What a relief.” He knew he was supposed to laugh at that too, and he was sure he would have, if she were standing here in the kitchen, where he knew she was safe.
“Yep,” he said. “You lucked out again.”
“Did Marian Fleming ask about me?”
“Of course,” he said. “So did a lot of other people. I told them you were in Morocco taking a belly-dancing course.”
“Oh, no. I used that excuse last time. Now I’ll have to do penance with committee work for the next thirty years.”
“Maybe not,” he said cheerfully. “But if you don’t know how to belly dance, you’re going to have to fake a hip injury.”
Jane said, “I’ll work on it.” She said quietly, “I’d better go.”
He said, “Do you have to?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Just let me know if you need anything.” He knew he had said it that way out of self-pity. She had never needed anything from him, and he was positive that she would never have asked if she had.
“I love you,” she said.
“Me too.” He hung up the telephone and walked to the counter. He saw the champagne glass and it reminded him that he had a guest. He picked up the champagne and walked toward the living room, but she hadn’t reappeared. He set the champagne bottle on the mantel and stared into the fireplace.
In the den off the bathroom, Linda heard the click and dialed the operator. “Can I have the time and charges on that call, please?”
The operator said, “Two minutes and seventeen seconds, billed at three minutes. That’s four dollars and eighty-eight cents.”
“For three minutes? That can’t be right.”
“There’s a two ninety-five surcharge for an operator-assisted collect call, ma’am.”
“Okay, but it wasn’t international or something. What are the night rates from Billings?”
“That might be your mistake. The call wasn’t from Billings.”
“That might be your mistake. She thinks she’s in Billings, and I’d bet on her. How could she be wrong about that?”
“It was Salmon Prairie, Montana. It’s the same area code, but it’s a different calling zone, and the pay phone is owned by another carrier.”
“Oh, I see,” said Linda. “My mistake after all. Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” The voice was imperturbable, but chilly.
Linda hung up and hurried down the hallway into the living room. She found Carey sitting on the couch looking at a magazine. He tossed it onto the coffee table. “Sorry. That was my wife.”
“You didn’t tell her, did you?”
“Tell her what?”
“About me. Sister Mary Boniface.”
It caught him by surprise. “Oops. You’re right. Forgot. Well, I’ll have to tell her tomorrow.” He had been wrenched from a sad contemplation of how close Jane had sounded, and how far away she was. Now he felt reluctant to let this stranger see that he was annoyed at himself for forgetting to tell Jane about her. He hated it when Jane called from a pay phone. It was impossible for a person to remember everything he had to say in a couple of minutes.
“You aren’t going to tell her,” said Susan. The smile was mysterious and amused now.
He was startled, and it irritated him. “Why do you say that?”
“Because this was the time to tell her, and now you won’t be able to, because it will look as though you were hiding me.” The smile had a trace of sympathy now, the full lips pursed. Then there was mischief in the eyes. “If you try to tell her tomorrow, she’ll think that you didn’t tell her now because you were hoping to get lucky tonight.”
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “She’s not that way at all.”
“That’s how women think,” she said. “You shouldn’t have decided to take one on full-time if you don’t know how they work.”
He suspected that she would have seemed bright and witty at about eight o’clock, but right now, he was not in the mood to be the butt of any more feminine teasing. “Well, I’d better show you where your room is. It’s getting late.”
She stood, but she took her glass with her and sipped from it as she headed for the stairs. “Just what I was thinking.”
He led the way up the stairs and turned right to take her down the hallway. “This is the best of the guest rooms,” he said. He flipped the light on and walked her into the room.
She sat on the bed, bounced a little, looked at the walls, the curtains over the big window. “It’s very pretty.”
He pointed to the door on the side wall. “Your bathroom is right there. Everything you need should be in the drawers—clean towels, shampoo, soap, even toothbrushes.”
Susan glanced in that direction with little interest. She set her champagne glass on the nightstand, stood up, turned her back on him, and bent her neck forward. “Unzip me.”
Carey stepped forward. He tried to lift her long hair out of the way without touching her neck, and carefully grasped the zipper without touching her back. He tugged the zipper down eight inches, to where he judged she could reach it, and stepped back. “There. If there’s anything you can’t find, I’ll be in the room at the other end of the hall. Good night.”
He began his retreat, but she said, “Not so fast.” He stopped and turned. She was holding her hair up off her neck. “What do you think I am—a contortionist? I can’t reach that.”
“Sorry.” He stepped forward, stopped three feet from her, reached out, and pulled the zipper down a few more inches. There was an instant—perhaps two seconds—when several things seemed to happen at once. She was still holding her hair up when she turned a little to say over her shoulder, “That’s more like it.” But her slight turn inside the dress seemed to spread the two unzipped sides of it apart. There was a tantalizing view of the white skin of the lower part of her back, where it softened and curved inward toward her hips. But worse, the front of the dress had nothing to hold it up. She quickly released her hair and hugged the dress to cover herself, but not before Carey had been presented with a glimpse of her left breast in profile.
“Good night,” Carey muttered. As he backed quickly out the door and closed it, the last thing he saw was Susan Haynes facing him, holding the front of her dress up, her big green eyes looking into his with that knowing, amused stare. When he reached his own room at the end of the hall, he closed the door and leaned against it for a moment. The stare was still with him. “Taking her to a hotel wouldn’t have been such a bad idea,” he muttered. He locked his bedroom door, then undressed and got into bed. He lay in the dark with his eyes closed, but what he had seen came back to him again and again. “That,” he thought, “is what the end of a marriage looks like.”
At three o’clock, he awoke, lying on the bed on his back. He imagined for a moment that he could feel Jane’s soft, silky hair on his arm. He turned to touch her, then remembered. He lay for a moment feeling sad and empty, and then he realized he could hear a voice. Someone was talking.
Carey sat up quickly and looked around him, but he saw nothing. He switched on the lamp beside the bed and squinted against the searing light to see the door. It was still closed, and the room was empty. It must have been a dream. As he reached for the lamp, he heard the voice again. It had to be Susan Haynes. It didn’t seem possible that there could be somebody here with her. He got to his feet and walked into the hallway. As he reached the second-floor landing, he followed her voice and looked over the railing. She was facing away, sitting on the couch near the fireplace. The sight of her obliterated the lingering clouds of sleep. She appeared to be wearing only a bedsheet, her legs folded under her and her purse beside her. She turned to look up and the green eyes focused on him, and then she hung up the telephone.
She put a plastic card back into her purse, fastened the white sheet under her arm, and stood up. As he looked at her from a distance like this, the thought that overwhelmed all others was her perfection—the long shiny hair, the smooth, white shoulders and arms, the graceful veiled curve of hip and thigh. When she turned toward him, he saw she was aware that he had been staring at her intently. In order to look up at him she tossed her hair
