“Needle-thin?” John frowned. “I presented you with a silver-and-coral Charles Horner hatpin on your last birthday. As I recall, it was fairly thick.”
“Sarah Wilds had altered hers, so the pin would pass through clothing and flesh, but not cause the victim to bleed much, if at all. Just a painful prick, and she’d withdraw it while reaching for her victim’s valuables.”
“But the man who died…Harry Holbrooke?”
“Henry. The police assume he was unlucky. The pin went in too deeply, punctured an organ, and caused bleeding and an infection. You must remember…Sarah Wilds was using the same pin over and over. Think of the bacteria it carried.”
John nodded. “Another job well done, my dear. Now, about Marchand’s and perhaps…”
“I accept your invitation upon one condition.”
“And that is?”
“You will pay for your evening from the proceeds of your Carville investigation, and I will pay for mine from my proceeds.”
John, as Sabina had known he would, bristled. “A lady paying her own way on a celebratory evening…unthinkable!”
“You had best think about it, because those are my terms.”
He sighed-a long exhalation-and scowled fiercely. But as she knew he would, he said: “An evening out with you, my dear, is acceptable under any terms or conditions.”
As was an evening out with him.
The Dying Time
Melissa
Autumn leaves skittered along the narrow main street of the small town in California’s gold country. They leaped the high curb, rattled down the board sidewalk, and drifted against the bench where I sat dying.
Was this where it was to end-Murphys, population around 300? A hard, wooden-slatted bench my last resting place in this life? Tricked-up shops and polyester-clad tourists my last sight? What was I doing here, anyway? Traveling aimlessly, as my husband and I had done over the past five years, possessed of more time and money than purposes and enthusiasms.
The pain was growing stronger now; if I had any chance to survive, I had better do something soon. But I felt curiously lethargic and resigned. Even the prospect of a painful death didn’t seem to bother me.
It had been a good life up until this past year. I’d accomplished most of the modest things I’d set out to do, had visited most of the places I wanted to see. Of course there were loose ends, but didn’t everyone leave a few of those? There was the emptiness of the past few years, but what were a few out of many? And then there were the events of September and my growing suspicions about the terrible way Jake Hollis had died…
I didn’t want to think about Jake. That was in the past, over now. All over. As my life soon would be.
Strange. I hadn’t expected to feel such detachment at the end. I seemed as little a part of the dying woman on the bench as the leaves that drifted at her feet. They were dying, too, torn by the wind from the trees that had sustained them through the sudden rainstorms of spring, the blistering heat of summer, the first frosts of autumn. Dying like…
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
Slowly I looked up. My husband Ray had returned from the used-book shop with a package under his arm. A handsome man yet, blond and tanned and fit, dressed in a new brown cashmere sweater and cords. Handsome as the day I’d met him at the sorority open house twenty-six years ago. A quarter century of marriage, so long that I could scarcely remember a time when he wasn’t there. Always there, yet so often absent even when physically present.
I should have sensed that quality even before we were married. The way his eyes kept moving restlessly as he pretended interest in what I was saying. The way he replied with nods and utterances that were mere reaction to my tone of voice, rather than my words’ content. But I was twenty years old; what did I know of a man for whom the real world was never quite enough? A man who sought elusive fulfillment in the new and strange and different, as if he might then enter another dimension that would measure up to his expectations.
Nothing had ever measured up. Nothing. Not a stellar career that began with the glimmerings of what the media now called the Information Age and culminated in the sale of the last of three computer software firms he’d founded-a sale unprecedented in financial annals that ensured the security of our children and their heirs for generations to come. The children-Donna and Andrew-certainly hadn’t measured up; he’d given them scant attention, and now they had drifted away. There were the various pursuits, all dangerous-flying, mountain climbing, auto racing-and now all discarded. Even the latest passion, skydiving, was a thing of the past. I would be the last to go, the wife who had become nothing more than a good traveling companion.
The Caribbe an in winter, when rains soaked northern California. Paris in the springtime. Alaskan cruises to escape the heat of summer in the Napa Valley. African photo safaris, visits to Egypt’s pyramids, tours of China and Russia. Hawaii at the holidays when our children and their families failed to return home. We migrated like birds, but insulated from unpleasantness and with fewer surprises.
Until this past month.
“Melissa, I asked you, what’s the matter?” Feigned concern turned the fine lines at his eyes’ corners to furrows. With an effort I said: “I’m not feeling well.”
“I told you you shouldn’t have made that chicken pasta for lunch. It’s a warm day, and heavy food and wine…”
I nodded wearily. It wasn’t the pasta or the wine, but there was no point in arguing. The only point was in calling for help, trying to save myself. And I still couldn’t seem to care. I was dying, and Ray had poisoned me.
Ray
Melissa didn’t want to leave the bench. “It’s already too late, isn’t it?” she said dully.
“Too late for what?”
“Oh, God, Ray, I can die here as well as anywhere else. It’s peaceful here…”
“Die? Don’t be silly, you’re not going to die.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, grimacing, and wouldn’t say another word.
I was tempted to let her sit there with her stomachache and suffer. She could be exasperating sometimes, when she was in one of her moods. She tended to exaggerate and overdramatize situations even at her best, and, whenever she was hurt or upset or angry, she retreated so deeply inside herself that no matter what I did or how hard I tried, I couldn’t reach her.
Not that I’d ever been able to get to the core of her, really, except in small ways and for short glimpses. There was just no common ground for us. I live in the real world; I don’t believe in anything I can’t touch or see or smell. I have strong appetites-sex, food, danger. I take life in both hands and squeeze hard. Melissa is just the opposite. She’s a romantic, a sentimentalist; she lives in a fantasy world of dreams and ideals, searching for comforts and fulfillments that I can’t give her, that nobody can, because even she doesn’t understand exactly what it is she wants out of life. “Little girl lost” is an apt description of her. Dorothy wandering around in some fantastic Oz of her own devising, where everything and everybody is strange and bewildering.
That lost quality was part of what attracted me to her in the beginning. It’s very appealing in a beautiful young woman; it makes her more desirable, the chase and catch more exhilarating. Chase and catch weren’t enough for me in Melissa’s case, though. Before we slept together the first time, I knew I was in love with her. But how can you keep on loving someone you can touch only part of the time, like a ghost who drifts in and out of your life and bed, substantial for a while and then little more than vapor? I don’t deal well with frustration or failure, yet that’s what Melissa had come to represent.