thought I might be about to go somewhere.
'Get in,' I said. 'Take a long, slow hot bath. Drink another drink. I'll make us some supper, and we'll eat it together. No candlelight, though. A lot of bright overheads.'
I took her nearly empty glass, added more ice, and filled it again. I gave it to her, pushed her gently into the bathroom, and closed the door.
'There's some kind of bubble bath or whatever in the medicine cabinet,' I said through the door. I waited till I heard her splash into the tub. Then I went to the kitchen. I put on a pot of rice to cook and got four boneless chicken breasts out of the meat keeper. I cooked them with wine and butter and cream and mushrooms. While they cooked I tossed a salad and made a dressing with lime juice and mint, olive oil, honey, and wine vinegar. There were two bottles of Rhine wine in the refrigerator for which I'd originally had other plans, but I could buy some more tomorrow.
By the time I'd gotten the table set in the living room, she was through, and came out of the bathroom wearing a towel with her hair tucked up and some color in her face. I handed her my bathrobe and she slipped into it, modestly closing it before she let the towel slip to the floor. It occurred to me that half the time we'd spent together she'd been without clothes.
I gave her a third drink and freshened up my own. She sat on a stool in the kitchen and sipped it while I put some baking powder biscuits in the oven.
She had not spoken since I'd found her. Now she said, 'Do you have any cigarettes?'
I found some thin filter tips in a fancy feminine package that a friend had left in one of the kitchen drawers. I held a match for her as she lit one and inhaled deeply. She let the smoke slip slowly out of her nose as she sipped her drink, holding the glass in both hands. The smoke spread out on the surface of the bourbon and eddied gently back up around her face. I felt my stomach tighten; I had known someone a long time ago who used to do just that, in just that way.
I got out the corkscrew and opened one of the bottles of wine. I poured some into each glass, and then took the biscuits out and served the supper. She sat opposite me at the small table and ate. Her manners were terrific. One hand in the lap, small bites, delicate sips of wine. But she ate everything. So did I. Still no talk. I had the radio on in the kitchen. When I offered her more, she nodded yes. When I got up to get the second bottle of wine, I plugged in the coffee. Its steady perk made a pleasant counterpoint to the radio. When we'd finished eating, I poured the coffee and brought out some applejack and two pony glasses. I put them on the cobbler's bench coffee table in front of the sofa. She sat at one end and I sat at the other, and we drank our coffee and sipped our brandy and she smoked another cigarette, holding her hand primly over the gap in the front of the bathrobe as she leaned over to accept my light. I got out a cigar and we listened some more to the radio. She leaned back against the arm of the couch and closed her eyes.
I stood up and said, 'You can sleep in my bed. I'll sleep out here.' I walked to the bedroom door and opened it. She went in.
I said, 'I'm sorry I don't have any pajamas. You could sleep in one of my dress shirts, I guess.'
'No, thank you,' she said. 'I don't wear anything to bed anyway.'
'Okay,' I said. 'Good night. We'll talk in the morning.' She went in and shut the door, then opened it a crack. I heard her get into the bed. I picked up the dishes and put them in the dishwasher. Then I went in and took a shower and shaved. I felt odd, like my father probably had when we were small and all home and in bed and he was the only one up in the house. I got a blanket out of the closet, shut out the lights, and lay on my back on the couch smoking the rest of my cigar, blowing the smoke across the glowing tip.
I heard the light click on in the bedroom. She called, 'Spenser?'
'Yeah?'
'Would you come in here, please?' I got up, put on a pair of pants, and went in, still smoking the cigar. She was lying on her back in bed with covers pulled up under her chin. 'Sit on the bed,' she said. I did.
'Did you ever work on a farm?' she asked me.
'Nope.'
'My grandfather, my mother's father, had a farm in Illinois. He used to milk fifty cows a day, and he had forearms like yours. He wasn't as big as you, but he had muscles in his forearms like you do.'
I nodded.
'You're not fat at all, are you?' she said. I shook my head.
'With your clothes on you look as if you might be a little fat, but with your shirt off you're not. It's all muscle, isn't it?'
I nodded.
'You look like… like a boxer, or like somebody in a Tarzan movie.'
'Cheetah,' I said.
'Do you know,' she said, 'do you know that I've only met you four times in my life, and you are the only person in the entire world I can trust?' As she got to the end of the sentence her eyes filled. I patted her leg and said, 'Shhh.' But she went on, her voice not quite steady but apparently under control.
'Dennis is dead. My mother and father use me to get even with each other. I thought I could join the Moloch people. They'd dropped out, they weren't hung up on all the crap my father is. I thought they just took you as you were. They don't.' Her voice got shakier. 'They initiate you.'
I patted her thigh again. I had nothing to say. The stub of the cigar was too short. I put it in an ashtray on the night table.
'Do you know what the initiation is?'
'I figured out the first part,' I said.
She sat up in bed and let the covers fall away.
'You are the only one in the world, in the whole goddamned sonova bitch world… ' The tears started to come. I leaned toward her and put my arm around her and she caught hold of me and squeezed.
'Love me,' she said in a choked voice. 'Make love to me, make me feel, make love to me, make me feel.' A fleeting part of my mind thought, 'Jesus, first the mother, then the daughter,' but the enduring majority of my mind said, Yes, Yes, Yes, as I bore her back onto the bed and turned the covers back from her.
Chapter 13
In the morning I drove Terry home. Riding out to Newton we mentioned neither the Ceremony of Moloch nor the previous night. We ran through the events of the murder again; nothing new. I described Sonny for her in detail. Yes, that sounded like one of the men. They had brought the drug with them that she'd swallowed. They had brought her gun with them. Yes, she had shared that apartment with Cathy Connelly before Dennis had moved in. They had parted friends and still were, as far as Terry knew. Cathy lived on the Fenway, she said. On the museum side, near the end closest to the river. She didn't know the number. I stopped in front of her house and let her out. I didn't go in. Having slept with mother and daughter within the same twenty-four hours, I felt fussy about sitting around with both of them in the library and making small talk. She leaned back in through the open door of my car.
'Call me,' she said.
'I will,' I said.
She closed the door and I pulled away, watching her in the rearview mirror. She went in very slowly, turning once to wave at me. I tooted the horn in reply.
Back to Boston again. I seemed to be making this drive a lot. Turning off Storrow at the Charlesgate exit, I went up the ramp over Commonwealth Ave and looked down at the weeping willows underneath the arch?bare now, with slender branches crusted in snow and bending deep beneath winter weight. There was a Frost poem, but it was about birches, and then I was off the ramp and looking for a parking space. This was not a business for poets anyway.
I parked near the Westland Avenue entrance to the Fenway and walked across the street to a drugstore. There was no listing in the phone book for a Catherine Connelly on the Fenway. So I started at the north end and began looking at the mailboxes in apartment lobbies, working my way south toward the museum. In the third
