“What makes you think anybody would write your sorry ass,” the face behind the mesh asks.
Basil can’t make out much, just the dark shape of the face and the wetness of eyes peering in at him. Basil knows what to do about eyes, how to put them out so they don’t shine at him, so they don’t see places they shouldn’t before they turn dark and crazed and he almost suffocates. He can’t do much in here, in his suicide cell, and rage and anxiety twist his stomach like a dishrag.
“I know I have mail,” Basil says. “I want it.”
The face vanishes and then the drawer opens. Basil gets off the bed, takes his tray and the drawer loudly clangs shut at the bottom of the thick, gray, steel door.
“Hope nobody spit on your food,” Uncle Remus says through the mesh. “Enjoy your breakfast,” he says.
The wide plank floor is cold beneath Lucy’s bare feet as she returns to the bedroom. Stevie is asleep under the covers, and Lucy sets two coffees on the bedside table and slides her hand under the mattress, feeling for the pistol’s magazines. She may have been reckless last night, but not so reckless that she would leave her pistol loaded with a stranger in the house.
“Stevie?” she says. “Come on. Wake up. Hey!”
Stevie opens her eyes and stares at Lucy standing by the bed inserting a magazine into the pistol.
“What a sight,” Stevie says, yawning.
“I’ve got to go.” Lucy hands her a coffee.
Stevie stares at the gun. “You must trust me, leaving it right there on the table all night.”
“Why wouldn’t I trust you?”
“I guess you lawyers have to worry about all those people whose lives you’ve ruined,” Stevie says. “You never know about people these days.”
Lucy told her she is a Boston attorney. Stevie probably thinks a lot of things that aren’t true.
“How did you know I like my coffee black?”
“I didn’t,” Lucy says. “There’s no milk or cream in the house. I’ve really got to go.”
“I think you should stay. Bet I can make it worth your while. We never finished, now did we? Got me so liquored up and stoned, I never got your clothes off. That’s a first.”
“Seems like a lot of things were your first.”
“You didn’t take your clothes off,” Stevie reminds her, sipping coffee. “That’s a first, all right.”
“You weren’t exactly with it.”
“I was with it enough to try. It’s not too late to try again.”
She sits up and settles into the pillows, and the covers slip below her breasts, and her nipples are erect in the chilled air. She knows exactly what she has and what to do with it, and Lucy doesn’t believe what happened last night was a first, that any of it was.
“God, my head hurts,” Stevie says, watching Lucy look at her. “I thought you told me good tequila wouldn’t do that.”
“You mixed it with vodka.”
Stevie plumps the pillows behind her and the covers settle low around her hips. She pushes her dark-blond hair out of her eyes, and she is quite something to look at in the morning light, but Lucy wants nothing more with her and is put off by the red hand prints again.
“Remember I asked you about those last night?” Lucy says, looking at them.
“You asked me a lot of things last night.”
“I asked you where you got them done.”
“Why don’t you climb back in.” Stevie pats the bed, and her eyes seem to burn Lucy’s skin.
“It must have hurt getting them. Unless they’re fake and I happen to think they are.”
“I can clean them off with nail polish remover or baby oil. I’m sure you don’t have nail polish remover or baby oil.”
“What’s the point?” Lucy stares at the hand prints.
“It wasn’t my idea.”
“Then whose?”
“Someone annoying. She does it to me and I have to clean them off.”
Lucy frowns, staring at her. “You let someone paint them on you. Well, kind of kinky,” and she feels a pinch of jealousy as she imagines someone painting Stevie’s naked body. “You don’t have to tell me who,” Lucy says as if it’s unimportant.
“Much better to be the one who does it to someone else,” Stevie says, and Lucy feels jealous again. “Come here,” Stevie says in her soothing voice, patting the bed again.
“We need to head out of here. I’ve got things to do,” Lucy replies, carrying black cargo pants, a bulky black sweater and the pistol into the tiny bathroom that adjoins the bedroom.
