Area of Suspicion

Chapter 5

It was nearly noon when, from my hotel suite, I got the call through to Tom Garroway in Syracuse. It had taken them fifteen minutes to locate him out in the shop. It made me remember the times I had tried to find him, and the uselessness of trying to teach him to leave word where he’d be.

He came on the line. “Gev! It’s damn good to hear your voice. Say, I read about Ken in the papers. I was going to write you. A damn shame, Gev. A sweet guy.”

“Thanks, Tom. Can you talk or do you want to call me back?”

“I can talk. What’s up?”

“Why did you leave? You had a good deal here.”

“I know that. After you left, I got lonesome.”

“Let’s have it, Tom.”

“Okay. When Mottling came into the picture it ruined things.”

“How?”

“I don’t like people leaning over my shoulder. I want to be given something and a chance to work it out my own way. If I had to spit, I had to make out a request in triplicate and get Mottling’s initials on it. I could feel an ulcer coming. Do it this way. Don’t do it that way. Do it my way not your way, and report on the hour.”

“No way to handle bull-headed Garroway.”

“You’re damn well told. This is a good outfit, Gev. Fine people. Hot problems. But I want you to know this. The day you toss out Mottling I’ll come running back if you want me to. And two bits says Poulson and Fitz will come back too.”

“Are they gone?”

“Man, yes. Where have you been? Mottling really took over. He pushed your brother around too. I don’t know why Ken stood for it. Mottling and that tin soldier Dolson are thick as thieves. The next step is to hoist Grandby out of there; then all the old guard will be gone. I’m not sentimental about it, Gev. If you were a knuckle-head, I’d say stay the hell out. But you’re one Dean who’s entitled to run Dean Products. Why don’t you take over again?”

“It’s a little late for that, Tom.”

“Hell, I’ll come back and teach you the ropes. You can be a trainee. One of Garroway’s bright young men.”

“I’m a beachcomber. There’s something with a real future.”

His tone changed. “Seriously, Gev. No joke. I almost wrote you a few times. There’s a smell around there. Like something crawled under the buildings and died. Maybe I should have stayed and fought. But it was safer to land another job. Give some thought to going back in there, Gev. Those years were good. I’d like it to be the way it used to be.”

I thanked him. The odds were against my going back in. I hung up and called room service and ordered a sandwich sent up. I thought of what he had said. Even thought I’d tried to deny it for four years, when I had quit, I’d felt as though both hands had been cut off at the wrist.

Sure, it was just another corporate entity that would keep churning along whether Gevan Dean was there or not.

But I missed it. I missed the hot stink of coolant and oil, that rumble and chatter and screech of the production areas, where metal is peeled sleekly back from the high-speed cutting edges, and the turret lathes and automatic screw machines squat heavily and busy themselves with their robot operations. And it had been good to go into the shipping department and smell the raw wood of the big packing cases, and see the fresh-paint stencils which said DEAN PRODUCTS.

When the pressure was off, I’d go down to Receiving and watch the materials coming in, the sheets and the bar stock, the castings and forgings, the billets and pigs. Raw and semi-fabricated items would come in; they would leave as complete assemblies, machined, assembled, inspected, crated. It all started when some prehistoric genius squatted on his haunches and chipped out an ax head and lashed it to a piece of wood. It must have given him a good satisfaction when he swung the completed tool. And there was a satisfaction in directing the skilled operation that made Dean Products tick, which turned materials into something that could be hefted, used. The skill was the value you added.

I remembered how it used to be with my father. When a new item was going into production, his desk top would be littered with machined component parts. He’d spend a lot of time picking them up and turning them over and over in his hands, holding them just so, so the light would turn machined steel surfaces into tiny mirrors. There was always a pair of coveralls hanging in his office closet and he was supposed to put them on before he went out into the production areas. But something would go wrong and he would forget and go bulling down and wade into the trouble and get grease smeared. Then Mother would give him a mean time, and so would his secretary, old Miss Brownell.

