“No, but one good outcome. How about you?”
“Lousy evening. Lousy outcome.” Zack turned his chair towards the hall. “But I am soaked to the skivvies, so you’re going to have to wait for the blow by blow till after I have a shower.”
“I’ll give you a rubdown when you’re ready,” I said.
Zack looked at me hard. “You do realize that most women would be ready to kill me right now.”
“The possibility crossed my mind,” I said. “But we took an oath to stay together for better or worse, and as you reminded me at the altar, a deal’s a deal.”
He took my hand. “Thank God for legal training.”
Casual physical intimacy was difficult for Zack and me. We couldn’t walk hand in hand along the beach at our cottage, grope each other in the kitchen when we were drying the dishes, or make out at the movies. But we were deeply in love, so we had built some small rituals into our day that gave us both pleasure. The mutual nightly massage was one of them. Sometimes as we kneaded each other’s muscles, we talked about our day; sometimes we were silent, content just to feel the comfort of deep touch. As I worked the knotted muscles of my husband’s shoulders, he groaned.
“Better?” I murmured.
“Getting there,” he said.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, but we have to.”
“Let’s have it, then,” I said.
“Boy, where to start? Debbie Haczkewicz is leading the investigation, which isn’t exactly a break for me.”
“I thought you liked Debbie.”
“I do. And that makes it harder.”
I followed his thinking. “Harder to lie?”
“Uh-uh. Unless you’re a cop, lying gets you in serious trouble. But there are ways of telling the truth that leave the facts open to interpretation.”
“And that’s what you did with Debbie.”
“Bingo. I told her that I went to Cristal’s condo to pay her off so she wouldn’t show a DVD that was personally embarrassing on the Internet.”
I poured more massage oil into my palm. “And Debbie naturally assumed that the person who would be embarrassed was you.”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t she ask to see the DVDS?”
“Yep, but I said they’d been destroyed, and that was the truth. As soon as I left Cristal’s condo, I went back to the office. We deal with a lot of stuff that’s too hot to toss without shredding. Cops have been known to go through trash. Anyway, I asked Norine to shred the discs, and she did.”
“No questions asked?”
“Norine’s been my assistant for fifteen years. She knows not to know what she shouldn’t know.”
“And Debbie accepted your word that the discs had been destroyed?”
“Debbie’s a smart cop. She probably had her guys picking through the firm’s garbage while she was interviewing me, but she was gracious. She knows I’m married. Of course, she’s still a cop, so we had a little go round about destroying evidence, but I pointed out that when I was dealing with those DVDs they weren’t evidence because Cristal Avilia was still alive.”
“So you’re home free.”
“No one’s ever home free, Jo. That’s why the cops keep burrowing in. Tonight after Debbie was finished making nice, her buddies showed me their crime scene photos.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Just in a sharing mood, I guess. Truthfully, I imagine they wanted to watch my reaction to seeing Cristal.”
“I hope you kept Sean with you.”
“I did. Over the years, I’ve probably instructed at least two thousand clients not to say anything to the cops, but there’s something about staring at pictures of a dead body that loosens the tongue. Anyway, I didn’t screw up, but there were some shots of Cristal that are going to stay with me for a while.” Zack’s body tensed and I dug my fingers more deeply into the spaces along his spine. “She was young and she’s dead,” he said. “That’s bad enough, but there was one thing that really got me. Whoever killed Cristal went to the trouble of placing a book on her chest. It was that novel you and Ned talked about the last time we had dinner.”
“Right,” Zack said. “Debbie’s tough, but even she was taken aback at the cruelty of that gesture.”
My heart lurched. “The night we had dinner, Ned told me he’d given a copy of the book to a young friend who was determined to make something of her life. He said his friend was like the character Isabel Archer – too good for her world.”
I squeezed some more oil into my hand and began to rub the scarred area at the base of Zack’s spine. His upper body was powerful, but his lower spine was criss-crossed with scarring from botched surgeries that failed to fix what a drunk’s car had done to him forty-three years ago when he was coming home from baseball practice.
I smoothed oil on the raised tissue of his scars. “What was Cristal like?”
“To be honest,” he said. “I don’t know. When I saw the tape of her with Ned, I was really surprised. Not at the sex, but at the way she was with him: affectionate, attentive, the kind of young wife he must have remembered. With me, there was none of that.”
“What was she like with you?”
“She was exactly what I wanted. All business,” he said wryly. “Your turn now.” Zack pushed himself to a sitting position, then used his arms to inch himself back so the pillows piled against the headboard supported him. It was an awkward process, and once at the beginning of our marriage, I’d offered to help. He’d been curt, and I hadn’t offered again.
When Zack was settled, he took a deep breath. “I’m ready. Move on in.” He picked up the massage oil I’d given him for his birthday. “Okay if I use this stuff or do you want something else?”
I sniffed my fingers. “Rosemary, jasmine, and a hint of wood and ocean breeze. At least that’s what the website promised. Can’t ask for more than that.” I removed my pyjama top. Zack kissed my shoulder. “Wood and ocean breezes aren’t as sexy as the perfume you’re wearing.”
“I’m not wearing perfume,” I said.
Zack kissed the hollow of my neck. “I hope you know I feel like shit about that relationship with Cristal.”
I reached over and turned out the light. “It was another time,” I said. “Everything’s different now.” I kissed him and slid down in the bed.
Zack moved beside me and caressed my breast. “You’re going to miss out on your massage.”
I slid my hand over his nipples. “A massage is only a massage,” I said. “But a good cigar is a smoke.”
Our lovemaking that night was urgent, as if we thought the heat of physical passion could burn away the ugliness of the last two hours. Usually, when the sex was that good, we both fell asleep afterwards, but that night, sleep did not come easily to me. I lay watching Zack’s chest rise and fall and thought about our life together. We had both embarked on middle age when we met, but perhaps because it had been the right time for us both, we had negotiated the tricky labours of day-to-day life together with surprising ease. My first husband had been a politician, whose star was still rising when he was killed on a snowy Saskatchewan highway. We had a young family, and before his death, I was the woman behind the man. Suddenly, there was no man for me to stand behind. Initially, I was devastated, then I was terrified, but ultimately, I’d learned to stand alone. Zack had always been a lone wolf. Abandoned by his father, dismissed by his mother, until we met, his emotional life began and ended with his work and with the legal partners he’d known since their first year together at the College of Law. No one had been more surprised than we were when we fell in love.
Six months after we met, we were standing in front of the altar at St. Paul’s Cathedral exchanging vows and wedding bands. As the dean pronounced us husband and wife, the old wives’ warning crossed my mind: “Marry in haste, repent at leisure.” For once, the old wives had been wrong. Until we met, Zack had travelled through life unencumbered, and I feared he would chafe at family life, but he gulped up domesticity like a starving man. Having
