had the guts to show up. If it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t have even had a headstone or a decent burial. It cost me my savings to do that for her.”
“I didn’t even know she was dead,” Amy said.
“Like you would have come anyway.”
“She was a whore, Doug.”
“Yeah? And why was that? We all know who did that to her. But who helped them do it?” Silence hung between them.
“April used to come to my place. A couple of mornings, every week. She fixed me breakfast… Eggs and pancakes and sausage and hash-browns and toast and fresh-squeezed orange juice. The works…I know she had other guys…but…she used to just kiss me. She kept her eyes closed, just for me. That was all we did. Just kiss.”
“You told her everything, didn’t you?”
“Not everything. Only the things she hadn’t figured out for herself. April wasn’t stupid, you know.” He laughed. “You make it sound like I should have been loyal to you or something.”
Amy grinned. “I’ll bet there were some things you didn’t tell her. I’ll bet you left a few things out.”
Doug actually blushed.
“So, what happens now? What am I going to have to do to get that film?” Amy looked at the camera, not at Doug. “Answer me, Doug!”
“I don’t like your tone of voice. What now, Doug? Answer my question, Doug! It’s just the way you used to talk to me. Like it didn’t matter at all what I said unless it was what you wanted to hear.”
“Deal with it, Doug. Maybe I’m not going to roll over so easily, like you did eighteen years ago.”
“Okay, then. If that’s the way you want it, I think we’ll do it the hard way. First off, I think we’ll try a little B amp;E. That’s cop talk for breaking and entering, in case you didn’t know.” Doug Douglas dug into his pocket and slapped a key onto the dashboard. “I’ll make it easy for you. This will take care of the ‘breaking’ part. You can take care of the ‘entering.’ ”
Amy stared at the key. Her adrenalin surge had run its course. A wildfire of anger had burned through her body, leaving only charred remains behind.
With great effort, Doug Douglas pulled himself out of the Mercedes. “You remember breaking and entering, don’t you. Amy? You remember the thrill you used to get by invading someone’s privacy?”
Amy didn’t move. She was tapped out. All her smart remarks were gone.
“C’mon. I know that underneath that fancy name you’re still the same old Amy. I’ll bet that you end up enjoying this. See, April left something for you.” He tossed a hand-drawn map onto the passenger seat. “And don’t be afraid. April hasn’t been dead that long. I don’t figure her place is haunted.”
Doug laughed, walking into the darkness.
“Not yet, anyway.”
2:15 A.M.
It wasn’t a matter of record, not with The Six Million Dollar Man’s doctors, not with his employers. April Destino was the only person who shared his secret. But April was dead, and The Six Million Dollar Man wasn’t making any new confidences. So no one knew that his conscious mind fired like an eternal machine, twenty-four hours a day.
Simply put, Steve Austin had stopped sleeping when he was seventeen years old. And, like so many paths in Steve’s life, this one led back to a certain dead cheerleader.
Steve had had an art class in his junior year. April Destino was in it. The class had been doing watercolors on a September day that sang of Indian summer. Simmering heat broken only by an occasional sea breeze that slipped over the dry, weed-choked hills to the northwest. Venetian blinds rattling with each breath that whispered through the open window, the sound of a playing card tickled by bicycle spokes.
Each student wore an old shirt-something loose and sloppy enough to ruin with paint. That meant, in most cases, a shirt dad had grown tired of wearing. April’s dad worked at the shipyard, and her shirt was one of those dark Ben Davis numbers that had been the uniform of blue-collar guys back in the sixties. Steve’s dad worked on the docks in nearby Oakland, and he was more than familiar with the uniform. But it had never looked as good on anyone as it looked on April. Once seventeen-year-old Steve Austin saw April Destino in that Ben Davis work shirt, he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Her blonde hair overflowed the worn collar, the perfectly curled strands a brilliant white-yellow against the dark, olive-colored cotton, her hair still holding the highlights that came from a summer spent in the sun. Her skin was golden and alive, and her perfect fingers were wrapped around a paintbrush.
There were other memories, too. The flash of embarrassment in April’s eyes as she laughed at her awful painting of the Destino family dog. The little smudge of white paint slick and wet on her cheek. The way she turned to Steve with a friendly sigh as if to say oh well, the empty working-man shirt’s shoulders sagging over her small frame in a way that made her seem completely vulnerable.
The big pocket of that Ben Davis shirt empty and gaping.
The images laced Steve’s dreams that September night in 1974, the last night he really slept. April Destino. Her dad’s shirt. Her dog. But in his dream they weren’t in a classroom. They stood in a meadow ringed with black pines. Doves nested in the deep shadows of the trees, their cooing music riding the warm breeze. April’s dog burrowed through stands of wild cosmos. The dog’s name was Homer, after Homer Price. But in Steve’s dream the mutt was a crazy-quilt version of a dog, just as it had been in April’s painting-out of whack, legs too short, head too big, impossibly yellow eyes crossed. A weird dog-clown, but not at all scary.
Slobbering, Homer charged through a net of poppies and cosmos. April laughed. The little smudge on her cheek bloomed, and when Steve worked up enough courage to move closer he smelled honeysuckle and felt the cool petals brush his cheek as he buried his face in April’s perfect curls.
Then came the longest wait in the world, in dream or in reality. Standing there with his arms around April’s waist, trying not to shake, trying to breathe.
Her golden hands settled on his shoulders. Her grip tightened as she moved closer. He kissed her and she kissed him. And he knew, instantly, in that way that only seventeen-year-olds can know, that April Louise Destino was the only girl for him. That this was a wonderful thing, and that it meant they would be together forever.
The meadow was their bed. April wore no pants, no skirt. Only the Ben Davis work shirt. No bra, no T-shirt. She undid the small green-black buttons and slipped the shirt over her shoulders while Steve took off his clothes. They lay together, the bright sun looming overhead, and it wasn’t like a meadow would be in real life because there weren’t any bugs and the wild grass beneath them didn’t make their skin itch and it wasn’t too hot or too cold.
Everything was perfect.
It was a dream.
Steve was still a virgin at seventeen. The result of an almost terminal case of shyness. But he dreamed what it would be like to enter April. To be inside April Louise Destino while his breath tickled her neck and his fingers danced over her dark nipples, lightly, the way the Playboy Advisor instructed. His hips moved slowly when he really wanted to move fast-more advice from the World’s Most Eligible Bachelor-and he didn’t surrender to the impulse to move faster until he couldn’t hold back any longer. April moved with him, her flat belly heaving against his. She sighed in a way he had never heard but accurately imagined.
She kissed him in a way no one ever had, with her mouth open, her tongue dancing with his. She didn’t talk dirty or wear leather or have a whip or any crap like that. This was a dream, but the girl in the dream was still April Destino at seventeen, not some weird doppelganger.
For Steve, in the dream, she was the real April.
As real as real could be.