She shuts the door and locks it. She undresses without looking at herself in the mirror, wishing what has happened to her body is imagined or a nightmare. She touches herself in the shower to see if anything has changed and avoids the mirror as she towels herself dry.
“Look at you,” Stevie says when Lucy emerges from the bathroom, dressed and distracted, her mood much worse than it was moments before. “You look like some kind of secret agent. You’re really something. I want to be just like you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“After last night, I know enough,” she says, staring Lucy up and down. “Who wouldn’t want to be just like you? You don’t seem afraid of anything. Are you afraid of anything?”
Lucy leans over and rearranges the bed linens around Stevie, covering her up to her chin, and Stevie’s face changes. She stiffens, stares down at the bed.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you,” Stevie says meekly, her cheeks turning red.
“It’s cold in here. I was just covering you because…”
“It’s okay. It’s happened before.” She looks up, her eyes bottomless pits filled with fear and sadness. “You think I’m ugly, don’t you. Ugly and fat. You don’t like me. In the daylight, you don’t.”
“You’re anything but ugly or fat,” Lucy says. “And I do like you. It’s just… Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”
“I’m not surprised. Why would someone like you like someone like me?” Stevie says, pulling the blanket around her and off the bed, covering herself completely as she gets up. “You could have anybody. I’m grateful. Thank you. I won’t tell anyone.”
Lucy is speechless, watching Stevie retrieve her clothes from the living room, getting dressed, shaking, her mouth contorting in peculiar ways.
“God, please don’t cry, Stevie.”
“At least call me the right thing!”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Her eyes huge and dark and scared, Stevie says, “I’d like to go now, please. I won’t tell anyone. Thank you, I’m very grateful.”
“Why are you talking like this?” Lucy says.
Stevie retrieves her long, black, hooded coat and puts it on. Through the window, Lucy watches her walk off in a swirl of snow, her long, black coat flapping around her tall, black boots.
Chapter 9
Half an hour later, Lucy zips up her ski jacket and tucks the pistol and two extra magazines in a pocket.
She locks the cottage and climbs down the snow-covered wooden steps to the street as she thinks about Stevie and her inexplicable behavior, feeling guilty. She thinks about Johnny and feels guilty, remembering San Francisco, when he took her to dinner and reassured her that everything would be all right.
You’re going to be fine, he promised.
I can’t live like this, she said.
It was women’s night at Mecca on Market Street, and the restaurant was crowded with women, attractive women who looked happy and confident and pleased with themselves. Lucy felt stared at, and it bothered her in a way it never had before.
I want to do something about it now, she said.Look at me.
Lucy, you look great.
I haven’t been this fat since I was ten.
You stop taking your medicine and…
It makes me sick and exhausted.
I’m not going to let you do anything rash. You have to trust me.
He held her gaze in the candlelight, and his face will always be in her mind, looking at her the way he did that night. He was handsome, with fine features and unusual eyes the color of tiger eyes, and she could keep nothing from him. He knew all there was to know in every way imaginable.
Loneliness and guilt follow her as she follows the snowy sidewalk west along the Cape Cod Bay. She ran away. She remembers when she heard about his death. She heard about it the way no one should, on the radio.
A prominent doctor was found shot to death in a Hollywood apartment in what sources close to the investigation say is a possible suicide…
She had no one to ask. She wasn’t supposed to know Johnny and had never met his brother, Laurel, or any of their friends, so who could she ask?
Her cell phone vibrates, and she tucks the earpiece in her ear and answers.
“Where are you?” Benton says.
“Walking through a blizzard in P town. Well, not literally a blizzard. It’s starting to taper off.” She is dazed, a little hung-over.
“Anything interesting come up?”
She thinks of last night and feels bewildered and ashamed.
What she says is, “Only that he wasn’t alone when he was here last, the week before he died. Apparently, he came here right after his surgery, then went down to Florida.”
“Laurel with him?”
“No.”
“How did he manage alone?”
“As I said, it appears he wasn’t alone.”
“Who told you?”
“A bartender. Apparently, he met someone.”
“We know who?”
“A woman. Someone a lot younger.”
“A name?”