by Thomas Perry
He felt his pulse quicken. She was going to the bedroom taking her dress off. Chelsea didn’t usually initiate sex; she acquiesced to it. Crane began to feel good. Maybe his life was about to get even better. He tried to keep his anticipation in control. It was late, and she just might be tired. In a minute she might come back out wearing flannel pajamas and fuzzy slippers and say good-night. He considered. How did he want her to see him when she returned?
He wanted to look confident and relaxed. He opened the bar hidden on the left wall and poured himself a cognac, and set a second glass next to his, with the bottle beside it as an invitation. She had turned down drinks lately. She’d said something about alcohol not agreeing with her. It had occurred to him that it might have been a reaction to the powder he had put in her drink the night they’d first had sex. He hadn’t mentioned that to her, of course. He sipped his cognac and waited, trying not to picture her in the bedroom naked, waiting for him to join her. The house was silent, and he thought he could hear his own heartbeat. Was the cognac a bad idea? He took a cocktail glass off the shelf and poured her a diet ginger ale.
He heard the bedroom door close, and then the flap of rubber on the tile floor of the gallery, and then turned to look at her.
She was wearing the tank top and shorts she’d often worn when he had visited her at her house, and a pair of flip-flops. He tried to stifle his disappointment. Okay. She looks beautiful, and in that outfit she must feel comfortable.
She didn’t. She looked anxious and miserable. Then he noticed the strap on her shoulder. What was that?
“Hi, baby,” he said, and forced a smile. “Have a ginger ale?” He held it up.
“I—” she said, then paused, like a stutterer who had to start over. “Sure.” She stepped closer and took it, then stepped away with it. She slipped the strap off her shoulder and set her overnight bag on the floor. “I need to talk to you.”
“Okay,” he said. His mouth was suddenly dry. He sipped his cognac. “Come and sit down.”
She looked undecided, and he realized that she had made some plan that had not included sitting down. But she turned and walked with him to the semicircular couch coiled around the big polished walnut coffee table. Her expression was serious, troubled. Could she be breaking up with him?
As though she were answering, she said, “This isn’t working out.”
He felt an emptiness in his stomach. He watched her, silent.
She began again. “You’ve been really kind and generous, and a true friend. You were the only one of Nick’s friends who even kept in touch with me. Nobody else gave a crap. Their girlfriends, who were always chatty and supposedly my friends, didn’t bother to call after the funeral. I would have thought you’d be the least likely to care, because you were the boss and older and everything. I’ll always be grateful that you were there for me.”
Maybe this wasn’t as bad as he had first feared. He knew he was walking along the edge of a precipice, but what she’d said made him decide to be bold and honest. “I did it because I love you.” He watched her face, hoping it would show something—if not joy, at least pleasure, however mild. Even surprise would give him a foothold he might be able to use, a chance to save himself. But her head gave a tiny involuntary shake, like a shiver.
Chelsea said, “This is my fault. I didn’t intend it, but I guess I’ve been leading you on. I wanted to give us both a chance to see if we could be happy together, but I should have been smarter about this.”
“You did nothing wrong,” he said. “Don’t think of it that way.” He swallowed hard, then stood. “Jesus, my throat is dry.” He went to the bar, reached into the refrigerator and got another ginger ale, and poured it in a glass. While he was there he reached under the bar to the cardboard box there and took one of the little brown envelopes. As he walked back to the couch he palmed it and held it in his left hand.
He sat down and drank, looking at her and noting the position of her glass.
Chelsea had gathered her thoughts while he’d been away. “This is the time to be open and honest. I went out with you because you’re such a great guy, and I felt safe with you. I felt I could talk to you about anything, but that you wouldn’t make me relive Nick’s murder. The first night we went out, I enjoyed it and forgot how sad I was for a while. I was distracted, and I was drinking, and I guess that one night I got carried away.”
Crane realized Chelsea was being absolutely sincere. She had actually remembered none of that night—passing out, his carrying her to the bedroom, moving her this way and that as he’d stripped her, the sex. The powder was magical. It had absolutely erased her memory. He had never used GHB before that night, but it had lived up to its reputation completely.
He could see she was blushing, and that it embarrassed her to look at him, but she wanted to be sure she was getting through to him. If she couldn’t see his hurt, then she couldn’t be sure he was hearing her.
She said, “The next morning I realized I had passed out at some point and a lot was a blank. I must have thrown myself at you, and so we’d had sex. I decided that since I’d done that, I owed it to you, and to me—I’m not saying I was being unselfish—to try to see if this was what we both really wanted, or just a drunken mistake.”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” Crane said. “I know this has been awkward for you, so soon after Nick died. But we hardly ever get to choose when it’s time for things in our lives, good or bad, to happen.”
Chelsea reached out and touched his hand, and he took it as permission to come closer on the couch. “It was good. It was,” she said. “But it’s still a mistake, and I’m so, so sorry.”