Remembering Miss Brownell made me think of my second valid source of information. When ancient Miss Brownell had finally retired, I asked Hilderman to recommend someone from the stenographic pool, someone I could take into my office on trial. Hilderman had sent Joan Perrit to me, and I wondered if he had suddenly acquired holes in the head. She was nineteen, and gawky and nervous, and she plunged around the office with such a reckless desire to please that I was in constant fear she would fracture herself on the furniture or fall out the window. She was painfully shy. But she could make a typewriter sound like small boys running and holding sticks against a picket fence. And she could take down and transcribe every mumble and grunt in a ten-man conference where everybody interrupted everybody else.

Technical excellence was just part of her arsenal of talents. Inside of a month she knew my style of expressing myself so perfectly that I couldn’t tell which letters I had dictated and which ones I had told her to handle. And she managed to fend off the pests, even those who would have gotten by Miss Brownell, without ever offending anybody, and without ever shooing away anyone that I wanted to see. She had schedules and timetables and appointments neatly filed away in her pretty head, and each morning when I came into the office there would be a typed notation on my desk, placed with geometric exactness atop the mail I should see. That notation would tell me not only the fixed appointments, but what was likely to come up.

She was a sweet kid, with dark red hair and a look of virginal freshness. She was so loyal it was embarrassing. On the morning I dictated my letter of resignation, she had to leave the office. She was gone a full ten minutes, and when she came back her eyes were reddened and swollen, but her voice was level and calm again as she read back to me the last sentence I had dictated.

I got her on the phone and her voice was just the same as on that last day. “I heard you were in town, Mr. Dean.”

I wondered how much four years had changed her. “I wonder if I could talk to you, Miss Perrit.”

“Of course, Mr. Dean. When?”

“Say this evening. After dinner sometime.”

“Will nine o’clock at the corner of Martin and Lamont be all right? In front of the leather shop.” I agreed. Though her voice had not changed, I knew she undersrtood I wanted information. Thus the quickness of her response was an indication she felt there was information to be given. I trusted her judgment.

After lunch I looked up car rental agencies in the phone book and found one quite close to the hotel. I rented a new Chevrolet sedan. I drove by the house where I was born, and headed south out of the city. At The Pig and It I found that Lita Genelli was off duty. I drove through the countryside for a time, parked near a place where we had always had family picnics. But they had changed everything. The elms and willows were gone. The area had been graded and filled. The pool where I caught the six-pound brown trout was gone. They had straightened and widened the highway, and there was a big drive-in movie where Ken and I used to play at being Indian scouts, trying to wiggle through the sun-hot grass until we were close enough to yell and leap out. I remembered the way the grass used to smell, and the way the picnic potato salad tasted, and the time Ken had tied the braids of a female cousin to a tree limb, and the way the line had hissed in the water when the brownie had taken the worm.

Now there was a stink of fast traffic, and a disheveled blonde on the drive-in ads, and a roadside place where they sold cement animals painted in bright colors.

And I kept glancing at my watch and thinking about Niki. A bitter excitement kept lumping in my throat. I drove slowly, and it was exactly four-thirty when I drove through the gateposts of the house Ken had built for Niki in the Lime Ridge section. The driveway was asphalt, and it was wide and satiny and curving. It led up the slope toward the house, to a turn-around and a parking area near the side entrance.

It was the house I would have wanted to build for her. A long, low white frame house, in an L shape, with a wide chimney painted white, with black shutters, with deep eaves. The spring grass was clipped to putting green perfection. High cedar hedges isolated the property from the neighbors. The three-car garage was separated from one wing of the house by a glassed-in breezeway, and beyond the garage was an apartment affair which I imagined belonged to the help. The house sat quiet and content in the spring sun, and it looked like a house people could be happy in.

There were two cars parked near the garage. One was a big fin-tailed job in cruiser gray, and the other was a baby blue Jag convertible with the top down. Both cars had local licenses, and I guessed the big one had been Ken’s and now both of them were Niki’s. And the house was Niki’s, and all the manicured grounds, and all the cedar hedges. A very fine take for the lass who had stood in the rain with her eyes ablaze on that December afternoon. Such thoughts helped still my nervousness.

I pressed the bell at the side door and a pretty little Negro maid in a white uniform let me in and took my hat, murmuring that I should go straight ahead into the living-room and she would tell Mrs. Dean I was here. It was a big room, and quiet. Low blond furniture upholstered in nubbly chocolate; lime yellow draperies framing a ten-foot picture window that looked down the quiet expanse of the lawn. A small bar had been wheeled to a convenient corner. There were fresh flowers, built-in shelves of books in bright dust jackets, wall-to-wall neutral rug. I lit a cigarette and tossed the match behind the birch logs in the fireplace. I looked at book titles. I looked out the window. The room was empty and silent, and I could hear no sound in the house. I felt the jitters coming back. I looked out the big window and wondered if they had stood there in the evening, his hand on her waist, her head on his shoulder, before going to their bed. And had they read any of the books aloud? And had he gotten up to poke at the fire while she sat in uxorial contentment...

“Gevan!” she said. She had come into the room behind me and I had not heard her. I turned, my mind foolishly blank, staring at her as she walked tall toward me, her hands outstretched, smiling.

Four years had changed Niki. The years had softened the young tautness of her figure. Her waist was as slim as ever, but under the strapless dress of some bright fabric, there was a new warm abundance of breast and hip. Her cheeks were the familiar flat ovals and her mouth was the same as it had been, deeply arched, sensuous and imperious.

She moved in the same gliding walk like the pace of some splendid animal. She walked toward me for an endless time while, with all senses sharpened, I heard the slither and whip of the hem of the heavy skirt and scented her familiar perfume.

“You’ve changed your hair,” I said inanely.

“Oh, Gevan, what a sparkling greeting!” When she said my name I saw the remembered way she said the v, white teeth biting at her underlip, holding the consonant sound just a bit longer than anyone else ever did.

I tried to take one of her hands and shake it in polite formality, but her other hand found my wrist, long warm fingers wrapping tightly around it, and she stood like that, smiling at me, tall and rounded, that black hair sheening like spilled ink.

“It’s nice to see you, Niki.” My voice was husky.

She closed her eyes for a moment. “It’s been a bit too long,” she said as she released my hand and turned away with an uncharacteristic awkwardness. I saw she shared my nervousness. It made her more plausible, made her more believable as the girl who had said she would marry me so long ago. She had betrayed me, and in her manner was awareness of that. Somehow, I had fallen into the habit of attributing to her a perfect poise, a bland denial of any guilt. To see her now, unsure of herself, uncertain of her ground, even perhaps a bit afraid of me, destroyed that false image of her. It was right she should feel guilt. In some obscure way she had destroyed Ken. She was the evil luck of the Dean brothers. And the warmth I felt for a few moments faded.

Perhaps she sensed that. She turned with a controlled smile and said, “You’re looking preposterously healthy, Gevan.”

“I’m a beach boy. A muscle-flexer.”

“With no dissipations? I’m quite good at martinis these days.” It made me remember the burnt-acid abominations she had mixed for us long ago.

“Prove it.”

I sat and watched her at the small bar. The room was silent. Ice tinkled. She measured with small girl intentness. She swirled the cocktail in the crystal bubble of the shaker, poured carefully, brought me the first drink. I stood up and took it and sipped. “You’re better than you used to be,” I said.

She sat opposite me with her drink. We were walking a polite and formal line. On either side were quicksands.

“You have a very nice home, Niki.”

“It’s too big, actually. Ken wanted a big house. I’ll sell it, I guess.”

“And then what?”

“Go away. Get sort of — straightened out. And come back here. Stanley says I should take an active interest in the company.”

The silence grew. It was not a comfortable silence. There was a tingling to it, a nervous suspense. I liked her hair better the way she used to wear it. The present effect made her face look more fragile, but it also gave her a look of false composure.

“Do you like Florida, Gevan?”

“Very much.”

“You’ll go back, I suppose.”

“Yes, of course.”

