Vapor Trail (23 page)

You think you lose it,
that it’s gone forever, worn to nothing by the drip of familiarity that breeds contempt. You resign yourself that it’s never going to happen again. Not happen like it used to, not heightened and intense, and then you discover it’s been there all along and that all you needed was the right person to bring it back strong. Flint and steel. Sparks, flame, inferno . . .

He was lost in his lovemaking.

God, it was like he was twenty-five again, and she made it all new. So good. Like secrets. All these cunning little physical secrets she revealed. Could she always do this? Or was it something kindled special between them?

Was it her? Was it them? It was like she was a mirror, and when he looked at her writhing in his arms, lips parted, eyes shut, slippery with sweat in this heat—all he could see was . . .

Himself.

But he wanted to please her; he wanted to slowly gather her in, then herd her, then push her into a run until they ended in a happy stampede.

Shhh, she said. We have to be quiet.

It’s all right; it’s all right, he said.

We’re making too much noise, she said. But then she began to really like it and then she began to whisper loudly, Oh God, oh God; it’s perfect, it’s perfect, and now I’m afraid I can’t stop. I’m afraid I can’t stop.

I don’t want you to stop, he whispered back.

Oh yes you do. Yes you do.

Drew Hensen was more than impressed. What a surprise Annie Mortenson turned out to be on a sultry Saturday morning. One minute he was waving to her from his studio porch, inviting her up for coffee. An hour later they were in bed.

Now he studied Annie as she began her transformation from wanton to quietly prim, drawing her knees together, sitting up, and pulling the damp sheet over her chest. She leaned back and fluffed her bangs.

While she was still wide-eyed and puffy-lipped, he reached over and ran his finger across her lower lip. “Is it true what they say about librarians giving the best head? I always wanted to know,” he said.

She mock-arched her eyebrows and briefly took his finger in her mouth, then slowly slid it out, turned it around, and wagged it at him. “But if I give you some, that’s all you’ll want.”

Drew actually had a little run of goose bumps with the temperature in the midnineties.

Annie laughed silently. “Is this how you give all the girls a tour of your studio?” she whispered.

“Why are you whispering?” Drew said. It was nuts, with the racket the TV was making.

Annie grimaced and stabbed her finger at the sound of the TV
on the other side of the curtain that was drawn over the alcove where the futon on which they lay was located. “There’s a little girl out there.”

“Oh, c’mon, she can’t hear anything. She’s OD’ed on
Shrek
for the second time this morning,” Drew said.

“It’s not funny.” Annie squirmed deeper in the sheet. “What if she would have pulled the curtain back?”

“We were under the sheet.”

“Not all the time we weren’t.”

Drew stood up and slapped his stomach. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it.” Abruptly he reached for the curtain.

“What are you doing?” Annie asked.

“I got to take a pee,” Drew said.

“Aren’t you going to put some clothes on?”

“Hey, Annie; she’s six years old, she’s my daughter.”

“It’s not right to walk around like that. At least dry yourself off.” Annie flung a corner of the sheet at him.

Drew ran the cloth over his crotch and dropped it. “I’m not going to make my kid ashamed of her body.”

“We’re not talking about her body. We’re talking about your body.”

“Don’t be so uptight,” Drew said as he stepped past the curtain.

Annie hugged herself, stared at the space where he’d just been, and muttered, “That’s what my dad used to say.”

She’d thought he was going to be different. Heck, he drew pictures for children’s books; he
should
be different. That’s why she took a chance when she saw him standing on his porch this morning. He’d waved at her. He’d invited her a number of times before. But he was married then.

Now he had taken off his wedding band. He said he and his wife were separated, that he had moved in here. But he was smooth. A different smooth than Harry Cantrell. Harry was
rough smooth, Drew was smooth smooth. But Harry had lied. After Harry got her good a couple of times, he still pined for that bodybuilding bitch. Already Annie was starting to worry that Drew would pull the same stunt. She’d seen the wife.

She pursed her lips and scowled. She didn’t like the idea of him out there parading his pecker in front of a kid. Any kid.

Uh-uh. Not one bit.

The TV audio turned off, and she heard Drew talking with his daughter. “You’re covered with grease and crumbs from last night; you need a bath.”

“But I thought we were going to Camp Snoopy,” Laurie said.

“We are,” Drew said.

“Is she coming?” Laurie said.

“No, no, she’s going home. But you have tomato sauce stuck in your hair. You know what that means.”

“I know,” Laurie said. “It means consequences.”

“Consequences, right. You got to do what you wanted, and now you have to get cleaned up.”

“You have to wash me because of my hands,” Laurie said.

“Don’t worry, I will,” Drew said.

