With an Extreme Burning

When Jerry was gone, he returned to the sideboard. Another two or three days and he would have it fitted, bonded, sanded, and ready for primer sealing and then staining. It had become important to finish it as soon as possible, but at the same time to make it as perfect as he was capable. When he was done and satisfied with it, it would mark both an ending and a beginning: Then, finally, he felt he would be through grieving and ready to start living again.

Heat and hunger drove him into the house at twelve-thirty. He made himself a tuna salad sandwich, opened a beer, ate sitting at the kitchen table and with some appetite. As he carried his empty plate to the sink, he noticed the blinking light on the answering machine. Three blinks now—three messages. He hesitated, then leaned over and pressed the playback button.

The first message was the one from Jerry about the golf date. The second was from a school acquaintance of Katy's who lived in San Francisco and who said she'd just heard about the accident and oh, Dix, dear Dix, she was so dreadfully sorry, if there was anything she could do, wouldn't he please call her back right away. Dix had met her once, years before, and could barely remember what she looked like. He didn't bother to write down the number.

The third message—

“Go look in your mailbox,” the tormentor's voice said.

That was all.

Now what? Come onto the property, put something in the mailbox? Christ. Virtually no risk of anybody seeing him if he skulked up Rosemont in the middle of the night. Trees and shrubs screened off the nearest neighbors, and the mailbox was down at the foot of the drive, invisible from up here unless you were standing out on the parking area in front of the garage.

What, though? Written calumny? Lies cut and pasted out of newspapers and magazines?

Dix went out and down the drive, forcing himself to walk at a normal pace. The mailbox was the rural kind, mounted on a pole. He dropped the front lid, bent to look inside.

A little box, about six inches square. Plain white, sealed with filament tape.

He removed it gingerly, held it for a few seconds—it hardly had any weight—and then shook it. Faint rattling. Unease began to build in him. Throw it in the garbage, he thought, don't open it. Instead, his legs carried him straight uphill and into the house. He slit the tape with a knife, lifted off the lid.

The box was stuffed with cotton, a thick wad of it. When he pinched up the wad between thumb and forefinger, something fell out and clattered on the drainboard. Its twin dangled from the cotton, glinting in the sunlight that burned down through the kitchen skylights.

Earrings.

White jade teardrop earrings with a tiny sapphire set into each hammered gold clip. One-of-a-kind pair, made to order by a jeweler in Santa Rosa four years ago.

Earrings Katy had been wearing the night she died.

SIX

It was five-thirty when Cecca drove up Rosemont Lane and turned into the Mallory driveway. She hesitated as she got out into the thinning afternoon heat, wondering again if she should have called first. But Dix's message had been as urgent-sounding as it was succinct: “I need to see you right away. Call or come up to the house— please, Cecca. I'll be home all day.” He hadn't left the time of his call; it could have been anytime after noon, when she and Amy had left for the tree farm. Monthly Sunday meal with her folks—“dinner,” Ma called it, even though they sat down at the table promptly at two o'clock. Ritual, but usually a pleasant one. Not so pleasant today though. The heat, and Pop's wearying new litany of complaints: getting old, useless, couldn't use his hands because of the arthritis, couldn't even get an erection anymore (this in front of Amy, who'd thought it was funny), might as well die and get it over with. And he was only sixty-eight! And now this urgent message from Dix, with the distraught edge to his voice. She couldn't imagine what had prompted it. Something else for her to worry about, no doubt, whatever it was. Sometimes she felt like an emotional sponge, soaking up other people's problems as readily as she soaked up her own, absorbing and then squeezing them out as if they were her own. “Why do you care so much about other people?” Chet had asked her once, seriously—a legitimate question coming from him, because the only person he cared about was himself. “I was born with a Mother Teresa gene,” she'd said. It was as good an answer as any.

She rang the doorbell three times without getting a response. She went to the garage; he wasn't there, but his Buick was. Out by the pool? She made her way down the side steps and around onto the rear terrace.

She heard him before she saw him. He was in the pool, swimming laps in a kind of frenzy: head down, eyes shut, arms and legs pummeling the water into a froth. Not really swimming, she thought as she watched him; it was as though he were trying to rid himself of some inner turmoil. It added to her feeling of concern. The man struggling in the pool wasn't the Dix Mallory she knew—the gentle, controlled one. Even Katy's death hadn't altered those qualities; he'd been the same man at the funeral and downtown yesterday. What could have happened to change him so radically in twenty-four hours?

He didn't realize she was there until she moved to the pool's edge and shouted his name. Then he stopped beating the water, caught the lip, and lifted himself out. He stood beside her, dripping, round-shouldered with fatigue, working to get his breathing under control.

“Amy and I were out at the farm,” she said. “Didn't get home until a little while ago.”

“Thanks for coming.”

He reached for the towel draped over one of the outdoor chairs. Cecca could see the strained muscles rippling in his arms and legs as he dried himself. And noticed, in spite of herself, how trim he looked in his swimsuit, the flatness of his belly.

“How long have you been in the pool?” she asked.

“A while. Too long, probably.”

“You look exhausted.”

“That was the idea.”

“Dix, what is it? What's happened?”

“In the house. I've got something to show you.”

He led her inside. Upstairs in the living room he said, “I'll go put on some clothes. Make yourself a drink if you want one.”

“No. Unless you do …”

“I'd better not.”

Waiting for him, she prowled the room. It was the first time she'd been there since the accident, and it felt odd. Katy's house, Katy's pride and joy—a legacy now. Blue and white decor, lots of crystal and cut-glass accessories, all chosen by Katy to her tastes. Her paintings on the walls, the huge dominating one she'd called “Blue Time”: rectangles and rhomboids in various shades of blue, splotches of white, three little dollops of yellow. Abstract Expressionism. She'd thought Jackson Pollock was the greatest of all American painters. Yet her own work was more in the style of Mark Rothko, whom she'd also admired—simple, sensuous color shapes rather than explosions of color. Rothko had once said that his paintings were facades, telling little but just enough about his perception of the world and his own life. “It's the same thing with my paintings,” Katy had been fond of saying. “Facades, little snippets of the real Katy Mallory.” And when someone had asked her what the snippets were, a wink, a grin, and: “That's for you to figure out, sweetie.”

Cecca had always liked this room, the house, but today it depressed her. Her mood, coupled with Dix's. She sat down on the blue brocade couch. She was staring out through the tall windows, watching a small plane circle for a landing at Los Alegres Airport across the valley, when Dix came down from the bedroom.

He'd put on slacks and a pullover, run a comb through his brown hair. His shoulders still wore their burden of fatigue. His jaw was set tight; she could see ridges of muscles at the corners of his mouth. He looked grim. Worse than he had the day after the accident. He had something in one hand, but his fingers were closed tight around it and she couldn't quite tell what it was. A box of some kind?

He said as he sat down across from her, “There's something I have to know, Cecca. I need you to tell me the truth—the complete and honest truth. Will you do that?”

“If I can. Of course.”