It was warmer in the cottage now, but not warm enough for her to shed her down jacket yet. The damp, musty smell was still pervasive. Wind howled in the chimney, chill breaths of it stirring ashes inside the fireplace. Four days. There was a TV and a combination VCR and DVD player, but no cable; a small collection of DVDs and VHS tapes were all you could watch. There was also a radio/CD boom box, the kind with Civil Defense and police bands, some music CDs of various types, and a shelf of paperbacks, mostly the historical romances that Kate considered steamy and she found overblown and silly. Four days. Pretense and superficial conversation and unsatisfying sex. If it stormed the whole time they were here, she’d be diving into the gin a lot earlier than seven P.M. by New Year’s Eve.
Jay came back out as she was pouring a martini for herself. He said, “None for me.”
“I thought you’d like one after that interminable drive.”
“Just a glass of wine. That’s all I want.”
New development, this. Jay liked martinis as much as she did; cocktails together when she wasn’t working the night shift had been one of their more pleasurable rituals. But lately he’d quit drinking hard liquor, cut back on wine as well. All he’d said when she asked him about it was that he’d been drinking too much and felt it was a good idea to ease off. Subtle dig at her? Probably not; he hadn’t suggested she cut back herself. Still, the holiday season was a funny time to make a decision usually reserved for the New Year.
Wind and hard rain slammed against the cottage, rattling the windows and the door in its frame, as he poured a small glass of wine for himself. He said then, “I’ll make a fire. You just enjoy your drink.”
Enjoy it? She swallowed half of the martini, felt its warmth spreading through her. Better. But she still didn’t take off her jacket.
From one end of the sofa she watched Jay arranging kindling and crumpled newspaper on the hearth. Man, the firemaker. Once he’d been robust, his dark hair thick and curly, his color high and his body radiating strength. An athlete in high school and his first two years of college, especially good at baseball—a power-hitting centerfielder who might have gotten a pro contract if he hadn’t damaged his knee in a home-plate collision in his sophomore year at UC Santa Cruz. Now … fifteen pounds lighter, hair thinning and losing its luster, shoulders tending to draw down instead of up and back when he moved. There were times, watching him like this, when she barely recognized the Jay Macklin she’d married twelve years ago, as if that man had somehow morphed into a near stranger.
The fantasy came over her again, as it did now and then at odd moments. She imagined that the familiar lines and angles of him were shrinking, blurring, losing definition; that he was dematerializing a little more each day, becoming harder to see clearly; that eventually he would turn fuzzily transparent, like a ghost, so you’d be able to see daylight through him, and then finally he would disappear altogether—the new invisible man.
She couldn’t bear to witness something like that, the literal slipping down and fading away of the man she’d once loved … no, still loved, or she wouldn’t still be with him. If that was what was going to happen, she’d be gone before the deterioration was complete.
Maybe gone sooner than that, she thought.
In spite of herself, a comparison image of Douglas flashed into her mind. Strong, solid. Not particularly good-looking, but those intense and frank hazel eyes were more appealing than any pretty-boy features. Another image: the seemingly effortless way he went about his duties in South Bay General’s ER—capable, commanding, in complete control no matter what the emergency or crisis case. Another: the openness of his smile when he spoke to her, so that she felt he was not only an honest man but one who seldom if ever hid his true feelings …
Shelby shook herself, hard, to rid her mind of the images and the thoughts that went with them. Emptied her glass in one stinging gulp.
Jay was on his feet now, poking among the pieces of driftwood on the mantel. “There aren’t any matches here,” he said.
“I’ll look in the kitchen.” She wanted another martini anyway.
She opened drawers and cabinets. The Coulters kept the cottage well stocked: liquor, coffee, spices, condiments. But no matches.
A door next to the stove opened onto a cramped utility porch. Washer and dryer. Microwave. Full wine rack. Vacuum cleaner. Pantry filled with canned and packaged goods and cleaning supplies—and nothing else.
She went back into the kitchen. Jay was at a catchall closet next to the breakfast bar, rummaging among the shelves. “Find any, Shel?”
“No.”
“Don’t seem to be any in here, either.”
“Maybe in one of the bedrooms.”
She went to look. Nothing.
Jay was still at the closet when she came back. He said, “Well, hell,” when he saw that she was empty-handed.
“You sure there’re no matches in there?” she asked.
“Look for yourself.”
The closet shelves were packed with all sorts of odds and ends. A pocket-size portable radio, flashlight, batteries, candles, hand tools, local phone directories, napkins and placemats, decks of playing cards, even Scrabble and backgammon games. Everything you might want or need except the one essential you were looking for.
“Ben must not have realized he was out or he’d have mentioned it.”
“Good old Ben.”
“Well, it’s not a crisis. We’ll buy some in Seacrest tomorrow. I’ll just use the stove tonight.”
“It’s electric.”
“Doesn’t matter. I can light a twist of newspaper on one of the burners, use that to start the fire.”
“Just don’t light up anything else on the way.”
He fetched a couple of sheets of newspaper, rolled them up as he moved into the kitchen to turn on the stove burner.
Shelby picked up the martini pitcher, started to pour her glass full again.
And all the lights went out.
T H R E E
MACKLIN STOOD BLINKING IN the sudden blackness. He heard Shelby suck in her breath, the clatter of the pitcher as she set it down hard on the countertop. “Shel? You okay?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to panic.”
“Power’ll probably come right back on.”
She didn’t say anything.
He groped his way around the wet bar, saying, “There’s a flashlight in the closet there—”
“I know, I saw it. The batteries better be good.”
She moved away from him, sideways to the closet. With the lights off, the furious whistling, rattling sounds of the storm seemed magnified. A power outage … just what they didn’t need right now.
A blade of light slashed through the dark, carving out whitish jigsaw pieces as Shelby swung it up and around toward him. “We’d better go sit down,” she said.
He followed her across the living room to the couch. She laid the flashlight on an end table and left it burning, so that the beam made a stationary white circle on the fireplace bricks. He knew she’d had a small scare. She was a borderline nyctophobe; had insisted on sleeping with a night-light on the entire time they’d been married. He suspected that one of the reasons she’d become an EMT was that it was a job requiring a certain amount of night work—her way of battling the demon.
They sat listening to the wind and rain, waiting. Minutes ticked away—five, ten. He wanted to say something, couldn’t think of anything that she’d want to hear. He settled for putting a hand on her leg, giving it a gentle squeeze; the muscles and tendons were taut. Shelby’s gaze remained fixed on the white circle.
The silence thickened between them until he couldn’t stand it any longer. “You get occasional power failures in remote areas like this,” he said. “But they don’t usually last very long.”