After a few beats of silence, Annie heard the bathwater running. Him peeing in the bowl.

Consequences, consequences, consequences.

The toilet flushed. He was in the bathroom with her, taking her clothes off. And him not wearing any.

She could feel the steam from the hot water billow like a sail in the heavy air. Snatches of their father-daughter conversation.

Like . . .

Slowly, Annie stood up and gathered her clothing, a pair of Levi’s cutoffs, a loose T-shirt with the arms and neck scissored out—hot weather gear. She pulled them on and walked barefoot through the studio, paused in front of the full-length mirror on
the wall, and checked the tiny cuts and slight bruising on her knees. Not bad. Ice packs had helped a lot last night. She put last night from her mind and went down the wooden stairs to the street.

The late-morning sky seemed to be in motion; flickers of light illuminated deep, convoluted canyons of black and gray clouds. The world struck her as such a beautiful place. Why did it always seem she was watching it from the outside? Why couldn’t she step into it and lose herself? Be part of it.

Why did she have to go on cleaning up after other people, finishing what they started and left undone?

It wasn’t fair.

She thumbed the remote on her key ring, and the door locks responded with a reassuring metal
shh-chunk
. She lifted the rear hatch, pulled up the floor cover, and removed the heavy saddlebag purse nestled in the concave bin in the middle of the spare tire.

When she returned to the studio, Drew was looking at himself in the mirror. He seemed to be trying to flex his not quite defined abdominal muscles. He had made a concession to modesty and slung a bright red towel low on his hips, sarong fashion. The towel had blue and green monkeys on it, and coconuts and palm trees.

“Where’d you go?” he asked.

Annie held up the purse. “Went to get my toothbrush.” Among other things. Then she cocked her head toward the bathroom. She could hear Laurie talking in the tub. “Is someone else here? She’s talking to somebody.”

Drew shrugged and said, “She talks to her dolls.”

Annie walked a circuit of the studio, making sure they were alone. When she returned, she said, “I have a minor confession to make. I read about you in something.”

Drew acted interested, but his eyes wandered back to the mirror. “And what was that? A review of a book?”

“It was a complaint. You were accused of something; I thought of investigating you.”

Drew turned and smiled. “You can
investigate
me anytime,” he said, sashaying his towel around in a mock striptease.

“This is serious, Drew. I used to go out with this county cop, you know.”

“Uh-huh. You told me.”

Annie nodded. “Well, your name was on this list he brought over. Your neighbor complained about you walking around naked when her daughter had a play date with Laurie.”

Drew’s striptease ended abruptly. “Oh, Christ. Mrs. Siple. Are you for real? She tried to get us on a complaint about our fence encroaching on her yard. When that didn’t pan out, she tried character assassination. I talked to a cop about it. He saw it for what it was; case closed.”

“But you do walk around naked in front of kids,” Annie said, setting her jaw slightly.

Drew shook his head. “Not other people’s kids,” he said firmly. “Jesus, talk about mood swings. How can somebody screw like a mink one minute and be such a prude the next?”

“Maybe you were a little too casual about nudity, but you seemed to be a good father.”

“I guess I should say thank you very much.”

Annie walked past Drew without a response. She went to the bathroom, shut the door behind her, and knelt at the side of the tub. Laurie was pink and shiny with several Band-Aids on her fingers and gauze wrapped around her knuckles. Because of the dressings, her hands were marooned on the sides of the tub. Otherwise she was perfectly formed. Three Barbies surrounded her, floating facedown, arms and legs extended, hair adrift like miniature drowning victims.

That’s when Annie noticed the Nokia cell phone lying on the wet floor. She picked it up. “Is this your dad’s?” she said.

Laurie clammed up and pursed her lips tight together. But she bobbed her head affirmatively. Annie slipped the phone into her purse. “This shouldn’t be in here on the floor where it can get wet,” she said.

“I really need my dad to wash me. My hands hurt if I get them wet,” Laurie said.

“Okay, I’ll tell him. But right now I have a present for you,” Annie said.

“Oh—thank you,” Laurie said apprehensively.

Annie took the medallion from her purse and carefully draped the chain around Laurie’s neck. Then she gently patted Laurie on the cheek, stood up, and left the bathroom.

Drew puttered in his
cramped kitchen area, getting an ice tray from the small refrigerator. He dropped some cubes into two glasses and added ginger ale. In the bathroom, Laurie began to sing a lackadaisical lyric of her own invention. Annie stood very still in the middle of the room with her purse slung over her shoulder. She had her right hand stuffed into its depths.

“You know what the really hard thing is?” she said.

