Shadow Woman

21

Carey drove up to the gate of the impound lot and parked. Susan stepped to the gate and rang the bell. Carey could hear the old-fashioned jangling noise a hundred feet away in the little shack in the center of the lot, and that meant trouble. There were no lights on in the windows. He stepped to the gate and stood beside her feeling useless.

Then he walked along the fence and around the corner. There was a small sign that said, LOT HOURS 6:00 A.M. TO 10:00 P.M. He walked back to Susan and frowned apologetically. “It’s closed until six in the morning.”

“No.” She seemed to see herself from outside. She was standing in a dark, desolate part of the city in the middle of the night, wearing three-inch heels and a strapless evening gown. Slowly, the beautiful smile reappeared. She let her arms come out from her sides in a “look at me” gesture.

He said, “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

They got into his car and he backed out of the drive. “You can’t really do that,” she said. “It’s all the way out in Orchard Park. If you could just drop me off at a hotel near here, you can go home and get some sleep.”

“Why would you stay in a hotel?” asked Carey. “It’s ridiculous.” Why was it that people who didn’t want to be any trouble always ended up being plenty?

“It’s now after midnight. If you drive me all the way to my apartment, it’ll be two before I’m asleep, and probably three before you are. So I’d get three hours’ sleep, call a cab, and for eighty dollars or so, he’d drive me to the other end of the county to get my car. That’s if I could even get a cab in Orchard Park at five in the morning. But if I stay here, I can be on the spot when the lot opens and drive myself home.”

“Here’s the problem with that. Look around you—factories, warehouses, and an impound lot. It isn’t very scenic in the daytime, so there’s a shortage of good hotels around here. By ‘good’ I don’t mean famous, I mean safe.”

“Oh,” she said.

“On the other hand, I happen to have a perfectly good house about twenty minutes away, with six spare bedrooms, five bathrooms, and clean towels.” He held his breath, hoping she would have a better idea.

“I hate to put you to that kind of trouble.”

That meant “yes.” He had no choice but to push the offer as graciously as he could manage at this hour, and make it sound easy. “I have to be at the hospital by seven, and I can take you to get your car on the way.” He glanced at her. “I might even be able to scare up some clothes for you that won’t look strange at dawn—like the bedraggled party-goer at the end of an Italian movie. Jane’s about your size.”

She looked at him with what seemed to be curiosity. “You would do that?”

“Sure.” What choice did he have?

“Won’t your—won’t Jane feel … uncomfortable?”

“What for?” he said too quickly. He had been concentrating on his own discomfort, so he had not yet thought about what Jane would feel. He cautiously considered the subject. He had a sudden vision of Jane’s eyes resting on Susan, taking an inventory—the long, golden hair, the little wisps on the nape of the long, delicate neck where they had escaped from the place where they had been tied, the impossibly smooth ivory skin—then focusing on Carey. But Jane’s look would be completely unjustified.

What he was doing was a simple act of kindness—no, it was even more innocent: an obligatory refusal to be unkind. He imagined Jane hearing his thoughts, and the gaze turned ironic. No, he thought. That wasn’t the way Jane would react at all—unless she was just teasing him. He was being irrational and unfair to her. She would never give him that look just because the person he helped happened to be female.

Then he admitted to himself that his deepest motive for taking her home with him had been provided by the needle on his gas gauge. He hadn’t insisted on driving her to her place, where she belonged, because he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to find an open gas station at this hour on the long, unfamiliar drive to Orchard Park. He might run out of gas, and then they’d both be stranded.

He realized he was taking too much time inside his own head. “If she were here, she would be the one asking you to stay. She’s always doing things like this.” It sounded true to him, as far as it went. He couldn’t quite get himself to feel certain that Jane would invite a woman who looked like Susan to stay in the house while she wasn’t there.

She looked at him closely. “I’d feel a lot better about it if I heard her say it. I’d hate to get you in trouble.”

He smiled and shook his head. “I’m not going to call her in the middle of the night to wake her up and ask her permission, no. But I’ll mention it the next time I talk to her.” He drove onto the boulevard and accelerated. “Of course, the first few times you meet her, you’ll have to get used to my calling you ‘Sister Mary Boniface.’ ”

She laughed the melodious, liquid laugh again. “Oh, well. I guess I’d rather just be your secret.”

