With the persistence and determination of a rabbit heading for his hole, the boy shot between several sets of legs straight for the splendid shadow that was fading so swiftly now. He tripped, skidded on his seat and looked up at the mighty head and neck, wings and crest, fading so swiftly against a sky of castles and stars. “Dragon gone?” It was a forlorn question now.
The head came slowly down, lowering over the boy, who sat unafraid as the dragon studied him lingeringly. Guerra remembered—shadow or no shadow—the dragon’s comments on the heart-melting tastiness of children. But then the boy’s father had him in his arms and was sweeping him off, darkly threatening to sue somebody, there had to be someone. And the dragon was indeed gone.
The castle was gone too; and so, in time, went most of the author’s neighbors, hushed and wondering. But some stayed a while, for no reason they could have explained, coming closer to the house merely to stand where the dragon had been. Several of those spoke diffidently to the author; Guerra saw others surreptitiously pluck up grass blades, both burned and untouched, plainly as souvenirs.
When the last of that group had finally wandered off, the author closed the notebook, capped the pen, stood up, stretched elaborately and said, “Well. Coffee?”
Guerra rubbed his aching forehead, feeling the way he sometimes did when, falling asleep, he suddenly lunged awake out of a half-dream of stumbling down a step that wasn’t there. He said feebly, “Where did he go?”
“Oh, into that story,” the author answered lightly. “The story I was making up for him.”
“But you didn’t finish it,” Guerra said.
“He will. It’s his fairy tale world, after all—he knows it better than I do, really. I just showed him the way back.” The author smiled with a certain aggravating compassion. “It’s a bit hard to explain, if you don’t—you know—think much about magic.”
“Hey, I think about a lot of things,” Guerra said harshly. “And what I’m thinking about right now is that that’s wasn’t a real story. It’s not in any book—you were just spitballing, improvising, making it up as you went along. Hell, I’ll bet you couldn’t repeat it right now if you tried. Like a little kid telling a lie.”
The author laughed outright, and then stopped quickly when he saw Guerra’s expression. “I’m sorry, I’m not laughing at you. You’re quite right, we’re all little kids telling lies, writers are, hoping we can keep the lies straight and get away with them. And nobody lasts very long in this game who isn’t prepared to lie his way out of trouble. Absolutely right.” He regarded the ruined strip of lawn and winced visibly. “But you make the same mistake most people do, Officer Guerra. The magic’s not in books, not in the publishing—it’s in the telling, always. In the old, old telling.”
He looked at his watch and yawned. “Actually, there might be a book in that one, I don’t know. Have to think about it. What about that coffee?”
“I’m off duty,” Guerra said. “You got any beer?”
“I’m off duty too,” the author said. “Come on in.”
THE BRIDGE PARTNER
I don’t play bridge, and I don’t know anything more about the game than I needed to know for this story, which is not a fantasy in any classic sense of the word. All I can really say about it is that I’d been reading a lot of Patricia Highsmith’s work at the time, and Highsmith is one of those people who will sometimes stir depths you’d generally prefer not to have stirred. Since writing it, I’ve always seen “The Bridge Partner” in my head as a nouvelle vague movie by Truffaut or Resnais, or perhaps Claude Chabrol. Black-and-white, of course. Definitely black-and-white.
I will kill you.
The words were not spoken aloud, but silently mouthed across the card table at Mattie Whalen by her new partner, whose last name she had not quite caught when they were introduced. Olivia Korhanen or Korhonen, it was, something like that. She was blonde and fortyish—Mattie was bad with ages, but the woman had to be somewhere near her own—and had joined the Moss Harbor Bridge Group only a few weeks earlier. The members had chosen at the very beginning to call themselves a group rather than a Club. As Eileen Berry, one of the two founders, along with Suzanne Grimes, had said at the time, “There’s an exclusivity thing about a club—a snobby, elitish sort of taste, if you know what I mean. A group just feels more democratic.” Everyone had agreed with Eileen, as people generally did.
