“I think that’s what we’re saying. I think we’re both glad we are who we are.”
Nodding, she said, “We agree it’s a good thing we were never an ‘item,’ back in school.”
Nodding, I said, “Best thing that never happened to us.”
And she said, “Kiss me….”
“You fool,” I said.
And we both laughed.
And both kissed.
And I’ll be damned if half an hour later we weren’t both embarrassed to be sitting naked next to each other in my bed, having made sweet, tender, enjoyable, and, ultimately, passionate love, more about which I decline to say, only to point out that despite its sweetness, tenderness, enjoyability and passion, we both were incredibly embarrassed about the whole thing, and neither one of us really understood why. Or did I say that already?
“If it was terrific,” she said, “why are we both embarrassed?”
“What do you mean, ‘if’ it was terrific? Didn’t you think it was terrific? I thought it was pretty terrific.”
“Mal, you were terrific. The earth moved, okay? So why do I feel like shit?”
I touched her arm. “I can’t agree.”
With a one-handed swing, she hit me with her pillow, in a fairly friendly way, a few embers off the cigarette in her other hand landing on the sheet.
“Okay, okay,” I said, flicking away the ashes. “Watch the cigarette, will ya; you’ll burn the place down.”
“You don’t smoke, do you?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I’d rather die some natural way.”
“Like getting hit by a bus, you mean?”
“I’m holding out for a heart attack during orgasm at age one hundred five.”
“You’ve always been a wise guy, Mal.”
“Are you complaining?”
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
“Jill. This is very confusing. We’re almost fighting now.”
“Almost,” she said.
I gestured toward the bed and us in it. “If we’d met today, and had tumbled into bed—and I’m not saying either one of us is of loose enough moral character to do such a thing, mind you—but if we had, it wouldn’t feel so awkward now. There’s four of us in bed, tonight. You and me yesterday, kids; and you and me today, grown-ups.”
She put her cigarette out in my one and only ashtray, currently on the nightstand beside her, and rested her head in the hollow of my shoulder.
“There’s really five of us in bed,” she said.
“Oh?”
“Ginnie’s here, too.”
She was right. I’d consciously not brought Ginnie up, wanting to spend the evening with this beautiful young woman from my high school past without that, hoping to get around to one touchy point eventually, but preferring to try to get to know Jill for Jill.
“I talked to Brad Faulkner,” I told her.
“What did he have to say?”
I told her all about it; pretty soon she was sitting up in bed, listening too intently to notice, or anyway care, that the sheet was around her waist and her breasts were showing. They weren’t large breasts, of the sort this culture worships; rather the sort of nice handfuls that seem to resist gravity despite age beginning to set in. In the flicker of candlelight her dark skin looked too beautiful to be real; she looked too beautiful to be real. The nicest part, however, was, she was real.
And I was telling her about Faulkner.
Stunning her, actually.
“Good God,” she said, whites of her eyes showing all around the blue. “Who’d have thought it? Brad Faulkner knocked Ginnie up!” Again, she was reverting to high school terminology. “And she had an abortion. God. Must’ve been pretty rough on her.”
“She pretended it wasn’t,” I said, remembering that night under the stars with Ginnie. “But it was. Why do you suppose she didn’t tell him?”
“That’s easy,” she said, lighting another cigarette, worldly wise. “He’d never’ve allowed the abortion; he would’ve married her. Junior year or not. If the parents wouldn’t consent, they’d go out of state.”
“And Ginnie didn’t want that. She wasn’t ready.”
“Not a free spirit like Ginnie, Mal, no. And if she’d told Brad about the abortion afterward, he’d have been furious with her. They’d have broken up for good. And he was her Mallory, remember.”
“What do you mean?”
A shrug; her breasts bobbed prettily. “The love of her life, high school style.” Archly, she added, “Of course, she and Brad obviously consummated their love a little sooner than we did….”
