"Like Abigail and Nathaniel."
He looked surprised but nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Like that. Sometime, if you can, get Ms. Valeria to talk about all that. You may want to reconsider buying that place."
"I'll be at the cottage until about seven," I said.
He looked at his watch, nodded, and then went up the walk toward the big house.
I found my way over to Carol's house a little after seven. I took Kitty with me, as well as one of Tony's many guns, since my SIG was still in lockup over at the county. He'd gone back to Triboro for the weekend but said he'd be available if anything came up.
Carol appeared in the doorway when I drove up. She was wearing a loose, knee-length flowing skirt, topped with a long-sleeved, modestly low-cut peasant blouse. The lights from the house backlit the skirt, revealing that she was, indeed, a very shapely lady. I was going to leave Kitty in the Suburban, but she insisted that I bring her into the house. Her own dog, a Heinz 57, took one look at Kitty and slunk off to the back of the house. Kitty went into the living room and lay down by the fireplace as if she owned the place.
I sat in the kitchen with a glass of wine while she worked on a primavera. There was warm French bread, some Port Salut cheese, and a small brick of pate on offer. I asked if she cooked like this all the time.
"There's a Whole Foods down the road in Hillsborough," she said. "If I did this every day I'd be two hundred pounds."
"Well, obviously you don't," I said. "I've been letting my own exercise program lapse, and damned if my clothes haven't started shrinking."
"Clothes do that," she said. "Okay, we're there."
After dinner we sat out on the side screened porch in deference to the mosquitoes of spring. She'd produced a bottle of single malt, much to my delight. I can drink wine, but I'm not a big fan. She switched to Scotch to keep me company, and I noticed she drank it neat, as I did. Kitty joined us on the porch, calm as always.
"She keeps you in sight, doesn't she," Carol said.
"That's her job," I said. "She's not as aggressive or knowledgeable as Frick and Frack, but she's learning."
We talked about the shepherds for a while, and then about the restoration business. I finally asked if she'd ever been married.
"Almost," she said. "How about you?"
I told her about my marriage history, how it had ended early in my career, when my wife, an up-and-coming trial attorney, had stepped out. Then I described how we'd restarted, with my ex now a state judge, and then how the rematch had ended with a boom in Triboro one night when someone put a bomb in her car.
"Jesus!" she said. "What was all that about?"
I told her the story of the cat dancers, and how it had ended in professional ambiguity. She asked if that case could be the origin of my current stalker.
"It's possible," I said, "but what he says, that I killed his wife, doesn't track. I haven't killed anyone's wife. I've got one of my guys going through records to see if anyone we put away could be connected to known suicides, things like that, but that's a real long shot."
She was sitting on the porch swing, legs crossed, and rocking the swing just enough to make me notice. She wasn't overtly flirting, but she was definitely letting me know what was possible in the great scheme of things. I was sitting in a large wicker chair that looked big enough for two people, and the view was enticing.
"I lived with another cop for almost a year," she said. "Until our sergeant found out. He pulled me in one day and told me what a bad idea that was, and why. How relationships between cops usually blew up, and all the subsequent problems with discipline, watch assignments. You know all this, I suppose."
"I do," I said. "He was mostly right. Even the marriages between cops often blow up."
"Well, after that some of the guys thought I was just stuck-up, you know, here I was, on street patrol with a college degree. Then that terrible night, after which none of this mattered anymore. Since then I've just been-lazy, I guess, is the best word."
"I've met too many women who are out there husband-hunting," I said. "They're kind of scary."
"I think it just has to happen. At my age, anyway, I think we'd have to be good friends before anything else could develop. I'm forty-two, by the way."
"I've got eleven years on you, and you don't look forty-anything."
She smiled, and she really didn't look forty-anything when she did that. There was a period of comfortable silence. She rocked, and I tried not to look.
"Don't you just love it?" she said. "Beginning the dance. Pretending we're talking about other people, or just people in general."
I laughed then. That was exactly what had been going through my mind. "This is the point where I clear my throat and say I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow, and thanks for a lovely dinner."
"Or," she said, reaching for my glass, "you could have another Scotch, and then you'd be over the legal limit, and then you'd have to stay for a while. Maybe go for a walk or something, work off all that alcohol."
"Work off."
She tilted her head and smiled again. "Said the spider to the fly."
"Well, shucks," I said. "If I really don't have any choice here, I guess I could go for just one more."
"Scotch?"
"That, too."
I got back to the cottage at midnight, feeling much better. Carol had had her moves pretty much all planned out, and the whole thing had been delightful. She'd gone back into the house with the glasses, then come back out onto the porch, stood next to my chair for a moment while she let her hair down, and then slipped onto my lap and gave me a long, lingering kiss. After that we made love right there, as if we'd been doing it for years. She dozed for a half hour or so afterward, opened one eye, and then told me a really funny joke. A married couple was in bed after dinner, watching TV. The wife was surprised to feel her husband's hands start in on her body, surreptitiously at first, but then with a lot more purpose. It had been a long time. She was enjoying all the sensations when he suddenly stopped. She opened her eyes, told him that that had been lovely, and asked why he'd stopped. Found the remote, says he.
After that she'd sent me on my way with a go-cup of black coffee and an invitation to come see her again whenever I was ready to start that exercise program. I'd driven back to the cottage, trying to analyze my feelings. Then I gave up and just savored the evening. There didn't seem to be any strings or subplots, just two grown-ups enjoying each other's company. Said the fly to the spider.
I let the rest of the mutts out when I got back and then took that nightcap that had never made it to the porch down to the swing set by the pond. The resident owl greeted me from across the still water, and Kitty whoofed back at it. We hadn't had owls in Summerfield, and I wondered what she thought it was. Then she whoofed again, and I turned around to look. There, along the driveway, came Valeria, carrying a tiny handbag over one arm, a small lantern in one hand, and a dainty parasol in the other. She looked like a ghost coming soundlessly down the gravel drive, dressed all in white. I stood up as she approached the swing-set.
"Ms. Valeria," I said in greeting.
"Mr. Richter," she murmured. "May I join you, sir?"
"Absolutely," I said. "Should I go in and get another glass?"
She sat down primly in the long swing and said that that would be very nice. I was back in a flash. She had put the parasol down now that she was under the canvas cover of the swing and safe from the evening dew. She was sitting back, her long black hair in a twisted coil over the front of one shoulder and her legs out in front of her, barely touching the ground. That's when I noticed what she was wearing: It was a long-sleeved dress made of what looked like layers of thin white gauze that reached all the way to her ankles. In terms of womanly flesh on display, it was modest in the extreme, except for the fact that sometimes, if the humidity is just right, gauze clings. That old rule about less being more applied in spades, as every aspect of her decidedly lush body was on perfect if circumspect display in the starlight. I felt guilty about even looking, especially considering the earlier part of the evening. We clinked glasses, and I waited to see what she'd come down for. At that moment I would have been content to just sit there and look at her.