Which accounted, Mattie thought, for the brisk acceptance of the woman now sitting across from her, despite her odd name and unclassifiably foreign air. Mattie could detect only the faintest accent in her voice, and if her clothes plainly did not come from the discount outlet in the local mall, neither were they so aggressively chic as to offend or threaten. She had clear, pleasant blue eyes, excellent teeth, the delicately tanned skin of a tennis player—as opposed to a leathery beach bunny or an orange-hued tanning bed veteran—and was pleasant to everyone in a gently impersonal manner. Her playing style showed not only skill but grace, which Mattie noticed perhaps more poignantly than any other member of the Bridge Group, since the best that could have been said for Mattie was that she mostly managed to keep track of the trumps and the tricks. Still, she knew grace when she saw it.
I will kill you.
It made no possible sense—she must surely have misread both the somewhat long, quizzical lips and the intention in the bright eyes. No one else seemed to have heard or noticed anything at all unusual, and she really hadn’t played the last hand as badly as all that. Granted, doubling Rosemarie’s bid could be considered a mistake, but people make mistakes, and she could have pulled it off if Olivia Korhonen, or whoever, had held more than the one single miserable trump to back her up. You don’t kill somebody for doubling, or even threaten to kill them. Mattie smiled earnestly at her partner, and studied her cards.
The rubber ended in total disaster, and Mattie apologized at some length to Olivia Korhonen afterward. “I’m not really a good player, I know that, but I’m not usually that awful, I promise. And now you’ll probably never want to play with me ever again, and I wouldn’t blame you.” Mattie had had a deal of practice at apologizing, over the years.
To her pleasant surprise, Olivia Korhonen patted her arm reassuringly and shook her head. “I enjoyed the game greatly, even though we lost. I have not played in a long time, and you will have to make allowances until I start to catch up. We’ll beat them next time, in spite of me.”
She patted Mattie again and turned elegantly away. But as she did so, the side of her mouth repeated, clearly but inaudibly—Mattie could not have been mistaken this time—“I will kill you.” Then the woman was gone, and Mattie sat down in the nearest folding chair.
Her friend Virginia Schlossberg hurried over with a cup of tea, asking anxiously, “Are you all right? What is it? You look absolutely ashen!” She touched Mattie’s cheek, and almost recoiled. “And you’re freezing! Go home and get into bed, and call a doctor! I mean it—you go home right now!” Virginia was a kind woman, but excitable. She had been the same when Mattie and she were in dancing school together.
“I’m all right,” Mattie said. “I am, Ginny, honestly.” But her voice was shaking as much as her hands, and she made her escape from the Group as soon as she could trust her legs to support her. She was grateful on two counts: first, that no one sat next to her on the bus; and, secondly, that Don would most likely not be home yet from the golf course. She did not look forward to Don just now.
Rather than taking to her bed, despite Virginia’s advice, she made herself a healthy G&T and sat in the kitchen with the lights on, going over and over everything she knew of Olivia Korhonen. The woman was apparently single or widowed, like most of the members of the Moss Harbor Bridge Group, but judging by the reactions of the few men in the Group she gave no indication of being on the prowl. Seemingly unemployed, and rather young for retirement, still she lived in one of the pricey new condos just two blocks from the harbor. No Bridge Group member had yet seen her apartment except for Suzanne
and Eileen, who reported back that it was smart and trendy, “without being too off-puttingly posh.” Eileen thought the paintings were originals, but Suzanne had her doubts.
What else, what else? She had looked up “Korhonen” on the Internet and found that it was a common Finnish name—not Jewish, as she had supposed. To her knowledge, she had never met a Finnish person in her life. Were they like Swedes? Danes, even? She had a couple of Danish acquaintances, a husband and wife named Olsen…. no, they were nothing at all like the Korhonen woman; one could never imagine either Olsen saying I will kill you to so much as a cockroach, which, of course, they wouldn’t ever have in the house. But then, who would say such a thing to a near stranger? And over a silly card game? It made no sense, none of it made any sense. She mixed another G&T and was surprised to find herself wanting Don home.
Don’s day, it turned out, had been a bad one. Trounced on the course, beaten more badly in the rematch he had immediately demanded, he had consoled himself liberally in the clubhouse; and, as a consequence, was clearly not in any sort of mood to hear about a mumbled threat at a bridge game. On the whole, after sixteen years of marriage, Mattie liked Don more than she disliked him, but such distinctions were essentially meaningless at this stage of things. She rather appreciated his presence when she felt especially lonely and frightened, but a large, furry dog would have done as well; indeed, a dog would have been at once more comforting and more concerned for her comfort. Dogs wanted their masters to be happy—Don simply preferred her uncomplaining.
When she told him about Olivia Korhonen’s behavior at the Bridge Group, he seemed hardly to hear her. In his usual style of picking up in the middle of the intended sentence, he mumbled, “….take that damn game so damn seriously. Bud and I don’t go yelling we’re going to kill each other”—Bud Gorko was his steady golf partner—“and believe you me, I’ve got reason sometimes.” He snatched a beer out of the refrigerator and wandered into the living room to watch TV.
Mattie followed him in, the second G&T strengthening a rare resolve to make him take her seriously. She said, “She did it twice. You didn’t see her face.” She raised her voice to carry over the yammering of a commercial. “She meant it, Don. I’m telling you, she meant it.”
Don smiled muzzily and patted the sofa seat beside him. “Hear you, I’m right on it. Tell you what—she goes ahead and does that, I’m going to take a really dim view. A dim view.” He liked the phrase. “Really dim view.”
“You’re dim enough already,” Mattie said. Don did not respond. She stood watching him for a few minutes without speaking, because she knew it made him uncomfortable. When he got to the stage of demanding, “What? What?” she walked out of the room and into the guest bedroom, where she lay down. She had been sleeping there frequently enough in recent months that it felt increasingly like her own.
She had thought she would surely dream of Olivia Korhonen, but it was only in the sweet spot between consciousness and sleep that the woman’s face came to her: the long mouth curling almost affectionately, almost seductively, as though for a kiss, caressing the words that Mattie could not hear. It was an oddly tranquil, even soothing vision, and Mattie fell asleep like a child, and did not dream at all.
The next morning she felt curiously young and hopeful, though she could not imagine why. Don had gone off to work at the real estate office with his normal Monday hangover, pitifully savage; but Mattie indulged herself with a long hot shower, a second toasted English muffin and a long telephone chat with a much-relieved Virginia Schlossberg before she went to the grocery store. There would be an overdue hair appointment after that, then home in time for Oprah. A good day.
The sense of serenity lasted through the morning shopping, through her favorite tea-and-brioche snack at La Place, and on to her date with Mr. Philip at the salon. It ended abruptly while she was more than half drowsing under the dryer, trying to focus on Vanity Fair, as well as on the buttery jazz on the PA system, when Olivia Korhonen’s equally pleasant voice separated itself from the music, saying, “Mrs. Whalen—Mattie? How nice to see you here, partner.” The last word flicked across Mattie’s skin like a brand.
Olivia Korhonen was standing directly in front of her, smiling in her familiar guileless manner. She had clearly just finished her appointment: the glinting warmth and shine of her blonde hair made that plain, and made Mattie absurdly envious, her own mouse-brown curls’ only distinction being their comb-snapping thickness. Olivia Korhonen said, “Shall we play next week? I look forward so.”
“Yes,” Mattie said faintly; and then, “I mean, I’m not sure—I have things. To do. Maybe.” Her voice squeaked and slipped. She couldn’t stop it, and in that moment she hated her voice more than she had ever hated anything in the world.
“Oh, but you must be there! I do not know anyone else to play with.” Mattie noticed a small dimple to the left of Olivia Korhonen’s mouth when she smiled in a certain way. “I mean, no one else who will put up with my bad playing, as you do. Please?”
Mattie found herself nodding, just to keep from having to speak again—and also, to some degree, because of the genuine urgency in Olivia Korhonen’s voice. Maybe I imagined the whole business…. maybe it’s me getting old and scared, the way people do. She nodded a second time, with somewhat more enthusiasm.
Olivia Korhonen patted her knee through the protective salon apron, plainly relieved. “Oh, good. I already feel so much better.” Then, without changing her expression in the least, she whispered, “I will kill you.”