Carey was still contemplating those words as he pulled into his driveway. He idled near the front door, where he usually parked in the summer, then found himself touching the gas pedal again to let the car glide the rest of the way up the long driveway before he stopped again at the old carriage house, out of sight of the street. There was no sense piquing the neighbors’ curiosity, he thought. The fact that what he was doing was innocent didn’t make it a worse story.

He opened Susan’s door, led the way to the back entry, unlocked the house, and let her enter first. He reached over her shoulder to flip the light switch just as she stopped to keep from stepping into a dark, unfamiliar room. It would have been much better if they had collided hard, but instead his body met hers softly. “Oops,” he said. “Excuse me.”

She half-turned to give him an utterly unreadable look, then stepped into the kitchen, looking around her. “Great kitchen,” she said. “Do you entertain a lot?”

“No,” he said. “At least I don’t think we do. Jane might let me know I’m wrong at any time. It’s big because that’s the way they were in the old days. Everybody hung around the kitchen because it was warm.”

She said, “Late eighteenth century?”

“The structure might be that old. Of course, it’s been remodeled.”

“When?”

“Beats me. If contractors worked the way they do now, they probably started in 1850 and finished in 1950.”

He flipped a second light switch up as he went, but when he reached the doorway into the dining room, he paused to let her get a head start. She lingered.

He detected that she was looking toward the cabinets on the wall. He said, “Can I offer you a drink?”

She pretended to decide, then smiled. “Sure. It’s a cinch I’m not driving.”

“I don’t have a lot here, so we’ll have to rough it. Let’s see. Malt scotch. McCallan. Terrific stuff. Makes you want to strap on your claymore and march against the Duke of Cumberland. Vodka. It’s Stolichnaya, but I’ve run my Geiger counter over it to be sure it was made before the Chernobyl reactor went. Gin, of course. There’s also some vermouth if you’re good at making martinis. I’ve seen every James Bond movie, and mine still taste like poison. The usual mixers. Cognac. Wine and champagne in the refrigerator.”

“Did you say champagne?”

“I think I did.” He opened the refrigerator and found it. He set it on the counter and lingered over removing the foil and the wire. He would have to remember to buy another bottle. Jane would remember putting it in the refrigerator, and the missing champagne was not the best way to lead into telling her there had been a guest. He removed the cork, plucked two tulip glasses from the cupboard, and filled them.

The sound of the telephone was jarring. He snatched the receiver off the hook on the wall. “Hello?”

The operator said, “Will you accept a collect call from Jane?”

“Yes I will,” he said.

“Hi, Doc.” It was Jane.

“Hi. I was hoping you’d call.” He looked at Susan as he said it, and she tactfully strolled off toward the dining room, then suddenly turned around and mouthed the word, “Bathroom?”

He pointed through the living room at the far hallway, and she walked in that direction. He felt relieved. “Where are you?”

Her voice was apologetic. “You know I can’t say.”

“That isn’t what I wanted to know anyway,” he said. “I should have said ‘How.’ How are you?”

“Tired of missing you. Tired of … all this.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear. When are you coming home?”

He heard her sigh. “I just don’t know. I wish it were now. But I really don’t want to have to do this again. And I really don’t want to see this guy’s picture in a newspaper.”

“Or yours, either.”

“You know why I’m doing this,” she said. “Just put yourself in my place.”

He craned his neck to look out the kitchen doorway and through the dining room. Susan wasn’t visible. “Just put yourself in mine.”

Her voice sounded worried, pleading almost. “Please, Carey. This is an aberration. It’s the last time, a job that I thought was finished, and it wasn’t. As soon as I’ve got him tucked away, I’m done. We’ll start over again, from the beginning.”

He was silent for a long time. “All right,” he said. “One last fling.”

“See?” she said. “I knew I could get around you if I batted my eyelashes loud enough.”

He knew it had been meant to be funny, an ironic comment on men and women that they were both supposed to laugh at, but he snorted mirthlessly. He tried to think of words that would take his mind off the worry and the emptiness he felt. He stared at the kitchen floor. “Well, I’m exhausted,” he said. “Tonight was the benefit for the children’s wing.”

