“So what’ll you do about him?”
“I can manage him.”
“How?”
She saw a glow now coming from the west, growing brighter and still brighter. And then a sleek, low-slung silver Acela rocketed past on its way to Boston. As it shot by, she could make out snapshot glimpses of figures seated at the windows, snug and warm. People who were going somewhere while she idled here in this car, going nowhere. And then the train had gone by and there was only the silence and the darkness and them.
“That’s no concern of yours,” she said, chewing fretfully on her lower lip, terrified that he was getting cold feet. He had to feel right about this. Since he was a man, that meant he had to feel it had all been up to him to decide. Only then would he get behind it.
“Well, what if they catch us?”
“They won’t. Why would they? She’s old and sick.”
“They won’t do tests or anything?”
“You mean like an autopsy? They only do those if there’s something fishy about how a person dies, which there won’t be. Trust me. Or if the family requests it, which they obviously won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because everyone’s waiting for her to die, silly.”
“So why don’t we just wait?”
“Because we can’t.”
“Why not?” he persisted.
“Because she can’t get away with what she’s doing to us.”
He sat there in silence for a long moment. “Well, no one lives forever,” he finally conceded, his voice hollow. “We’re all going to die soon enough. Each and every one of us. We’ll just be kind of easing her along. I guess that’s one way you can look at it.”
“Please don’t get all gloomy on me. You know it makes me crazy.”
“I’m not, I’m just… We’re talking about taking another human life.”
“Not human. Her”
“Will she feel any pain?”
“Not one bit. She’ll never even know what hit her.”
He ran a gloved hand over his face, distraught. “I don’t know, it feels so wrong.”
“There’s no such thing as wrong. There’s bold and there’s frightened.” She studied him carefully in the dimly lit car. “Which are your
“Right now, I’d say you have balls enough for both of us.”
She let out a soft laugh. She had a delicious laugh. She had been told this by any number of men. “It’s the right move. We need to do this.”
He gazed at her pleadingly. “How do I know for sure that you love me?”
So that was it. She relaxed now, knowing what he wanted, knowing that everything was going to be okay. Turning in her seat, she reached over and gently unzipped his pants, searching for him with her deft sure fingers, caressing him, squeezing him, feeling him grow under her touch.
“There, there…” she whispered lovingly.
He drew his breath in but remained stone-still, as if he were afraid she’d stop if he so much as moved a muscle.
“There, there…”
She wriggled sideways and knelt before him, taking him deep into her mouth, teasing him with her lips and tongue. Slowly, she moved her head up and down on him, up and down. Steadily, his breathing grew more rapid.
It bothered some women, performing this particular task on a man. A couple of her friends disliked it so intensely they flat-out refused to do it, even for their own husbands. Her it had never bothered. In fact, she found an open-mouthed kiss to be infinitely more off-putting. Some guy jamming his tongue into her mouth, forcing his spit and his gastric juices down her throat. That was supposed to be romantic? No, for her this was nothing. Besides, when she had a man’s zipper down, she was in charge of him. And she was always happiest when she was. She knew this about herself.
He climaxed in no time, his hands gripping her head tightly, feet kicking out at the floorboards, that strange gurgling noise of his coming from his throat. Then she zipped him back up, gave him an affectionate pat and sat back in her seat.
He stared straight ahead, waiting for his breathing to return to normal. “I love you,” he said, his voice painfully earnest. “You do know that, don’t you?”
“I do,” she said. “And I love you back.”
He put the car in gear and eased it out into the darkness of the parking lot, away from the floodlit platform.
“So what do you say?” she asked, gazing at him.
“I say the mean old woman’s in our way,” he replied solemnly. “And she has to die. She just has to.”
Delighted, she leaned over and kissed his cheek and said, “So she’ll die.”
NEXT MORNING
CHAPTER 1
It was Mitch’s first stay on the Connecticut Gold Coast in February-the official off-season. As in a lot of Dorset, locals shut off their water, bled their pipes and headed somewhere-anywhere-else. Mitch was discovering that there was a very good reason for this. Those refreshing summer sea breezes off of Long Island Sound were now howling thirty-five-miles-per-hour arctic blasts that never let up. Especially out on Big Sister Island, where Mitch’s quaint little antique post-and-beam carriage house offered very little in the way of insulation. Make that none. His big bay windows, with their breathtaking water views in three different directions, offered so little wind resistance that they might as well have been thrown open wide. It was very difficult to keep the temperature inside his house above a gusty fifty-five degrees, even with the furnace running nonstop and the fireplace stoked with hickory logs.
And then there were the storms.
Like the wicked Nor’easter that blew in on the last day of January, flooding his kitchen and crawl space, ripping half of the roof from his barn and, for good measure, washing away a section of the quarter-mile wooden causeway that connected the forty-acre island to the mainland, rendering it unsafe for vehicular traffic. The only way Mitch could cross it now was on foot.
All of this plus it happened to be the snowiest winter anyone under the age of ninety could remember. It seemed as if every three days another six inches fell. Mitch had personally measured seventy-eight inches since the first flakes appeared back on Thanksgiving Day. The banks of plowed snow that edged the town roads had to be ten feet high.
In spite of these rigors, Mitch Berger, lead film critic for the most prestigious, and therefore the lowest-paying, of New York’s three daily newspapers, stayed on. This was his off-season, after all. The season when the studios released only what was officially known in the movie trade as “Post-Holiday Crap.” Nothing was due out until Memorial Day that didn’t star either Martin Lawrence or David Spade. Or, God forbid, Martin Lawrence and David Spade. Besides, Mitch was finding the beach a surprisingly beautiful place to be in the winter. He had never seen a full moon shine so brightly as it did on a cover of pure white snow. He had never seen sunsets such as these; the crystal-clear winter sky offered up such awe-inspiring pink-and-red light shows that he’d taken to photographing them many afternoons. Honestly, he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to leave such a winter wonderland.
So he stayed. He also had his responsibilities, after all. He’d promised the other islanders, all of whom had migrated south to the Peck family compound in Hobe Sound, that he’d keep an eye on their houses for them. Plus three of Dorset’s elderly shut-ins were counting on him to deliver their groceries. This, Mitch had learned, was part of the social contract when you lived in a small town. Those who were able-bodied looked out for those who were not.
And Mitch was not exactly idle professionally. He was busy making notes for Nothing But Happy Endings, a book he wanted to write about the pernicious influence of Hollywood escapism on contemporary American politics. Washington and Hollywood were one and the same, Mitch felt. The nation’s halls of power nothing more than sound stages, its politicians merely actors mouthing carefully scripted, substance-free dialogue, its journalists nothing more than compliant pitchmen eager to peddle that day’s feel-good story line. Every policy issue, no matter how knotty and complex, was now being reduced to a simplistic, highly commercial morality tale. Even war itself was nothing more than just another cable entertainment choice, complete with blood-free battles, awesome computer-generated graphics and soaring background music. As Mitch had watched Hollywood’s escapist mind-set steadily engulf and devour the nation’s public discourse, he’d found himself growing more and more alarmed, because if there was one thing he knew, it was this: