Now it made sense. The byline was: S. Howard, Andrew M. Freeman, and Nancy King.
King was Nancy Willard’s maiden name. These must be research papers she’d done while working at N.I.H. before she got married.
Then he noticed the door in the darkest corner.
It caught his attention only because it added to the room’s imbalance. He supposed it was a closet, but why would there be a closet in here? He opened the door to face a rectangle of absolute darkness, which seemed long yet somehow devoid of depth. Warm air rushed his face, and a faintly unsettling redolence, like tar.
“Don’t go in there.”
Glen whirled at the sound of Nancy Willard’s command. Her voice rang with a thin underpinning of panic. She was standing just inside the study doorway, cloaked in a robe of dark gold terry. Her hair glistened slickly from the shower, and she had combed it out in straight, shiny lines. Her looks had always deceived him; she was plain and bookwormish, yet he found something opaquely sensuous about that, more so now without her glasses. The lamplight drew a line on her, shadowing one half of her body and bringing out the other half to a fresh, wet crispness. Droplets of water clung to her neck and bare calves, as though she’d dried herself in haste.
“Sorry,” he said, and closed the door. “Just curious. Seemed odd to have a closet in a study.”
Her eyes widened, concentrating speculatively on his face as she spoke. “It’s not a closet; it’s the stairwell to the cellar. I keep telling Charles to nail it shut, since we never use it. One of these days someone’ll go down there and wind up with a cracked skull.”
He couldn’t stand it when she made him guess. She was doing it on purpose, he knew she was. Her sadistic streak ran deep. He went closer to her, and elevated himself an inch off his heels to look past her shoulder into the hall.
She smiled and handed him an envelope. “Here’s your paycheck.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Willard,” he said, projecting his voice. He tilted his head to get a better look behind her. “Hope I didn’t disturb you, coming so early.”
“Cut,” she said, and laughed. “We can stop with the ‘Mrs. Willard’ for now. I get such a kick out of watching you peek around to see if it’s safe.”
Glen released a hard, allaying breath. He noticed now that her eyes were fixed on his crotch, and that her robe had come unsashed. It seemed her breasts were keeping the robe open, luring his gaze to her exposed flesh. She wore her nakedness obscenely and without a thought. One foot parted; he thought again of that sadistic streak.
They embraced immediately. Kissing, he reached into the gap of the robe, sliding his hand to her shoulder blades, then slowly down the length of her back. His palms pressed against her rump, squeezing their hips together. Her head lolled back at a soft angle; he tracked a damp, warm line along her throat in kisses.
“Charles went to the library in Bethesda,” she said. She closed her eyes. Around his waist her arms tightened, drawing slack. “He won’t be home for hours.”
“Good,” he managed to say, and his kisses went back to her mouth, long, hot, penetrating kisses. He breathed in the soapy fragrance of her hair; it roused him, made him feel light in the head. His hands continued feeling her beneath the robe.
“I thought about you…” he whispered, “…all night. I couldn’t wait to see you, couldn’t stop thinking about how much I love you.”
“Show me,” she said back. “Show me how much.”
“I’ll show you. I’ll…” His hands were already out from behind her, his fingers delicately touching her breasts. Then he watched her eyes and touched her lower.
She gave a little hiss, his touch sending up a spike of pleasure. Her words grew heavy with heat and love. “Not here, darling. Oh. We have lots of time. We can go upstairs.”
“Here,” he said. He could feel a warm current moving in his gut, and he could feel her heat. Urgency pulled them slowly and carefully to the floor like a sudden swell of gravity. Now she lay before him on her back, soft and spraddled and legs trustingly open. Shadows emphasized her shape; her skin shone darkly in the downreaching light. Their eyes locked—he was looking at her. Searching. Kneeling up between her white, open legs. He loved her so much, another man’s wife. Her abdomen seemed to be quivering, her flesh tense in wait, and he was kissing circles lightly around her navel, while his hands smoothed over her breasts and down to her warm, bare hips. She breathed jaggedly through her teeth, as if exerted. His kisses roamed harder, lower, more direct. So close now, he began kissing the inside of her thighs, inching up, and was at last working on the vital spot. Her mouth opened. Her eyes reduced to slits. She stared off into dim space, sighing her bliss.
She tasted sharp and lovely. Glen felt her body under him squirm. Though the room was deadened with silence, he could hear her sounds as though they had been excessively amplified. He could hear her lungs working, her heart, her pulse. He could hear the tiny whimpers that came with every breath she let out. He could hear her lips part, her hands in his hair, and the wet sounds of her throat as she swallowed. But he was so lost in his love for her that he didn’t hear the strange, faint shuffling from the cellar.
««—»»
The voice rocketed through his sleep.
“Kurt! Kurt! There’s something
Small hands attached to his shoulders and shook him around, roughly, violently, lifting his head off the bed, shaking shaking shaking.
“Oh, wake up, you poop!”
Kurt thought he was being shocked out of a coma. His eyes peeled open, and they took a long time focusing on Melissa’s terrified face, which seemed to hover over him like a demon spirit. She continued shaking him, continued shouting in his ear.
His eyes bored into her. “Damn it, Melissa. If you weren’t a girl, I’d punch the stuffing out of you. Now just what the f— What are you doing waking me up at—” a hard glance to the clock—“at eight-thirty in the morning when you know I didn’t get to bed till after four?”
She spoke, panting, as some sheer terror made gibberish of her words. “I went outside to put water in the birdbath out back, you know where the birdbath is—something between the trees like guts or hair or something in a pile. Kurt, you’ve got to
He tried to be mad at her, but found he couldn’t. She was a menace, yes, a gadfly, a prank, and pain in the ass, but still, she was only a little girl. “If this is another one of your jokes—”
“It’s not, Kurt. I swear, it’s not,” she assured him, rhythmically shaking her head. “I wouldn’t kid about something like this.”
Like the time she’d said she’d heard someone in the attic. Kurt had grabbed his revolver and pulled down the attic stairs. A bucket containing cold three-day-old barbecue sauce had tipped over on his head. “Go downstairs and make me coffee,” he told her. “I’ll be down in a minute.”
Melissa’s face was stark. She nodded and dashed out of the room. Kurt couldn’t remember ever seeing her this unstrung.
He pulled on old clothes, every movement of his body sluggish from being cheated out of sufficient sleep. When he went down the steps, his feet thumped like blocks of concrete. Instinct made him fumble in his top pocket for a cigarette; he groaned audibly when he found none. The sunlight in the kitchen seemed like an energy field designed to repel. Melissa had her back to him; she was staring intently out the sliding-glass door into the backyard, her fingertips pressed against the glass. She wore red sneakers, striped socks, a bright yellow T-shirt, and brand-new denim overalls.
“Thief!” she shouted, grabbing. “Gimme ’em back!”