“Jill, why did she tell him about that abortion, after all these years?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
“It was a cruel thing to do, considering the loss of his kid not long ago, his marriage breaking up because of it.”
“Mal, we both know Ginnie could be cruel, at short notice.”
“You said you’d been having lunch with her, off and on, these past six months. And that the topic of conversation was often ‘old times.’”
“That’s right. Brad’s name came up—but nothing about the abortion. She was looking forward to the reunion, to seeing Brad after all these years.”
“Why?”
“She was entertaining fantasies—at least I thought they were fantasies—of getting back together with him.”
“What? I don’t believe…”
“Mal, she was looking for a fresh start. She felt her life was at something of a dead-end, and she was floundering around for something new. She knew Brad was single again, and she made vague reference to his running a business, that hardware store”—she shrugged elaborately—“which may mean she had notions of pooling their collective business acumen in some new venture. Or something.”
“But she was way out of Brad Faulkner’s league! You can’t convince me that Ginnie wanted to come back to Port City and settle down with the likes of Faulkner. And, what—run a hardware store together? Besides—he’s a religious fanatic, for Christ’s sake. What was she thinking of?”
“You want my opinion?”
“That’s why I’m asking.”
“I think she’d led a fairly decadent life these last ten or fifteen years. I think she was tired of all that, and had glowing memories of her childhood, including her high school days, and she was fantasizing about returning to Port City and climbing inside a Norman Rockwell painting.”
“It never would have worked.”
“Of course it wouldn’t have. She knew that, too. But it didn’t stop her from looking forward to seeing Brad at the reunion.”
“But why Brad?”
“I told you! He was her Mallory!”
Her Debbie Lee. I guess I could understand it, after all. Old obsessions are something our brain never quite sorts out of the filing system, never quite discards.
“There’s something I should’ve told you,” she said, with an embarrassment that wasn’t remotely sexual.
“Which is?”
“That I’m the one who called Brad Faulkner and told him you were asking around about Ginnie.”
“I’ve been trying to think of a nice way to ask you about that.”
“I’ve been trying to think of a nice way to tell you.”
“Why’d you do it? Is he a friend of yours or something?”
“No. I just felt I owed it to him, since I gave you his name. Common courtesy. Nothing sinister, Mal. Quit thinking like a mystery writer.”
“I am a mystery writer.”
“I know. I’ve read your books.”
“No kidding? You’re the first person I’ve met lately who has.”
“I didn’t say I liked them.”
“Thanks a lot.”
She grinned. “I did like ’em. Even the one that was all about Debbie Lee.”
“Debbie Lee. When you mention her, and I remember how stupidly I behaved when she reentered my life, I can believe tha
t Ginnie might honestly have hoped to get something going with Brad Faulkner again. After all these years. At a high school reunion, no less.”
“I’ll bet that’s exactly what she did,” Jill said. “I bet she came on to Brad, bubbling about old times, eventually gushing forth some of her dreams about new times, and it didn’t take. He wasn’t having any.”
“He seemed to be,” I said. “They were dancing close at the Elks, hanging all over each other.”
“That would’ve been the ‘old times’ phase. But after an evening with Ginnie—with who Ginnie had become over these fifteen years—conservative, religious Mr. Faulkner would eventually be turned off. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” I said. “And their reunion began turning sour at the Sports Page.”
She snapped her fingers, pointed at me. “That’s when she got pissed off, and blurted out the abortion story! To hurt him!”
I thought of the cafeteria, years ago, and knew Ginnie was capable of that. Not upon reflection, not with malice afore-thought, but with the quick trigger of temper, with the impulse decision of the born risk taker, the gambler, that was Ginnie, all right.
“She would’ve been sorry later,” Jill said. “But she did have it in her to lash out at him that way. If he’d hurt her, disappointed her, crushed her fantasy of him, you can bet she’d have opened the closet and let the skeletons come rattling out.”
She was right.
“You,” I said, “are one of the smartest women I’ve ever met.”
“If you weren’t such a sexist boor,” she said, smiling, “that would’ve come out ‘smartest persons’ you ever met.”
“If you’re so smart, how come you’re in bed with a sexist boor?”
“Ya got me there, Mal. Why’s that little green light gone out?”
“Huh?”
“The little green light you told me about. The burglar alarm.”
I clutched Jill’s arm and whispered: “Somebody could be in the house.”
She breathed my name back, some fear in it; I didn’t blame her.
“Just sit tight.” I whispered in her ear; hardly a sweet nothing. “Don’t make a sound.”
I slipped out of bed, my right toes touching my jockey shorts on the floor where I’d discarded them in a considerably more carefree moment. I bent down, found them with my hand, climbed into them, bumping against the chest of drawers as I did. The sound of it was like bumping unwittingly into the car behind you as you parked, but louder. The silence that followed was louder still.
I felt better with my shorts on—I didn’t particularly relish being naked while confronting a midnight intruder—but not that much better. The burglar alarm system I’d inherited covered most of the doors and many of the windows in the house, so I had no real sense of where this possible intruder might have entered. There had been a rash of house break-ins this summer; kids with no jobs looking for loose change and/or kicks. That’s probably all this was.
But at the very least a door or a window had been breached. The alarm system had, as I’d told Jill earlier, been disconnected as far as alerting the local cops was concerned and I rarely, almost never, switched the key in the control panel to turn on the loud, neighborhood-rousing alarm that went with the system; that left only the various tiny glowing green lights on walls about the house to provide a constant source of security, telling me my doors and windows were secure.
Or not.
I was in the little connecting nook between my bedroom, study, bathroom, and dining room, the carpet beneath my bare feet helping keep my footsteps down to a minimal squeak. I paused, listening.
I heard nothing.
I edged carefully toward the open door to my study. Listened. Heard nothing. Just my heart pounding.
I moved into the dining room; there was a little light coming from the dining room windows and filtering through sheer curtains: street light, moonlight, not much, enough to help me and my memory maneuver around chairs, tables and such.
Soon I was in my small kitchen, a little hallway with appliances, the linoleum cold on my soles. Cold on my soul, too. The lingering smell of that Italian sauce I was so proud of now made my stomach turn; why nausea accompanied fear was a puzzle to me—I’d noticed it first in Vietnam, but had never got used to it.
I took tentative steps, because walking made more noise in here; no getting around it. I’d pause between steps, listening, stepping sideways, my back to the stove and dishwasher, brushing their cold metal, so that should anyone enter via the door at either side of the small kitchen, I’d not provide that someone with my back. Also, that allowed me to face the doorway to the basement (here in the kitchen), several windows of which were among those wired to the alarm system, meaning an intruder could be coming up via the basement steps. I crossed to the basement door as silently as I could, shut it as silently as I could, bolted it as silently as I could, which in the latter case meant making the following noise: THUK!, which seemed to echo through the house.
I moved back against the appliances, trembling, waiting, listening.
Nothing.
I began wondering if the alarm system had shut down for some maintenance reason; but every little green light in the system—there were half a dozen of them—couldn’t burn out simultaneously. If such were the case, I’d be sure to call Ripley tomorrow. Still, there could be some other bug in the system. Could any intruder be this quiet?
That was when I heard the noise out in the entryway area, a bumping. Unless I missed my guess, someone had just bumped into my pinball machine. Thank you, Bally.
I moved to the kitchen drawers directly across from me, slid one open—it creaked, but just barely—and my hand fell on the tray of silverware within. My hand found the knives alongside the tray—not table-setting knives, not even steak knives, but the carving set a relative had sent last Christmas, a gift I’d never used. I felt for the thickest wooden handle among them, knowing it held the longest, widest blade in the set, and withdrew it, clutching it in my hand like Jim Bowie sitting in his little room at the Alamo, waiting for the Mexican Army to rush in.
