Things Beyond Midnight (6 page)

Life in California was like being caught inside one of those silent Chaplin films, where everything is speeded up and people whip dizzily back and forth across the screen. Did she
really
love Jaimie? Did he
really
love her? Did it matter?

Just let it happen, kid, she told herself. Just flow with the action. “Here we are,” said Jaimie, swinging the high-fendered little MG into a circular driveway of crushed white gravel. He braked the car, nodding toward the house. “Our humble abode!”

Lizbeth drew in a breath. Lovely! Perfect!

Not a mansion, which would have been too large and too intimidating, but a just-right two-story Spanish house topping a green-pine bluff, flanked by gardens and neatly trimmed box hedges.

“Well, do you like it?”

She giggled. “Silly question!”

“It’s no castle.”

“It’s perfect! I hate big drafty places.” She slid from the MG and stood looking at the house, hands on hips. “Wow. Oh, wow!”

“You’re right about twenty-thou-a-year actors,” he admitted, moving around the car to stand beside her. “This place is way beyond me.”

“Then how did you...”

“I won it at poker last Thursday. High-stakes game. Went into it on borrowed cash. Got lucky, cleaned out the whole table, except for this tall, skinny guy who asks me if he can put up a house against what was in the pot. Said he had the deed on him and would sign it over to me if he lost the final hand.”

“And you said yes.”

“Damn right I did.”

“And he lost?”

“Damn right he did.”

She looked at the house, then back at him. “And it’s legal?”

“The deed checks out. I own it all, Liz—house, gardens, pool.”

“There’s a
pool?
” Her eyes were shining.

He nodded. “And it’s a beaut. Custom design. I may rent it out for commercials, pick up a little extra bread.”

She hugged him. “Oh, Jaimie! I’ve always wanted to live in a house with a pool!”

“This one’s unique.”

“I want to see it!”

He grinned and then squeezed her waist. “First the house,
then
the pool. Okay?”

She gave him a mock bow. “Lead on, master!”

Lizbeth found it difficult to keep her mind on the house as Jaimie led her happily from room to room. Not that the place wasn’t charming and comfortable, with its solid Spanish furniture, bright rugs, and beamed ceilings. But the prospect of finally having a pool of her own was so delicious that she couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“I held a cleaning service come up here and get everything ready for us,” Jaimie told her. He stood in the center of the living room, looking around proudly, reminding her of a captain on the deck of his first ship. “Place needed work. Nobody’s lived here in ten years.”

“How do you know that?”

“The skinny guy told me. Said he’d closed it down ten years ago, after his wife left him.” He shrugged. “Can’t say I blame her.”

“What do you know about her?”

“Nothing. But the guys a creep, a skinny creep.” He flashed his white smile. “Women prefer
attractive
guys.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “Like
you
, right?”

“Right!”

He reached for her, but she dipped away from him, pulling off his cap and draping it over her dark hair.

“You look cute that way,” he said.

“Come on, show me the pool. You promised to show me.”

“Yes, madame... the pool.”

They had to descend a steep flight of weathered wooden steps to reach it. The pool was set in its own shelf of woodland terrain, notched into the hillside and screened from the house by a thick stand of trees.

“You never have to change the water,” Jaimie said as they walked toward it. “Feeds itself from a stream inside the hill. Its self-renewing. Old water out, new water in. All the cleaning guys had to do was skim the leaves and stuff off the surface.” He hesitated as the pool spread itself before them. “Bet you’ve never seen one like it!”

Lizbeth never had, not even in books or magazine photos.

It was
huge,
at least ten times larger than she’d expected, edged on all sides by gray, angular rocks. It was designed in an odd, irregular shape that actually made her... made her... suddenly made her...

Dizzy. I’m dizzy.

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” She pressed a hand against her eyes. “I... I feel a little... sick.”

“Are you having your...”

“No, it’s not that. I felt fine until...” She turned away toward the house. “I just don’t like it.”

“What don’t you like?”

“The pool,” she said, breathing deeply “I don’t like the pool. There’s something wrong about it.”

