mean, I’m not really a heartless beast.”
“Gee, really? You had me fooled. I figured you for a heartless beast for sure.”
“They were going to destroy us, Dick and me.”
“There had to be a better way, Mrs.
Keys.”
She was silent.
I looked at her for a long time and said very quietly, “Maybe now I should call Cliffie.”
She looked back at me, andfora moment there I thought she might start crying but she didn’t.
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe now would be a good time to call him, wouldn’t it?”
Twenty
Mary was in the hospital another week, by which time she remembered just about everything, including the sad-but still spooky-sight of Dick Keys trying to work himself up to killing her in the cold cabin where he’d kept her. Once she went home we spent several evenings playing cards and watching Tv together. I was so grateful she was alive and getting well, I didn’t think about Pamela Forrest much, which was good news for everybody. One night, when we were sure her folks were asleep, we really got into some randy sex on the couch in front of the Tv. We knew we didn’t dare risk going all the way there, but we had a lot of fun anyway. It was like being back in high school again and how could you beat that?
Jeff and Linda got married.
Chip O’Donlon got the crap beat out of him by a jealous husband. And the Judge, over the Thanksgiving weekend, flew to New York, where she was a dinner guest at Lenny Bernstein’s place. At Christmastime, one of our sidewalk Santas got arrested for being intoxicated, Old Lady Arness emptied a shotgun into the Nash Rambler belonging to an IRS man who was trying to collect back revenues, and our basketball team came within three points of beating the number-one ranked team in the state.
And then one day I got a perfumed envelope, out of which dropped a wallet-sized color photo of the gorgeous mystery lady: the blond hair, the black head scarf, the black shades, the black Ford.
On the back it said: We’ll meet again someday, McCain.
I sat there and stared at it for a long, long time.
And then I took out my billfold and slipped the photo into one of the plastic windows. Right between the photos of Mary Travers and Pamela Forrest.
I was a blessed man. I was, a truly blessed man.