She began to cry. She bent her head down and he hugged her. He could feel her sobbing, and he could tell her tears were making the shoulder of his sport coat wet. While he held her with his hands behind her back, he tore off the end of the envelope, transferred the envelope from his left hand to his right, and poured the envelope into her ginger ale, trying to make his gesture quick and measure the dose by eye. Was that too much? He slipped the empty envelope into his coat pocket and brought his hand up to pat her tenderly. He stayed there, could have stayed there forever holding her, but after another minute or two she straightened, her head came up, and he had to release her.
He handed her the silk handkerchief from the breast pocket of his sport coat. She wiped her nose and dabbed at her eyes. The black eyeliner smeared on it, and she cried some more. “I’m ruining this.”
“Keep it.” While she was occupied with staring at his handkerchief, he watched the last of the white powder dissolve in her ginger ale.
She pivoted to face the coffee table, picked up the ginger ale, took a few swallows, and set it down. She seemed to collect herself. “I made a mistake. You’re a wonderful man, but I’m not in love with you.”
“I think you are, deep down. Whenever you’re not thinking, brooding over things, everything is fine. Maybe this was too soon to start a new relationship and you weren’t ready, as you say. Maybe we need to step back and take things more slowly. We can still see each other, and over time—”
She was already shaking her head impatiently. “I’ve got to be totally honest. If I thought that could be the problem, then I’d leave things the way they are, keep my mouth shut, and wait. That’s what I wanted to do, but I can’t. This has got to be over before the future can start.”
He took a drink of his ginger ale, trying to get her to feel thirsty.
It worked. She took another long draft of her ginger ale, stood, carried it to the bar, and set her glass on the granite surface. “I need to go home.”
“Please don’t go back to that empty house now. It’s late. We don’t have to talk about this anymore. I can sleep in one of the guest rooms, and in the morning I’ll drive you back there.”
“I know it’s not fair to drag you
out to drive me at this hour. I’ll call a cab.”
“No,” he said. He stood up from the couch. “Of course I’ll drive you home if that’s what you want. Just give me a minute to pull myself together.” He walked to the arch leading to the gallery and headed for the bedroom.
In the bedroom he checked the spots where she had always put her things on overnight stays. She had left nothing. It occurred to him that while he’d been standing at the bar imagining her hanging up her dress and brushing out her long blond hair in front of the mirror, she had been feverishly stuffing the dress into her overnight bag and gathering her other belongings as fast as she could.
He went into the bathroom and pissed, brushed his teeth to get rid of the smell of cognac on his breath, combed his hair, went to his closet, hung up his sport coat and returned his tie to the rack, and then took out a windbreaker. He put it on and walked slowly back up the gallery to the living room.
She was sitting on the couch again, so he could only see the back of her head, but it looked odd. She was slouching, leaning her head back against the top of the couch as though she were studying the ceiling. As he came around to the front of the couch he saw that her eyes were closed and her mouth open. He glanced in the direction of the bar and realized that while she was waiting she must have downed the last of the ginger ale.
The powder seemed to have taken her much more quickly than it had the first time. He touched her neck. Her pulse was slow, but strong. He was still a little worried. He had ordered the powder from an online pharmacy in Mexico. He didn’t know what sort of regulation there was in another country, how strong the powder was, or even if it was the same strength all the way through. But it was too late to undo this, and she had been fine the first time.
He began by taking her overnight bag into the bedroom, then unpacking it. He laid the dress she’d worn across the top of the chair and her shoes on the floor as though she had stepped out of them. He went into the bathroom and put her toothbrush and toothpaste, mouthwash, hairbrush, makeup case, and deodorant out on the counter by the second sink. He ran water over the toothbrush and shook it a bit to make it seem used. He even ran the fresh bar of soap under the faucet for a second and put it back on the soap dish.
He went into the bedroom, opened the covers on the bed to bare the sheets, and then returned to the living room to pick her up off the couch and carry her back to place her on the bed. Her shorts and tank top came off much more easily than the dress had last time. She had done much of his work for him.
This morning as he drove toward his storage facility, he remembered the rest. He went over each detail. He had started to pull the covers over her sleeping form, but he had made the mistake of letting his eyes linger too long on her. He was hoping she would believe she’d relented during the part of the evening she wouldn’t remember, and if that had happened, they probably would have had make up sex. He felt a little guilty, but then assured himself that he had the right, after all he’d done for her. He also knew that this might very well be the last time.
Now he wished that he could still be at home to try to guide her to the proper interpretation of what she would see when she woke up. He had planned to be there. He had called to give Verna Machak the day off so she wouldn’t be in the way, but a few minutes later he’d remembered that Salamone hadn’t come to the storage office on his usual day, so he probably would come today.
JANE DROVE PAST DAVID CRANE’S house at eight fifteen, and on to the plaza to park her car. She returned on foot and went through the little woods to watch the house. The Range Rover was gone, and she knew it would be at least two hours before the housekeeper, Mrs. Machak, arrived. She moved to the house and walked slowly and quietly, checking windows to see if the girl Chelsea was still there.
Jane moved from window to window, but the house appeared to be empty. There were a few rooms that she suspected only opened onto the central Japanese garden and the broad hallway with the pillars. She moved into the garden and looked. There was an empty office, a living room, and a couple of rooms that had no obvious purpose. She followed the wall and realized she had misinterpreted the structure of the building. It seemed to fold twice, to wrap itself around the garden, giving the illusion that the garden was completely surrounded.
