smoothed back tight to his skull and glistened with the stuff he used to smooth it.
'She friendly with the rest of the station crew?' I said.
'She wasn't unfriendly,' Antonelli said. 'But they don't mingle that much. Everybody has their shift. They pass each other in the hallway, you know. Sometimes they get friendly with an engineer, or something, but Lisa wasn't much of a mixer. Tell you the truth, I think she saw this as a stepping stone. She was in ten to two, and she was gone.'
'What did she do the rest of the time? Work up her music for the next day?'
Antonelli smiled.
'Naw. We work off a Top 40 service. Music's all preprogged. Most of the commercials are recorded. All Lisa had to do was a little chatter, couple live commercials, maybe a PSA, segue to the news at the top of the hour. She could come in ten minutes to ten and do all the preparation she needed.'
'Challenging,' I said. 'What'd she get for this kind of work?'
'Salaries are confidential,' Antonelli said.
'Sure,' I said. 'Just estimate the range for me. What's a midday disk jockey get from a station like this?'
She stared at him across the small table. There was candle light and the glow of the silent monitors. She stared across at him. His face was so familiar, his voice the same as it had always been, his tone light, and pleasant, slightly mocking as it always was, but calm and loving, just as she remembered. She knew he was not calm. She knew he was unstable and crazy. It was why she had left him, fled from him, really. But except that he had kidnapped her and held her prisoner, he seemed a normal man. The familiarity helped her to control the frenzy that she held back so grimly. He was, after all, the same man she'd loved. The man who had loved her, who thought he still loved her, though she knew, in the small part of her able to think, that whatever this was, it was no longer love, maybe had never been love. God, he is beautiful, she thought. I wasn't wrong about that.
'Every day will be fun, chiquita,' he said. 'Every day we will play a different game.'
'And what's this one?' Lisa said. 'Tie me up and drag me up here on a damned dolly like a pig to a barbecue?'
He laughed. 'A pig at a barbecue? You. My beautiful Angela? No, I don't think so.'
She put her hands on her hips and surveyed the room.
'Oh, and this is fun,' she said. 'A cartoon room, and cartoon costumes.'
There was a table set with ornate china. There was a decanter of wine, some cheese, some fruit, some bread, just like the picnic at Crane's Beach. He gestured at the table.
'We should eat, Angel, and talk of our future.'
'Future? Future? We have a past, ' she said. 'But we don't have a goddamned future, Luis. My husband will find me, and he'll find you and he'll kill you.'
'No,' he said. 'I think not.'
'You don't know,' Lisa said. 'My husband… '
He shook his head.
'No more, ' he said as if to a noisy child. 'He will not come. Let us have no more talk of this man. Sit down at the table.'
Lisa sat. 'This man will show up one day and kill you,' she said.
Luis smiled like an indulgent parent. Frank will come. She wasn't hungry, but she knew she should eat. I'm trying, Frank. I'm trying to stay ready. She took some bread and a slice of cheese. She broke off a small segment of each and ate them, looking quietly at him while she chewed and swallowed. The bread seemed like Styrofoam. The cheese seemed like wax. It was difficult to swallow. Her mouth was dry and her throat was tight. Gotta eat, she thought. And broke off another piece. She took some grapes. He poured some wine from the decanter into her glass. She ignored it. The semblance of another time. The sham of intimacy was hideous. She could feel tears form behind her eyes. I want to be home with my husband, she thought. I want to be in my house. She forced herself not to cry. She would not cry! She forced a grape into her mouth and chewed it and swallowed it, squeezing it down her narrowed throat, fighting the need to wash it down with the wine.
'That is good, Angel. It is lovely to see you eat like this. It is a good beginning.'
I want to kill you, she thought.
Chapter 8
Merrimack State was a small cluster of mismatched buildings on the west fringe of Proctor, where the crime rate wasn't keeping up. It looked more like an elementary school with some outbuildings than a college. The administration building appeared once to have been a two-family house. The building had been painted white, but not recently, and the parking area out front was dirt covered. I parked in a spot marked Visitors and went in. I asked at the counter in the Registrar's Office, and got shunted around for maybe half an hour until I ended up talking to the Dean of Students.
'I know this is trying, Mister Spenser, but obviously the right to privacy is something we must respect in regard to our students.'
'How about the right to get found, if they're lost?' I said.
The dean smiled politely.
'May I see your credentials, please.'
I thought about showing him my gun, rejected the idea, and let him see my license.