There was the faintest squeak of footsteps in the entryway beyond the kitchen—how could anyone learn to walk so quietly? Then a frightening thought came to me: if it was your job to walk quietly, you would learn how.
This was not some kid, some vandal; this was not just another house break-in. This was, instinct told me, something else. Someone professional. A cop, maybe? If I was lucky, a cop.
Behind me, on the stove, was a light switch; just a small light, a light by the built-in clock on the stove, not enough to illuminate the room, but enough to throw some light on the subject should I feel the need. With my free hand, the one not clutching my carving-set Bowie, I reached for the little switch, rested my fingers on it, and waited.
If he was moving through the house, he would either cut through the bathroom, which with its doors at either end would lead him directly to the bedroom, where Jill waited; or he would come through this kitchen, with the same destination in mind. What little light was filtering in from outside couldn’t reach the longer-than-it-was-wide cubbyhole of the kitchen, so I was protected in the darkness. I held my breath. Stood there in my jockey shorts like a side of beef preparing to butcher itself. The knife in my hand, held out to my side, blade up and pointing out slightly, quivering. What a man.
The curtains out in the entryway were open; plenty of light from the street was coming in there—moonlight, too. I could see my neighbor’s little bungalow across the street from me with frightening clarity. Then a shape blocked it out.
He was big, rather wide, and had something in his hand.
Something that seemed to be a gun.
Just a silhouette, just a shape, but a shape to be reckoned with. I had to pee. Thank you, God.
He moved toward the kitchen.
He filled the doorway.
Could he see me? The kitchen was pitch black, what light there was was to his back, I was plastered up against the
appliances, but could he see me?
No.
He moved right by me; must’ve stood six-three. He smelled like English Leather. With luck, I smelled like nothing at all. He was approaching the doorway, about to move into the dining room, about three steps away from me, when I hit the little light.
He whirled, a big man in black in a ski mask—hardly the time of year for the latter—and eyes glowed at me, those of a beast caught in headlights on the highway, and the gun in his hand, an automatic with a silencer, just like in the movies, was pointing right at me, and I hurled the knife and it sunk into his shoulder above the arm with the gun in hand and he howled, more like a man than a beast, and the gun pointed down and went snick, and chips of linoleum went flying.
He fell backward, pitching into the refrigerator, and I was on him, using the pain in his shoulder to wrest the gun from him. It was in my hand now, and I stood over him, shaking, grinning, saying, “Take the mask off. Christmas is over.”
It seemed witty to me at the time.
He sat there, glaring at me—quite an accomplishment, since he was doing it through the circles of the ski mask with just his heavily browed eyes, an oddly attractive shade of green, pretty jewels in ugly settings—and pulled the knife out of his shoulder.
I swallowed.
He pushed himself to his feet.
“Don’t do that!” I said. Nothing vaguely witty occurring to me.
He held the knife, blade streaked with his own blood, in his big hand, the hand of the arm ending in the good shoulder, and spoke. His voice was a raspy whisper.
“Give me my gun,” he said.
I found myself backing up. I should’ve shot him on the spot. But I’d never shot anybody in my kitchen before. And I’d never before hurled a knife at somebody and sat him down and seen him get up and take the knife out and lumber toward me, with the grace and, apparently, the pain threshold of Frankenstein’s monster.
“I’ll shoot,” I said. It sounded kind of lame, even to me.
Then he raised the knife in stabbing position and lunged at me, and I shot my refrigerator.
He was on me, a thousand pounds of him was on me, unless I’d killed the Frigidaire and it fell on me, and the gun wasn’t in my hand anymore. I had the presence of mind to grab the arm with the knife, with two hands, but the son of a bitch was strong, and then an arm looped around his neck and a hand pulled off his mask, and I got a good look at him being surprised and pissed—green eyes, broken nose, wide mouth, scarred cheekbone—as he must not have known anybody else was in the house.
A Shroud for Aquarius (A Mallory Mystery) Page 11