She saw that there was a louvered window in the pantry beside the kitchen. She touched it, wiggled one of the louvers a little, and saw what she had been hoping for. The sheets of glass were tempered—maybe even unbreakable—but they were mounted in an aluminum framework that opened and closed with a crank. She took out her pocketknife and used its blade to bend the frames holding the first two louvers, then slipped the first one out. She removed the next and the next the same way. Soon she had all eight out and piled neatly on the ground beside her.
Jane hoisted herself up and slithered in the window, stopped and listened for a minute, pulled herself through and listened again, and then moved out of the kitchen. She looked for the bedrooms first. People who had something to hide seemed to be most comfortable keeping it close to them while they slept. The row of bedrooms was where she had thought it would be, off the gallery on the right side where there was a view of the garden, but the windows were shielded by the protruding front wing.
There were a couple of model bedrooms that looked as though nobody ever stepped inside except to dust. Then she reached the master suite. She slipped inside and saw the girl. She was lying on the bed, fast asleep, so Jane backed out and closed the door to keep any noise from reaching her.
She went to the office she’d seen from the outside, closed the door, and began to search the drawers of the big desk. It was an impressive piece of furniture, the top of it made from two pieces of a large tree with a subtle pattern of whorls. In the inside top drawer she found a Kimber .45 caliber pistol. She checked the magazine and found it loaded.
Seeing the gun reminded her of the one she’d found in Nick Bauermeister’s toolbox. It made her shift her search to places that might hold stolen jewelry. She didn’t find any, or anything else that looked as though it had been hidden. The filing cabinets were full of file folders that contained Crane’s personal financial records, mostly monthly brokerage reports. Other drawers seemed to be duplicates of the financial records of the Box Farm Personal Storage Company—property taxes, business taxes, and other dull paper. She moved out of the office and worked her way through the house, listening for sounds that would mean Chelsea was awake.
When she finished her first circuit of the rooms it was still only nine, and she had at least an hour before Mrs. Machak would show up. She thought about the pistol. It had been a promising find, but plenty of people owned handguns. They were legal and common. Nick Bauermeister had been killed with a rifle, so the gun proved nothing. She turned her attention to finding a hiding place that was long and narrow, but she was beginning to feel discouraged. The murder weapon was probably either destroyed or still in the possession of the shooter.
She moved along the gallery and heard something. The sound was a loud electronic beep, unchanging and harsh. “Bee bee bee bee bee bee . . .” An alarm system?
She ran toward it, hoping to be able to turn it off. Usually home systems gave the user thirty or forty seconds to disarm them before a telephone signal went to the security company or the police station. She reached the place where it was loudest, swung the door open, and found herself in the master bedroom again. She saw what it was—not an alarm system, an alarm clock.
The digital clock was beside the king-size bed on an end table. The alarm was one of those that got louder each minute or two, and by now it was painful to hear. It began to make a different noise, like a howl, as some car alarms did, just when Jane reached it and hit the button.
The girl had not awakened. She was still lying motionless in the bed, her head no more than three feet from the deafening alarm clock. Jane looked closely at her. She was sprawled on h
er back with one arm a little behind her. She seemed to be lying on it. Jane saw a small downy feather from a pillow clinging to the bedspread. She picked it up and held it beneath Chelsea’s nose. The thin filaments of white barely moved, then were still for a count of five, six, seven, then moved again. The girl was barely breathing. Drugs?
The girl was in trouble. Jane shook her shoulder. No reaction. She shook her harder, then rolled her onto her side and pulled the arm out from under her. It was cool, and looked white as though she had been in the same position for hours. Jane got onto the bed, straddled her, and pulled her up by the shoulders. She held her and moved her hips back so she could keep her upright, then put two big pillows behind her. She patted the girl’s face once, twice, then harder. “Chelsea. Chelsea, wake up.”
The girl’s eyes fluttered but didn’t stay open. “No,” she croaked. “No.”
“You took something,” Jane said. “What was it?”
The girl’s eyes opened, but they were opaque, glassy, with no understanding. They closed again.
Jane let her lean back and hurried into the bathroom. What was it? There were no bottles or plastic bags on any of the counters. She ran back and scanned the tops of the dressers, the nightstands, then looked at the floors, and ran her hands over the bedcovers to feel for a pill bottle.
She remembered seeing a bar in the living room. There had been glasses—dirty ones left on the counter for the housekeeper to wash. She hurried into the living room and over to the bar. She sniffed the two glasses, but smelled nothing. There was also a cognac glass. She went around the granite bar and looked closely at the bottles, which seemed unremarkable, and the sink. There was no residue she could detect. When she turned to look over the bar at the room, something caught her eye. There was a shelf just below the bar for shakers, blenders, peelers, corkscrews, and other equipment, but there was also a small, plain cardboard box, and beside it the torn-off top of a little envelope. It was at most a quarter inch wide and an inch long, but the trace of white powder beside it attracted her attention. Sugar?