“A bucket to hold my kindling.”
“Hell, got some old copper apple-butter tubs in my barn. Fix you right up.”
“That’s awfully generous of you, Hangtown.”
“The hell it is. You’ll pay me for it.”
“Why, sure,” Mitch said hastily. “How much did you have in mind?”
“I need you to take this aerial home for me. Won’t fit in my sidecar.”
“You’ve got yourself a deal,” Mitch said, glancing admiringly at Wendell Frye’s antique ride. “That’s quite some old bike.”
“It’s a 1936 Chief,” Hangtown said, as the two of them deposited the aerial on the tarp in the back of Mitch’s truck. “Manufactured right up the mm-rr-road in Springfield by the Indian Motorcycle Company. Found her in a barn in Higganum a few years back. Cylinders still had the original nickel plating.” He climbed slowly on and donned his leather helmet and goggles, cackling at him. “Spiral Staircase was another good one. Remember that eye in the peephole? Man, that’s the good stuff! Who was the villain in that?”
“George Brent.”
“George Brent! Whatever happened to him?”
“He died.”
Hangtown shook his huge white head at Mitch. “Wish people would stop doing that. Makes me wonder if it might happen to me someday.”
“You think it won’t?” Mitch found himself asking.
“I don’t think at all, Big Mitch,” the great artist roared, kick-starting the bike’s engine. It caught right away, spewing clouds of thick exhaust in the morning air. “Thinking is what kills you. Christ, didn’t you know that?”
CHAPTER 2
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
They were at it again up on the third floor. Those damned Sealy Posturepedic gymnasts in the room right above hers. They’d been humping away up there nonstop every night for the past week, that bed of theirs shaking like a washing machine in its final spin cycle.
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
Whoever she was, she was not quiet. Her love cry was plaintive, the cry of a sad young girl. As for him, Des hadn’t heard the man make one single sound yet. Assuming that it even was a man up there. Because if there was one thing Des Mitry had learned so far in life, it was this: Never assume.
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
Thoroughly wide-awake now, she flicked on her bedside lamp and fumbled for her heavy horn-rimmed glasses, the ones that were forever sliding down her nose. It was 4 A.M., according to the clock on the nightstand, and more than anything in the whole wide world she wished she were in her own bed in her own home. But that was not possible-the renovations on her new place still hadn’t been completed. In fact, every single aspect of the job was taking twice as long as the contractor had said it would. She knew this was normal. But knowing it didn’t make it any less aggravating. Besides, it was just plain impossible to get comfortable in a new job in a new town when everything she owned was in storage and she was sleeping-make that trying to sleep-in a strange bed. Even if it was a damned canopied bed.
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
The inn was fine, really. Except for those damned X-games upstairs, of course. But they weren’t the real reason why she was awake. After four years at West Point, Des could sleep through a carpet bombing. No, it was the wondering. Wondering if she’d made the right decision when she gave up a job she was good at to chase after something she really loved, but-let’s face it-might be no good at at all. Wondering about this new, highly unlikely relationship she was in with a pigment-challenged man who sometimes made her feel as giddy as a schoolgirl and other times just plain scared to death.
It was entirely possible, Des realized, that this was the happiest she’d ever been in her life. It was also entirely possible that she had completely lost her mind.
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
She got up and put on her sweatpants and started in on her homework exercises. A succession of hand and wrist studies by Durer to be copied out of Robert Beverly Hale’s Anatomy Lessons of the Great Masters. Des was studying figure drawing two evenings a week at the world-renowned Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, one of the only institutions in America that still taught art the same painstaking way the Renaissance masters had learned it-line by line, stroke by stroke, with serious attention to craft and a refreshing absence of baloney. One night a week they worked with a model, the other they studied perspective and anatomy. Paul Weiss, her professor, was so serious about anatomy that he had taken them to the morgue at Yale-New Haven Hospital to watch medical students dissect cadavers. Not that Des had needed to tag along. She knew what was underneath the skin only too well- violent death was what had driven her to the drawing pad in the first place. In fact, when Paul got a look at her portfolio of murder victims he became so disturbed that he fled the studio and vomited. When he returned, looking exceedingly pale, he’d asked her if he could show her portfolio to some other faculty members. She let him, naturally. Now they all stared at her, wide-eyed, when she strode the corridors with her drawing pad and tackle box filled with charcoals.
They did not know what to make of her. She was not like the others.
Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…
Seated on the edge of the bed, she went to work diligently replicating Durer’s intricate hatchings and cross- hatchings. She worked in pencil, focusing her considerable attention on the flexor tendons of the palmaris longus, transfixed by how, somehow, each line articulated tendon and sinew and bone, how the human wrist slowly came to three-dimensional life on the drawing pad in her lap. It was sheer magic.
And, God, was it ever fun.
Shortly after five she heard a door open upstairs, then a low murmur of voices, followed by light footsteps on the stairs. A woman’s footsteps. The moaner was leaving. Des could get back to sleep now, if she desired. But she was so totally into her work that sleep was the farthest thing from her mind.
At six she stowed her homework, did fifteen minutes of stretching and made her bed, pulling the corners tight. The housekeeper would happily have done that for her, but Des did not feel right about having someone else pick up after her. It was her bed. That made it her mess. When she was done she put on her New Balances and a fleece pullover and headed downstairs.
Outside, the early-morning air was crisp and clean. She inhaled it deeply, enjoying the country quiet, her eyes still seeing the lines and shapes from her drawing pad in the dewy meadow before her. She walked, her stride swift and sure. Des was six feet tall, lithe, long-stemmed and high-rumped. When she wore tight jeans she could cause fender benders. Up Frederick Lane she strode, past the historic homes that backed up on the Connecticut River. One narrow dirt drive led its way back to a goat farm, another to a llama ranch. Occasionally, there were new houses, houses so huge and gaudy that they stuck out like the gold teeth in a gangbanger’s mouth.
A milkman passed by in his delivery truck. He waved to her. Otherwise, she saw no one. A mile up the road she turned in at Uncas Lake and made her way around it to her new place. It was a snug little two-bedroom cape on a hilltop with a great view of the lake and, best of all, incredible light. The living room, where she intended to set up her easel, had skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows. And it was hers. All hers. Gazing at it, Des positively tingled with excitement.
This is my house.
The price had been right, too. Of course, it had needed a whole lot of work. A new roof. New kitchen. New furnace. New wood floors, plaster, paint. Plus the back deck was all rotted out. A young contractor named Tim Keefe, who was Dorset’s assistant fire chief, was handling the whole thing. She’d hired Tim because he knew the local workmen, and she was way too busy.
Trouble was, so were they. Everything was half-completed. The roofers, who were supposed to have been done a week ago, still hadn’t even finished stripping the old shingles off. In place of a roof she had a festive blue tarp held in place by two-by-fours. She unlocked the front door and moseyed inside, fearing the worst. And
