She was a talker and went on about how pleased she was with her surgery and how so many people complimented her. She jokingly hoped that her commercial real estate business would improve as a result. He responded politely, while feeling his head throb with annoyance over her chin, which he kept fixing in his mind, giving it greater length and squaring off the sharpness. And there was that hair. It was a shade too red. Plus she also wore some citrusy perfume that reminded him of cleaning fluid, not the sultry scent of Shalimar.
It took them an hour to reach Cape Ann. He drove to a secluded launch on the Essex River where the day before he had secured a canoe. Nobody was around.
“How cool,” she said. “I haven’t been canoeing in years.”
He untied the rope and pulled the boat out from the brush. They loaded the cooler and picnic basket and then he steadied the boat so she could get in. She would ride in front. In a few minutes they were paddling down the river and into open water toward Hogg Island. Visible was a large old brown house which, he explained, was part of the set for the movie version of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, filmed out there a few years ago.
They spread a blanket on a grassy rise just up from the water and under a large oak that partly blocked their view from the mainland. They ate patés of goose liver and bluefish, goat milk cheese and aged Gouda, sliced tomatoes and Calamata olives with a fresh baguette, followed by sliced fresh kiwi fruit and melons with chocolate pecan truffles. And they washed it down with the bottle of Taittinger. Diane was rightfully impressed.
While they chatted, he studied her face, taking in the angles, adjusting them, trying to forgive where they fell short. At once adoring them when for a microsecond they slotted in place, yet simultaneously hating them when they didn’t.
Feeling the glow of the champagne and the warmth of the setting sun, she took his hand. “This is wonderful,” she said, and put her hands around the back of his neck and gave him a long kiss that made giddy sensations in his genitals.
It was just what he had hoped for. Along the horizon were long slashes of deep purple clouds and not a boat in sight. But his head was throbbing to distraction. He fingered two pills from his breast pocket and gulped them down, hoping to God that he wouldn’t have a seizure, or if he did that it would be fast and unnoticeable in the dimming light.
“You okay?”
“Just a little headache.”
“I’ve got some Advil.”
“I just took something.”
She looked toward the horizon. “We’ll have enough light to get back, won’t we?”
“Yes.”
In a short while he felt the ache level off.
Is it the size of a refrigerator?
Smaller.
She put her hand on his. “How you doing?”
“Better. But maybe you could rub my temples if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Of course.”
He laid his head in her lap as she placed her palms against his temples and made gentle circles in the way he showed her. As she massaged away the pain, he stretched out, her breasts hanging above his face. Her nipples were outlined in the white cotton as she moved. And in his mind he saw them rubbing themselves pink and hard with the friction. He groaned.
“Better?”
“Mmmm.”
The next moment she leaned over and kissed him on the mouth. It was a long, open, wet probing kiss that tasted of cool champagne and hot intentions. He pulled himself up to a sitting position and instantly her hands encircled his neck and began caressing the back of his head as she pressed her breasts to his chest.
She pulled back to catch her breath. “I’ve been to a lot of doctors in my life, but this is the first time I’ve ever made out with one.”
“Always a first time for everything.”
She smiled. “How’s the head?”
“Better.”
She kissed the nape of his neck and munched her way to his ear. He nuzzled his face into her breasts as she slid her hand down his side to his front. Her hand slipped under his shirt and inched down to his belly and lower. She undid his belt and began to zip down his fly.
“No,” he said.
“What?”
“You first.”
Without a word she removed her top and gave her breasts a rub as if to wake them; then she removed her shorts, revealing small white panties. In the afterglow of the sun, he watched her get to her knees then rub the front of his pants. She moaned in disappointment because he was flaccid.
Still in her panties, she pulled down his pants, removed his shoes until he was lying flat in his underpants. She kissed the lump of his genitals, then glanced at him in dismay. She put her knees together and shimmied out of her panties and then restraddled him. He said nothing. Just studied her face.
She grasped the band of his shorts and pulled them down over his feet. She lowered her face to his mouth for several wet seconds, then nibbled a line down his chest, his belly, and below. He closed his eyes and strained with all his might, but nothing. So she put him into her mouth limp as he was.
Again he strained and arched, seeing Lila in his head, groaning against the horrible realization that things were not working. Meanwhile, this woman was doing all she could.
“Wait a sec,” he said, and he reached for his pants and pulled something out of his pocket.
“What’s that for?”
In his hand he held a black lace-top stocking. “It might go better if we played a little game.”
“A little game?”
“Get on your knees and drag it across me.” And he showed her.
She looked at him blankly, wondering if he was joking or weird. But she did what he said. She knelt beside him and ran the stocking up and down his body, making curtsies and turns and teasing brushes against him while she had him rub her with his hands. He locked his eyes on her face as she did several passes, occasionally closing his eyes to bring Lila to mind, then opening them again at the slightest twinge. This went on and still he could not be aroused.
“I don’t know what the problem is,” she said.
In his head Lila stood over him cooing and teasing him. But not this woman. Her face was off—the weak dwarf chin, the too broad brow that he could do nothing about, nor the green eyes, the carrot hair. And he hated what he saw—an incomplete forgery.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you okay? You look strange.”
“You don’t understand.”
“I do. You’re just nervous. It’s okay.”
He muttered something and sat up, feeling as if his head would burst.
“Pardon me?”
Suddenly the magma chamber split open. In a blinding flash, he grabbed the stocking and in one precise movement he had the material noosed around her neck. “Dirty girl,” he growled.
She never knew what hit her.
81
“It does looks like her,” said Jackie. “But it’s probably just an unfortunate coincidence.”
Steve was sitting at her dining-room table, the printout of the Essex River woman plus a photo of Dana sitting side by side.
Jackie sipped a glass of wine as she studied the two images. The last time she saw Dana was at a party three years ago and she didn’t remember her clearly. “But this is a digital reconstruction, so at best it’s generic—the heart-shaped face, the big eyes, the full mouth.”
“What about Farina?” he said, and laid a shot of her beside the other two.
Jackie studied the three images. “Again, only vaguely. At the right angles, lots of people resemble each other, like those funny separated-at-birth shots of celebrities—you know, John Kerry and Herman Munster, or Courtney Cox and the singer Nelly Furtado.”