Roz smiled. “Absolutely.”
“Well, then I guess I was drifting off some, and I was thinking about what happens after The End? Thinking about sex, I guess,” she said and cleared her throat. “Just a fantasy thing, candlelight and flowers and a big white bed, being in love. Making love.” She lowered her head, put it in her hands. “This is mortifying.”
“Don’t be silly. Healthy girl like you didn’t think about sex, I’d be worried.” Roz gave her shoulder a little shake.
“It was nice. Romantic and exciting. Then, it changed. Or I changed. And it was calculating. I was thinking about how I’d do these things. I could feel the skin and the form and the heat. There were roses. I could smell roses, but I had lilies in the fantasy, and now there were roses, and firelight. And his hands were different—soft and smooth. Rich, that’s what I thought. And I thought the guy’s wife wouldn’t do what I’d do, and that’s why he came to me. How he’d pay. And I felt my hair, and I could see it. Long and blond and curly. I saw it when it fell over my face, not like I was watching, but like I was there. It was me. And I saw him. His face.”
She turned to the board and pointed at Reginald. “His face. He was inside me, and I saw his face.”
She let out another long breath. “So.”
After a moment of silence, Roz spoke. “I don’t think it would be that unusual for your mind to weave that sort of thing together, Hayley. We all spend a lot of time thinking about these people, trying to put it all together. We know she was his mistress, we know she bore him a child, so we know they had sex. And for her, we can assume or at least speculate that it was, at least in part, a kind of business arrangement.”
“You know how your body feels when you’ve been fooling around? Physically. Not just the buzz you get from a sex dream, but how you feel physically when you’ve been with a guy. Maybe I haven’t been with one since before Lily was born, but you don’t forget how it feels. And that’s where I was when I woke up, or came out of it. Roz, I smelled those roses. I know how his body was shaped.”
She had to take a breath, had to swallow hard. “I felt him inside me. Inside her, I guess, but it was like being her while it was happening. She liked being with someone handsome and skilled. It wouldn’t have mattered if he’d been ugly as homemade sin and a dud in bed, but this was like a bonus. Rich was the bottom line—the rest was icing. I know that, because I was right inside her head. Or she was in mine. I didn’t imagine it.”
“I believe you,” Mitch told her.
“We believe you,” Roz corrected. “You’re the closest to her age when she died, at least the age we think she was. Maybe she’s relating to that, to you, and trying to go through you to tell us what it was like for her.”
“Possibly.” Mitch tipped back in the chair when Roz arched her brows at him. “It could give us more insight on her, on what happened and why. What else can you tell us about her?”
“Well, I don’t think she got that much of a rush out of sex—from the power, the control, yeah, but not the rest of it. It’s just what she did, and from his, um, response, she was good at what she did. Her body was a lot better than mine.”
With a sheepish smile, she held her hands in front of her breasts to mime someone well-endowed. “And she was cold inside. The whole time they were doing it, she was thinking about what she’d get out of him. There was a derision—that’s the best way to describe it—for the wives of men like him. I guess that’s about it.”
“Hardly her best side. Or maybe it is, from her point of view,” Mitch considered. “She was in charge, doing what she’d chosen to do. Young, beautiful, desired by a powerful man and controlling that man through sex. Interesting.”
“Creepy’s what it was. And if I get to have sex, I’d like to have it with my own body. But anyway, I feel better, getting all that out. I think I’ll go back up, maybe do some yoga. I don’t think she’s going to bother me while I’m trying to twist myself into the warrior position or whatever. Thanks for hearing me out.”
“Anything else happens, I want to hear it,” Roz told her.
“That’s a promise.”
Roz waited until Hayley was gone, then turned to Mitch. “We’re going to have to worry about her, aren’t we?”
“Let’s not skip straight to worry.” He took her hand. “Let’s start with we’ll keep an eye out for her.”
five
FROM STELLA’S KITCHEN window, Hayley could see the spread of the back gardens, the patio, the arbor, the treehouse Logan and the boys had built snugged into the branches of a sycamore.
She watched Logan push Lily on a red swing that hung from another branch while the boys tossed an old ball for Parker to chase.
It was, she thought, a kind of moving portrait of summer evening. The sort of lazy contentment that only comes on breathless summer days right before the kids are called in for supper and the porch light goes on. Yellow glows to chase the moths away and to shine a circle that says: We’re home.
She remembered, so clearly, what it was to be a child in August, to love the heat, to rush through it to snatch every drop of the sun before it went down.
Now, she hoped, she was learning what it was to be a mother. To be on the other side of the screen door. To be the one who turned on the porch light.
“Do you get used to it, or do you still look out sometimes like this, and think ‘I’m the luckiest woman in the world.’ ”
Stella moved over to the window, smiled. “Both. You want to sit out on the patio with this lemonade?”
“In a minute. I didn’t want to talk about this at work. Not just because it’s at work, but because it’s still on the Harper estate. And she’s on the estate. She can’t come here.”
“Roz told me what happened.” Stella laid a hand on Hayley’s shoulder.
“I didn’t tell her that it was Harper. I mean when I was fantasizing, I was with Harper. I’m just not going to tell her I was fantasizing about getting naked with her son.”
“I think that’s a judicious edit at this point. Has anything happened since?”
“No, nothing. And I don’t know whether to hope something does or something doesn’t.” She watched Logan field the mangled slobbery ball that rolled his way, then toss it, sending dog and boys on a mad chase while Lily bounced in the swing and clapped her hands.
“I can tell you this, if I have to star in someone’s life and times, I’d rather take a turn in yours.”
“I believe in being a good and true friend, Hayley, but I’m not letting you have sex with Logan.”
Hayley snorted out a laugh, then gave Stella an elbow nudge. “Spoilsport, and though I wasn’t going there, I bet—wow.”
Stella’s smile was lazy as a cat’s. “You bet right.”
“Anyway. I was just thinking how it would be to have someone as crazy about me as Logan is about you. Toss in a couple of great kids, a beautiful home you’ve made together, and who needs fantasies?”
“You’ll have what you’re looking for one day, too.”
“Listen to me, you’d think I was the redheaded stepchild. I don’t know what’s wrong with me lately.” She rolled her shoulders as if shrugging off a weight. “I keep catching myself doing a poor-me routine. It’s not like me, Stella. I’m happy. And even when I’m not, I look for a way to make myself happy. I don’t brood and bitch. Or hardly.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Maybe I’ve got a thing for Harper, but a little frustration’s not enough to bring me down. Next time you hear me feeling sorry for myself, give me a good smack.”
“Sure. What are friends for?”
SHE MEANT IT, too. She wasn’t the type to sit around ticking off the negatives of her life to see if she could make them outweigh the positives. If something was wrong, something was missing, she acted. Fix the problem and move ahead. Or if the problem couldn’t be fixed, she found the best way to live with it.