Mortal Fear

“Yes. And I thought about doing it. But frankly… I was told not to.”

“By who?”

“Someone in the company. Look, can you just take the names? Maybe I’m nuts, but I’d feel better, okay?”

“Shoot.”

I read the names and numbers from a notepad. Mayeux repeats them as I give them; I assume he is speaking into a pocket recorder. “That’s five different states,” he notes. “Six women, five states. Spread across the country.”

“Information Superhighway,” I remind him.

“No shit. Well, I’ll get back to you if anything comes of this. Gotta go, Mr. Cole. Time to talk to the fairies and the vampires.”

The conversation leaves me strangely excited.

After weeks of suspicion, I have finally done something. I am tempted to call Miles in Manhattan and tell him exactly what I’ve done, but I don’t. If Miles Turner turns out to be right-if all those women have slipped contentedly back into the roles of happy housewives or fulfilled career women-then I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. But if I turn out to be right-if those women are less than healthy right now….

I’m not sure I want Miles to know I know that.

This realization shocks me a little. I have known Miles Turner for more than twenty years. Since grade school. He was eccentric then. And during the last fifteen years-since he left Mississippi for MIT in 1978-I have seen very little of him. It was Miles who got me working for EROS in the first place. But I can’t blame him.

I was a willing Faust.

Hearing the solid door-chunk of Drewe’s Acura outside, I hunch low over the keyboard of the Gateway, assuming the posture that announces to my wife that I have been manically trading commodities contracts for the last eight hours.

“Who were you talking to on the phone?” she calls from the hallway.

Busted. During her commute, she must have tried me on her cellular. She often does, as the sight of summer cotton fields lazing by the car windows gets monotonous after the first ten seconds or so.

Drewe leans into my office, pointedly refusing-as she has done for the last few weeks-to enter the domain of the EROS computer. My wife, like many wives, is jealous of my time. But there is more to this conflict than a wife and a computer. EROS is not merely a computer but the nexus of a network of five thousand people (half of them women) who spend quite a bit of their waking hours thinking about sex.

“I picked up some chicken breasts,” Drewe says, arching her eyebrows like a comic French chef.

“Great,” I say. “Give me a minute and I’ll get them going.”

It’s not that Drewe doesn’t think about sex. She does. And it’s not that she doesn’t enjoy sex. She does that too. It’s just that lately she has begun thinking about sex in a whole new way. As a means to an end. By that I mean its natural end.

Children.

She smiles. Childless at thirty-three, Drewe still possesses the tightness of skin and muscle of a woman in her twenties. Her breasts are still high, her face free of wrinkles save laugh lines. I love this about her. I know how selfish it is, wanting to preserve her physical youth. But part of me wants that. Her hair is auburn, her skin fair, her eyes green. Her beauty is not that of a fashion model (her younger sister, Erin, was the model) nor the pampered, aerobicized, overly made-up elegance of a young Junior Leaguer. Drewe’s distinctive allure emanates from her eyes. Not only the eyes themselves, which are deep set and clear, but from her brows, which are finely curved yet strong, like the ribs of a ship. What emanates from her eyes is pure intelligence. Cool, quantitative, uncommon sense.

Drewe Cole is smart.

Her smile widens to a pixie grin-something I haven’t seen much lately-and then she heads off for the kitchen. I take a last look at the Chicago figures and follow.

Our house would be something of a curiosity to anyone not born into a farm family. It began seventy-five years ago as a square, one-story structure just large enough to shelter my maternal grandfather and grandmother (who married at the ages of nineteen and sixteen, respectively) and the first children they expected. But as the farm prospered and more children arrived, my grandfather began adding on rooms-first with a doggedly logical symmetry, later, apparently, anywhere he could most easily tack them on. The result is something like a wooden house of cards built by an eight-year-old. Moving from room to room often involves a sudden stepping up or down to a slightly different elevation, though since I grew up in this house, I no longer sense these changes consciously.

The heart of the house is the kitchen. It is a long room, and too narrow. I once thought of tearing out a wall and expanding it, but a black carpenter friend told me that since the entire house seemed held to this core by some form of redneck magic, I’d do better to enjoy rubbing asses with my wife whenever we passed between the stove and the opposite counter at the same time. That turned out to be good advice.

“Are we richer or poorer today?” Drewe asks from the sink. She is already rinsing off the chicken.

“About even,” I say, taking a heavy cast-iron skillet out of the oven and laying it on a hot gas burner.

Her question is perfunctory. The truth is that with ten contracts in play, which is about average for me these days, I could only-in the absolute worst contingency-lose about fifty thousand dollars. This would not seriously affect us.

I am good at my real job.

“Save any lives today?” I ask. My question is not perfunctory. Drewe is an OB-GYN. She delivers the babies that my father (a family practitioner) would have delivered thirty years ago. She doesn’t usually deal with car accidents or shootings, but she often handles traumatic births.

She answers my question with a quick shake of her head and plops the chicken breasts into the sizzling skillet. I am peppering them liberally when she asks, “What about EROX?”

She has purposefully botched the acronym, pronouncing it as a disc jockey would: E-Rocks. EROS stands for Erotic Realtime On-line Stimulation. Drewe substitutes the X to emphasize the prurient nature of the network. Nine months ago she did not do this. She was as fascinated by the forum as I was, and our sex life had blossomed with her fascination. Nine months ago she spoke of EROS in a tone befitting the Greek god of love and desire.

Now it ranks just above phone sex. Barely.

“Something really bad happened,” I tell her.

Drewe looks up from a can of LeSueur peas with apprehension in her eyes. Family, she is thinking. Who died?

“Karin Wheat was murdered last night.”

Her eyes widen. “The author? New Orleans Karin Wheat?”

I nod. “It was on CNN. You believe that?”

“Sure. Anybody who’s had movies made of their books-and has fans as weird as she does-is bound to rate some national airtime. I bet it’ll be on Hard Copy in an hour.”

She’s probably right. Should I watch? I know from experience that facts will be sparse and titillation rampant. On the other hand, Drewe can’t stand more than ten minutes of Crossfire.

“You sound really upset,” she says, eyeing me with genuine concern.

I look away for a moment, disguising my mental stocktaking with an appraising glance at the chicken. How much to tell? “She was on EROS,” I say, not wanting to sound guilty but knowing I do.

“What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

I look up, some defiance in my eyes. “You haven’t wanted to hear anything about EROS for months, Drewe. Karin only joined a few weeks ago.”

She lifts her chin and studies me. “So it’s Karin, ” she says finally. “You’ve talked to her on-line?”

“Sure. The usual sysop guidance.”

“Please.” She fits the pea can into the opener and drowns any reply with a grinding flourish. I go back to the chicken.