"Starr Bright" watched Billy Ray Cobb die. Amid a pool of blood dark as oil staining the carpet in the dim-flickering pink-fluorescent glow from the window.
"Now you see! Now you see! All of you!"
In the light of early morning, not yet dawn, an eerie calm prevailed. It was the silence of the western desert, the vast western sky. Below, in the courtyard of the Paradise Motel, the kidney-shaped swimming pool was deserted of course, smaller than it had appeared the previous evening. And there was the air-mattress floating at the deep end, not striped like the American flag as "Starr Bright" had believed but only red and blue-inflated plastic, a bit worn. A toy for adults, something sad about it. Almost imperceptibly it floated atop the rippleless turquoise water that was like a skin stretched over something living, invisible, inviolable, unknowable.
It was not yet 6:00 A.M. In no haste, "Starr Bright" left room 22 of the motel, quietly crossed the empty courtyard to the parking lot at the rear; unlocked the steel-gray Infiniti sedan with the rental license plates; placed her scarred Gucci case on the passenger's seat, and her midnight-blue sequined purse atop the case. An observer, had there been one, would have noted a tall, poised, coolly attractive blond woman in white linen trousers, a pale blue silk shirt, flat-heeled shoes. Her ashy-blond hair, still damp from the shower, was brushed back neatly from her face. Her eyes were hidden behind tinted glasses so dark they might have been black. Her flawless cosmetic mask betrayed no sign of alarm, nor even of especial concern. As if I'd been here before. In His sign. And all yet to come, in His terrible mercy.
In the eastern sky, beyond the imitation-Spanish facade of a neighboring Holiday Inn, the morning sun was emerging out of a pearl-opalescent darkness of massed clouds. A fiery all-seeing eye. Beneath its scrutiny "Starr Bright" drove the unfamiliar car out of the parking lot of the Paradise Motel and turned left on the near-deserted Route 80 as if this had always been the plan, a fate prescribed for her clear and unerring as a road map. She would drive south and east on Route 95 into Vegas where, amid a sea of cars at Caesars Palace, she would abandon the Infiniti. She meant, for as long as she could, to keep that fiery eye before her.
Heartbreak House by SARA PARETSKY
Natasha's hair, as sleek and black as a raven's wing, framed the delicate oval of her face. Raoul thought she had never looked more desirable than now, with her dark, doelike eyes filled with tears, and a longing beyond tears.
"It's no good, darling," she whispered, summoning a valiant smile. "Papa has lost all his money. I must go to India with the Crawfords to mind their children."
"Darling-for you to be a nanny-how utterly absurd. And in that climate. You must not!" His square, manly face suffused with color, betraying the strength of his feeling.
"You haven't even mentioned marriage," Natasha whispered, looking at the bracelets on her slender wrists, wondering if they, too, must be sold, along with Mama's diamonds.
Raoul flushed more deeply. "We're engaged. Even if our families don't know about it. But how can I marry you now, when I have no prospects and your papa cannot give you a dowry. …"
Amy looked up. "Wonderful, Roxanne. Your strongest effort yet. Do Raoul and Natasha get married in the end?"
"No, no." Roxanne took the manuscript back. "They're just the first generation. Natasha marries a planter, not that she can ever give her heart to him, and Raoul dies of blackwater fever in the jungle during the Boer War, with Natasha's name on his writhen lips. It's their grandchildren who finally get together. That's the significance of the last page."
She turned the manuscript over and read aloud to Amy, "Natalie had never met Granny Natasha, but she recognized the face smiling at the head of the bed as she embraced Ralph. It seemed to say 'Godspeed and God bless,' and even, in the brief glimpse she caught before surrendering herself to love, to wink."
"Yes, yes, I see," Amy agreed, wondering if there were another person in New York -in the world-who could use writhen with Roxanne's sincere intensity. "Very much in the spirit of Isabel Allende or Laura Esquivel."
Roxanne looked haughtily at her editor. She didn't know the names and didn't care to learn them. If Amy thought the star of Gaudy Press needed to copy someone, it was time for her to have a conversation with Lila Trumbull, Roxanne's agent.
Amy, an expert on Roxanne Craybourne's own doelike glances, leaned forward. "All the South American writers who've been winning Nobel prizes lately have ghosts haunting their work. I thought it was a nice touch, to show The New York Times and some of these other snobs in the most delicate way imaginable that you are fully aware of contemporary literary conventions, but you only choose to use them when you can enhance them."
Roxanne smiled. Amy really was quite nice. She'd proved it the weekend she'd stayed at the Taos house, after all. It was terrible to be so suspicious of everyone that you couldn't trust their lightest comments. But then, when she thought how badly Kenny had betrayed her…
Amy, watching the shift from complacency to tragedy on her star's face, wondered what nerve-storm she now had to deflect. "Is everything all right, Roxanne?" she asked in a gentle, caring voice that would have astounded her own children and grandchildren.
Roxanne gave a little sniff, brushing the hint of a tear from her left eye. "I was just thinking of Kenny, and how badly he treated me. And then to see it written up in the Star and the Sun. It's too much to suffer tragedy, without having it plastered around the supermarkets where all one's friends see it, and badger one forever. Not to mention Mother's insufferable mah-jongg club."
"Kenny? What-did his embezzling habits not die at the end of his parole?" Amy was startled out of maternal concern into her normal sardonic speech. She cursed herself as soon as the words were out, but Roxanne, in as full a dramatic flight as one of her own heroines, hadn't noticed.
"I thought he was trying." She fluttered tapered, manicured fingers, muscular from the weight of the rings they held up. "Mother kept telling me he was just taking advantage, but it's the kind of thing she's always saying about my boyfriends, ever since high school, jealous because she never had half as many when she was young. And when he hit me the first time and said he was truly sorry of course I believed him. Anyone would have. But when he walked off with a million in bearer bonds it was just too much. What else could I do? And then, well, you know I had to spend months in the hospital."