The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Fifteen

His browser was Firefox, and it had a pull-down menu called History. He selected Clear Recent History, and it wanted him to say for how long. One hour? Two hours? It was getting on for seven o’clock, and he wasn’t sure when he’d started. Last Hour. Last Two Hours. Last Four Hours. Today. Everything.

Probably two hours, he thought, but he selected Last Four Hours and wiped away that much of the recent past.

Then he went and got that beer from the fridge and took it out onto the dock.

He thought about Roberta Ellison, with her round belly and her swelling tits, and about the conversation she’d inspired.

“You should take her from behind, with both of you lying on your sides, and you’ve got your arms around her so you can put your hands on her belly...”

Got him hard, talking like that, but it was very different from the phone sex with Barb Hamill. That had been stimulating because stimulation was its whole purpose, its sole reason for being. Their words had been selected for erotic effect, to get them going and get them off, and it had worked for Barb and would have worked for him if his body hadn’t chosen to hold itself back.

Saving the money shot for Lisa.

He’d have to tell Lisa about Barb. He’d mentioned her — that there was a married woman he was seeing casually, but he’d have to tell her about the sex, the phone sex and the bedroom sex.

Would he keep seeing Barb? He’d met the love of his life, he’d finally encountered Fantasy Girl and had found with her something that went way beyond his fantasies, so why would he want to go on seeing Barb?

Because she was hot, he thought. Because it was a joy to pose her on her knees and moisten himself in one of her openings so he could slip into the other one, fucking her gorgeous heart-shaped ass and making her like it.

He wished she would call. It wasn’t going to happen, she only called during the daytime, but he wished she’d call right now and come over right now so he could fuck her.

And the best part would be later, when he told Lisa about it.

Kinky, he thought, but it wasn’t just kinky. It was more than kinky. It was... well, he didn’t know what it was, exactly.

He found himself thinking, for the first time in years, of Phyllis Arenbeck. She was a tiny brown-haired creature, built like a boy, and married to Red Arenbeck, a uniformed cop built like a tight end. He had in fact played that position at Long Island University, and he’d been big enough for the NFL, but nowhere near good enough. He was bigger as a cop than he’d been as a football player, packing fat on top of muscle, and there was a Mutt and Jeff aspect to the Arenbecks as a couple.

He knew Red from the job, but not well, and he’d met Phyllis a couple of times at parties. Then there was an engagement party for a mutual acquaintance at somebody’s house in Ridgewood, and he was fixing himself a drink he didn’t particularly need when Phyllis joined him.

She said, “Cops. You wouldn’t believe how many of ’em hit on me in the past what, two hours?”

“I’d believe it.”

“Oh yeah? Come on, I’m nothing special. I’m a skinny little thing with a flat chest.”

“All the same,” he said, “you’re hot.”

“You didn’t hit on me.”

“I thought about it,” he said. He hadn’t, but it was something to say, and he’d no sooner said it than he felt her hand on his crotch, copping a quick feel.

“Okay,” she said softly, letting go of him and moving to the side. “The guest bathroom’s off the kitchen. Lock the door and wait.”

She kept him waiting just long enough to suspect she’d probably thought better of it, and then there was a quiet knock on the door. “It’s me,” she said, and he opened the door. She slipped in, turned the lock, and got up on her tiptoes for a kiss. She’d been drinking something sweet and her mouth tasted of it, and when he put his tongue in her mouth she sucked on it, and he thought, Jesus, is this happening? In a fucking bathroom?

Then her hand was on his crotch, only this time she was lowering his zipper and taking what she wanted.

She said, “Oh, good. You’re circumcised.”

“I didn’t know you were Jewish.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m just particular about what I put in my mouth.”

Phyllis, skinny little thing, no tits, no ass, and none of that mattered.

“Choke me, will you? Come on, how tricky is that? Use both hands, put ’em around my throat, and choke me a little. Not too hard. Oh, that’s nice. A little harder, just a little bit. Oh, yeah.”

Weird, that part. He’d have to tell Lisa, wondered what she would make of it.

