Erections scared and disgusted him. Pain and shame were inextricably intertwined with any reminder of the sexual act.
He thought again of the dream. Lotion on her finger; her finger between her legs…
The stream of images would unwind in his mind throughout the day, persistent as a migraine, unless he did something to push the memory away.
He knew what was necessary. The photo. His special picture.
Quickly he rose from bed and threw on a robe, belting it to hide his body from himself. Barefoot, he left the bedroom and proceeded down the hall to the den at the far end.
The den contained just three sticks of furniture-a writing desk he’d salvaged years ago from a retiring professor’s office, the desk’s swivel chair, and a steel file cabinet. Dust dressed everything in a dull gray coat.
At the back of the file cabinet, in an unlabeled manila folder, he kept the photograph.
Carefully he took it out, then sat in the desk chair and studied it in a band of light filtering through a gash in the curtain.
The photo’s corners were dog-eared, the edges worn from repeated handling. It had been crisp and new when he’d obtained it. But since then, nearly every night, he’d found himself drawn to the picture, gazing at it sometimes for hours.
The picture calmed him, as it always did. He lost himself in it and felt the world slide away.
Relaxed now, the dream banished, he could examine his own feelings more objectively.
Yes, his ugly impulses were stirring. But he could control them. He could hold off the need to take action. He could refrain from taking Erin outside the ranch, to the arroyo. He could stop himself from ending her life in a shout of flame.
He was certain of it.
Almost certain, anyway.
14
Late.
Annie checked her watch for the fifth time.
She sat alone at a table for two, a menu in her hands, the table’s umbrella unfolded to shelter her in shadow. Around her, bright noon sunshine fell in ribbons of glitter through a scrim of fluttering banners and rippling leaves, the sun rays shifting with the wind.
Voices murmured over the clink of silverware. At a table across the courtyard, half a dozen women in power suits laughed at a shared joke. Nearer to Annie’s table, two men pursued an intense discussion of the upcoming NFL draft.
Pleasant here, in this courtyard restaurant in the heart of Tucson’s downtown. Ordinarily, Annie could relax in a place like this as easily as slipping into a warm, soapy bath.
Today, foreboding overlay her impressions of the restaurant, the bright sun, the blue sweep of sky. Foreboding-and a memory of her insomnia last night.
She had sensed danger to Erin. A premonition, irrational and no doubt groundless. Yet even now she couldn’t shake it.
And Erin was late.
The two of them had made a lunch date for twelve o’clock. Annie had been waiting fifteen minutes already, and she’d arrived ten minutes late to begin with.
Her sister was maniacally punctual, always had been. Whichever gene was responsible for tardiness had been omitted from her complement of chromosomes. For her to be this far off schedule was simply unheard of.
Possibly an unexpected crisis had come up in her practice. Suicidal patient, say.
Or maybe something had… happened to her.
Traffic accident.
Random violence.
Medical emergency.
Hell, anything. Anything at all.
Really, though, it was silly to get all worked up. The simple truth was that Annie had almost certainly misunderstood the arrangements she and Erin had made. Probably she’d gotten the time, the date, or the location wrong-very possibly all three. She’d done it before.
Her sister could remember every detail of her schedule without strain. Annie had trouble enough just remembering to get up in the morning.
Most likely Erin was still at her office, expecting to have lunch at one o’clock-or she was waiting at a different restaurant entirely and wondering how scatterbrained Annie had managed to screw up again.
Of course. It had to be something like that.
I’ll just call her office, Annie thought, and “Still waiting?”
The male voice startled her. She looked up from the menu held indifferently in one hand, and her waiter was there, a blond kid with Malibu surfer looks, incongruous in the desert.
“Uh, yeah.” Annie put down the menu. “I may have been stood up. Is there a phone around here?”
“Right outside the rear entrance.”
“Thanks.” She pushed back the tubular chair. “If a woman comes in-redheaded like me, but a lot better looking-please tell her I went to make a call.”
“I’ll tell her. But she won’t be better looking.”
The compliment lifted a surprised smile to her lips. The smile lingered as she left the cafe.
Nice to be admired by a younger man. Of course, he probably had no idea how much younger he was. Most people took her to be about twenty-five, but she and Erin had both turned thirty last month and had commiserated together.
Erin. The smile faded.
A telephone kiosk, fortunately not in use, was just where the waiter had said it was.
Though she had dialed the switchboard at Erin’s office countless times, the number was gone from her memory. Hardly an unusual occurrence-she had no head for figures, and she wasn’t good with names and faces either.
The number was in her address book, and her address book was somewhere in the chaos of her purse. She pawed through a clutter of key rings, tissues, cosmetics, coupons, scribbled notes to herself, Life Savers, breath mints, pens, business cards, loose coins, and out-of-date lottery tickets before she found the booklet.
Then she fed a quarter into the phone and punched in the number.
The receptionist answered. “Sonoran Psychological Associates.”
“Hi, Marie, this is Anne Reilly. Is my sister-”
“ Annie. I’ve been calling your shop.”
Tension in the words-alarm, even. Fear pounced on her like a tiger. “You have? Why?”
“You didn’t get my message?”
“No, I’ve been out, I’m still out, what message, what’s going on?”
“It’s Erin. We can’t find her.”
“You can’t find her?” She felt stupid repeating the words.
“No one knows where she is. She missed her ten-fifteen, and her eleven o’clock, too.” A truck rattled past the pay phone, and Annie had to strain to hear. “I’ve called her home three times; her machine keeps answering. Tried calling you forty minutes ago, left a message with your assistant-”
“I was already on my way downtown. For lunch with Erin. She hasn’t shown up here either.”
Unthinkable for Erin to miss even one appointment with a patient, let alone two. The world would end before she would permit herself that kind of irresponsibility.
Could she have had a seizure? Terrible thought. Erin’s last epileptic episode had occurred in high school; since then the prescription medicine she took had kept that problem completely under control.
Still, it was possible. If she’d suffered convulsions while driving to work-or fallen in her apartment and struck
