Marcia Muller - Games to Keep the Dark Away

“You have an open face. You look like you won’t judge people.” Don’s eyes moved over my face, in the same appreciative but inoffensive way they’d appraised my body when he first saw me. I smiled back and lay down, my head on a pillow, feeling warm and finally relaxed. The wine had made me drowsy and a little disconnected from my surroundings.

“I’ve always asked too many questions,” I said, aware I was almost repeating myself. “My mother used to get mad at me. ‘Why, why, why?’ she used to say. ‘ Why are you always asking why?’ ”

Don chuckled and got up. He turned off the lights, brought a candle from the kitchen, lit it, and set it on the rug. Then he lay down, his elbow on the pillow next to me, head propped on his hand.

“Tell me about you,” he said. “You asked me the right questions earlier this week and I gave you my life history. Now it’s your turn.”

“There’s not a whole lot to tell. I’m from San Diego, got a sociology degree from Berkeley, couldn’t find a job. I’d done security work part-time while I was going to school, so I went back into that and got training as a detective.”

“And your family-what are they like?”

“An average middle-class clan.”

He traced one finger along my hairline. “I find it hard to believe that an average middle-class clan produced someone like you.”

“Hmmm. Well, I guess you’re right. Now that I think of it, I’m the most normal of the lot.”

“Tell me about them.”

I shut my eyes, visualizing my parents’ old rambling house in San Diego and all the people who had lived there at one time or another. “I have two older brothers. One’s married with two kids, the other’s single. They get in trouble with the law a lot.”

“The kids or your brothers?”

“My brothers. The kids are too young yet.”

“What do they do?”

“Minor things. Overdue traffic tickets. Getting rowdy in bars. My brother John once punched out a cop. Then I have two younger sisters.”

“Do they beat up on cops?”

“No. Their specialty is pregnancy.”

“Oh.”

“One of them lives on a farm near Ukiah. She has three kids, each by a different boyfriend. My other sister lives in a suburb of L.A. She’s got four kids and is married to a musician.”

“Are all the kids his?”

“Oh, yes. Unlike Patsy, Charlene is very monogamous. That’s the problem.”

“Problem?”

I opened my eyes. Don had a bemused smile on his lips and the candlelight flickered over his tanned, handsome face. “Charlene’s husband keeps leaving her. Not for anything like other women-just to go on tour with this country-western band. He’ll go off for six, eight months at a time and then, when he shows up, bingo! She’s pregnant again.”

“It sounds serious.”

“Oh, it is. They’ve only been married five years. God knows how many kids they’ll end up with.”

“What about you?” Don ran his finger down my cheek and along my jawbone. “Do you want kids?”

“I never think about them. Good Lord-I don’t even know if I want to get married.”

“And I’ll bet your mother worries about that.”

“Oh, yes. That, and the fact that I’m always getting mixed up in murders. My poor parents! All they ever wanted were good Catholic kids-and look what they got.”

“How do they handle it?”

“Well, my mother’s an expert at coping. She holds the family together through the worst trials and traumas.”

“And your dad?”

“When we were younger, he wasn’t around all the time. He was a chief petty officer in the navy and managed to pull a fair amount of sea duty. Now he’s retired and works as a cabinetmaker. When things get to be too much for him, he just goes off to his workshop in the garage and plays his guitar.”

“What? Another musician?” Don’s finger stopped moving along my chin and he stared down at me.

I grinned. I loved to tell people about my eccentric family. “Only amateur.”

“What does he play? Rock?”

“No. Irish folk ballads.”

“I thought McCone was a Scottish name.”

“Scotch-Irish.”

“But you look Indian.”

“Shoshone. One-eighth.”

“Ye gods.” He brushed a tendril of hair away from my face and wound a thick lock of it through his fingers. “Did you know your family was, uh…not usual when you were growing up?”

“Oh, no. For years, I thought we were just like everybody else. It wasn’t until high school that I became aware of certain…oddities.”

“What enlightened you?”

“It’s a long story.”

“We have all night.”

“Yes, we do, don’t we?”

Don and I exchanged solemn looks for a moment. Then I said, “Well, I really figured it out because of our Corvair. You know, one of those little compact cars with the engine in the rear?”

Don nodded.

“One day, in tenth grade, I was telling a girlfriend about it. You see, there was so much junk in our garage-my father’s guitar included-that we couldn’t drive the car in all the way. During the winter, its rear end stuck out and the engine got cold and wouldn’t start.”

“All right. So far I can picture it.”

“Every night,” I went on, “when it was time to go to bed, my dad would take this torchlight out to the car. He’d plug it in and turn it on, and then he’d open the rear hood and stick the light in there to keep the engine warm. And then he’d take a couple of old quilts and tuck the back of the car in for the night.”

Don opened his mouth, but I held up my hand. “I know what you’re going to say. Just what my friend in high school did. There I was, telling her this story about how clever my dad was to keep the car’s engine warm in spite of everything, and she said…” I started to laugh. “She said, as logical as could be, ‘Why doesn’t he just back the car into the garage?’”

Don started to laugh too, and then I laughed harder, and he laughed harder still. He buried his face against my neck and put his arms around me and we laughed and laughed. Finally we lay there, holding each other, panting and bursting into occasional giggles. After a few minutes, Don raised his face, looked down into mine, and kissed me.

What with the wine and the weariness, I almost felt I was floating. I kissed him back, aware of nothing but his lips and the soft fabric of his robe. And then I felt the rough-but-gentle touch of his hands on my body. And responded, my own hands on him.

Soon my clothes and his robe lay heaped on the floor next to us, and we merged together in slow but powerful motion on the blue rug. And the aftermath of its climax brought shared peace and a shield from the haunting shadow of violent death.

Sometime during the night we moved to the bed in the alcove and slept, close in each other’s arms. And, toward morning, I awoke with a start from dreams of Corvairs wrapped in blood-spattered quilts. Awoke thinking of one thing that might have made John Cala go out to the old pier.

A car. The presence of a car he’d thought he recognized.

The morning sunlight shining on the water at Salmon Bay had that pale quality I associated with autumn, and there was a slight chill in the air. I parked my car by the side of the main road and contemplated Rose’s Crab Shack.

An hour earlier, after calling Barbara Smith’s sister and still getting no answer, I’d allowed Don to feed me a disgraceful amount of scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns, and toast. But I supposed a cup of coffee wouldn’t hurt me, and here at the Crab Shack it might open the door to a conversation about the night that Jane Anthony died. I got out of the car, crossed the road, and went into the hole-in-the-wall restaurant.