She gasped, and he began to wish he had not mentioned it. “It was?” Then she said, “At least I missed that. What a relief.” He knew he was supposed to laugh at that too, and he was sure he would have, if she were standing here in the kitchen, where he knew she was safe.

“Yep,” he said. “You lucked out again.”

“Did Marian Fleming ask about me?”

“Of course,” he said. “So did a lot of other people. I told them you were in Morocco taking a belly-dancing course.”

“Oh, no. I used that excuse last time. Now I’ll have to do penance with committee work for the next thirty years.”

“Maybe not,” he said cheerfully. “But if you don’t know how to belly dance, you’re going to have to fake a hip injury.”

Jane said, “I’ll work on it.” She said quietly, “I’d better go.”

He said, “Do you have to?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Just let me know if you need anything.” He knew he had said it that way out of self-pity. She had never needed anything from him, and he was positive that she would never have asked if she had.

“I love you,” she said.

“Me too.” He hung up the telephone and walked to the counter. He saw the champagne glass and it reminded him that he had a guest. He picked up the champagne and walked toward the living room, but she hadn’t reappeared. He set the champagne bottle on the mantel and stared into the fireplace.

In the den off the bathroom, Linda heard the click and dialed the operator. “Can I have the time and charges on that call, please?”

The operator said, “Two minutes and seventeen seconds, billed at three minutes. That’s four dollars and eighty-eight cents.”

“For three minutes? That can’t be right.”

“There’s a two ninety-five surcharge for an operator-assisted collect call, ma’am.”

“Okay, but it wasn’t international or something. What are the night rates from Billings?”

“That might be your mistake. The call wasn’t from Billings.”

“That might be your mistake. She thinks she’s in Billings, and I’d bet on her. How could she be wrong about that?”

“It was Salmon Prairie, Montana. It’s the same area code, but it’s a different calling zone, and the pay phone is owned by another carrier.”

“Oh, I see,” said Linda. “My mistake after all. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” The voice was imperturbable, but chilly.

Linda hung up and hurried down the hallway into the living room. She found Carey sitting on the couch looking at a magazine. He tossed it onto the coffee table. “Sorry. That was my wife.”

“You didn’t tell her, did you?”

“Tell her what?”

“About me. Sister Mary Boniface.”

It caught him by surprise. “Oops. You’re right. Forgot. Well, I’ll have to tell her tomorrow.” He had been wrenched from a sad contemplation of how close Jane had sounded, and how far away she was. Now he felt reluctant to let this stranger see that he was annoyed at himself for forgetting to tell Jane about her. He hated it when Jane called from a pay phone. It was impossible for a person to remember everything he had to say in a couple of minutes.

“You aren’t going to tell her,” said Susan. The smile was mysterious and amused now.

He was startled, and it irritated him. “Why do you say that?”

“Because this was the time to tell her, and now you won’t be able to, because it will look as though you were hiding me.” The smile had a trace of sympathy now, the full lips pursed. Then there was mischief in the eyes. “If you try to tell her tomorrow, she’ll think that you didn’t tell her now because you were hoping to get lucky tonight.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “She’s not that way at all.”

“That’s how women think,” she said. “You shouldn’t have decided to take one on full-time if you don’t know how they work.”

He suspected that she would have seemed bright and witty at about eight o’clock, but right now, he was not in the mood to be the butt of any more feminine teasing. “Well, I’d better show you where your room is. It’s getting late.”

She stood, but she took her glass with her and sipped from it as she headed for the stairs. “Just what I was thinking.”

He led the way up the stairs and turned right to take her down the hallway. “This is the best of the guest rooms,” he said. He flipped the light on and walked her into the room.

She sat on the bed, bounced a little, looked at the walls, the curtains over the big window. “It’s very pretty.”

He pointed to the door on the side wall. “Your bathroom is right there. Everything you need should be in the drawers—clean towels, shampoo, soap, even toothbrushes.”

Susan glanced in that direction with little interest. She set her champagne glass on the nightstand, stood up, turned her back on him, and bent her neck forward. “Unzip me.”