And again there was the silence of the big room. She sipped her drink. I saw her round throat work. She looked down into her glass, frowning. “We could talk and talk and talk and never say a thing — if we keep on this way.”

“This is the safe way.”

She looked up sharply. “Is it? Then I’ll say it. I should never have married Ken.”

The silence came back but it was altered. It had changed.

“Don’t step out of character,” I said. “Remember, you’re the shattered widow.”

“I know I hurt you. I know how badly.”

“Do you?”

“Don’t try to hurt back. Not right now. Later, but not right now. Let me say this.”

“I’ll listen to you.”

“Six months after I married him I knew it was a mistake. But he loved me, and I’d hurt enough people. I tried to make him as happy as I could.”

“Not very successfully, from what I hear.”

“Then you know how he was the last few months. I couldn’t help that, Gevan. I tried. God, how I tried! But he — sensed how it had all gone wrong. He guessed I was pretending. But I never told him I regretted marrying him.”

I set my empty glass aside. “That raises a pretty question, Niki. Why did you marry him?”

“For a long time I didn’t know why I did that — dreadful thing to you. To us. Because what we had was so good, Gevan. So right for us. I finally figured it all out.”

“With diagrams?”

She leaned forward. “You and I are both strong people, Gevan. Terribly strong. Dominants, I guess you call it. Ken was weaker. He needed me. He needed strength. He appealed to something — maternal, I guess. You would never need me that way. My strength seemed to respond to his weakness. He made me feel needed.”

“And I didn’t.”

“Not in the same way. It was so queer the way it began. It crept up on us. We weren’t expecting it. And then it got worse and worse and we had to find some time and place to tell you how it was with us. We were going to tell you that same night when you walked in. But having it happen that way made it all sort of nasty. I’ll never forget that night, or the way you looked.”

“It hasn’t exactly slipped my mind, Niki.”

“I want to be honest with you. I’ve had to be dishonest for so long. I’ll tell you how it is. I miss him. I miss him dreadfully. He was sweet. But I didn’t love him. So I can’t miss him the same way I’ve missed you for four years. I can’t look at you while I say this. If things had gone on, Ken and I would have separated. And then — darling, I would have come to you and begged forgiveness. I would have come to you on any basis you wanted.” She lifted her head then and looked directly at me. “I would have come to you, Gevan.”

I looked back into her eyes. They looked darker. “Is that supposed to help?” I asked her.

“It’s too late, isn’t it?” she asked. Her voice was soft and remote. It was less question than statement, an acceptance of a mistake which had forever changed our special world. “Much too late,” she said, turning away from me.

I knew how quickly and how easily I could reach her. The impulse brought me to my feet before I could bring it under control, my empty glass bounding and rolling on the silence of the rug. She sat with her head turned away from me. I saw tendons move in the side of her throat. Except for that small movement, she did not stir for the space of ten heartbeats. Then, with a careful precision she put her glass on the table and rose to her feet with a remembered effortlessness and came over to me, her eyes downcast, smudged by the darkness of her lashes. I heard a hush of fabric and a hiss of nylon. She stopped, inches from me, and slowly raised her glance until, with the mercilessness of a blow without warning, she looked into my eyes.

After that instant of recognition her eyes lost their focus; her mouth trembled into slackness and her lips, wet-shining, seemed to swell as they parted. Her head lolled, heavy, sleepy, on the strong and slender neck, and her knees bent slightly in her weakness. Her body seemed to become flaccid, heavier, sweeter, softer with the inadvertent arching of her back, and there were tiny, almost imperceptible, movements of which I knew she was, as she had told me long ago, completely unaware, small, rolling pulsations of belly, hip and thigh.

With us it had been a strong and a compulsive attraction, a grinding feverish spell that always began in this humid hypnotic way, building to an urgency that made frantic use of the nearest couch or bed or rug or grassy place. It was always beyond thought and plan, and in a shamefully few moments she had taken me back into our rituals as though nothing had ever come between us. I found I was grasping her by the upper arms, in an ancient sequence, closing my hands with a force that twisted and broke her mouth and propelled the heat of her breath against my throat in a long hawing sound of pain and wanting. Under the strength of my hands I felt the warm sheathings of firm muscles as she strained to break free. It was one of our contrived delays. She rolled her head from side to side with an almost inaudible moan. I knew how violently she would come into my arms the instant I released her, how harsh and glad would be her cry, how astonishingly strong her arms would be, how hotly sweet the heavy mouth would taste, how all of her tallness would be in urgent, rhythmic, helpless movement.

