“No. No, of course not, but…” Watching his eyes, she felt her mouth slide into a faltering smile. “Oh, look at you. You got your glasses all smudged up.”
“It doesn’t matter-”
“Sure it does. Let me have them.”
She fogged the lenses with her breath and carefully polished them with a soft tissue.
“You know you can’t see without your glasses,” she said weakly. Some emotion she couldn’t identify quavered in her voice and made it ragged. “You’re… practically helpless.”
A tremor passed through her hands, and the glasses nearly dropped from her grasp.
“You okay?” Steve asked.
“Just a little worked up, I guess.”
He slipped the glasses back on. He had trouble snugging the stems behind his ears.
Kirstie frowned. “Your hands are shaking, too.”
“It was that amorous interlude we just shared,” he said lightly, then planted a quick social kiss on her cheek, merely an affectionate peck. “Left me kind of unglued.”
He picked up the carrying case and headed off before she could say anything more.
16
Jack’s anxiety had passed, leaving him composed and controlled, by the time Steve stepped onto the patio.
“Ready to go?” Steve asked brightly.
“Sure. As soon as I climb into my suit. Your suit, I mean.”
“I left one in the bathroom, on the towel rack.”
“Be right with you.”
Jack pulled on a pair of red-white-and-blue trunks, concealing the knife, with the blade safely retracted, under the elastic waistband.
It was the same knife he had brought with him to the island on those summer days nearly two decades ago, and now it would slash Steve’s throat. The thought made his stomach clench.
He cooled his face with a damp towel again, then emerged from the bathroom and found the Gardners waiting wordlessly in the foyer. The tension between them was obvious. Kirstie must have been trying to warn her husband not to go, but he hadn’t listened. Part of Jack-a very small part-almost wished he had.
“Suit fit all right?” Steve asked.
“Perfect.”
“All set, then.” A clap of hands. “On the attack-Jack!”
Jack’s smile covered his wince as he echoed the clap. “Ready to go-Steve-o!”
It was a ritual from their high-school days, pleasantly goofy then, painful now. It brought back memories of better times. Unwanted memories.
He followed Steve and Kirstie out the door, then along the flagstone path to the dock. Together he and Steve climbed down the ladder and boarded the motorboat. Kirstie threw off the mooring line.
“Have a good time,” she called, her voice neutral, eyes guarded. She fixed her gaze on Steve and added, “Be careful.”
Steve returned the stare complacently. “Always am.” He settled into the stern and fumbled with the starter cord, smiling at Jack. “Great day, isn’t it? Just like summertime when we were seventeen.”
Jack looked at the blue sweep of sky, the turquoise water, the dancing spangles of sun. His answer, low and bitter, was swallowed by a ripping cough of sound as the outboard motor revved to life.
“Yeah, Steve-o. It’s a perfect day.”
He touched his waistband, felt the shape of the knife.
Throttling back, Steve guided the boat away from the dock, heading east, toward the reef.
Jack looked back once and saw Kirstie still standing at the end of the dock, her hair blown in the wind, her arm cutting the sky in a long, sweeping wave.
17
Anastasia was waiting by the front door when Kirstie stepped back inside the house. The dog whined.
“You miss your buddy Jack?” Kirstie snapped. “Well, I don’t.”
Then she sighed. Kneeling, she stroked Ana’s silky coat. “Sorry, girl. Mommy’s a little worked up right now. And the thing of it is, she’s not even sure why.”
Steve was probably right: she was being irrational. She’d taken an instant, visceral dislike to Jack Dance and had allowed it to color all her subsequent impressions.
Most likely he really was nothing worse than a creep. Not the devil incarnate, just your garden-variety… snake.
“But how come he had to spoil our paradise?” she wondered aloud.
Ana had no answer.
The house seemed disturbingly empty with Steve gone. Empty and quiet. Unwanted phrases slipped through Kirstie’s mind: quiet as the dead, lonely as a cemetery, silent as a grave.
She wandered the rooms restlessly, finding no joy in the bars of sun slanting through the arched windows in the living room or the French doors of the loggia. The cheery tinkle of the fountain in the patio seemed irritating, extraneous, an artificial merriment, like a music box’s tinny rhapsody or the rippling chatter of wind chimes.
She looked for more dishes to wash, but there were none in the kitchen sink. She poured a glass of water and left the water running, pointlessly, wastefully, until she realized she had left it on, just to hear the noise it made. Then with a jerk of her wrist she closed the tap.
Back in the living room she confronted the television set, which had remained off throughout the past two weeks. She had considered it a victory of sorts not to have turned on the set even once, to have lived for half a month without the canned idiocy that was too much a part of modern life.
But now she needed it. The TV was company, and a distraction; she wanted both.
She found the remote control, figured out how to work it. The TV popped on with a buzz and crackle. She flipped through channels, passing game shows and soap operas, before settling on a noontime Miami newscast.
Ana stretched out before the flickering picture tube as if lying by a fire. Kirstie was too fidgety to relax. She circled the room, idly rearranging things-the schooner on the mantel, the potted fern in a corner, the globe near the couch-while the newscasters alternated glibly between happy talk and sober seriousness.
The world, it appeared, had survived her two weeks of neglect. Nothing had changed. The same dreary procession of disasters and senseless tragedies still filled the airwaves.
On the screen, a video graphic read fire; cut to a burned-out housing project on Tenth Street, someone’s mother shrieking in Spanish as a small body was wrapped in sheets and carted away.
Back to the news desk. Another graphic: carjacking. Cut to the scene of a fatal struggle over an automobile, the victim’s remains already gone by the time cameras arrived, the lenses focusing greedily on a smear of blood discoloring the curb.
The news desk again. Graphic: murder.
“Nationally,” the female anchor said, “the manhunt continues for a serial killer now officially linked to the deaths of seven women in six western and southwestern states-”
This wasn’t helping at all.
Kirstie clicked the remote, and the TV shut off.
“I guess listening to the news isn’t exactly the best way to calm your nerves,” she remarked to the room.
