“At night the harbor in Baltimore is beautiful with all the city and dock lights reflected in it, but the reflections keep you from seeing the water itself.”
“If you are painting it, Anna, the reflections are the water.”
I turned to him. “But if you fall in, they’re not.”
He took my face in his hands and looked into my eyes; I felt as if I had slipped off a bank and was drowning in his gaze. I looked away.
“Do you want to dance?” he asked softly.
“It’s hot in there.”
“Out here,” he suggested.
“Most guys I know don’t like to dance.”
“Most guys I know want to dance, if it’s with the right girl.”
“Oops. Song’s over.” And it really was. But the music started again, with a slower beat.
“Come on, Anna. Why do you make things so hard?”
“Maybe you expect things to be too easy.”
He laughed and put his arms loosely around my waist.
“Come on.”
I kept my heels on, and I looped my hands around his neck. I didn’t try Erika’s touch-and-tantalize strategy, partly because I didn’t think I could pull it off, mostly because just feeling his arms around me was enough touching and tantalizing.
As we danced, Zack pulled me closer. I couldn’t see his face now. I thought — maybe I was wrong — I thought he spoke my name, as if he had said it silently but I heard it anyway. Then I felt his hand on the back of my neck. He leaned my head against his chest. I could hear his heart beating. In half a breath I could have raised my face to kiss him. I felt him lowering his head. In half a breathI got a bucket of cold reality. Through the door to the dining room, I saw Erika standing next to the DJ, watching us, her arms crossed, a satisfied smile on her lips. Zack was on assignment.
I pulled back. Zack stopped dancing. “What is it?” He gently touched my face, lifting my chin with just the backs of his fingers. I gazed into eyes the color of the creek at twilight. I don’t know what Zack saw in my gaze, but he quickly let go of my face and started dancing again, as if he were afraid to look any longer.
He ought to be afraid, I thought. His conscience ought to be cowering in the basement of his brain. Faker!
“Do you remember Monday night?” I asked.
“Monday. .”
“Do you remember what you said?”
He shook his head no.
“Well, you were right.”
“I was right?” he repeated. “About—?”
“You can fake it with anyone.”
He took a step back, staring at me as if I had just slapped him.
I turned, headed for the dining room, and moved quickly through it, using the crowd to make it hard for Zack to catch up. I hurried down the staircase. When I got to the first floor, all I wanted to do was run to the bathroom and bawl. I stood still in the hallway that led to the ladies’ room and shut my eyes, trying to keep the tears from slipping out. I was such a sucker!
“Are you all right? Are you all right?” a man asked.
I opened my eyes. Mr. Gill.
“You look very upset,” he said, his voice sympathetic.
“I’m fine.”
He kept staring at me. “I saw you hurrying across the dance floor. I feared that something was wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
He shook his head slightly. “You’re a friend of my daughter, but I don’t know your name.”
At first I thought it was kindness — unwanted kindnessand I tried to think of a polite way to tell him to get lost. Then I realized why he was so concerned and why he had followed me down the stairs. He knew my name — the name I was born with — and I knew his old phone number. “Anna O’Neill Kirkpatrick,” I replied, and watched Elliot Gill swallow hard.
“I’m not really friends with Erika. I arrived in Wisteria just a few days ago. I came tonight with Zack, who lives next door to my great-aunt.”
“Of course,” he said. “You came because of your uncle’s death.”
I explained once again how I had been responding to Uncle Will’s invitation and didn’t learn he was dead until I arrived. Elliot Gill never took his eyes off me. The way he listened, his mouth moving as if he were anticipating my words, as if thirsty for whatever I had to say, made me wonder if I not only looked like my mother, but sounded like her.
“Your aunt Iris,” he said, “how is she taking all this?”
“The way anyone who knows her would expect. She still talks to Uncle Will.”
“Crazy as a loon,” he remarked softly.
“Maybe.”
Mr. Gill raised a pale eyebrow. His eyes were gray, his hair a thin mix of gray and yellow combed across the large dome of his head. Erika must have gotten her dark beauty from her mother.
He pointed to a booth, the one where the stalker and his friend had sat. “Why don’t we sit and chat?”
I wanted to go home and cry my eyes out, but I pulled myself together. One of my reasons for coming to this stupid party was to ask him questions about my mother.
As soon as I slid into the private, candlelit booth, I wished I had insisted on a table in the center of the room. It was the way he looked at me. I wanted to keep reminding him, I’m Anna! Anna!
“You’re not staying with Iris, I hope?”
“What do you mean?”
“You should stay with me,” he said. “We have an extra room next to Erika’s. You will be safe with me.”
“Thank you, but I really like being with Aunt Iris.”
“Are you aware of the degree to which Iris suffers from mental illness?”
“I’ve never seen her medical records, but I have some idea.”
“Over the years she has been in and out of hospitals. As you may or may not know, your mother’s life with Iris and William was extremely difficult.”
“It would have been more difficult without them,” I replied, feeling the need to defend them. “It would have been hard for my mother to keep me and continue with school.”
“She had options.”
“She did? Like what?”
He didn’t answer.
“You mean there were other people she could have lived with.”
“Exactly.”
“What was Joanna like?” I asked.
He stared at the flickering candle. It took him a long time to answer. “Bright, imaginative, beautiful. . She was a young woman with big dreams. I had just purchased my first store — I’m a pharmacist by training — and hired her to work part-time behind the counter. Joanna was hoping to attend medical school, but after she became pregnant, she thought nursing a more practical choice. She was a healer by nature, intuitive about people.”
“She was psychic,” I said.
He went on as if he hadn’t heard me, his narrow fingers tracing a pattern on the tabletop. “She was so innocent, so full of life. I watched her fall in love.” His eyes rose to meet mine. “When a young woman falls in love, she looks a certain way, has a certain light in her face. She becomes irresistible.”
I folded my arms and sat as far back as I could.
“You move like your mother,” he said.
