“Yeah. But you think he's dead too, don't you? Be honest.'
“Yes. I do,” he said quietly, after a few seconds. It seemed noisy in the silence of the car. “I have nothing more to base it on than the others being missing. But I think he's gone.” He reached over and patted her arm. She felt stiff.
“Yes,” was all she said. Yes. That's what I think. That's what I feel. Yes was enough.
“As far as the Ecoworld deal having anything to do with it. I don't know. Five minutes ago I thought it might. At this second I don't believe that it does. Five minutes from now I may change my mind again. We don't have real facts. We're working from suppositions based on what others are telling us. And we know the legendary Marty Kerns isn't giving us anything. This CCC deal still looks fishy as hell to me, I don't care if there is a serial murderer out there somewhere.'
“This thing says that World Ecosphere surveyed ‘small towns throughout the middle-American states, from the northern heartland to the South, in search of the perfect community for development.’ Jeezus! Royce—I just thought. Sam was supposed to make all this money by buying up surrounding land and what they called ‘access properties.’ This was supposed to be one of the perks for setting up the deal, see? He'd be in the know and all, and nobody else would know about it, so he could buy land at reasonable prices. Then when the Ecoworld park was promoted nationally, the ‘nothing ground’ he'd been buying up would have become choice real estate.'
“So?'
“First—he was reluctant to wade in and invest. You know, he never totally trusted these guys—it was all so bizarre. And he'd seen some of these pipe dreams fall apart. But what I'm saying is, I just recalled that there was a big flurry of paperwork on it. The company had their access routes that they didn't want him ‘muddying up'—I remember that particular phrase. It was fine for him to cash in on surrounding land and whatnot, but there were certain areas he wasn't to mess with. This was when it was all real secretive, and they had a code name and stuff.'
“A code name?'
“Yeah. I just remembered that. He wasn't supposed to refer to the Ecoworld project by name in any fax or cable or whatever. There was a mound of telegrams and night letters and stuff—and I know he wasn't carrying all that around in his briefcase. I'll bet all the paperwork is still tucked away—either in the office or at home.'
“Think you could find it?'
“I can't imagine where to start looking that I haven't already looked. It probably wouldn't tell us anything we don't already know. Joseph Fisher would probably let us look at their copies if we said something.'
“Maybe ... What was the code word?'
“Oh...” She thought for a while. A lot of time had gone by, and her mind didn't seem to want to function. “Rampage? No ... mm ... something about the waterworks.
“The idea of a code name—Sam thought it was kind of silly. As if somebody would know what the heck Ecoworld meant. I just finished reading about it and I still don't know.'
Mary had turned in the seat, and her skirt pulled up more than she meant it to. He kept his eyes on the road, but that was okay. He knew every sweet dimple and lovely curve. He knew all too well what those beautiful legs looked like.
“I'm sorry, Mary,” he told her.
“Hm?'
“You know—” He didn't say it. Just covered her hand with his. “Everything.” He let it go.
She thought he seemed different. In school he'd been the least likely guy to end up as some skanky doper. He was more like the Royce she remembered.
“Yeah,” she said, and it was as much a whispered prayer as anything else.
Royce took his hand away. Without saying anything, she'd spoken to him in the intimate language of old friends and lovers, and there was no way on God's earth he'd put a move on her. All he wanted to do was start over. Turn the clock back and start acting like a man for a change.
He'd told himself a thousand times he was over her, always knowing that was complete bullshit. You didn't “get over” Mary Perkins, with that soft skin and that mouth and those sweet ways and those legs. You didn't get cured of her. Mary was fatal.
She'd left a part of herself in every place where they'd been together, like a Persian cat shedding small, fluffy balls of itself, insubstantial but real legacies that would catch in the currents of the air like microscopic tumbleweeds, and come back to whisper to you.
Just about the time you'd kicked the Mary habit, you'd chance upon an errant long hair in an unexpected place, and you'd hear that lovely voice, her throaty, warm contralto, or you'd see that natural, sexy, skinny-legged, loose walk of hers in your mind, or you'd smell the fragrance of her memory, and—
Mary knew she was feeling something toward Royce that she shouldn't. It was an emotion she'd been fighting.
What was it about some men? There were those certain guys who could get on a woman's wavelength. Her junkie lover of long ago, with the wide, lopsided smile so full of unexpected warmth and tenderness, he'd been one of those. He could send her into a mood swing the way north draws the needle of a compass. Explain it? She couldn't even define it.
All she knew was that they occupied two different worlds—physically, spiritually, and sexually—yet he nudged her at the oddest times in a way that could only be compared to the desire for a guilty pleasure. And it wasn't sex, truly. Sam had been a sensual lover and sufficiently ardent and gentle to keep her content in that department. Mary realized that it was something more than sex or romance, a deep and not insubstantial part of her that was drawn to this man.
That night she dreamed of him, watching herself enter a room where Royce Hawthorne was. She sees herself as a vision, suggesting the best of early Perry Ellis and most inspired Marc Jacobs, the classiest Geoffrey Beene tailored with flashes of striking Armani, the tearoomiest Ralph Lauren with a hint of Ms. Herrera, mixed and matched by the latest kids—the ones with the unpronounceable names—and just a spritz of Fredericks. The vision moves.
His beautiful eyes follow the deep V-cut of the double-breasted black gabardine with the gold buttons, devouring her with his gaze. She feels the heat of his look. The vision at her best, striding through the room in a scented cloud of Opium, Poison, and Serpent's Eve—her special bedroom fragrance that triumphs over Royce's masculine aromas and engulfs the room in heady perfume. Royce, captivated, comes to her.
He offers her his arm and she takes it, seeing his old leather jacket with the worn elbows, imagining his forearms bulging with thick, ropy veins between the ridges of hard muscle, wanting to feel his big hands touch her again.
In the car the vision's tousled hair is the colors of brandy and champagne, streaked with highlights, lips glossy and desirable, and as she turns, the skirt rides up on her legs—which he tells her are “still A-one.” She is in the front seat with Royce, in her cognac-colored wool jacket with the stone white poorboy turtleneck, and she watches him not look at her thighs.
Fear-shackled, tragedy-pinioned guilt speaks to her in a familiar man's voice.
“Mary?” She turns and looks for Sam, treading water, doing her best not to drown in the dizzying, unexpected waves of whatever this emotion is.
Royce wanted to open up to Mary. That was a problem. He couldn't. Not right now—the way things were hanging. Too much was going on. There was too much at stake. He was carrying too much baggage.
How could he ever begin to explain it to her—about the dope? He knew that she knew he'd fallen into the cracks, somewhere along the line. Royce could see it in her eyes sometimes, that how-did-you-let-yourself-get- this-way stare. Where does one start trying to explain a life? Your weakness and your vices and your mistakes look so easy to control when one is on the outside looking in.
He'd grown up in Waterton, just as Mary had. Born in 1962, in a hinterlands bump in the road that hadn't changed since the Second World War—Waterton, Missouri, was an American ghost town. The only thing good about it was, a kid could drive across the river to Tennessee and get illegal schooners of cold beer, vodka-laced watermelons, or home-grown reefer that just about everybody tried at one time or another when they were in their teens.
