talking. “You use the years you have left.”
She cocked her head to the side and stared at him. “Are you the future? You and your drugstore philosophy?”
“Maybe. But that’s irrelevant. The future is on the way, the past is receding. Willis is over, but that doesn’t mean the end of your life.”
She smiled dubiously. “A new beginning?”
“A continuation,” Carver said. “New beginnings are mostly bullshit. We’re only allowed so many of those and we tend to use them up in a hurry. I’m talking about a continuation of you as you. The you that was getting by before you met Willis.”
“You seem to have this all worked out for me.”
“I worked it out for myself, and not so long ago.”
She stood up and walked to the low wall around the veranda, looking out to the sea. Then she stepped over the wall and walked to the edge of the drop, the point where Willis had left his folded jacket and his shoes and allegedly leaped to his death.
Carver wanted to jump up, shout her name, run to her and snatch her back away from the edge. But he didn’t. He knew that kind of rescue would be only temporary, and he was sure she wouldn’t follow Willis’s imagined plunge to the sea. She knew he hadn’t leaped. She knew now what he was. She had to know!
But she was leaning outward, her hair flung like a pennant in the breeze. The wind off the sea might grab her, claim her.
Carver stood up, bumping his head on the damned umbrella.
She turned, as if sensing his movement.
Then she walked back onto the veranda.
They both remained standing.
Keep it out in the open, he thought. Keep it out where she has to face it. She was strong enough now; he could see that in the depth of her eyes, the raised, smooth sweep of her jaw. She was one of this war’s survivors. He said, “Ask yourself how you feel about Willis. How you really feel.”
She crossed her arms, hugged herself as if she were chilled in the ocean breeze. “I don’t feel love anymore. But there’s something-a kind of passionate need I can’t identify.”
Carver walked over to her and stood beside her but didn’t touch her. Without speaking, she moved as if drawn toward the house.
He walked beside her with the cane, and she slowed her pace to match his.
Inside the house, she slid the glass doors to the veranda closed. The roar of the surf became distant, a constant, seductive whisper. Carver circled her waist with his free arm, kissed her.
In the bedroom the sea was louder. The window was open and the drapes swayed lazily. Carver lay on the bed and watched Edwina undress. She was no longer even slightly shy with him; there was, in fact, a meticulous, unhurried grace to her movements that suggested she enjoyed undressing before him.
She walked over and stood nude next to where he lay, so he could reach her. Her sun-darkened flesh had goose bumps on it and she was breathing rapidly, quaking so that he could see the vibrant trembling in her breasts. He reached out and with the backs of his knuckles caressed the paler, smooth flesh of her inner thigh. She jerked a breath inward, lightly closed her eyes.
The telephone jangled. Neither of them moved.
It rang again. Twice. Three times. Four.
Persistent.
Women and phones. Edwina touched Carver’s face gently, then stepped aside and lifted the receiver.
She said “yes” three times, hoarsely, then she turned and held out the receiver for Carver. “It’s for you. Desoto.”
Carver twisted his body, took the receiver, and reached out to drop it back in its cradle.
Edwina gripped his wrist, stopping him from hanging up. “He’ll call back,” she said. “Better to talk to him now.” She ran a hand across her stomach, leaving faint scratches from her fingernails. “Maybe it’s not important; get rid of him.”
Carver was staring at the pink tracks on the smooth flesh of her stomach; his heart was racing, his blood roaring like the sea in his veins. He pressed the receiver to his ear and identified himself. Not important, get rid of him.
“Amigo,” Desoto said, with exaggerated geniality. “Feel like looking at more dead bodies?”
Carver made the conversation with Desoto as brief as possible, then clung enthusiastically to life before leaving to look again at death.
CHAPTER 27
“Do you know them?” Desoto asked. “They knew you.” Carver stood beside Desoto and a gum-chewing attendant in the morgue in Orlando. This time it wasn’t so tough. Maybe that was because the spaciousness and business atmosphere of the place made the bodies on the carts, a man and a woman, seem somehow unreal, like wax creations set out for display. Or maybe it was because these were people he hadn’t killed.
“I’m not sure,” Carver said. “They look familiar.”
For an unsettling instant, the two pale, nude cadavers reminded him of himself and Edwina just a few hours ago; he wondered if that accounted for the disturbing sense of familiarity. Every cop knew love had too much to do with death.
The man and woman were both slender, and looked as if they were in their mid-forties when they died. There were cleaned-up contusions on both their foreheads. The woman’s frail body was slightly misshapen, bent, just beneath her pointed breasts. One of the man’s legs obviously had been broken, and his nose was mashed.
Carver breathed in some of the mint-disinfectant scent of the morgue and swallowed. Now this scene was quickly becoming too real for him. Too much death for one day. “How did they die?” he asked.
“Instantly. A one-car accident on Highway 75. They went off the road, down an embankment, and hit a concrete bridge abutment at high speed. There was some heavy vegetation down there and the wreckage wasn’t found until this morning. Time of death is placed as late last night, about when you and Jorge Lujan were trying to teach each other to swim.”
Carver looked away from the bodies, at Desoto. “Is that all that ties this accident with me, the time of death?”
Desoto arched a hand and delicately smoothed his dark hair, almost as if he had a mirror before him. In the presence of the dead, the vain and commonplace gesture was strikingly incongruous. “That, and the woman had your name written on a piece of paper in her attache case. Along with a receipt from the Tumble Inn Motel in Solarville, dated one of the nights you stayed there.”
Recognition rushed at Carver now. “Was the car a black Lincoln?”
Desoto nodded.
Carver looked again at the bodies, tried to reach beyond the impersonality of death and imagine them in life, without their injuries. The man in a three-piece suit, the woman not nude and crushed, but sleek and fully dressed and with a diamond, gimmick wristwatch. People with grand desires and petty grievances and places to go. The executive types he’d seen in the motel restaurant his first night in Solarville. The wealthy tourists.
“I don’t know their names,” he told Desoto, “but I remember them from the motel. They seemed to have money. I pegged them for a rich couple roaming around doing Florida. You know the type: travel as a hobby.”
“They weren’t married,” Desoto said. “Maybe they were sleeping together; people do. He was David Panacho, with a wife and kids in Gainesville, and she was Mildred Kern, single, from Orlando. They were employees of Disney World; the Lincoln was a company car.”
“An exec and his secretary on vacation,” Carver suggested.
“They were both executives. We’re checking now to find out more about them.”
“An accident,” Carver said. “I don’t see how this fits in with me, with Willis Eiler. Or don’t you think it was an accident?”
