Nothing happened to disturb me, and it was dark when I woke up. My watch read seven forty-five. I got up and put my jacket on — the air in there had turned a little chilly and a little dank; I did not like the feel of it in my lungs — and went to look in on Alex again. He was still sleeping, lying on his back now, the bedclothes rumpled around him.
That damned musty dankness drove me out of my room and downstairs. People can learn to like living in different places, different environments, but the Cappellanis could have this place and welcome to it.
When I stepped down into the foyer I saw somebody sitting in the big family room across from the stairs. Shelly. I detoured over there and went inside, and she smiled when she saw me and got to her feet. There was nobody else in the room.
“Sitting here all alone?” I said.
“Not until a couple of minutes ago. I was having a drink with Leo, but he’s gone into a business conference with Mrs. Cappellani. He’s leaving for San Francisco tonight.”
“When did you get back from the fest?”
“A little after five. It was pretty dull after you left. How’s Alex?”
“Still sleeping it off.”
“Looks like you’ve been sleeping yourself. Your hair’s mussed.”
Which told me I had forgotten to run a comb through it before leaving the bathroom. Old age or chronic slob, take your pick. I got the comb out and worked with it briefly and put it away again. “Better?”
“I liked it more the other way. Want a drink?”
“I don’t think so. I was going out for some air. How about joining me?”
“I’d love to — as they say in the old movies.”
We went outside and wandered down the lane and then down the road past the cellar. There were drifting clouds in the sky now, obscuring what there was of a moon, and the air had an autumn crispness that cleared my lungs immediately. We were the only two people out and around that I could see. The winery buildings and the rolling vineyards were dark shadows against the dark sky; the nightlights on the main cellar had a remote look.
Shelly took my arm and held it so that I could feel the swell of her breast, intentionally or otherwise. I began to think again about getting laid. She was thinking about it too, because when we got down beneath the black oak near the pond she stopped abruptly and turned to face me, and a couple of seconds after that we went into a clinch. As they say in the old movies.
The intensity of her kiss surprised me: there was a kind of violence in it. Violence, too, in the way she wrapped both hands not around my neck but in the material of my shirt, as if she wanted to tear it off me, and in the hard thrusts of her body against mine. It went on that way for twenty or thirty seconds before I stopped it; one of her clutching hands had dug into the wound where she’d bitten me on Thursday night.
“Hey,” I said, “take it easy. I’m an old man.”
“Sure you are.” Up close this way, her face had a kind of fixed intensity of its own. Even in the darkness I could see that her eyes were bright and excited. “Let’s go somewhere.”
“Where? Your cottage?”
“No. Come on.”
She let go of my shirt, reached down for one of my hands, and pulled me along the shore of the pond. But there was nothing where she was heading except the curving rows of grape vines. I said something to her about that, but she didn’t give me an answer; she just kept moving forward, hurrying, holding tightly to my hand. I had known eager women in the past, and I had been eager myself a few times — I was eager enough right now — yet there seemed to be something just a little odd about the way she was acting.
She led me straight up into the vineyard, between two rows of tall old vines where the ground was hard and clodded. Then she stopped and pivoted to me, kissed me again — quick, hard — and tugged on my jacket and my arm so violently that we both went down to our knees. She leaned in against me, breathing rapidly now, and began banging the side of my neck with a bunched fist. Not gently; with enough force to hurt.
Confusion and the pain from her blows made me grab both her wrists, hold her away from me. “Christ, Shelly,” I said, “what’re you doing?”
“Come on,” she said, and there was a kind of animal wildness in her face. “Come on, come on.”
“Here?”
“Right here, right now. Just like the other night.”
“What?”
“Rough, rough. Make me fight you, hurt me a little.”
I got it then, and it was like having cold water splashed on the back of my neck. I said, “Jesus.”
“What are you waiting for? Come on!”
Just like the other night, I thought. Out here in the vineyards. That was the big attraction for her, that was what all those looks had meant on Thursday and at The Boar’s Head on Friday and this afternoon at the fest. Make me fight you, hurt me a little. All the eagerness and all the desire went out of me; I released her wrists and pushed up onto my feet.
I said, “No. No way.”
She sat on her knees on the hard ground and stared up at me; the wildness faded out of her expression, the intensity faded, and what was left was bewilderment. Thickly she said, “What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m not into rough stuff. If that’s the impression you got of me the other night you couldn’t be more wrong.”
Silence at first while she came to terms with what I was telling her. Then things happened in her face, giving it a bunched, masklike appearance for an instant, and she called me something obscene that I was not and never would be. I thought I was going to have to deal with savage outrage — only she surprised me on that score too. As soon as the one word was out of her mouth, her features smoothed and her lips quirked upward at one corner in a wry smile. She got slowly to her feet.
“You like your sex all cozy and cuddly in bed, is that it?” she said. “Strictly missionary position, right?”
“Not exactly. But you’ve got the idea.”
“Then that’s your tough luck, big man. I stopped liking it cozy and cuddly the first time my ex-husband raped me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For me? Bullshit. Different strokes for different folks.”
“If you like it that way, why did you fight me the other night when you thought I was a rapist?”
“You were a stranger then,” she said, as if that explained it.
The other night. Out here in the vineyards.
The thought made me frown because it kept replaying at the back of my mind. Out here in the vineyards; just like the other night. Then something else jarred in my memory, and all at once I was hearing Frank Hastings’s voice on the telephone this afternoon, saying to me at the tag end of our conversation, “Just take it easy out in those vineyards this time. No more nighttime wrestling matches.”
But how had Hastings known about what happened between Shelly and me on Thursday night? I hadn’t told him; I had not told anyone.
I said abruptly, “Shelly, did you tell anybody about the other night? About us, about what happened with us?”
The sudden shift of the questions made her blink. And then she misread my reason for asking them. Her smile curled up at the other corner of her mouth: contempt mixed with the wryness. “Worried about your reputation?”
“No. Listen, did you tell anybody?”
“No, I didn’t tell anybody.”
So how did Hastings know?
Unless—
Sure. The only other person who could have known, who could have seen me wrestling with Shelly, was the man I had been chasing — the man who had attacked Alex. And if that man had accidentally let a comment slip to Hastings at some time during his investigation, and Hastings could remember who it was…