She started to get up to hang up the phone, but he took it from her hand and cradled it himself, then sat down on the sofa again beside her. “Now we wait,” he said. The dancing movements were starting in his eyes again. He patted her knee. “We wait and talk,” he said. “We get acquainted.”
He kept touching her, quick brief taps at her elbow, her knee, the back of her hand. It was sexual, the whole atmosphere of the situation was sexual, yet at the same time there was something remote and impersonal about his manner toward her. The thin humming aura of rape was in the air, but it was as though it would be rape without desire. A little later he would attack her, not because he wanted her in particular but simply because the situation seemed to him to call for it.
And in the meantime he sat beside her on the sofa and encouraged her to talk, about her parents, her upbringing, her dead husband, all sorts of things; and while she talked he kept touching her, small pointless taps at her elbow, her knee, her hand.
After a while she offered to make a fire, as an excuse to get up from the sofa, and he said sure, that was a fine idea. He didn’t offer to help, but watched her crumple the paper and spread the kindling and carry in the logs from the porch, and all the time he watched her he had a happy smile on his face, as though she were doing something nice, especially for him.
She lit the fire, and he beamed at it and said, “You know how to live. Away from the hassle, away from the whole thing.”
“Yes, it’s nice.” She hoped he wouldn’t notice that she’d chosen to stay on her feet, over by the fire, rather than sit down again on the sofa beside him.
“Yeah, this is what I want sometime. A house just like this. A nice fire, everything. Come sit down.”
She’d been holding the poker. Could she hit him with it? “It’s time for my pill,” she said. She put the poker down, leaning against the stone side of the fireplace.
“Pill? Birth control?”
“No, it’s medicine. I’m supposed to take it every four hours.” She looked at her watch, and it was almost four o’clock. “I’m due now.”
“Medicine?” He was frowning all over his face. “What kind of medicine?”
“I don’t know what it’s called, it’s a prescription.”
“What’s it for?”
She allowed her nervousness to show, masking as embarrassment. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
He got to his feet, his frown deeper. “What the hell you talking about? Where is this medicine?”
“In the bathroom.”
“Let’s go.”
She led the way down the hall toward the kitchen. The other one—Manny, this one had called him—was still lying in bed, facing the windows and the lake. He didn’t deem to have moved in the last two hours.
There were two ways into the bathroom: a door from the bedroom and another from the kitchen. To avoid entering the room with Manny, Claire continued on down the hall and through the kitchen.
She remembered the bottle as being in the medicine chest; but what if she’d thrown it away? When she’d first come north from Florida to look for a house, a couple of months ago, she’d come down with some sort of flu, and a doctor in New York had given her a prescription for medicine. She tended to keep things like that around, just in case the same kind of illness should come back, but she wasn’t entirely sure this bottle had survived the transition from the hotel in New York out here to the house.
Yes. She opened the mirrored door, and recognized it at once: a small clear plastic bottle with a white cap, up in a corner of the top shelf. The drugstore label on it looked nineteenth-century baroque. She took the bottle down and closed the door again, and he reached past her to pluck it out of her hand, saying, “Let’s see that.”
She stood beside the sink and he stood between her and the doorway, frowning at the label on the bottle. She knew what it said: “Mrs. Willis—one every four hours— Dr. Miller.”
He looked at her, looked at the bottle. “It’s a drugstore in New York,” he said.
“I didn’t want anybody around here to know about it,” she said. It was a relief to be able to show how nervous she was, to use the true nervousness as a verification of the lie she was building.
“Every four hours,” he said, reading the label again. Then, “Hey, this thing’s two months old!”
The date. Down at the bottom of the label were the prescription number and the date; she’d forgotten about that. She stammered as she said, “It’s taking a while to cure it.”
“Cure it?” He frowned at her some more, and she could see him turning it over in his mind, not trusting it, not understanding what she might be up to and yet instinctively not trusting it. I can’t fool him, she thought. And because I tried to, he’ll kill me. She remembered what Parker had said when he’d called, about his friend having died of a painful illness, and all at once she was full of second thoughts. She should have taken Parker’s advice and gone away from here. She shouldn’t have tried this stunt with the medicine. It was going to end very, very badly, and it would be all her fault.
She was blinking again, forcing herself to meet his eyes, and she wished there was some way to make the blinking stop, it would betray her yet.
At last he looked down at the bottle again. “Cure it,” he muttered, and snapped the lid off the bottle, and shook out three or four of the pills into the palm of his hand. They were smallish, round with beveled edges, robin’s-egg blue. He shook the pills in his palm, watching them rock, and then lifted the plastic bottle and sniffed at the open top, like a wine connoisseur smelling the cork.
She watched him, tense and afraid. She knew what she wanted him to think, eventually, getting to the idea himself—but what was he thinking now? What was going on in his mind?
He lowered the bottle again, looked at the label, shook his head, eased all but one of the pills from his palm back into the bottle. Then he said, “Fill that glass with water. No, just half full. Put it on the counter there.”
