Hutchmeyer paled. 'Fake her own death? Did you say...'
Mr Synstrom nodded. 'We call it the Stonehouse syndrome in the trade,' he said. 'It happens every once in a while someone wants the world to think they're dead so they disappear and leave their nearest and dearest to claim the insurance. Now you've put in a claim for three and a half million dollars and we've got no proof your wife isn't alive some place.'
Hutchmeyer stared miserably at him. He was considering the awful possibility that Baby was still around and with her she was carrying all that evidence of his tax evasions, bribes and illegal dealings that could send him to prison. By comparison the forfeiture of three and a half million dollars was peanuts.
'I just can't believe she'd do a thing like that,' he said finally. 'I mean we had a happy marriage. No problems. I gave her everything she asked for...'
'Like young men?' said Mr Synstrom.
'No, not like young men,' shouted Hutchmeyer, and felt his pulse. 'Now this Piper writer was a young man,' said Mr Synstrom, 'and from what we've heard Mrs Hutchmeyer had a taste for...'
'Are you accusing my wife of...My God, I'll...'
'We're not accusing anyone of anything, Mr Hutchmeyer. Like I've said we're trying to get at the truth.'
'And are you telling me that my wife, my own dear little Baby, filled that cruiser with gasolene and deliberately tried to murder me by aiming it at my yacht in the middle of '
'That's exactly what I'm saying. Mind you, that could have been an accident,' said Mr Synstrom, 'the cruiser blowing up where she did.'
'Yeah, well from where I was standing it didn't look like an accident. You can believe it didn't,' said Hutchmeyer. 'You want to have a cruiser come out of the night straight for you before you go round making allegations like you've just done.'
Mr Synstrom got to his feet. 'So you still want us to continue with our investigations?' he said.
Hutchmeyer hesitated. If Baby was still alive the last thing he wanted was investigations. 'I just don't believe my Baby would have done a thing like that is all,' he said.
Mr Synstrom sat down again. 'If she did and we can prove it I'm afraid Mrs Hutchmeyer would stand trial. Arson, attempted murder, defrauding an insurance company. And then there's Mr Piper. He's an accessory. Bestselling author, I hear. I guess he could always get a job in the prison library. Make a sensational trial too. Now if you don't want all of that...'
Hutchmeyer didn't want any of that. Sensational trials with Baby in the box pleading that...Oh no! Definitely not. And Pause was selling by the hundred thousand, had passed the million mark and with the movie of the book in production the computer was overheating with the stupendous forecasts. Sensational trials were out.
'What's the alternative?' he asked.
Mr Synstrom leant forward. 'We could come to an arrangement,' he said.
'We could,' Hutchmeyer agreed, 'but that still leaves the cops...'
Mr Synstrom shook his head. They're sitting around waiting to see what we come up with. Now the way I see it...'
By the time he had finished Hutchmeyer saw it that way too. The insurance company would announce that the claim had been met in full and in return Hutchmeyer would write a disclaimer. Hutchmeyer did. Three and a half million dollars was worth every cent for keeping Baby 'dead'.
'What happens if you're right and she turns up out of the blue?' Hutchmeyer asked as Mr Synstrom got up to leave.
'Then you've really got problems,' he said. 'That's what I'd say.'
He left and Hutchmeyer sat back and considered those problems. The only consolation he could find was that if Baby was still alive she had problems too. Like coming back to life and going to prison. She wasn't fool enough to do that. Which left Hutchmeyer free to go his own way. He could even marry again. His thoughts turned to Sonia Futtle. Now there was a real woman.
Chapter 19
Two thousand miles to the south Baby's problems had taken on a new dimension. Her attempt to give Piper the experience he needed relationshipwise had succeeded too well and where before he had thrown himself into Work In Regress he now insisted on throwing himself into her as well. The years of his celibacy were over and Piper was making up for them in a hurry. As he lay each night kissing her reinforced breasts and gripping her degreased thighs Piper experienced an ecstasy he could never have found with another woman. Baby's artificiality was entirely to his taste. Lacking so many original parts she had none of those natural physiological disadvantages he had found in Sonia. She had, as it were, been expurgated and Piper, himself in the process of expurgating Pause, derived enormous satisfaction from the fact that with Baby he could act out the role he had been assigned as narrator in the book with a woman who if she was much older than him didn't look it. And Baby's response added to his pleasure. She combined lack of fervour with sexual expertise so that he didn't feel threatened by her passion. She was simply there to be enjoyed and didn't interfere with his writing by demanding his constant attention. Finally her intimate knowledge of the novel meant that she could respond word-perfect to his cues. When he murmured, 'Darling, we're being so heuristically creative,' at the penultimate moment of ecstasy, Baby, feeling nothing, could reply, 'Constating, my baby,' in unison with her prototype the ancient Gwendolen on page 185, and thus maintain quite literally the fiction that was the essential core of Piper's being.
But if Baby met Piper's requirements as the ideal lover the reverse was not true. Baby found it unflattering to know that she was merely a stand-in for a figment of his imagination and not even his own imagination but that of the real author of Pause. Knowing this, Piper's ardour took on an almost ghoulish quality so that Baby, staring over his shoulder at the ceiling, had the horrid feeling that she might just as well not have been present. At such moments she saw herself as something that had coalesced from the pages of Pause, a phantom of the opus which was Piper's pretentious name for what he was now doing in Work In Regress and intended to continue in another version. Her future seemed destined to be the recipient of his derived feelings, a sexual artefact compiled from words upon pages to be ejaculated into and then set aside while he put pen to paper. Even the routine of their days had altered. Piper insisted on writing each morning and driving through the heat of the day and stopping early at a motel so that he could read to her what he had written that morning and then relate.
'Can't you just say "fuck" once in a while?' Baby asked one evening at a motel in Tuscaloosa. 'I mean that's what we're doing so why not name it right?'
But Piper wouldn't. The word wasn't in Pause and 'relating' was an approved term in The Moral Novel.
'What I feel for you...' he began but Baby stopped him.
'So I read the original. I don't need to see the movie.'
'As I was saying,' said Piper, 'what I feel for you is...'
'Zero,' said Baby, 'absolute zero. You've got more feelings towards that ink bottle you're always sticking your pen in than you have towards me.'
'Well, I like that...' said Piper.
'I don't,' said Baby and there was a new note of desperation in her voice. For a moment she thought of leaving Piper there in the motel and going off on her own. But the moment passed. She was tied by the irrevocable act of the fire and her disappearance to this literary mongol whose notion of great writing was to step backwards in time in futile imitation of novelists long dead. Worst of all, she saw in Piper's obsession with past glories a mirror-image of herself. For forty years she too had waged a war with time and had by surgical recession maintained the outward appearance of the foolish beauty who had been Miss Penobscot 1935. They had so much in common and Piper served to remind her of her own stupidity. All that was gone now, the longing to be young again and the sense of knowing she was still sexually attractive. Only death remained and the certainty that when she died there would be no call for the embalmer. She had seen to that in advance.