As she turned off Interstate 10 onto State Highway 111, now only eleven miles from Palm Springs, she wondered if she could have done more to dissuade him from coming with her to the desert. But upon leaving Geneplan's offices in Newport Beach, he had been quietly adamant, and attempting to change his mind had seemed as fruitless as standing on the shore of the Pacific and commanding an incoming tide to reverse itself immediately.
Rachael deeply regretted the awkwardness between them. In the five months since they had met, this was the first time they had been uneasy with each other, the first time that their relationship had been touched by even a hint of anger or had been in any way less than entirely harmonious.
Having departed Newport Beach at midnight, they arrived in Palm Springs and drove through the heart of town on Palm Canyon Drive at one-fifteen Tuesday morning. That was ninety-nine miles in only an hour and fifteen minutes, for an average speed of eighty miles an hour, which should have given Rachael a sense of speed. But she continued to feel that she was creeping snail-slow, falling farther and farther behind events, losing ground by the minute.
Summer, with its blazing desert heat, was a somewhat less busy tourist season in Palm Springs than other times of the year, and at one-fifteen in the morning the main street was virtually deserted. In the hot and windless June night, the palm trees stood as still as images painted on canvas, illuminated and slightly silvered by the streetlights. The many shops were dark. The sidewalks were empty. The traffic signals still cycled from green to yellow to red to green again, although hers was the only car passing through most of the intersections.
She almost felt as if she were driving through a post-Armageddon world, depopulated by disease. For a moment she was half convinced that if she switched on the radio, there would be no music — only the cold empty hiss of static all the way across the dial.
Since receiving the news of Eric's missing corpse, she had known that something terrible had come into the world, and hour by hour she had grown more bleak. Now even an empty street, which would have looked peaceful to anyone else, stirred ominous thoughts in her. She knew she was overreacting. No matter what happened in the next few days, this was not the end of the world.
On the other hand, she thought, it might be the end of me, the end of my world.
Driving from the commercial district into residential areas, from neighborhoods of modest means into wealthier streets, she encountered even fewer signs of life, until at last she pulled into a Futura Stone driveway and parked in front of a low, sleek, flat-roofed stucco house that was the epitome of clean-lined desert architecture. The lush landscaping was distinctly not of the desert — ficus trees, benjamina, impatiens, begonias, beds of marigolds and Gerber daisies — green and thick and flower-laden in the soft glow of a series of Malibu lights. Those were the only lights burning; all the front windows were dark.
She had told Benny that this was another of Eric's houses — though she had been closemouthed about the reason she had come. Now, as she switched off the headlights, he said, “Nice little vacation retreat.”
She said, “No. This is where he kept his mistress.”
Enough soft light fell from the Malibu fixtures, rebounded from the lawn and from the edge of the driveway, penetrated the windows of the car, and touched Benny's face to reveal his look of surprise. “How did you know?”
“A little over a year ago, just a week before I left him, she — Cindy Wasloff was her name — she called the house in Villa Park. Eric had told her never to phone there except in the direst emergency, and if she spoke with anyone but him, she was supposed to say she was the secretary of some business associate. But she was furious with him because, the night before, he'd beaten her pretty badly, and she was leaving him. First, however, she wanted to let me know he'd been keeping her.”
“Had you suspected?”
“That he had a mistress? No. But it didn't matter. By then I'd already decided to call it quits. I listened to her and commiserated, got the address of the house, because I thought maybe the day would come when I might be able to use the fact of Eric's adultery to pry myself loose from him if he wouldn't cooperate in the divorce. Even as ugly as it got, it never got quite that tawdry, thank God. And it would have been exceedingly tawdry indeed if I'd had to go public with it… because the girl was only sixteen.”
“What? The mistress?”
“Yes. Sixteen. A runaway. One of those lost kids, from the sound of her. You know the type. They start doing drugs in junior high and just seem to… burn away too many gray cells. No, that's not right, either. The drugs don't destroy brain cells so much as they… eat away at their souls, leave them empty and purposeless. They're pathetic.”
“Some are,” he said. “And some are scary. Bored and listless kids who've tried everything. They either become amoral sociopaths as dangerous as rattlesnakes — or they become easy prey. I gather you're telling me that Cindy Wasloff was easy prey and that Eric swept her in out of the gutter for some fun and games.”
“And apparently she wasn't the first.”
“He had a thing for teenage girls, huh?”
Rachael said, “What he had a thing about was getting old. It terrified him. He was only forty-one when I left him, still a young man, but every year when his birthday rolled around he was crazier about it than the year before, as if at any moment he'd blink and find himself in a nursing home, decrepit and senile. He had an irrational fear of growing old and dying, and the fear expressed itself in all sorts of ways. For one thing, year by year, newness in everything became increasingly important to him: new cars every year, as if a twelve-month-old Mercedes was ready for the scrap heap; a constant change of wardrobe, out with the old and in with the new…”
“And the modern art, modern architecture, all the ultramodern furniture.”
“Yes. And the latest electronic gadgetry. And I guess teenage girls were just another part of his obsession with staying young and… cheating death. I guess, in his twisted mind, being with young girls kept him young, too. When I learned about Cindy Wasloff and this house in Palm Springs, I realized that one of the main reasons he'd married me was because I was twelve years younger than him, twenty-three to his thirty-five. I was just one more means of slowing down the flow of time for him, and when I started to get into my late twenties, when he could see me getting a little older, then I no longer served that purpose quite as well for him, so he needed younger flesh like Cindy.”
She opened her door and got out of the car, and Benny got out on his side. He said, “So exactly what're we looking for here? Not just his current mistress; you wouldn't have rocketed out here like a race-car driver just to get a peek at his latest bimbo.”
Closing her door, withdrawing the thirty-two pistol from her purse, and heading toward the house, Rachael did not — could not — answer.
The night was warm and dry. The vault of the clear desert sky was spangled with an incredibility of stars. The air was still, and all was silent but for crickets singing in the shrubbery.
Too much shrubbery. She looked around nervously at all the looming dark forms and black spaces beyond the glow of the Malibu lights. Lots of hiding places. She shivered.
The door was ajar, which seemed an ominous sign. She rang the bell, waited, rang again, waited, rang and rang, but no one responded.
At her side, Benny said, “It's probably your house now. You inherited it with everything else, so I don't think you need an invitation to go in.”
The door, ajar as it was, provided more invitation than she would have liked. It looked as if it were the open door on a trap. If she went inside in search of the bait, the trap might be sprung, and the door might slam behind her.