He finished the beer, thought about getting another, found it easier to stay where he was, looking out at the water. Found it too easy to stay there, he knew, and he couldn’t stay there much longer, because with the sun down the bugs would be coming around soon. So many of the little bastards with nothing better to do than fly around looking for somebody to bite.

Time to shut off the flow of memories. Time to get off his ass and do something.

George and Lisa Otterbein lived in a three-story house built of quarried stone and located exactly a mile and a half north of the Belle Vista town line. The house was at the top of a rise, a feature less common in Florida than elsewhere, and a white rail fence girdled the eight-acre property. The house could have been plucked from one of those sleepy villages along the Delaware, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, say, or New Jersey’s Hunterdon County. And the rail fence put you in mind of horse farms in Kentucky, and a mint julep in a frosty glass.

There was a good-sized pond, too, and trees, live oak and sweetgum, dripping with Spanish moss.

He didn’t stop, but slowed down as he drove past the place. Place? The Otterbein Estate, that’s what it was, and yes, he was impressed. Who wouldn’t be?

George had lived here with Jo, had raised his kids here, and moved Lisa into the house when he married her. Doak had heard tell of second wives who bridled at the idea of moving into another woman’s house, but he figured it might depend on the house. A three-bedroom cube in Levittown was one thing, a stone mansion was a whole ’nother story.

She must have felt like a queen here. Or a princess, given the age difference. A princess living in a palace, that’s how she would have felt.

Until she didn’t.

A princess in a tower, and instead of letting down her long black hair she’d cut it off and gone back to work. And one night she’d picked out a man with a raffish reputation and asked him to hook her up with a murderer.

And so on.

A hell of a way for a girl to meet her soul mate, her other half. He pointed the Monte Carlo away from Chez Otterbein, drove without paying much attention to the route he was taking. Jesus, the damn fantasy, two lovers sufficiently besotted with each other to walk away from everything they had. Easy for him to spin that yarn, because what did he ever have that it would pain him to walk away from? A low-rent house he never cared about, a low-rent life that was no pleasure to live. And a wife he couldn’t stand — and, it had turned out, who couldn’t stand him, either.

Who could expect a woman like Lisa to walk away from that big pile of stone? Who in his right mind would ask her to head out for the territories in his broken-down Chevy? Never mind that she drove a Lexus. He’d be willing to bet there were at least five other vehicles garaged at the Otterbein estate, and even the riding mower had to be worth more than the piece of shit he was driving.

Go ahead, try to picture her in the house on Osprey Drive. Once, maybe, before George Otterbein, before the stone house, before all the money. If the timing had been different, if their paths had crossed before she ever met the old man, before she got used to a life he’d never be able to afford. Maybe the same chemistry that worked for them now would have been there in that alternate universe, and they could work side by side at the kitchen table. She could keep the books and send out invoices, and he could teach her the handful of skills and street knowledge you needed in his business. Hell, she’d be a natural at undercover work, and she’d enjoy it, learn to make a game of it. Miller & Yarrow, Confidential Investigations...

Yeah, right.

It was hard enough to bring the image into focus, and that was before you reminded yourself it could never have happened because the timing could never have been right. It had taken every bit of his past and every bit of hers to bring them here now at the same time, at what was probably the only moment of their mutual lives when they were ready for each other.

And consider this. If that was what she’d wanted, a love match that partnered her with a guy who had to work for a living, she’d have found it a lot sooner in her hopscotch pilgrimage from Minnesota to Florida.

With her looks, her manner, she’d never have been involuntarily alone. She’d have had men around her all the time. She wouldn’t have had any trouble finding one to marry her.

The one she found was George Otterbein. And he might be twice her age, but that didn’t mean he’d snatched her from the cradle. She’d lived more than a handful of years, a grown woman on her own, before Otterbein came into the picture.

Picture Lisa Yarrow on Osprey Drive?

No, I don’t think so. But what if you flip the negative.

Could you picture Doak Miller leaning back in a recliner on a couple of acres of lawn? With a big stone house behind him, and a pond, and a rail fence?

How would that strike the eye?

Things to do.