Tires made a droning sigh on asphalt and stopped outside. A car door slammed. I held her until I felt the straining go out of her arms, and then I released her. I watched her come back to the objective world. Her mouth healed itself and her eyes became quick and her body straightened and tightened into formality. After a purely animal sensation of fury at my loss, I felt all the gladness come. I knew I would not have stopped. Nor could she. By accident I had been delivered from a sweaty interlude that would have shamed me beyond my ability to forgive or excuse myself.

She touched her hair and looked at her watch. “It’s Stanley Mottling,” she said. “I forgot I’d asked him to stop by.” She tilted her head and looked at me in a challenging way, arched and roguish. “It isn’t really too late, darling.”

“For a moment I almost forgot it was. Go greet the nice man. What does he drink? I’ll start fixing it.”

I was puddling the sugar in a teaspoon of water when Stanley Mottling came in. No one had described him to me. I had expected one of those hard-jawed, little terrier types, with nerves drawn tight and sharp and quick. Mottling ambled in and was introduced. He was vast and rangy, tweedy and shaggy. He looked sleepy... a young forty with mild, watchful eyes, and, in tweeds that looked slept in, there was an upper drawer flavor to the way he looked and handled himself. He was at least six-four, and his handshake was firm.

“Nice to know you, Mr. Dean. Damn shame it had to take a mess like this to bring you back here. Hope we can get along as well as Ken and I did.”

I said trite things while I tried to figure him out. The guy was likable. He had charm and ease of manner without seeming to be conscious of either. He also seemed very much at home. Though he had been in the room only a few moments, he had the air of host rather than guest.

I took the drinks over and he sat facing Niki and me on the other couch. The two couches were at right angles to the fireplace with a squat cocktail table between them.

We said pleasant nothings while I decided on one fast and definite gambit which might teach me something about the man.

“I was disturbed, Mr. Mottling, to learn Tom Garroway left us.”

He nodded. “It was a hell of a shame. A good man. The kind we ought to make a special effort to keep. If there’d been less pressure, I would have tried to re-educate him. He was spoiled.”

“Spoiled! For what?”

He smiled. “Mr. Dean, you’ve just let yourself in for a short lecture on one of my pet management theories. I feel that industrial techniques have advanced beyond the point where any one man can be given a production problem to work out in his own way. I believe in operation on a team basis. Suppose, for example, I have a tool-design problem, a tricky cutting edge for high-speed operation. I want to form a team consisting of a mechanical engineer, a metallurgist, and a practical shop man to lick it. It saves time because what they come up with will have a minimum of bugs. If it is a quantity situation, I want somebody from purchasing on the team too, so that they’ll specify something we can get without too much delay. Tom Garroway wouldn’t work that way. And I didn’t have time to re-educate him.”

It was one of those things that sounds perfectly plausible if you say it fast enough. A fine theory — and I didn’t like it. “Same problem with Fitz and Poulson?” I asked casually.

His eyes narrowed just a bit, and for a moment the real Mottling spoke. “I keep men around me who work with me, Dean, not against me.” The real Mottling was a most impressive organism. Cold, direct, tough, and ruthless. A deity who would countenance no atheism. Then the mask was back, and he was again, a big, shambling, tweedy guy, mild and amiable, pipe smoker, bird dog fancier.

“I understand you’ve made yourself quite a record, Mr. Mottling.”

He shrugged. “A lot of luck. I’ve managed to go into companies where they’ve been too close to some very obvious problems. Too close to them to be objective about them. And pointing out the obvious is no indication of genius.”

“Then we had an obvious problem too?”