Drew carried the two glasses of ginger ale to his round coffee table. “What’s that?” He indicated one of the chairs, then sat in the other one.

“My father started making sexual advances toward me and my sister when we were not much older than Laurie in there,” Annie said.

Drew’s head came up abruptly. “That’s horrible.” He watched her for several beats. Annie had the feeling he was making some great male discovery about her and sex. “It must be difficult to talk about,” he said, leaning forward, looking genuinely concerned.

Smooth.

“It is, but right now I need to,” Annie said.

Drew nodded. “I’m a good listener.”

“I guess what set me off was seeing you and your daughter and you being naked. That’s like my dad; he’d wash us and then he’d show us how to—wash him.”

Drew winced. “You mean . . .”

Annie nodded and studied his face. “Right, I
mean
.” An edge hardened in her voice that Drew hadn’t heard before. “By the time we were eleven, he had progressed to actual intercourse with Angela, my twin sister. Angela had always protected me. She convinced Dad to do it to her and leave me alone. I’d lie in bed and pray to God to help me. But the only person who helped me was my sister. I pretended I was invisible.”

Drew studied her face. Annie thought the story fascinated him. Just as he’d seemed to be excited by making love behind a curtain while his daughter watched TV fifteen feet away.

But his voice was serious. “Makes sense, denial as a cloaking mechanism. It’s one of the ways kids cope. Jeez, Annie, I’m really sorry . . . how long did this go on?” He removed an ice cube from his glass and slid it in little melting circles on his sweaty chest.

“Until we were fifteen; that’s when Dad had a heart attack and died.”

“What about your mom?”

“She denied it right up until her death. Angela tried to stuff it, too. She worked hard as an attorney, but she had to take meds for depression.” Annie paused and set her jaw. “The meds didn’t work for the cancer.”

Drew winced. “Cancer? On top of . . . Jesus, Annie, what happened to you?”

Annie shrugged. “I went to college in Madison. I floated from library to library and wound up back here. But when Angela died,
something just . . . snapped. That was just about the time Ronald Dolman was acquitted.” Annie leaned forward. “You remember Dolman?”

“Sure,” Drew said, “the child molester last summer. He was . . . wait a minute.” Drew sat up, thinking out loud. “On the news last night, the prosecutor who committed suicide; they hinted she might have killed that guy last summer as well as a woman yesterday—that she was . . . ?”

“The Saint.”

“Yeah, the Saint.” The indulgent afterglow dropped from Drew’s face. He narrowed his eyes. “What are we talking about here?”

Annie withdrew her hand from the purse and dropped the medallion and chain on the table.

He pushed the chain with his finger. “What’s this?”

“St. Nicholas, he’s the patron saint of children. That’s why I gave one to Laurie just now.”

Drew sat up and looked at the bathroom door. “Wait a minute, you
what
?”

“Hung it around her neck, to protect her.”

Drew began to breathe more rapidly.

Here comes the first fear,
Annie thought. “Do you know how Ronald Dolman died?”

Drew tensed forward in his chair. Instinctively, he measured distances: the distance between himself and Annie, the distance to the bathroom, the distance to the telephone on his drawing table.

“Someone shot him,” Drew said slowly.

Annie nodded. “With a thirty-eight-caliber Colt Detective Special revolver with a two-inch barrel. Would you like to see it?”

Drew’s chair banged on the floor as he startled and planted his feet, pushing away from the table when Annie smoothly pulled the revolver from her purse.

“Oh my God,” Drew muttered. His eyes fixed on the bathroom door. “Laurie,” he said.

“Laurie has nothing to fear. She’s going to be safe.
Now
she is, I mean,” Annie said. “You sit very still. I’m not through talking.” She thumbed back the hammer and steadied the barrel at Drew’s chest. “You don’t know much about guns, do you?”

Drew shook his head. His eyes were riveted to the bullet tips he could see inside the pistol’s cylinder.

“Well, I do. Harry taught me. This is a double-action revolver. Cocking the hammer makes the trigger pull smoother,” Annie said.

It was silent in the room for a few beats. Just the faint sound of Laurie singing in her bath.

“Please, take it easy with that,” Drew said.

“Settle down, drink your ginger ale,” Annie said. “See, my sister had just died, and I was going through her things. She had this wig—well, that’s a long story—but the thing was, I was going out with Harry, and he’d go off all weekend with that Gloria Russell. We used to do a lot of things together until . . . he bought her a gun and taught her to shoot.” Annie brandished the pistol. “This gun.”

Drew squirmed against the back of his chair, seeing the hate come to Annie’s face.

