'I might feel better but I don't think it's going to-'
'Here,' she said, taking my wrists in her hands. She pulled them behind her until our tummies were touching. Then she moved our hands around in back of her, fast, and wrapped my hands around so they cupped her lovely, meaty hams. I had two handfuls of luscious bun. It was a flagrant case of a 112-pound woman sexually abusing a 174-pound man. Despicable.
'How's that, Doc?' she purred.
'Great,' I said. I could not tell a lie.
'Are you getting it out of your system a little?' she whispered.
'I'm getting it, but not out of my system.'
'Then I think we'll have to- whoopsie!'
She disengaged, spun a pirouette like a dancer, took two fast steps sideways, and was demurely fiddling with the coffee machine as Jim strode through the doorway.
'What's goin' on? Where's that coffee? Oh, there. Well come- on then.' He was gone faster than he arrived.
A deep smear of crimson had invaded Janice's neck and cheek. She grinned at me and giggled.
'Whew!' she whispered, then frowned. 'Sorry, Doc.'
'Let's get out of here,' I said, taking the tray of cups, cream, and sugar. 'And we should never do that again?
'It's going to happen at the lake I bet,' she whispered as she walked steadily beside me, holding the tray of coffee and spoons. 'Up at the lake. We'll be having a party at the dock, and the others will all leave for Wolfsboro to buy food and booze and there'll just be us on the dock… in only our bathing suits…'
'Nope. Never happen.'
She half-closed her eyes and grinned.
'Oh I can just see it. We'll be rubbing oil on each other, then go into the boathouse and-'
'Never happen.'
'Gonna happen, Doc. Gonna haaaaaaapen…'
'No. No. A thousand times no,' I said, trying to convince myself. Trying not to imagine her skinning out of her wet tank suit in the shadows of the boathouse.
'Well it's a pleasant fantasy anyway. Now here we are; stop smiling.'
I put the tray down and poured coffee for everyone. Mary was frowning at the cards on the table. She sipped coffee and looked up.
'You're still dummy, Charlie,' she said.
'You're not kidding,' I said.
I felt the eyes on me. The dreaded mal'occhio- the Evil Eye- of southern Italy.
'Why are you staring?' I asked.
'I think you know.'
Ha. A bluff. How could she know what I knew? I gripped the wheel a bit tighter and swung around the curve back to Old Stone Mill Road.
'Whatever do you mean?'
'Don't kid around. You grabbed Janice's ass in the kitchen, didn't you? I can tell because you've been smiling. You don't know you're smiling, but you are. It's the smile of Charles Adams the ass grabber. Not Doctor C. Adams after he's performed a beautiful operation, but Charles Adams the lech. And you're going to get it, buddy. Just you wait.'
I didn't say anything.
'Oh I'll give you some credit; I bet it wasn't your idea. She probably set you up for it. I sort of like Janice, but she's going to have to be taught a lesson.'
'What's going to happen to her?'
'I'm going to hit her on that behind of hers, so the punishment will fit the crime. I'll use an implement.'
'Belt? Paddle?'
'No. Chain saw. A Homelite will also render her anatomy less attractive to you. Thus I'll kill two birds with one stone. And as for you-'
'Hmm?' I gulped, feeling a damp flush on my brow.
'I haven't decided. But it will be exquisite. I promise you.'
I didn't like the cold smile she was wearing. In the dim light her swarthy features and high cheekbones gave her the appearance of an Indian squaw. I remembered that the Indians, when they captured the lone white man after a battle, handed the poor guy over to their women. Of course he would beg to be killed, but they'd refuse and tie him to an old wagon wheel and invite the squaws out. Then he'd sit there, tied to the wheel, while the womenfolk assembled a gruesome array of equipment: rawhide thongs soaking in water, glowing brands, sharp flint shards, smoked hornets' nests… and so on. I'm sure the poor guy didn't know exactly what was on the agenda, but he would have a vague hunch that it wasn't Dinner at the Ritz.
At home we exited from the car and walked up the flagstone steps. I put my arm around her shoulder.
'Nothing bad happened,' I said. 'And Janice is okay.'
'Sometimes I just get mad-'
But she didn't finish her sentence, because I had opened the front door and we were staring inside at our living room. Chairs were overturned. The sofa was shredded and hanging open like a disemboweled cow. Pictures were off the walls. Mary's desk was apart and all its contents spread over the room.
'Charlie!'
I walked through the dining room. Compared to the living room it was almost untouched. They had broken no china, yet all the pieces had been shifted in the cabinets. The silver, worth perhaps thousands of dollars, had been extracted and tossed in a heap. But none of it appeared to be missing. Same story in the kitchen. My study was a wreck, with its desk in the same condition as Mary's. They'd hit every room, and obviously spent time and effort in each in direct proportion to the room's capacity for concealment. I was boiling mad, but inwardly relieved that nothing had been taken.
I was still thinking this when I entered the darkroom; then my heart sank. It wasn't a total wreck; it was just gone. The enlargers were still there. But the cameras were gone. All gone. The two multidrawered Shaw-Walker metal cabinets were gone. Twenty years' worth of negatives, our life on Elm, gone. Mary found me leaning against the bench. She told me later I looked like I was ready to sink right through the floor.
'Good Christ,' I groaned, 'I wish they'd taken anything but that. The paintings, rugs, stereo stuff, jewelry… even the cameras can be replaced. But not those negatives.'
'That cardboard box, Charlie. That little box with Tom's front teeth inside. That's what they were after.'
'And dammit, if I'd left it on my study desk where they would have found it right away, they wouldn't have done all this.'
'Where did you leave it?'
'In Brian's office, for safekeeping. Safekeeping! And look!'
Mary crinkled up her face a bit and her eyes got shiny. The corners of her mouth turned down.
'Oh no,' I said. 'This is something to get upset about, but not to cry over. You don't cry over property; you cry over people. You cry over Roy Abernathy, not stuff like this.'
Roy Abernathy was a thirty-three-year-old father of four who, a year and a half ago, had noticed pain in his right testis. In the space of fourteen months he had been transformed from a strong carpenter into a moaning, panting, babbling, ninety-four-pound, shriveled sack of agony. As a registered nurse, Mary had performed the post-mortem care on what was left of him while Moe Abramson had done his best to arrest the avalanche of despair and depression in his now institutionalized wife. The children were fast changing from floating, speechless zombies of shock into truants and thieves.
So much for the Abernathy family. It's just one of those minor incidents that makes it a wee bit tougher to put on the spruce duds of a Sunday morning.
Mary let out a low moan and came apart at the seams. Now why did I have to mention Roy Abernathy? But
