“Don’t move,” called Dorie when Pender opened his eyes.
“Why not?” He’d been dozing on a picnic blanket spread out under a wind-sculpted cypress tree at Lovers Point while Dorie painted; now he opened the other eye and saw that she’d moved back another fifteen yards or so and had swung her chair and easel around to face him.
“You’re in the picture now.”
“Wait.” Pender, feeling the breeze on his scalp, assumed his beret must have slipped off. He started to look around for it. Dorie called to him not to move again. “But my hat, I need my-”
“It’s over here.” She was seated behind and slightly to the right of her easel, glancing back and forth between subject and canvas, painting rapidly with her left hand. Even at this time of day, the light was constantly changing; take too long and you find yourself finishing a different painting than the one you’d started. “I had to take it off.”
“What do you mean you ‘had to take it off’?”
“The brown just bled. Into the tree trunk. Behind you,” she called between brushstrokes. “I needed the splash. Of pink. For the composition. Now quit. Fidgeting.”
“I want my hat.”
“Think of it. As a sacrifice. To art.” But much as she hated to interrupt her work, Dorie could sense from the growing tension in the reclining figure that a little TLC oil was going to have to be applied to the subject. She put down her brush and crossed the lush green lawn, knelt on the edge of the blanket. Pender, lying on his left side, his right arm suspended in a clean sling (a trapezoidal patch of white in the painting; another reason why she needed the whitish-pink of the scalp for balance), started to sit up. She touched his shoulder lightly. “Pen, please-this is important to me.” Pen was her own private nickname for him; somehow, he just didn’t feel like an Ed to her. “It’s been years since I last tried putting a human figure into one of my paintings.”
“The mask thing?”
She nodded. “The faces-I couldn’t finish a face and I couldn’t leave one blank.”
“Well, you picked a hell of a one to start with.”
“It’s only this big.” She held her thumb and forefinger about a quarter of an inch apart. “Please, Pen? I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”
And after a brief, whispered lovers’ conference, during which they discussed just how she might make it up to him, Dorie returned triumphantly to her easel and Pender to his nap. When she’d finished, she packed up her gear, crossed the green again, slipped his beret over his scarred scalp, and lay down next to him.
“When do you have to be back in Washington?” Much as she treasured both her independence and her privacy, with Simon still on the loose Dorie wasn’t exactly looking forward to sleeping alone again.
“I have a meeting with my ghostwriter on Friday. I’m supposed to be taping my memoirs for him. Funny little guy named Bellcock-you’d like him. He says he’s cowritten so many books his friends think his first name is As Told To. He loaned me a Dictaphone, told me just start talking, tape is cheap, he’ll sort it out later. Then he said don’t censor myself, he’s heard it all. And I’m thinking, my friend, you have no idea.” Pender shook his head sharply, as if to clear it of a quarter century of serial killers-the rippers, ghouls, collectors, and necrophiles that comprised his all.
“So Thursday?” asked Dorie, nestling close against him.
“At the latest. Abruzzi could probably use a helping hand, too.” He slipped his good arm under her head for a pillow, and they lay together listening to the raucous seagulls, the barking seals, the waves breaking gently against the rocks at the tip of the point. “I could sure get used to this, though,” he added after a few minutes.
Oh, do, thought Dorie.
“Say, you want to come with?” Pender asked her casually, as if the idea had just occurred to him. He’d been thinking about it for a while, though-with Childs still at large, he wasn’t real thrilled about the prospect of leaving Dorie alone.
“You mean, like, come home with you? To Washington?”
“Maryland, actually. Just for a little while-at least until Childs is behind bars.”
“You don’t think-”
Pender quickly backtracked. “No, no. Of course not-there’s no reason to think he’d be coming back for you. He’s not that stupid. I just thought you might enjoy a little vacation. I could show you around, you could do some painting.”
“No can do.” Dorie was tempted-but there was no sense getting all worked up over an impossibility.
“Why not?”
“Aviophobia.”
“What’s that?”
“Fear of flying.”
“Maybe it’s time to deal with it.”
Dorie sat up, annoyed. “What are you, my shrink now?”
“No,” replied Pender. “But I know enough about fear to know that it makes a useful servant and a lousy master.”
“Oh, swell,” muttered Dorie. “First he’s a shrink, now he’s Yoda.”
“Think it over, scout. Do me a favor, just think it over. I’ll be there holding your hand every inch of the way.”
“It’s not just the fear of flying,” Dorie temporized-phobics were good at temporizing. “I have too much work to do here-I have to get another half-dozen paintings done in time for my show.”
“Why, that’s perfect, then. The trees around Tinsman’s Lock are a knockout this time of year. Box elder, white ash, sugar maple, sycamore, hickory, elm-I bet you’d have to buy a whole new box of crayons.”
“Hey, Pender.”
“What?”
“Give it a break, would you?”
“You bet,” said Pender, making a mental note to pick up a ticket for Dorie when he called for reservations. He had a first-class ticket to turn in-it would more than cover two coach fares.