“Okay,” I said. “Put down the booze and take one end of the dining-room table.”
We moved it in front of the fire and brought two chairs and set the table while the spaghetti boiled and the broccoli steamed. The bell on the timer rang. I went to the kitchen and drained the broccoli and tried the spaghetti. It needed another minute. While it boiled I ran the Cuisinart another whirl and reblended my oil and spices. Then I tried the pasta. It was done. I drained it, put it back in the pot and tossed it with the spiced oil and broccoli. I put out the pot, the leftover loaves of Syrian bread that I bought for lunch, and a cold bottle of Soave Bolla. Then I held Susan’s chair. She sat down. I put another log on the fire, poured a dash of wine in her glass. She sipped it thoughtfully, then nodded at me. I filled her glass and then mine.
“Perhaps madam would permit me to join her,” I said.
“Perhaps,” she said.
I sipped a little wine.
“And perhaps later on,” she said, “we might screw.”
I laughed halfway through a swallow of wine and choked and gasped and splattered the wine all over my shirt front.
“Or perhaps not,” she said.
“Don’t toy with me while I’m drinking,” I said, when I was breathing again. “Later on I may take you by force.”
“Woo-woo,” she said.
I served her some pasta with broccoli and some to myself. Outside it was snowing steadily. There was only one light on in the room; most of the light came from the fire, which was made of applewood and smelled sweet. The glow of the embers behind the steady low flame made the room faintly rosy. We were quiet. The flame hissed softly as it forced the last traces of sap from the logs. I wasn’t nearly as sore as I had been. The pasta tasted wonderful. The wine was cold. And Susan made my throat ache. If I could find Rachel Wallace, I might believe in God.
The sun that brief December day rose cheerlessly and invisibly over one hell of a lot of snow in the city of Boston. I looked at the alarm clock. Six AM. It was very still outside, the noise of a normal morning muffled by the snow. I was lying on my right side, my left arm over Susan’s bare shoulder. Her hair had come unpinned in the night and was in a wide tangle on the pillow. Her face was toward me and her eyes were closed. She slept with her mouth open slightly, and the smell of wine on her breath fluttered faintly across the pillow. I pushed up on one elbow and looked out the window. The snow was still coming—steadily and at a slant so I knew the wind was driving it. Without opening her eyes, Susan pulled me back down against her and shrugged the covers back up over us. She made a snuggling motion with her body and lay still. I said, “Would you like an early breakfast, or did you have another plan?”
She pressed her face into the hollow of my shoulder. “My nose is cold,” she said in a muffled voice.
“I’m your man,” I said. I ran my hand down the line of her body and patted her on the backside. She put her right hand in the small of my back and pressed a little harder against me.
“I had always thought,” she said, her face still pressed in my shoulder, “that men of your years had problems of sexual dysfunction.”
“Oh, we do,” I said. “I used to be twice as randy twenty years ago.”
“They must have kept you in a cage,” she said. She walked her fingers up my backbone, one vertebra at a time.
“Yeah,” I said, “but I could reach through the bars.”
“I bet you could,” she said, and with her eyes still closed she raised her head and kissed me with her mouth open.
It was nearly eight when I got up and took a shower.
Susan took hers while I made breakfast and built another fire. Then we sat in front of the fire and ate cornbread made with buttermilk, and wild-strawberry jam and drank coffee.
At nine fifteen, with the cornbread gone and the strawberry jam depleted and the
I dialed it, and a woman answered on the first ring. I said, “This is Spenser. I have a message to call this number.”
She said, “Spenser, this is Julie Wells.”
I said, “Where are you?”
She said, “It doesn’t matter. I’ve got to see you.”
I said, “We’re in an old Mark Stevens movie.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I want to see you, too,” I said. “Where can I meet you?”
“There’s a snow emergency, you know.”
They never said that in the old Mark Stevens movies. “Name a place,” I said. “I’ll get there.”
“The coffee shop at the Parker House.”
“When?”