“Very. Your grandfather set up certain organizational matters in accordance with his own theories of management. Your father left those unchanged and added more superstructure of his own. Then you and your brother glued on some more. As a result there were no clear-cut lines of responsibility and authority. The place was running by ear, or by tradition, I suppose you could say.”

It was a callous dismissal of everything my father had done, of the way he had held the firm together during the dark days when competitors were going into receivership with monotonous regularity. I felt annoyance and Niki made a half-gesture that caught my eye. I glanced at her and saw on her face a reflection of my own distaste for that approach. I felt close to her in that moment, then wondered if her annoyance was based on her desire to have Mottling make the very best of impressions on me. That made me feel cool toward her again, cool and wondering what her stake was — in Mottling.

“It may have been running by ear, as you say, but running as a successful and profitable enterprise,” I said. “You are aware of that.”

He smiled, patronizing me. “Of course. We can’t afford to continue on that basis. I’ve been clearing out the dead wood, redefining lines of responsibility and authority, setting up standard production controls and ratios of accomplishment. All under your brother, of course. Now, whether I follow through with the program is up to you. From what I’ve seen, you did an adequate job when you were here. Within, of course, the handicaps under which you had to work. I believe you should let me show you what I’ve done so far. Then you will have the facts. Facts which will be important to you in any decision you may make.”

It was very direct, a broadside with heavy weapons, yet it had gotten him neatly over the hurdle. Niki leaned back, her expression bland and interested. I sensed relief in her. A proprietary relief. It was possible she had succumbed to a virus which is rare among beautiful women — the power drive in an industrial sense. Obviously she could not go down there and head up the company. But if she had a capable alter ego, under full control — a man like Mottling — that would mean that her protestations of lack of knowledge about the firm and the work and the legal angles were a smoke screen to keep me from guessing her true purpose. If Mottling could be controlled, by the use of her obvious feminine weapons — and Ken had become relatively immune to them...

“Why did Ken bring you in here in the first place?” I demanded, trying to match his directness.

“He saw the expansion coming, saw how space age contracts would grow. And he sensed the job would outgrow him. He had given up trying to get you back here. He had to find someone. I was recommended to him. I happened to be relatively free. He gave me almost complete authority. It was a sound management decision on his part.”

“And I should do the same, I suppose?”

He grinned, spread his big hands in a quick gesture. “I didn’t say that. I said you should check the facts.”

The man was likable. “That seems fair enough. One thing bothers me, though. If you’re doing so well, why should you have so much opposition from one group of shareholders?”

Mottling frowned and loaded a pipe, slowly and carefully. “It’s a bit difficult to explain, Mr. Dean. In spite of the size of Dean Products, it has always had the flavor of a local concern. Local ownership. Local talent. And, forgive me, the usual low-pressure operation that invariably accrues from such background. I’ve been ruthless. I am an outsider. I keep the pressure on. Their response is emotional. To them I am a foreigner coming in here, pushing nice people around. Mr. Karch, who has been instrumental in organizing the minority stockholders, and getting the backing of your uncle with his block of stock, is annoyed because I fired his son, who was incompetent. Granby, I am afraid, is a symbol of the comfortable past. I’m a symbol of the uncomfortable future. The human animal resents change.”

He was so sweetly reasonable. He made it all fall into place. Then he proved his timing was excellent. He glanced at his watch. “I’m afraid I’ve got to go back to the office.”

“Oh, Stanley!” Niki said.

“Can’t be helped, Niki. Very nice to have seen you, Mr. Dean. And thanks for the chance of telling you, a little bluntly I’m afraid, exactly how I feel about the job. Can I expect to see you in the morning?”

“I’ll probably be over. I don’t want to get in your way. I’ll just poke around, if that’s all right with you.”

“I think that would be the best way. I don’t want you to get the impression that I want to edit the trip in any sense. I don’t believe you’d let me do that anyway.”

