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Carver took another bite of steak, wondering how Edwina could see Cahill so clearly, but not see Willis.

“How’s your sandwich?” he asked.

“Like the rest of Solarville. Tolerable.”

Carver kept quiet and chewed.

Sam Cahill didn’t come into The Flame that evening. After supper, Carver and Edwina drove back to the Tumble Inn in the Olds with the top down. The heat of the night was moderated by the breeze that whipped around the windshield and rushed back to splay Edwina’s dark hair across her cheeks and forehead. In the constant flow of wind she looked oddly like a beautiful woman underwater, drowned and alone. When Carver slowed the Olds to take a curve in the road, the breeze lessened and the close scent of the swamp crept in for a few seconds, until he built up speed again. The secret of life: keep moving.

“We might as well leave here tomorrow,” he said, glancing over at Edwina. “If Willis was here when I arrived, he isn’t anymore.”

“Why not tonight?” she asked, as if she were afraid.

“A DEA agent named Burr wants to talk to me about Lujan.”

“Drugs,” Edwina said. “They think everything in Florida is drugs.”

“If you want to return to Del Moray tonight, you could get your rental car back and drive,” Carver said. She had left her Mercedes in the shop in Del Moray for service. He was afraid of the same thing she was; he wanted to make it clear to her that it made no difference to him if she drove back to Del Moray alone, tonight, without him.

She seemed to consider the idea. Then she said, “No, that would be stupid. We’re both going in the same direction, and my room is already paid for.”

As Carver turned the Olds onto the Tumble Inn’s parking lot, a black Lincoln coming out braked to make room for him, then turned left on the highway, traveling away from Solarville. The Lincoln’s windows were tinted, but not so darkly that Carver didn’t notice that the driver was the three-piece-suit type he’d seen earlier in the Tumble Inn restaurant, and his passenger, sitting as far away from him as possible on the front seat, was the executive-tailored blonde woman who’d been with him. Off to new diversions, Carver thought, wondering how it would be to have that kind of money, that kind of leisure. Lately he’d found himself envying other people too often.

He parked the Olds halfway between his room and Edwina’s.

Neither of them moved to get out of the car right away.

“Do you want some coffee?” Carver asked. “Or a drink in the hotel lounge?”

“No, it’s late. I’m tired.” The car’s engine ticked, cooling.

For the first time Carver realized it was almost ten o’clock. They’d had a late supper, sat longer than he’d planned in The Flame. Against the dark sky, a huge full moon was plastered like a decoration at a dance, low on the haze above the swamp. Night insects were screaming as if they were dismayed about the world in general.

“What time are we leaving tomorrow?” Edwina asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll call you after I talk with Burr.”

She worked the chrome handle, started to push open the door to get out of the car. Carver’s hand was on her shoulder before he knew it had moved, feeling the sharpness of bone and the warmth of flesh beneath the crisp white material of her blouse. There was something desperate in the action. She twisted on the seat and looked at him, confused and a little angry in the moonlight.

“Not a good idea,” she said. “Wrong.” But her own hand rose and her fingertips brushed the side of Carver’s face, so lightly he might have imagined it.

She got out of the car and he watched her walk to her door. She unlocked it and went inside without looking back.

Carver put up the canvas top on the Olds, then went to the Tumble Inn lounge and sat nursing one beer for almost an hour, listening to an unbroken string of sad love songs wafting from unseen speakers. It was almost as if the bastards who’d set up the music knew.

Not a good idea. Wrong.

He didn’t feel like sleeping. But he didn’t feel like sitting there and drinking and feeling mawkish any longer either, so he left the lounge and walked back across the parking lot to his room, listening to the solemn sound of his soles crunching on gravel, the growling drag of his cane.

It took as much willpower as he’d mustered in years not to stop and knock on Edwina’s door.

But she was waiting for him in front of his door. So much for willpower.

He touched her shoulder and she came to him, clung to him. He bowed his head, sought her eager mouth, found it with his own. Her grip on him tightened, and her body writhed tight against his.

Somehow he managed to fit his key into the lock.

CHAPTER 18

The next morning, Carver studied Edwina over the rim of his coffee cup. She kept her eyes averted from him, her gaze downcast. She wasn’t wearing makeup; her face was fresh-scrubbed and her eyes were puffy. Her dark hair gave off a faint, clean perfumed scent and was drawn back from her forehead, parted and combed oh so neatly. She was wearing a denim skirt and a tailored blue pinstripe blouse, no jewelry. She might have been a nun in street clothes.

But Carver remembered her fierce and desperate softness of the night before. He’d been awkward at first, with his lame leg, having to support and lever himself carefully with his good knee and his arms. But within a few minutes Edwina had made him forget all about the leg, about everything but her. Her intensity had amazed and delighted him, taken him away. His own intensity had shocked him. She was like a hand grenade tossed into his mind.

But now it was Willis Davis again. He could see that. Or was it something more than Willis?

How had she viewed the night before? As a lapse, a temporary surrender to desire? An unfortunate, never-to-be-repeated interlude?

Carver knew that now he had every reason to find Willis Davis, to lay Willis to rest alive or dead in the mental landscape of Carver’s relationship with Edwina. Otherwise Willis would continue to haunt them, to sour what could be between them. Willis was one of the world’s spoilers, all right. Carver disliked him more than anyone he’d never met.

“I’d use your toothbrush,” Carver said.

Edwina stared at him. “What?”

“That’s the test of true intimacy, if you’d use your partner’s toothbrush.”

She didn’t smile. “That’s disgusting. And you’ve already brushed this morning. Finish your coffee.”

They sat for a while without speaking in the cool motel restaurant. It was as if the night before had been cut from the calendar. Carver stared out the window at the cloudless sky, the morning heating up in the glare of slanted sunlight. At the edge of the swamp beyond the parking lot, Spanish moss and vines seemed to drip from the trees as if the branches were melting in the sun. Carver looked at his watch. Nine-thirty. Alex Burr had phoned half an hour ago. Carver was to meet him in town at eleven. He had time to kill; he knew how he wanted to kill it.

“Do you want to take a walk?” he asked Edwina.

“No, I’ll stay here for a while.”

The implication was clear: Carver could take a walk. Alone. Down love’s rough road. With a pang of jealousy, he remembered how, the night before, she had called him Willis without realizing it.

He thought he’d better not push Edwina any further. When the waitress wandered by, he waved her down and had her refill both coffee cups. Edwina didn’t look up, absently added cream and sugar to her coffee, and stirred. She seemed listless, somewhat confused beneath her brittleness.

“What are you going to tell Burr?” she asked.

“Whatever he wants to know. He’ll probably have the answers to everything he’s going to question me about anyway, or he wouldn’t ask. It’s the way the feds work.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Think of your tax form.”

Daninger walked past the restaurant entrance from the lobby, looked in, and smiled tentatively at Carver. Everything was all right now, the smile said. Wasn’t it? Carver hoped Daninger didn’t come into the restaurant for added reassurance that the legal profession wasn’t going to pounce on him.