Baby, Would I Lie?

29

“What’s going to happen to Binx?” Sara asked.

Jack looked at her in surprise. “Binx? Why should anything happen to Binx?”

It was Saturday night and Sara and Jack were having dinner at the Candlestick Inn, where she’d been Thursday with Binx, so that hapless fellow had been intruding into her thoughts the entire meal. She said, “Well, he’s the one we’re going to exposé, isn’t he? Him and his team?”

Jack snapped a bread stick as though it were Binx’s neck. “So?”

“So what if they fire him?”

“They fire everybody,” Jack said. “Sooner or later, they fire everybody.”

“I know, I know,” Sara said, tired of that excuse, “but when they fire everybody else, I’m not responsible.”

Jack put down the halves of his bread stick. “You’re responsible for Binx Radwell? Responsible for his life? Responsible for his decisions?”

“No, of course not,” Sara said, frustrated and helpless. It didn’t help to be told her guilt feelings were irrational. All guilt feelings are irrational, in that with sufficient sophistry all actual guilt can be reasoned away, but so what? Sara didn’t want to bury her sense of shame toward Binx; she wanted to wallow in it, and she wanted Jack to wallow in it, too, and the bastard just wouldn’t cooperate. “The only thing is,” she said, still hoping to explain herself somehow, break through his leather skin somehow, make him feel had somehow, “we all used to be friends, in the old days, Binx and us.”

“That’s the way you remember it, eh?” Jack smiled at her. “That’s nice.”

“All right, we had friendly competition,” Sara said, and Jack laughed out loud, and Sara hated him, but had to grin and duck her head and say, “Oh, all right.”

She pretended to eat for a couple of minutes, aware of Jack’s eyes on her but determined to say not another word on that or any other subject, and then Jack said, “Two things.”

She looked up at him, expectant. Two things was two things more than she’d anticipated. “Yes?”

“The story is two stories,” Jack told her. “I was on the phone with Hiram again this afternoon, and we’ve agreed on that. The Weekly Galaxy is one story and the Ray Jones murder trial is a different story.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means I’m going to do the Weekly Galaxy story,” Jack said, “so if any rain falls out of that cloud onto Binx’s head, it’s my fault and not yours, okay?”

“That helps,” she admitted. “Not a lot, but some.”

“So that means,” Jack said, “you’re doing the Ray Jones trial story as the Ray Jones trial story — country celebrity on trial in a country setting.”

“Good,” she said. “I can do that, no problem.”

“Just go a little light on the salt-of-the-earth stuff, okay?”

“I won’t mention gingham once,” she promised.

“Glad to hear it.”

“You said two things,” she reminded him. “Was that both of them?”

“No. The other thing, I didn’t know when exactly to tell you.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Not that bad,” he said, and grinned at her. “We’re still the dynamic duo.”

“The unholy two.”

“Now and forever. However, Hiram says I gotta go back.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

The feeling that came over Sara now was much more real and much harder to take than her crocodile guilt over Binx Radwell. She’d enjoyed having Jack around, enjoyed sharing with him her reactions to this weird place, enjoyed sleeping with him. “What’s the hurry?” she asked.

“Well, it isn’t exactly a hurry,” he said. “I’ve been here almost a week as it is, and Hiram’s wanted me back since Wednesday. I stalled it as long as I could, but now I gotta go. I said to him, ‘Why don’t I stay till the end of the trial?’ and he said, ‘We have somebody covering the trial.’ ”

“Me.”

“That’s who he had in mind, all right.”

“I’ll miss you,” she said.

His face was really very attractive, in those rare moments when he permitted an honest expression to cross it. “We’ll miss one another,” he said with a rueful smile. “But then we’ll be together again.”

“I’ll hurry home.”

“You do that. The instant the trial’s over.”

“In the meantime,” she said, pointing at his wineglass, “don’t drink too much of that stuff. I’ll want you at your best tonight, for the farewell scene.”