We shook hands and Niki walked him to the door. I heard the low murmur of their voices in the hallway. They were both delightfully plausible. I wondered if they were congratulating each other on how well Gevan Dean had been handled. I wondered if they were setting a time and place for their next assignation. There was an undercurrent of closeness between them, of uniformity of viewpoint, as though, somehow, they were members of the same club, knew the grip and the password and the club songs. Maybe between them it was very simple. A big profitable company is a nice thing to pick up and walk off with.

I resented feeling as if I had been an audience of one at a special play put on by competent actors. I resented being steered. I resented liking the guy. I resented being able to look at Niki and still want her. I resented knowing I should leave here, too.

She came back and I heard his car going down the drive. “Do you like him, Gevan?”

“Very impressive.”

“And terribly nice. He’s let down his hair with me. He told me that he hates to hurt people, but he had learned that it has to be done to get a job done.”

“Protesting too much, wasn’t he?”

“Please don’t be nasty, Gevan. And when you go to the plant, please try to understand his position. You’ll need a special pass to get into C Building. From Colonel Dolson. And I’m positive that if you give the Colonel a chance he will speak very highly of Stanley.”

“What goes on in C Building?”

“Oh, it’s some kind of a secret contract. I don’t know what they’re making. I remember Ken saying they had to buy an awful lot of special equipment for that contract, and Colonel Dolson came the day the contract was signed, and a security officer, a Captain Corning, arrived the same week. I guess there’s a big military staff there now.”

“Niki, who recommended Mottling to Ken?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea, Gevan.”

I frowned down at my drink. “I’d like to know.”

Her voice changed. “Let’s not talk about the plant and Mottling and all that.”

“Put some violins on the sound track, and we can talk about us.”

She sat beside me. She leaned far forward, the black hair spilling to one side. I saw the tiny dark V of soft hair at the nape of her neck, the shift of muscle under the creamy skin of her shoulder as she crooked her arm, resting her forehead on her forearm. She was close to me. I wanted to lay my hand against her smooth back, run my finger tips up to the nape of her neck, feel the warmth of her and the breathing. She was near me, warm, very alive — somehow more immediate than life, and more dramatic. The stillness had changed again. We were back in a soundless world. I saw her faint shudder.

“Tears?” I asked.

She gave an abrupt nod and did not speak. She did not seem real to me. She seemed more like something I used to dream. I put my hand on her shoulder. I felt the starting tremor of her, and that stillness in her as though she had stopped breathing. I remembered all those beach house nights, when I would be alone and think of Ken and her together, and torture myself by envisioning them in all the gaudy forms of love, all her animal torments.

I knew once again that all this breathing aliveness was mine to take. She had married Ken. This was their house. He lay in earth between bronze handles on padded satin. I took my hand away. She stood up in one unbroken movement, in one sleek flex of thighs, turning away from me to go to the mantel, her back to me. I put my empty glass on the coffee table. It made a decisive click in the silence of the room.

I stood up and she turned. Her mouth looked soft, but there was an expression on her face that seemed to hint of conspiracy — as though we had again come closer during this time of silence. I resented it.

“I’ll be running along.”

“But you’ll come back, Gevan.” It was half question and half statement of fact.

“If there’s anything to discuss, Niki.”

She smiled then. A woman-smile, full of conquest. It made me feel young, crass and inexperienced. The advantage had passed to her, and that was something I had not intended should happen.

I walked down the hallway. The maid brought me my hat. I drove down the curving driveway. I slowed and glanced back. She stood in the big window, watching me leave. There was an immobility about her, as though she planned to stand there for a very long time, as though the next time I came up the drive she would be standing in exactly that same place, waiting for me. I wondered if I would have the strength not to come back. Ken married her and was killed, and though it made no sense, I knew I had to hold her emotionally responsible for it, had to keep my awareness of that blame, or there was no power that would keep me from returning. She would wait there for me, and she had made it very clear.

I drove too fast. This was happening the wrong way. It should have happened the way she had told me it might, for them to drift apart and for her to come to me. That would have been simple. Make her pay for the lost years. Make her humiliation complete, and then build from there. But Ken had died and everything was confused. It could never be clear cut now. In death, he sat silently between us, as though I had reached around him to place my hand upon her.