Carey stepped forward. He tried to lift her long hair out of the way without touching her neck, and carefully grasped the zipper without touching her back. He tugged the zipper down eight inches, to where he judged she could reach it, and stepped back. “There. If there’s anything you can’t find, I’ll be in the room at the other end of the hall. Good night.”

He began his retreat, but she said, “Not so fast.” He stopped and turned. She was holding her hair up off her neck. “What do you think I am—a contortionist? I can’t reach that.”

“Sorry.” He stepped forward, stopped three feet from her, reached out, and pulled the zipper down a few more inches. There was an instant—perhaps two seconds—when several things seemed to happen at once. She was still holding her hair up when she turned a little to say over her shoulder, “That’s more like it.” But her slight turn inside the dress seemed to spread the two unzipped sides of it apart. There was a tantalizing view of the white skin of the lower part of her back, where it softened and curved inward toward her hips. But worse, the front of the dress had nothing to hold it up. She quickly released her hair and hugged the dress to cover herself, but not before Carey had been presented with a glimpse of her left breast in profile.

“Good night,” Carey muttered. As he backed quickly out the door and closed it, the last thing he saw was Susan Haynes facing him, holding the front of her dress up, her big green eyes looking into his with that knowing, amused stare. When he reached his own room at the end of the hall, he closed the door and leaned against it for a moment. The stare was still with him. “Taking her to a hotel wouldn’t have been such a bad idea,” he muttered. He locked his bedroom door, then undressed and got into bed. He lay in the dark with his eyes closed, but what he had seen came back to him again and again. “That,” he thought, “is what the end of a marriage looks like.”

At three o’clock, he awoke, lying on the bed on his back. He imagined for a moment that he could feel Jane’s soft, silky hair on his arm. He turned to touch her, then remembered. He lay for a moment feeling sad and empty, and then he realized he could hear a voice. Someone was talking.

Carey sat up quickly and looked around him, but he saw nothing. He switched on the lamp beside the bed and squinted against the searing light to see the door. It was still closed, and the room was empty. It must have been a dream. As he reached for the lamp, he heard the voice again. It had to be Susan Haynes. It didn’t seem possible that there could be somebody here with her. He got to his feet and walked into the hallway. As he reached the second-floor landing, he followed her voice and looked over the railing. She was facing away, sitting on the couch near the fireplace. The sight of her obliterated the lingering clouds of sleep. She appeared to be wearing only a bedsheet, her legs folded under her and her purse beside her. She turned to look up and the green eyes focused on him, and then she hung up the telephone.

She put a plastic card back into her purse, fastened the white sheet under her arm, and stood up. As he looked at her from a distance like this, the thought that overwhelmed all others was her perfection—the long shiny hair, the smooth, white shoulders and arms, the graceful veiled curve of hip and thigh. When she turned toward him, he saw she was aware that he had been staring at her intently. In order to look up at him she tossed her hair in a gesture that should not have been intriguing because it was self-conscious and calculated, but it was mesmerizing because she was posing for him, trying to look more beautiful. “I was just calling my machine in San Francisco. I didn’t want to use the phone upstairs and wake you up. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I just wondered—”

“Don’t worry, though. I used a credit card, so it won’t be printed on your phone bill.”

He felt a sick chill. It had not occurred to him before that he had somehow become a man who was in the business of hiding evidence from his wife: first the champagne, and now the telephone bill.

Susan seemed to forget about him for a moment. She hitched her shoulder uncomfortably, then did a poor job of retucking the bedsheet she was using as a sarong. She frowned, unwrapped a little of it, and tried again. It was as though she had unaccountably forgotten she was not alone. But then she abruptly looked up into his eyes, pretended to follow his line of sight and be surprised to find her own eyes looking down at the translucent sheet that covered her body. As she tucked the sheet under her arm she looked up again with the knowing, amused expression.

“Something else on your mind?” The smile was still on her face as she moved up the stairs toward him. She walked so lightly that her feet seemed not to touch, as though she were floating.

He shook his head, as much to clear it as to communicate with her. “No,” he said, already backing away. “No. I was afraid it was a burglar or something. But it was just you. See you in the morning.” As he walked back to his room and closed his door, he wondered why it was that virtue had to be so clumsy and inept.