Mattie thought later that she must have fainted in some way; at all events, her next awareness was of Mr. Philip taking the curlers out of her hair and brushing her off. Olivia Korhonen was gone. Mr. Philip peered at her, asking, “Who’s been keeping you up at night, darling? You never fall asleep under these things.” Then he saw her expression, and asked “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Mattie said. “I’m fine.”
After that, it seemed to her that she saw Olivia Korhonen everywhere, every day. She was coming out of the dry cleaners’ as Mattie brought an armload of Don’s pants in; she hurried across the street to direct Mattie as she was parking her car; she asked Mattie’s advice buying produce at the farmers’ market, or broke off a conversation with someone else to chat with Mattie on the street. And each time, before they parted, would come the silent words, more menacing for being inaudible, “I will kill you.” The dimple beside the long smile always showed as she spoke.
Mattie had never felt so lonely in her life. Despite all the years she and Don had lived in Moss Harbor, there was no one in her local circle whom she could trust in any sort of intimate crisis, let alone with something like a death threat. Suzanne or Eileen? Out of the question—things like that simply did not happen to members of the Bridge Group. There was Virginia, of course…. Virginia might very well believe her, if anyone did, but would be bound to fall apart under the burden of such knowledge. That left only going further afield and contacting Patricia.
Pat Gallagher lived directly across the Bay, in a tiny incorporated area called Witness Point. Mattie had known her very nearly as long as she had known Virginia, but the relationships could not have been more different. Pat was gay, for one thing; and while Mattie voted for every same-sex-marriage and hate-crimes proposition that came up on any ballot, she was honest enough to know that she was ill at ease with homosexuals. She could never explain this, and was truly ashamed of it, especially around someone as intelligent and thoughtful as Pat Gallagher. She found balance in distance, only seeing Pat two or three times a year, at most, and sometimes no more than once. They did e-mail a reasonable amount though, and they talked on the phone enough that Mattie still knew the number by heart. She called it now.
They arranged to meet at Pat’s house for lunch on the weekend. She lived in a shingly, flowery, cluttery cottage, in company with a black woman named Babs, an administrator at the same hospital where Pat was a nurse. Mattie liked Babs immediately, and was therefore dou
bly nervous around her, and doubly shamed, especially when Babs offered in so many words to disappear graciously, so that she and Pat could talk in private. Mattie would have much preferred this, but the very suggestion made it impossible. “I’m sure there’s nothing I have to say to Patricia that I couldn’t say to you.”
Babs laughed. “That you may come to regret, my dear.” But she set out second glasses of Pinot Grigio, and second bowls of Pat’s minestrone, and sat down with them. Her dark-brown skin and soft curly hair contrasted so perfectly with Pat’s freckled Irish pinkness, and they seemed so much at ease with one another that Mattie felt a quick, startling stitch of what could only have been envy.
“Okay,” Pat said. “Talk. What’s got you scared this time?”
Babs chuckled. “Cuts straight to the chase, doesn’t she?”
Mattie bridled feebly. “You make it sound as though I’m a big fraidy cat, always frightened about something. I’m not like that.”
“Yes, you are.” The affection in Pat’s wide grin took some of the sting from the words. “You never call me unless something’s really got you spooked, do you realize that? Might be a thing you saw on the news, a hooha with your husband, a pain somewhere there shouldn’t be a pain. Maybe a lump you’re worried about—maybe just a scary dream.” She put her hand on Mattie’s hand. “It’s fine, it’s you. Talk. Tell.”
She and Babs remained absolutely silent while Mattie told them about the Bridge Group, and about Olivia Korhonen. She was aware that she was speaking faster as the account progressed, and that her voice was rising in pitch, but all she wanted was to get the words out as quickly as she could. The words seemed strangely reluctant to be spoken: more and more, they raked at her throat and palate as she struggled to rid herself of them. When she was done, the roof of her mouth felt almost burned, and she gratefully accepted a glass of cold apple juice from Babs.
“Well,” Pat said finally. “I don’t know what I expected to hear from you, but that was definitely not it. Not hardly.”
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