fawning sort
of guile and a strong stomach. It was like biting the head off a
chicken. She was soiled. Unclean. The only way he was ever going to
feel right about this was to make it even. He was going to do the
same to Jane Whitefield before he killed her. Then he was going to
make Linda go back and watch him drop the hammer on Carey McKinnon.
Maybe he would make her go back and do it herself.
He stepped out of the shower,
quickly dried himself, and dressed, tossing pieces of clothing into
his suitcase as he saw them. Then he remembered the way she had cut
him off at the end of the call – quickly, abruptly. It was
probably because McKinnon was awake again. He nearly reeled with the
sudden realization that it was worse, more humiliating than he had
thought. McKinnon was awake. She would have put down the telephone
and needed to distract him. She was doing him again right now, this
second, while Earl was two thousand miles away in a hotel room. He
didn’t dare close his eyes, because he knew that the sight of
it was forming behind his eyelids.