“Don’t tell me he’s a fan.”
“Actually, he thinks you’re a bore. I believe his exact words were ‘officially sanctioned’ bore.”
“Sure, when I was his age I felt the same way about Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby. I didn’t realize how good they were until I grew up.”
“Wait, you grew up?” she said teasingly.
“That’s pretty standard stuff for teenaged boys. So is the graffiti thing.”
“Explain that to me, will you? Why are a bunch of middle-class white boys freakin’ like this? They live in big houses, have money in their pockets, brains, every opportunity in the world… Why?”
“They want attention.”
“From who?”
“Girls, silly. That’s why we do everything. We pound on drum kits, slam into each other on the football field, paint dirty words on public buildings-anything so that girls will notice us. It’s always about girls. And it never stops. When we get a little older we just find more permanent ways of saying Look at me. Which explains the Bruce Leanses of the world.”
She thought about this for a moment. “That’s totally pathetic.”
“We’re a pathetic lot, all right. Maybe now you can begin to appreciate just how fortunate you are that you found me.”
“Um, okay, I’m thinking I liked you better when your self-esteem was a couple of dozen notches lower, boyfriend.”
“You have no one to blame but yourself, Master Sergeant. I’m floating on a cloud, thanks to you.”
“Mitch, I’m floating along right next to you,” she said, suddenly serious. “And there’s nothing underneath me. If you go down, I go with you.”
He glanced over at her, startled and pleased. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, you know that?”
She said nothing in response, just swiveled her head and stared out her window. He couldn’t see her face. She didn’t want him to see her face.
It was nearly three by the time they got back to his cottage. Mitch tromped straight up to bed. Des, who was still wired, set up her easel in the living room. She had some grisly crime scene photos of Moose’s charred remains that she was anxious to depict in charcoal. It was her way of dealing.
Mitch didn’t look at the photos. He didn’t want to see them.
She was still down there working when Quirt started meowing outside the front door, shortly before dawn. She let him in, but Mitch padded downstairs anyway, yawning and blinking, to find a dozen or more haunting portraits torn from her pad and flung all over the room.
Everywhere he looked there was Moose Frye, or what was left of her.
Des’s hands and face were smeared black with charcoal, her eyes bloodshot. She was so fried that she barely seemed to notice Mitch standing there. She was still inside of it. Still bothered. In spite of all of the years he had spent as a critic, Mitch had never truly understood what artists put themselves through until he met her. He had newfound respect for people who create things, thanks to Des. She was definitely rubbing off on him. Was he rubbing off on her? He wondered.
He went in the kitchen and put coffee on and said good morning to Quirt, who was hunched over the kibble bowl with single-minded intensity. He threw on rumpled khakis and a sweatshirt and ran his fingers through his hair. He poured two cups of coffee and carried them into the living room. Handed Des one. Put a jacket around her shoulders. Took her by the hand and led her out the door, stepping over that morning’s fresh headless mouse, and on down to the beach. Des came willingly enough, and sat next to him when he patted the driftwood log where he liked to perch in the early morning with his coffee. There was a sliver of moon on this calm, frosty morning. Geese flew overhead in V-formation.
“Look, it’s just something that we have to get through.”
She gazed bleary-eyed out at the water, shivering. She seemed very far away from him at that moment. “What is?”
“You know perfectly well what.” Tonight was the Deacon’s birthday dinner. Her father and Mitch were going to set eyes on each other for the first time. “It’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine. You’re my soul mate, he’s your closest living relative. I want to meet him.”
“I’m hearing it,” she grunted. “But I’m disbelieving it.”
“Believe it. Besides, this is not a totally new experience for me. I went through this with my own folks and Maisie. They thought she was from the planet Pluto-all because her people came over on the Mayflower.”
“Now there’s an eerie coincidence for you-mine came over on a boat hundreds of years ago, too. The only difference is they were in chains at the time.”
“By the time Maisie died,” Mitch plowed on, “they’d convinced themselves that she was actually half- Jewish.”
“Then they’ll just love me. According to Bella, I’m a member of the lost tribe.”
Mitch sipped his coffee in guarded silence. “I’m not going to let you do this.”
“Do what?”
“Pick a fight with me so you’ll have to call off the dinner. That’s not going to happen.”
“Doughboy, you are impossible, you know that?! You just sit there acting nice to me when all I want to do is bite and scratch and get mean. Damn, what is wrong with you?”
“If you want to wrestle, we’ll wrestle. That’s fine by me. I not only outweigh you but I have a lower center of gravity. I’ll whup your skinny ass. I am talking pancake here-your nose down in the sand.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that we have no business being together?” she demanded. “That our lives are spiraling out of control? That we’re completely insane?”
“Sure,” he said easily.
“And…?”
“And then I do this…” He leaned over and kissed her softly on the lips. “And I know everything I need to know.”
She let out that little whimper of hers and flung her arms around him, hugging him tightly. They kissed. They kissed some more.
“How about we go back to the house and, like, I play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for you on my Stratocaster?” he murmured in her ear.
“How about if we go back to the house and, like, you don’t?”
Des never did get any sleep that night. In fact, she barely had enough time to shower and climb into her uniform before she was due at Center School for traffic control.
“I should buy him something today for his birthday, right?” Mitch said as she hurriedly dumped a bag of dried black-eyed peas into a pot of water to soak.
“No, don’t. He doesn’t like gifts. That’s why I make him dinner.”
“Well, can I at least get a bottle of wine?”
“The Deacon never touches it.”
“Beer?”
“Don’t bother,” she said, kissing him good-bye. “I’ll get it.”
After she had sped away in her cruiser Mitch parked himself in front of his computer and logged on to that morning’s New York tabloids. Moose Frye’s murder had gone directly to page one. LOVE CRAZY, screamed the Post’s banner headline. OH, TEACHER, cried the News. Mitch was not surprised. She was a nice-looking small-town New England schoolteacher. She was the daughter of one of America’s greatest living artists. And she’d been having a wild, clandestine affair with the married school superintendent-a man who was presently on medical leave because he’d recently tried to kill himself. Such juicy details were bound to surface quickly. It was impossible to keep them under wraps.
Yes, it was page one, all right. And the editor of the Sunday magazine had already e-mailed Mitch twice that morning to put his pedal to the metal and go.
So Mitch went.
Not that it was exactly easy to get in. A dozen news vans were crammed this way and that at the entrance to Lord Cove’s Lane, where a stone-faced young trooper had set up a barricade to keep the press out. Mitch had to
