by Susan Dunlap
She let a beat pass before she asked, “And what is there behind the mask?”
He laughed dismissively. “Nothing special. Or at least, someone who’s a lot less special than I thought I was—and all the time I was the great stunt man, I thought I was a pretty modest guy.” The paper bag rattled in the wind; he stuck his hand in and came out with a muffin.
The picture of him in the gym flashed in her mind, flushed with the glow she’d painted on it year after year. The awkward Greg Gaige visiting the gym who’d made a special effort to encourage her; not much else in her life had been that special. It was wrenching to give that up. But this new Greg Gaige—she liked him. Greg Gaige grown up. She could almost not believe she was about to get an answer to her question: “You made your decision to be ‘dead’ off-balance, too suddenly. But once you got over the shock, what was it like? You were the best in the business. You’d created a Move that no one could copy. What was it like to walk away?” She swallowed hard. “What was it like to live without the thing that mattered to you most?”
Greg took a long swallow of coffee and crumpled the paper cup but didn’t let go of it. “Hard,” he said slowly. “Hardest thing I’ve ever done. Stunt work was my life, more important than eating, sleeping, sex. Way more important than sex. It shaped what I did, who I was with, and, more than that, how I thought of things that weren’t even connected to it. I never just watched a woman move; I watched how she moved, in case there was something about it that I could incorporate in a gag when I was doubling a woman. Not doing, not thinking about gags was like being plopped down in a foreign country with a language you can’t quite understand and customs that don’t make sense. Or like being shunned—you know, the Amish punishment.” He stared down at the crushed paper cup and ran his finger along the broken lip. “A hundred times a day I saw something—a movie poster, a wooden horse like the one my father had covered for me to practice on when I was six, or just chalk—and it was like my cells screamed out for the life I couldn’t have anymore .”
When she’d gotten to India after being fired from the coroner’s office, she’d felt utterly “other.” Then she’d ascribed it to culture shock. Now she felt the bond of worn-out regret between them. She longed to reach out to him, but she couldn’t, not the way other people did. Instead she nodded in understanding.
“I guess I did the whole grieving bit—anger, bargaining, et cetera. Then for months I just spaced out. Didn’t think, didn’t exercise—unless you call long glassy-eyed walks exercise. Didn’t talk to anyone I didn’t have to. I was more out of shape than I’d ever been in my life; it was like being in a stranger’s body. I got a labor job up around Redding. Later, I got some jobs helping a couple with remodeling—even out of shape, I’m stronger than the average man and not afraid of climbing up on slanting second-story roofs.” He flashed a wry smile. “You wouldn’t believe how rare a quality that is. I took any odd job that wasn’t connected to movies or gymnastics. I was real careful not to blow my cover. My cover—it was like that was all I had from my old life. I realized later I was protecting that cover. As long as it shielded my old life, I believed at some level that I could get that life back someday. Ridiculous, of course.” He caught her eye and shrugged.
She held his gaze, afraid to let him escape into shrugs and asides. “And the stint of teaching at High Country gym, what about that?”
He put the last piece of muffin into his mouth and chewed deliberately. When he’d swallowed, he said, “It was a mistake. I should never have taken that chance.”
A mistake or a death wish? But she didn’t ask that.
“I was up in Alturas to see if there was any work with the wild horses. I spotted the gym, like I did every place gymnasts practiced. But this time I went in. I didn’t want to teach, I just wanted to smell the chalk and the sweat, to feel the intensity of practice. But before I could stop myself, I was correcting a girl in her uneven bar dismount. I knew from the moment I took the job there, I was courting danger. I kept having to come up with new lies about my ‘past.’ Kids ask ten times more questions than an adult would. They wanted to know which tournaments I’d been in, which I’d won, which of the great gymnasts I knew, why I hadn’t made the national finals. I made the Olympic trials, and I was just lucky that none of them found photo coverage of it, or the poster. Pitfalls were everywhere. And then there was Lark.” Greg nodded slowly, his face paling back to gray. “Lark—God, how can she be dead? It’s not my fault, you’ll say; everyone will say. But—”
Now she did squeeze his hand.
In a moment he went on. “Lark was so good. She wasn’t a natural, but she had talent and drive like I haven’t seen anywhere, even in Hollywood. She inspired me. It had been so long since I’d even been able to push off into the Move, I just wanted to do it again. It was like discovering a photo of a dead lover: it’s not her, but you stare at it so hard, you get caught in the ‘pretend,’ and for an instant it is her, you know? I knew I would never do the Move again like I did on the screen when I practiced every day and I had the second unit director telling me he could only afford one take. But just to feel the air twisting around me as I did the flip and the punchback …” He shrugged. “I thought it would be enough. Like looking at the photo until the spark of life leaves, and it’s just a piece of paper.
“But it wasn’t. Lark went crazy over the Move. She begged me to teach her. Against all logic I did, because—at least this is what I thought at the time—because I really wanted the excuse to practice again and to assure myself I could still do it.” He shrugged.
“And could you? Could you still master it?”
“Not quite. For a while I told myself that it had been seven years since I tried it; I was out of shape; I just needed more practice. Now I had the gym to practice in; I could come as early as I wanted, stay as late, even get a kid with a video camera to record it so I could see my faults. I could have it again. But the truth was, I could have it and not have it.”
“What do you mean?”