He looked confused. “I thought you’d
love
it!” His tone held irritation. “Didn’t you just tell me you always wanted...”

“Not one like this,” she interrupted, overriding his words. “Not
this
one.” She touched his shoulder. “Can we go back to the house now? Its cold here. I’m freezing.”

He frowned. “But it’s
warm,
Liz! Must he eighty at least. How can you be cold?”

She was shivering and hugging herself for warmth. “But I am! Can’t you feel the chill?”

“All right,” he sighed. “Let’s go back.”

She didn’t speak during the climb up to the house.

Below them, wide and black and deep, the pool rippled its dark skin, a stirring, sluggish, patient movement in the windless afternoon.

Upstairs, naked in the Spanish four-poster bed, Lizbeth could not imagine what had come over her at the pool. Perhaps the trip up to the house along the sharply winding road had made her carsick. Whatever the reason, by the time they were back in the house, the dizziness had vanished, and she’d enjoyed the curried chicken dinner Jaimie had cooked for them. They’d sipped white wine by a comforting hearth fire and then made love there tenderly late into the night, with the pulsing flame tinting their bodies in shades of pale gold.

“Jan and David are coming by in the morning,” he had told her. “Hope you don’t mind.”

“Why should I? I think your kids are great.”

“I thought we’d have this first Sunday together, just the two of us; but school starts for them next week, and I promised they could spend the day here.”

“I don’t mind. Really I don’t.”

He kissed the tip of her nose. “That’s my girl.”

“The skinny man...”

“What about him?”

“I don’t understand why he didn’t try to sell this house in the ten years when he wasn’t living here.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t need the money.”

“Then why bet it on a poker game? Surely the pot wasn’t anywhere near equal to the worth of this place.”

“It was just a way for him to stay in the game. He had a straight flush and thought he’d win.”

“Was he upset at losing the place?”

Jaimie frowned at that question. “Now that you mention it, he didn’t seem to be. He took it very calmly.”

“You said that he left after his wife split. Did he talk about her at all?”

“He told me her name.”

“Which was?”

“Gail. Her name was Gail.”

Now, lying in the upstairs bed, Lizbeth wondered what had happened to Gail. It was odd somehow to think that Gail and the skinny man had made love in this same bed. In a way, shed taken Gail’s place.

Lizbeth still felt guilty about saying no to Jaimie when he’d suggested a post midnight swim. “Not tonight, darling. I’ve a slight headache. Too much wine, maybe. You go on without me.”

And so he’d gone on down to the pool alone, telling her that such a mild, late-summer night was just too good to waste, that he’d take a few laps around the pool and be back before she finished her cigarette.

Irritated with herself, Lizbeth stubbed out the glowing Pall Mall in the bedside ashtray. Smoking was a filthy habit—ruins your lungs, stains your teeth. And smoking in bed was doubly stupid. You fall asleep... the cigarette catches the bed on fire. She
must
stop smoking. All it took was some real will power, and if...

Lizbeth sat up abruptly, easing her breath to listen. Nothing. No sound.

That was wrong. The open bedroom window overlooked the pool, and she’d been listening, behind her thoughts, to Jaimie splashing about below in the water.

Now she suddenly realized that the pool sounds had ceased, totally. She smiled at her own nervous reaction. The silence simply meant that Jaimie had finished his swim and was out of the pool and headed back to the house. He’d be here any second.

But he didn’t arrive.

Lizbeth moved to the window. Moonlight spilled across her breasts as she leaned forward to peer out into the night. The pale mirror glimmer of the pool flickered in the darkness below, but the bulk of trees screened it from her vision.

“Jaimie!” Her voice pierced the silence. “Jaimie, are you still down there?”

No reply. Nothing from the pool. She called his name again, without response.

Had something happened while he was swimming? Maybe a sudden stomach cramp or a muscle spasm from the cold water? No, he would have called out for help. She would have heard him.

Then... what? Surely this was no practical joke, an attempt to scare her? No, impossible. That would be cruel, and Jaimie’s humor was never cruel. But he might think of it as fun, a kind of hide and seek in a new house.
Damn him!