right about her surprising him with her strength.
Outside, some sort of bird wheeled close to the window and screamed, as if it wanted in. Like madness circling. Edwina winced at the sound. Carver decided he wanted her with him. He wanted to help her, to protect her, even if she did think she’d made the necessary painful adjustment and had managed some kind of peace with herself. He wished he could be sure about her.
“We’re going back to Solarville,” he said.
“When?”
“Unless you can’t make it, when we’re done with these drinks. We’ll drive by my place so I can get a few things, and we can be in Solarville within a few hours.”
“I can make it,” she said.
She finished her drink and placed the glass on a table by her chair. There was a steady calmness about her now, a sureness of movement and a directness in her eyes. Carver didn’t know if that was good or bad. The ongoing disillusionment she’d suffered since Willis’s disappearance had to have taken a serious toll. He knew it was important to keep her oriented, stable.
She apparently felt the same need for orientation. “You think Willis is in Solarville,” she said. “Why?”
Carver finished his own drink, then he sat back, toying with the damp, cool glass. “Willis pulled out of Sun South early,” he said. “Franks found out about the time-share scheme only because the bank contacted him, and that happened only because Willis drew virtually all the money out of the secret account. Willis had the opportunity to steal even more money from Sun South customers without any real danger of discovery. Which means he probably left when he did because he had enough money to suit his purpose.”
“Which is what?” Edwina asked. The bird made another pass and screamed again, louder, as if it desperately wanted something. Carver wished it would hunt up a worm.
“To make even more money,” he continued. “It has to be a drug deal. And it probably had to be financed by a certain date, which also helps to explain why Willis abruptly pulled out when he had slightly more than the nice round figure of a hundred thousand dollars. The red-penciled area on the map hidden in his apartment is swampland just south of Solarville. And it’s in Solarville that Willis’s old friend and fellow dreamer Sam Cahill is living beyond his means and selling backwater real estate. I think Willis and Cahill are partners who needed the hundred thousand to make a drug buy, possibly to take place when the Malone brothers receive a shipment. It could be that the drugs will be smuggled in by plane and dropped into the red-penciled area of the swamp, then picked up and sold to Willis and Cahill.” Carver stopped handling the glass and set it aside. “Which means that Willis Eiler must be somewhere around Solarville, waiting with Cahill for the deal to be consummated.”
Edwina sat back and seemed to think about what Carver had told her, finding it easier to digest than it would have been the day before, when she hadn’t known that Willis Davis hadn’t really existed, that he was an act, a production, Willis Eiler.
She said, slowly, “There’s something I have to tell you. Something it’s past time to tell.”
“There’s no need for any kind of confession,” Carver said. But he suspected there was a need, in Edwina.
“Because it isn’t required, I want to tell you. I was married for five years to a husband who beat me. Badly. Systematically. It took a broken collarbone and blood transfusions finally to convince me I had to leave Larry.” She laughed softly, deep in her throat, and shook her head. “Sounds dumb. The battered-wife syndrome. Classic, huh?”
“Classic,” Carver agreed, watching her with a neutral expression.
“The trouble was, when I left Larry I found that what he’d done to me went with me. At first I didn’t know what to do. I was terrified being alone. I’d hole up in my apartment; the walls seemed to scream at me. I learned how lonely someone could be. After a while I tried the singles bars. I started going out with men, too many men, looking for a lover who didn’t exist, looking for him in a lot of lovers.”
There was no apology in her voice when she said this. Carver liked that.
“Finally I realized what was happening, how hopeless it was. I quit craving love, sex, men, almost everything. I was repulsed by what I’d become; I thought hard about suicide. A year of analysis helped to pull me out of my depression. And my work helped. I went into real estate as much for therapy as to make a living; that’s why I got so good at it so fast. Still I had problems, with men, sex. I didn’t want to get involved; I was afraid.” She bowed her head slightly, not looking at Carver.
“Then I met Willis,” she said, “just the way I told you, at a time when I thought I might be ready again for one more try at a relationship, my last. And he turned out to be the lover I’d only dreamed existed, the one I’d searched for after playing punching bag for Larry, before my illness. He knew exactly what I needed. He was gentle and compassionate.”
“It was his business to know what you needed,” Carver said softly.
She looked directly up at him. “I know that now; I can face it. When I told you about going up to Willis’s room with him at the sales convention, that was true. But we didn’t make love. I told him about me. Everything. About how the violence and shame had made sex impossible for me with other men. And he understood, held me to him all that night. He was the only man who ever stayed with me without sex. He didn’t demand, didn’t rush things. He had more patience with me than my therapist had shown me during analysis.” She drew a deep breath, then said, “The only time Willis and I made love was the night before he disappeared. That’s how I know it was a good-bye, Carver. It was the only time.”
Carver sat silently. He wondered if Willis would have been so understanding and gentle if he hadn’t had an ulterior motive. All that time with a beautiful woman, without sexual union… He didn’t voice that thought to Edwina, who had lived so long with brutality and then found the gentleness she’d sought. Her gentle man.
Carver understood now why Willis had meant so much to her. And he understood why she’d been vague, why she’d kept this part of her life secret: She’d taken a chance on Willis and lost. She had to know Carver before she could trust him with her past.
She smiled, a soft smile he was seeing for the first time. “Despite your cynicism and hard exterior, there’s a gentle compassion in you, too.”
“Is that why you called Willis’s name that night at the motel, when you were with me in my bed?” Immediately he realized the selfish cruelty of his question and regretted it.
Her smile dimmed and she seemed surprised. She had no answer. Her face was transformed to the familiar mask again, but it wouldn’t hold. Her lower lip began to tremble; the mouth of a ten-year-old beneath those calm and knowing eyes.
Carver took her hand and drew her to him, gently.
When they emerged from the house into the heat, Edwina locked the front door behind her and got in the Olds with Carver. She had a leather overnight bag slung by a strap across her shoulder. She worked it free and turned to place it on the backseat.
“I didn’t pack a lot of clothes,” she said. “How long will we be in Solarville?”
Carver shrugged and started the engine. “Maybe not long. It depends on how things go. On how right I am.”
He backed the car away from the small but plush house that had been home to Edwina and Willis, in that simpler world before the truth, then drove north along the coast to his cottage.
While Edwina waited, he packed a few things in the new suitcase the Tumble Inn had provided after the fire. This time the zipper stuck and he had to wrestle with it, snagging a fingernail before he finally had it zipped all the way around.
Then he phoned Ernie Franks at home and explained where he was going and why.
It all sounded good to Franks; the odds on Willis Eiler being found, and at least some of the Sun South money being recovered, had suddenly improved. His elation and hope throbbed in his voice. Franks and Edwina; maybe there was something in sales that eventually engendered desperate faith.
“Let me know,” Franks said, before hanging up. “When whatever it is that’s going to happen is over, you let me know about it, okay?”
Carver assured Franks that he would. That was the idea behind their arrangement. That was why Franks had offered him a percentage of the money, wasn’t it?
As Carver and Edwina drove south, then cut west on 70 toward south-central Florida, Carver watched the lengthening shadows along the flat highway and began to feel the same heightened optimism that Ernie Franks had