“He’d have me over and get his kicks; then he’d stick me in front of the TV and go down in the basement and load bullets for her to practice with. So I started watching her, when she left her apartment, when she came back. It was last summer, so she left her windows open. There was a perfect tree under the window. I climbed up, slit the screen, went in her bedroom, and took the gun.”

Annie drew herself up. “Then Gloria let Dolman get away. Harry came over drunk and said how she was raving about wanting to kill the guy. I even drove him over to her place so he could take the gun off her.” Annie smiled. “But the gun wasn’t there.” She moved the pistol out of line long enough to give it an admiring look.

“Maybe Gloria failed, but her gun didn’t. And the bullet casings left with the body could be traced back to her. All I had to do was return the gun to her apartment, hide it, and tip the cops.” Annie’s smile jerked on her lips. “But I kept . . . putting it off . . .”

The gun barrel wavered off his chest, and Drew started to rise in his chair. The gun snapped back. “Sit,” Annie commanded. Drew sat.

“It was you, last night,” Drew said. “The woman up the hill, the teacher. You—”

“Oh, she was easy. Now Gloria, that was hard,” Annie said.

But as Harry always says, if you never take the long shots, you never win big.

So she bets it all that Gloria will be home. And it’s just like she has Harry’s lucky arm with the three 7s hugging her. Gloria opens the door and sees bedraggled Annie all beat up from ducking through the bushes.

“Help. This guy jumped me.”

Barge past her, going into the apartment. Track dirt, shed bits of shrubs. Feigning shock, mumbling after the phone, compassionate Gloria tags along, does not notice the latex gloves. Wrong turn into the bedroom, return with the pillow. One hand stays in the pack on the Ruger, but the silencer is back at the storm sewer.

More shock, stumbling into the bathroom—then the one moment of cruelty. Face-to-face.

Harry sends his love, bitch!

One beat, two. Let it sink in. Then the gun comes out. Shove the pillow in her face to muffle the scream of protest, the sound of the shot. Make sure the angle of the barrel is credible for a suicide, jam it in, and . . .Gloria’s dead, open eyes watch her enjoy a cool shower on a hot night.

Take the time now to be careful. Arrange the pistol just so in the
lifeless hand. Scuff her up with the dirty clothes and shoes, leave them strewn on the bathroom floor. Even thought to bring a small branch to gouge her shin and knee. Then a moment of quiet celebration in the bedroom, slow tour of Gloria’s closet to find a fresh change of clothes. Leave the pack in the closet; Angel’s cheap wig, the bodysuit, medals, the Saints jacket.

One last touch. Send the world’s first wireless suicide note. To her weightlifting buddy. The cop. His address is right in her queue. Message him on Gloria’s Palm Pilot. A trained detective, and he comes running because he sees a dead woman’s name printed on his gadget.

No one sees her go in or out. Perfect. Gloria Russell is the Saint. Harry’s theory comes true. All she has to do is leave the .38 along with the Ruger.

But here it is, in her hand.

Annie stared at Drew, almost fondly. “Like I told you, I can’t stop. Just like I couldn’t resist coming over this morning because you were the last name on my list.”

Drew balled his fists, desperate and angry, getting ready to fight. “You’re crazy, really fucking crazy.”

“DON’T SAY THAT!” Annie yelled. Her hand began to shake now, and Drew half rose, gathering himself.

“Crazy . . .” he said again, but he looked past Annie. She extended her arm, pointing the gun at his face, but she turned slightly and saw Laurie standing naked and dripping in the bathroom doorway.

“Daddy, I’m
scared
,” Laurie sobbed.

Annie looked back and forth between them. She couldn’t stop the shaking.

“Go back in the bathroom, honey,” Drew said, finally finding his voice. He steadied, gathering himself. “Listen to Daddy.”

“DON’T SAY THAT!” Annie shouted.

Laurie screamed and ran to the bathroom. When Laurie slammed the door, Annie jerked around at the sound. Drew made his move, coming over the table. Annie swung back and yanked the trigger. Drew’s momentum carried him forward into her as the gun went off.

The loudness of the explosion shocked her. She was used to the silenced Ruger. She watched Drew’s eyes go wide, then he toppled against her, and they both rolled to the floor. Annie was up quick. Drew lay facedown, leaking blood.

Annie staggered to get her balance. She blinked her eyes and swallowed to clear her hearing. Now what? She pushed through the door and entered the bathroom with the pistol hanging in her hand.

“I’m trying to help you,” she explained. She reached out to grab Laurie by the shoulders, to reassure her. Laurie twisted away like a wet fifty-pound wildcat and screamed, “I WANT MY DADDY!”

“DON’T SAY THAT, GODDAMMIT!” Annie screamed back and grabbed at the girl to restrain her.