"Even one glass takes my edge off. I can't afford that right now."
Gray glanced at her. The fire's hues played on her face and sweater. Golds and reds and blues painted her in reeling patterns, making her seem an illusion. She brought up a few flakes of the fish and touched them with her tongue before eating them. Gray watched her chew. She seemed to do it absently, with the delicacy of disinterest. She gently twirled the wine. Colors of the fire sparkled in the wine and her eyes.
"You're staring at me again," she said quietly.
"Damn it." He shifted his gaze to his plate.
"I still mind, but not so much."
They ate in silence awhile. Gray had hoped for a comment about the fish, but none came. Trout was a meal he knew he cooked superbly, and this fish was tender and buttery, suggesting the wilderness without being gamey.
She sipped her wine. Her lips left a slight red print on the glass. Gray stared at the glass a moment. He wondered why such a common sight — lipstick on a wineglass — could be so suggestive.
She said, "Your friend Pete Coates likes to look at the files of people he works with."
"He knows more about me than I do."
"Did he tell you a lot about me?"
"Nothing I'd call tantalizing," he answered.
"You know about my husband?"
"A pilot who died in a plane crash. Sad business."
"I read once in a psychology text that for any given person in the United States there are sixty thousand other people that person could fall in love with. But I knew that statistic was sheer nonsense. There was one person for me and I had the good fortune to find him. Then I lost him."
Gray brought up a forkful of rice. He wondered where the conversation was going.
"I first met Rick when I was in grade school. Then we went to the same high school, and we both went to UCLA. I don't remember when I didn't know him, and I always knew that I would one day marry him. It was just a given in my life."
She was looking fully at him, so he thought there would be little risk in turning to her to listen. She might not snap at him for staring at her. Her eyes shimmered with reflected firelight.
Adrian went on, her voice a whisper above sounds of the fire and storm. "When I heard Rick died, I died, too, everything except my pulse. I became an empty shell with nothing inside."
"It must have been hard." About as inane a comment as possible, but he could think of no other.
"I have a few seconds of happiness each day just after I wake up in the morning. Then I realize again that Rick is gone. Every morning I endure again the crushing return of his loss."
Gray nodded his understanding.
"Do you know that I haven't dated anyone since he died? I doubt that little fact was in Pete's file."
"In four years?"
She smiled and shook her head. "Four years. And you can infer all you want from that about my sex life, and you'll be right."
"It's not my province to infer anything about you. And besides, I'm too gentlemanly." He chewed several peas. "Not in four years?" He wanted to add that it was a terrible waste, but thought better of it.
She renewed her smile. "It's a terrible waste, right? I've heard that before from guys trying to put the make on me."
"But not from me."
"When I get hormonal urges, I go to my martial arts gym and use a striking bag. An hour's worth usually does it." She ate some of the rice, then said, "From what I understand, you are like me."
Gray shrugged. "I get out once in a while."
She laughed. "Yes, to the zoo or a children's museum or McDonald's for Happy Meals."
He rubbed the side of his nose. "I know what you are doing, Adrian."
"Yes?"
"You are opening up to me, confiding your deepest wound and the great secret of your sex life. But you and Pete Coates are alike, always on the job."
She again sipped her wine.
"You believe that I have something hidden in my past that will help your investigation," Gray said. "You think that if you bare your soul to me I'll reciprocate, that I'll reveal my past so you can clinically examine it like some coroner picking apart a body."
She grinned at him. "It's working, isn't it?"
"Not at all."
"Sure it is. The fire, this remote cabin, the storm outside, the delicious food, me. You are yearning to tell me your secret. The urge is overwhelming."
"I don't feel any such urge." Gray turned back to the fire.
"I can outlast you."
"Outlast me?" He tried to add a touch of scorn to his voice but failed. "You don't know anything about endurance. You don't know—"
He abruptly rose and walked into the kitchen. He returned with a wineglass. He held up the glass to fill it precisely halfway. "Half a glass and I'll still have all my reflexes." He took a drink of the chardonnay, then returned to the couch.
"Tell me your secret," she demanded softly. She crossed her legs and leaned back against the armrest as if expecting a long confession.
Gray swallowed more wine.
"A line of perspiration has appeared on your forehead, Owen."
"This sofa is too close to the fire."
She laughed lightly. "You are sweating because you are about to break. You are desperate to tell me, someone who will understand."
He waved his hand in dismissal.
"You don't have a choice," she said. "Tell me."
Gray swallowed. His throat was dry. He held the glass with both hands. The fire swayed and flashed and hooked its tongues of flame, curling around the logs and twining together and pulling apart. It was enticing him, beguiling him. Tendrils of her scent reached for him, a light gardenia. The wind coursing through the trees had gained a low musical, pulsing quality. The air had become dense. Gray was having trouble breathing.
"You've put something in my wine," he protested feebly.
"It only feels like it. You were about to tell me."
" I… can't."
Her voice brushed him. "Tell me."
An age passed.
"That number." The words at last escaped his mouth. "Ninety-six."
"The number of your kills in Vietnam." She was utterly still, perhaps not wanting to derail Gray by a movement.
"That's the number that brought me fame in the Marine Corps, that got a rifle range named after me at Quantico, that got the stories in the Marine Times about the so-called legend. And my ex-wife and the army psychiatrists thought that number was the source of all my problems. The doctors talked about the patriotism of that number, of a soldier doing his duty. My wife kept asking what it was like to look through crosshairs at ninety-six people."
She lowered her chin slightly, a delicate encouragement.
"The number wasn't ninety-six." He emptied his glass. "It was ninety-seven." He had said it. She had broken him. Gray looked at her, but her face carried no trace of a victor's smirk.
"Ninety-seven," she said, not a question.
He turned back to the fire. Blue flames curled around the bottom of the logs. "My last shot in Vietnam. In Elephant Valley, or at least that's what the Marines called it. My spotter Allen Berkowitz and I had been out for three days. We hadn't had any luck. I don't like to look back and think I was impatient and careless, but of course I was. Berkowitz didn't see them, but I did, the telltale three white dots of a human in the brush, the face and two hands. And a flash of reflected light from a scope or binoculars. We knew we were in enemy territory. No friendlies anywhere near. So I aimed and fired as fast as I could, thinking the flash might be a scope and the enemy had me in it." Gray's eyes dropped from the fire to the stone hearth.
"Go on," Adrian whispered.
A moment passed, then he said, "My kill fell out of the bush where he had been hiding." Gray placed his glass on the table. His hands were trembling, and the base of the glass rattled on the tabletop. "He was an American. A Marine sniper."