“Oh, I don’t need anything,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“Never mind,” she said. “I know just the thing.”
She took her empty orange juice glass back into the kitchen, and exchanged it for a bottle of champagne that had been sitting in the refrigerator since the verdict. “I’ve been waiting for someone to enjoy this with,” she said as she popped the cork and poured. “I can’t think of a more appropriate way to mark the end of one life and the beginning of another, can you?” She handed him a glass and raised her own.
“To life,” she said. They both emptied their glasses in one long gulp, and Clare promptly refilled them.
“To life,” James echoed.
“How is it you’re not off in Texas, spending the holiday with family?” she asked.
He shrugged. “All that’s left are a couple of cousins,” he told her. “They invite me every year, of course, they’re very good about that, but this year, I don’t know, I guess I just didn’t feel like going all the way down there.”
“That’s odd,” she mused. “In all the years I’ve known you, I think this is the first time you’ve ever mentioned anything about them.”
“I guess it just never came up.”
“I guess not.” She took a sip of her champagne. “Where are your parents?” she asked.
“My dad is dead,” he said. “I never really knew him. He’s been dead a long time. He died in Vietnam. I was four.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said sincerely. “And your mother?”
James blinked behind his glasses. “My mother was never around a lot, either,” he said. “She was very young, and I guess being a widow with a kid wasn’t exactly her idea of having fun. She’s been dead a long time, too. I think the story goes that there were two guys outside some bar down in Laredo who squared off over who was going to have her for the night. No one was exactly sober, and she got caught in the crossfire. I was nine. Her parents raised me for a while, and then, after they got killed in a car accident, my cousins took me in. I was twelve.”
It was a terrible story. “Now I’m really sorry,” Clare said. “No one should have to lose their family like that.”
He looked around suddenly. “Speaking of family, where are the kids?” he asked. “Where is your housekeeper?”
“The kids are having some well-deserved fun for a change with their aunt and uncle and cousins,” Clare replied with a smile. “They’ll be back tomorrow. Doreen is at her sister’s. She’ll be back tomorrow, too. And I’ve been enjoying a little time by myself.”
“Oh well then, maybe I should be leaving,” he said, the color in his face deepening just a bit. “I really just stopped by to see how you were holding up.”
“All things considered,” she declared, “I think I’m holding up pretty darn well -- thanks in no small part to you.”
“Oh, I didn’t do that much,” he said with a diffident shrug.
“Don’t be modest, James,” she told him. “I wasn’t kidding before when I made that toast. You gave me back my life.”
He considered that. “Well, the way things were going, somebody had to, I guess,” he said. “But you did most of it. I only helped.”
“The police wouldn’t have believed me if I’d gone to them -- you were right about that,” she said. “I had no evidence. They would have just patted me on the head and sent me on my way, and sooner or later, Richard would have succeeded.”
“Forgive me for saying so, since he was your husband and all, but the man was a pig,” James and the champagne declared. “I watched him rutting around women for almost four years -- using the position you gave him to get away with it. Frankly, I don’t know why you wanted to hold onto him.”
Clare sighed. “I loved him,” she said simply. “I really did. In spite of everything.”
“Well, maybe, but he didn’t deserve you, you know that,” James said.
“That’s very sweet, but not to worry,” she told him. “All the wonderful things I felt for him all those years vanished as soon as I realized what he meant to do to me.”
They were sitting side by side in front of the fire, watching the flames flicker and snap. “I do feel bad about duping the police, though,” she admitted finally.
“Really?”
“Detective Hall came by, to apologize. I think she really meant it. I think she was really sorry.”
“I don’t know why she should be,” James said. “There wasn’t anything the police could have done differently. Or should have done differently, now that I think of it. They had everything covered -- except, of course, what they couldn’t have anticipated.”
“I almost told her,” Clare confessed.
James blinked. “You did?” he said cautiously. “Now why would you have done a thing like that?”
“As I said, I felt bad for her.”
“But what would that have accomplished, after the fact and everything?”
“I don’t know,” Clare conceded. “Maybe nothing. But maybe they’d have been able to put their obsession with the stalker to rest, once and for all.”
“I guess,” he said with a dry chuckle.
“You were very good, you know, very convincing,” she told him. “You should have been an actor. Some of those phone calls would have scared me out of my wits, if I hadn’t known. In fact, there were times when I have to admit I wasn’t even all that sure.”
“Well, that was the whole idea, wasn’t it?” James suggested.
“Yes,” she said, “but you didn’t have to be quite so good at it, did you? You even managed to hide your adorable Texas twang.”
“Of course I did -- the police were listening,” he reminded her. “Besides, you were just as good as I was."
“You have a point,” she conceded.
He chuckled again. “Actually, it was kind of fun,
