But now they tried to come again, unchecked and snarling, swirling around like ghosts inside my car. I would have lowered my window to flush them out, but it was already down. I turned up the vent fan all the way. I would not be baited.
"It's because you made me mourn you falsely," I said.
"Does that mean you feel cheated? Yes, I think it does. It means that you were happier believing I was dead. You can admit that, Russ. Damn, what a vicious, shallow man you are."
I ignored her provocations. I stayed on track. "When were you expecting Alice?"
"How patient you've become. We sure could have used some of that when we were together."
"When were you expecting Alice?"
"On the fifth, originally. But she left a message on the third saying she'd hit Laguna two days early. I was already in Beverly Hills, like I said, so I got a hold of her at her hotel, told her to go straight to my place, get comfortable, and I'd be home the next day. The maid was staying with family down in San Diego for the week, so she hadn't made up the guest room. So I told Alice to take the master. I wanted her to feel welcome. She and I had just started… we were trying to… well, I was trying to connect with her. It was part of my new, well, self. Gad, it sounds so fucking trite."
Amber sniffed and ran her fingers under one eye, then the other.
Amber's new self, I thought. My anger slid out of the car, whipping away in the slipstream. I began the long circle around the Dana Point Marina. The harbor sprouted thousands of yacht masts; the dark water shone with wedges of light that flickered on the swells, then vanished.
"But I enjoyed my friend in Santa Barbara, and it was late before I knew it. By eleven, I was on the road. When I got home, she was gone. Her bags were there. I saw a new throw rug beside my bed. There was a stain under it. There was fresh paint on the walls. In my study, someone had knocked over a lamp and some magazines. My heart was racing. The only thing I could think of was to call someone I trusted, someone who might know about these… these kinds of things."
"Marty," I said. It explained his abrupt change in attitude that day at the Wynns.
"Yes."
"And it took Marty a long time on the phone to believe you were really you. He didn't believe it at first. He insisted on seeing you that night-morning by then. Drunk or not."
Amber drew lightly on her cigarette, an action so fraught with distaste, I wondered, as I had always wondered, why she bothered smoking in the first place. It was so much like Amber to be able to flirt with a such a strong addiction and never real surrender to it. I'd seen her go for days without one.
"I'd never seen Martin so upset," she said. "Never. And he'd been married to me for a whole year, the poor man. He told me that Alice had been murdered, and that someone he obviously cleaned up the… my room."
Amber puffed again on the cigarette, staring out the window at the marina. The breeze blew through her platinum blond wig, and in the harsh violet light of the harbor lamps, her face looked like one freshly prepared for burial. For a moment, all the death of the last few days paraded through my mind: the Fernandezes; the Ellisons; the Wynns; their once-perfect two boys, Jacob and Justin; Alice Fultz, Amber's sister. Then I could actually see the tumor cells raging unchecked in the brain of my Isabella-tiny black star-shaped little fuckers programmed multiply themselves out of existence, aiming at nothing but the final annihilation of their host. For a moment, I saw those monstrous vultures circling with hideous ease outside our window, I saw Black Death sitting atop our telephone pole, lazily assured, patient, stinking.
My car was veering off the narrow drive.
I lighted a cigarette and took a pull from my flask, packing my visions down deeper inside with all the efficiency of a Lexington patriot tamping the ball into his musket.
"You smell funny," said Amber, not unkindly.
"I don't feel very funny. What then, after Marty told you what he'd seen?"
"I could only focus on one idea. Something that Martin kept saying again and again: ' Whoever killed Alice was trying to kill you.' I was terrified, Russ. You know me well enough to understand that I wouldn't react… well to this kind of thing. So I agreed to do what Martin told me."
"Disappear."
"Yes. And wait for him to handle who had killed Alice."
"That being me."
"You and Grace."
"Does he still believe that?"
Amber studied me for a long while, then turned away.
"Yes."
"How much did Alice look like you?"
"A lot. Especially to someone in a dark bedroom, someone assuming I was sleeping in my own bed."
I thought. We circled the marina again, slowly. "So why in hell," I asked, "did you come to me?"
She was watching me again. Amber always had a way of not being there, the capacity simply to exit, leaving only her body behind. She had often done this when under duress. She had sometimes done this when I made love to her-a form of punishment and a way of experimenting with a martyrdom that, like her smoking, she rarely took beyond the casual. I sensed her absence now. Slowly, almost visibly, she repopulated herself.
"Because of Martin. I began to wonder. He told me he was at my house that night because a call came over his police radio, and he was in the area, so he answered it. I believed him at first-he kept saying we, like it was he and his partner and everything was official. When he told me what he'd found, I was too afraid to see what a strange story it was-that he just happened to be in my neighborhood. I mean, how long since Martin has been on patrol? How long since he drove around with partner? So I pressed him. It didn't take much. He kind of broke down-all two hundred pounds of rock Martin always was-he made this, this… confession that he'd been in my room on his own, that he'd been there before, always when he knew I’d ^ be gone. That he'd lie in my bed and think about us. Russ, that scared me almost as much as what he'd found, or said he' found. So I came to you."
"But you knew I was inside your house, too."
She looked at me through the dark glasses. "I believe what you told Martin. That you'd seen him come out, then found my sliding glass door open. Russ, I understand what you were doing parked outside my house that night. I think of you sometimes and I dream of you, and I know you think and dream of me. It's all about the way we were, the way we won't ever be again with anyone else. But you're not capable of true obsession, Russ-the same way I'm not. You're harmless. That's another way of saying that I trust you. Right now, I think you're one of the few men in this world I can truly trust."
"What about Erik?"
"Erik is still upset about our breakup. I don't think he should see me now."
"A decade of panting after you, and poor Erik only gets one thin year to bathe in the glow."
I simply couldn't resist the opportunity to hurt Amber, only because I knew that my weapons had always been to dull to dent her shining, perfect surface.
"Russell?" she said, "Why don't you just fucking grow up?"
Not grown-up, harmless and incapable of true obsession, I guided the car back up to Coast Highway and north toward Laguna. The anger I thought Amber's words would bring to me did not come. For a long time, all I could think about was Izzy, asleep in the small bed in her father's house. I tried to send her the most peaceful and hopeful of dreams. And I was aware of Amber as of someone in a dream, too-she was nearby but intangible, present but unavailable. Then, a new emotion began to gather inside me, though at first I couldn't identify it. But as it started to fill the space left by my diminishing confusion and shock at seeing Amber again, I realized what it was: I was pleased that this woman was alive. In fact, I was more than pleased; I was happy, grateful. And deeper down, beneath these understandable and approvable truths, grinned a simple, unsanctioned, forbidden concept that I tried to ignore but could not: I was thrilled by her nearness. Secretly, wildly, insanely thrilled.