“To have it, I had to give it to Lark.” He waited till Kiernan nodded in acknowledgment. “I didn’t deal with that for a while—you know they always tell us it’s getting to the top that’s hard.” He shook his head. “Climbing’s the easy part. Sliding down the other side, that’s the hard part. In a couple of months, Lark was doing the Move better than I was. It was really her Move then. That’s when I decided Greg Gaige really was dead. That was my great realization. And I knew I had courted danger too long there and I had to move on before someone recognized me.”
“And yet you took this job on the set here. Talk about taking chances!” Thinking back to the Baltimore gym, Kiernan smiled. “I remember you going out of your way for a girl who needed it. Did you take this chance now because Lark wanted you to be here to see her Move?”
He shrugged. “Part for Lark, part for me. I didn’t just take this catering job, I sought it out. It was a stupid idea. I told myself I just wanted to stand in the shadows and see the Move performed again before the cameras with everyone watching and the cast and crew bursting into applause when she climbed out of the catcher. Or maybe I just couldn’t resist being near my Move again. Maybe I haven’t really given it up.” He closed his fingers tighter around hers. “I don’t know anymore. I just don’t know.”
She sat unwilling to move. The sky had lightened, but the damp cold had seeped beneath her skin and penetrated her spine. A bolt of sunlight cut the clouds, warmed her face, and vanished. His hand lay on top of hers, but it no longer felt real. “So Greg, what are you going to do now?”
He hesitated. “I don’t know that, either. Things have changed again so completely. I’ve gotten used to being Luke Correra. Now I’ll have to be Greg Gaige again and tie up ends I left hanging, people I left hanging.” He stared out over the water. He hadn’t released her hand, and now he tapped his forefinger on it. “But I’ll be able to get a passport. That’s really great. I can go wherever I want now. Hokkaido, New Milford Sound, Lha
sa, Rangoon.” He turned to her, his beard twitching as he smiled. “Want to come?”
Greg Gaige really was dead, she thought, and yet he wasn’t. She leaned into the crook of his shoulder. Below, the morning light had faded the water to a silky blue-green, the waves swelled, arched, crashed, spreading into a lacy froth and pulled back teasingly. The welcome mat to the world beyond.
There would be more ends to be tied than he suspected, more complications. Nothing was certain. Maybe Rangoon would turn out to be Seattle or Del Mar. After this flash of closeness burned out there might be nothing but embers. Or maybe—But she’d never been deterred by a challenge. Long odds only whetted her appetite and made the prize all the more succulent. Dreams of childhood coming true, what were the odds on that? No matter how long the odds, she knew she wouldn’t let go of Greg Gaige.
“You do have a passport?” he said.
She linked her arm through his and felt the warmth of his body permeate hers. “Yes.”
A Biography of Susan Dunlap
Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.
Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally to Northern California, where many of her novels take place.
One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book, Karma (1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.
After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published Pious Deception, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.
Dunlap concluded the Smith series with Cop Out (1997). In 2006 she published A Single Eye, her first mystery featuring Darcy Lott, a Zen Buddhist stuntwoman. Her most recent novel is No Footprints (2012), the fifth in the Darcy Lott series.
In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga and worked for a private investigator on death penalty defense cases and as a paralegal. In 1986, she helped found Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women in the field of mystery writing. She lives and writes near San Francisco.
Dunlap and her father at the beach, probably Coney Island. ”“My happiest vacations were at the beach,” says Dunlap, “here, at the Jersey shore, at Jones Beach, and two glorious winter weeks in Florida.”
Dunlap’s grammar school graduation from Stewart School on Long Island, New York.
In 1968, Dunlap arrived in San Francisco; this photo was taken by her husband-to-be atop one of the city’s many hills. Dunlap recalls, “It’s winter; I’m wearing a T-shirt; I’m ecstatic!”
Dunlap’s dog Seumas at eight weeks old. “We’d had him two weeks and he was already in charge, happily biting my hand (see my grimace),” she says. “He lived for sixteen good, well-tended years.”
Dunlap started practicing yoga in 1969 and received her instructor certification in 1981, after a three-week intensive course in India with B. K. S. Iyengar. Here she demonstrates the uttanasa pose (the basic standing forward bend) for her students.
Seumas and Dunlap in 1988: “He was an old guy by this time, who had better things to do than be a photo prop. I think his expression says it all.”
Dunlap relished West Coast life. “This is what someone who grew up in the snow of the East Coast dreams of . . . the California life!”
For her fiftieth birthday, Dunlap and a group of close writer friends went to Santa Cruz for the weekend. Seated above from left to right: Marilyn Wallace, Marcia Muller, Dunlap, and Shelley Singer. Seated on the floor: Judith Gruber (pen name Gillian Roberts), Linda Grant, and Lia Matera.
The Sisters-in-Crime presidents and former presidents—known as the Goddesses—always gather for a picture at conventions. One year, Dunlap had to miss the gathering. Her friends, knowing how much she wanted to be there, photoshopped her into the image.
Dunlap’s last typewriter, before she happily switched to writing on a computer. “Plotting is one of the aspects of writing I really like—everything’s new, all gates open, all roads wide,” she says. “But it involves a great deal of data with connections that are not always linear. On paper or white board or with notes taped on corkboard—I tried them all—it was cumbersome. Using the computer was magic.”
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1994 by Susan Dunlap
cover design by Kathleen Lynch
978-1-4532-5058-7
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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