than a dead ringer for Carrie.
“My mother,” she said, looking over my shoulder. She set the glass of Coke on the desk.
“Who’s this next to her?” I asked, pointing at the guy on the woman’s left. Broker was on her right.
“That’s my father,” she said.
“I see. Is there a story here?”
“I guess so. Sort of. Both of them loved her. They all three went to school together-college, I mean-back east someplace. My father ended up marrying her.”
“And the other guy in the picture waited around a few years and then settled for you, is that it?”
“You make it sound sick or something…”
“Sorry.”
“Maybe I can make you understand…”
“Please.”
She didn’t have the whole story, having just heard pieces of it, over the years. She gathered that her father and the Broker had been close friends before her mother came between them, and it wasn’t until some few years later, with her mother’s early death, that the two men resumed their friendship, perhaps out of a need to console each other. At any rate, she’d grown up having two fathers around, in a way, though the real one paid little attention to her (“He was busy, out of town on business a lot, still is… his firm handles cases all over the place”), though doting on her younger sister who didn’t bear such a painfully close resemblance to their dead mother. Her surrogate father, however, the kindly old Broker, didn’t shun Carrie for looking like her mother, rather his reaction was to worship the child for it. And she liked the attention of a doting father figure; she had settled for that, in lieu of the real thing. “I always told him I was going to marry him, when I grew up,” she said, “and I did. And if you want to make something sick out of that, that’s your problem.”
She’d been frank with me, but there was one thing she’d sluffed over, and I had to go back to it, even at the risk of upsetting her further.
“Your mother,” I said.
“What about my mother?”
“You said she died. You didn’t say how.”
“She was an alcoholic.”
“That doesn’t have to kill you.”
“It did her. I was a little girl when it happened. She killed herself in a car.”
“An accident.”
“Or something. Look, I really don’t want to talk about any of this anymore, if you don’t mind. I mean, it’s not really… relevant to anything, after all, is it? And, I… well, I have certain… wounds that never really healed over, in my life, you know? So don’t ask me to go picking at them.’’
“Okay.”
She dropped the blanket to the floor in a woolen puddle and sat on my lap and put her arms around my neck. “Why don’t we go sit by the fire. It’s going to die out if you don’t tend to it.”
“Let me ask you something first.”
She sighed. Stiffened.
“I won’t pick at any wounds,” I said. “I promise.”
“Go ahead and ask, then.”
“Your husband… did he do much work down here, at the cottage? You said he was down here a lot.”
“He was, and he did do some work down here, sometimes, but nothing important, I don’t think. Just fiddled.”
“What do you mean?”
“He just worked on minor stuff down here. Like his mail-order businesses. Checking the books and like that. He liked checking his own books. He had a streak of accountant in him. Now, are you going to keep that fire going or not?” She nuzzled my neck.
Earlier, after making love, she’d got me to take a shower with her, in this same coaxing way.
“You win,” I said, and dumped her onto the blanket on the floor.
“Ouch! You’re a bully.”
I picked her up, blanket and all, and deposited her in front of the dwindling fire. It didn’t take long to get the fire going again, and she put her head on my lap, supposedly to go to sleep, but since my lap was her pillow she began smoothing it like one, and then pretty soon her head was in my lap, and then later, finally, she did fall asleep, curling into a fetal position, cuddling in against me, the blanket around her. I sat with her an hour watching the fire, not feeding it any more wood, letting it sputter and die, since the fog might lift and chimney smoke betray us.
She was sleeping soundly, now, and wouldn’t be doing much complaining about me letting the fire go out, so I again lifted her in my arms, a heavy little bundle in her blanket, and took her over to the double bed and tucked her in.
Then I went back to the desk and started going through drawers.
22
A noise woke me, and for a moment I thought I was home, back in Wisconsin, and then I remembered where I was, in a cottage all right, but a different one, and on a river, not a lake. The circle had come around and this was ending as it began, with me waking up in the middle of the night, hearing somebody who was coming in to try and kill me.
Me and someone else, this time.
I was on the bed with Carrie, but not under the covers with her, just stretched out on my back, with all my clothes on, on top of the blankets, the silenced Ruger on my stomach, the. 38 snug in my waistband. I hadn’t really intended to fall asleep, but hadn’t fought it either, despite the fact I was expecting a caller.
After all, I knew who my caller would be, and how he’d come in. Right now, for instance, he was working a key in the front door, just as I’d known he would. That wasn’t the noise that woke me, though.. it was the sound of him creeping up the outside steps; soundlessly, I suppose he thought. If so, he thought wrong. I’d heard him, and was awake, and by the time that key was slipping in the lock on the door, I was almost smiling.
I leaned over and put a hand across Carrie’s mouth and nudged her awake with my other hand, put my lips to her ear, and whispered, “We have company… be quiet, and don’t panic.”
The beam of a big heavy flashlight was probing the porch area, the door between the rooms having a window through which we could see our intruder and his light, though in the total darkness of the place he didn’t see us yet. But he would soon.
Very soon, as now he was opening that door between rooms, that door with the window we’d been observing him through, and he stepped inside, into the room where we were on the bed in the far right corner, and I shoved Carrie off onto the floor, so she’d be between bed and wall and not in any line of fire, and took a couple of silenced shots with the Ruger at the source of the beam beginning to poke around the room.
By source I mean the flashlight itself, not the man carrying it, but I wasn’t used to the Ruger and it was dark in there and I nicked his arm with one shot and I don’t know where the other shot went, but the flashlight tumbled to the ground and some other metal thing did, too, as the guy slammed back against the door he’d just opened, then got the hell out and was clomping down those outside steps he’d come up so carefully minutes ago, before I was even off the bed.
Not that I was in a great hurry. I did get off the bed and turn to the window, which was right above where Carrie was on the floor, cowering, and I threw the lock and forced the window up and saw the guy running out there in the fog, which had thinned a bit, running off the gravel and splashing into the marshy area, an instinctive move I guess, an attempt to find a shortcut maybe, or lose himself as a target in the snarl of brush and branches and bog. All it served to do, of course, was slow him down, and he was hardly off the road, only a dozen feet from the house, when I yelled, “Ash!”
He froze a second, then trudged on a step.
He was well within range, and knew it, and I hardly had to yell at all when I leaned out the window and said,
