Max Collins - Quarry's list

So was the idyllic atmosphere they were basking in. They were on a boat, a cabin cruiser apparently, fishing gear evident in the background of the color photograph, and lots of sun and blue sky.

“That was taken a year ago,” she said. “In the Bahamas.”

The picture was on the wall, with a number of other framed pictures of the Broker and Carrie, and of the Broker and various men and women I didn’t recognize. I was sitting at the big scarred-top desk, flashing a high-intensity lamp on the wall of pictures, and had centered in on this one.

“You know,” I said, “I saw you together once. I’d forgotten about it, just remembered. You were at a restaurant together, a fancy one, in the Quad Cities.”

“When?”

“I don’t remember exactly. Not too long ago.” I did remember exactly, but didn’t want to say; it was just days before the Broker died trying to have me killed.

“Did my husband introduce us?”

“No. I spoke to him, but not in front of you.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“Wasn’t hard. We met in the toilet We talked in toilets a lot, your husband and me. It was that kind of relationship.”

“Jack, I… I’d rather you didn’t go into any of that. I… there are some things I’d really rather not know, Jack. I don’t think I could handle knowing some things, you know?”

“Sure. Forget it. I didn’t mean to bring any of that up, anyway.”

“Listen, why… why don’t I get us something to drink?” She was standing there in bra and panties with a plaid woolen blanket she’d got from somewhere shrugged around her shoulders.

Her eyes were big and clear and blue, and she looked like a kid. Funny, in that restaurant that time, I’d thought she was in her mid-thirties, thought she looked cold, the frigid bitch type, figured her for a wealthy, worldly, well-educated pain in the ass. Now, I knew she was in her late twenties and young for that, and anything but cold or a bitch, and no matter how many times she may have been to Europe or the Bahamas, worldly she wasn’t, and no matter how many private schools for girls she’d suffered through, there was a lot this girl had yet to learn.

“I have bourbon in the cabinet,” she said.

“Just put some Coke in a glass,” I said. “Nothing hard for me.”

She touched my leg and grinned in a way I hadn’t seen since last night. “Maybe I’m in the mood for something hard.”

“Maybe you better let me catch my breath,” I grinned back. “For now, just some Coke and ice, okay?”

She went over to the kitchen area, dragging her blanket, and I flashed the little lamp across a few more pictures. Many of them were of the Broker and Carrie in shots similar to that one I’d lingered over, some of the photos taken here at the cottage and on the river, others sunny vacation pictures, the Bahamas, Florida, what-have-you. I skimmed right over one picture, thinking it was the Broker and Carrie with some unknown fellow vacationer, then something clicked in my head and I went back to it, lifted it in its frame off the wall, and gave it a close look.

The picture was of three people dressed in white tennis garb, rackets in hand, leaning against the wire-mesh fence of a court somewhere. One of them was the Broker, all right, but years ago. His face had never been lined, but it had gotten fleshy over the years, and in this picture his face was firm and lean, and his hair dark brown, with a few streaks of the premature white that would eventually take over. Next to him was a beautiful woman, who looked remarkably like Carrie, but was someone else, someone obviously related to her, an older sister perhaps. The woman was, in the picture, perhaps eighteen or twenty, and she had the same naturally white-blond hair as Carrie, only worn in the pageboy style of the times. It wasn’t a color picture, but her eyes were light and clear and probably as blue as Carrie’s, and only something slightly different around the nose and mouth made the woman less than a dead ringer for Carrie.

“My mother,” she said, looking over my shoulder. She set the glass of Coke on the desk.

“Who’s this next to her?” I asked, pointing at the guy on the woman’s left. Broker was on her right.

“That’s my father,” she said.

“I see. Is there a story here?”

“I guess so. Sort of. Both of them loved her. They all three went to school together-college, I mean-back east someplace. My father ended up marrying her.”

“And the other guy in the picture waited around a few years and then settled for you, is that it?”

“You make it sound sick or something…”

“Sorry.”

“Maybe I can make you understand…”

“Please.”

She didn’t have the whole story, having just heard pieces of it, over the years. She gathered that her father and the Broker had been close friends before her mother came between them, and it wasn’t until some few years later, with her mother’s early death, that the two men resumed their friendship, perhaps out of a need to console each other. At any rate, she’d grown up having two fathers around, in a way, though the real one paid little attention to her (“He was busy, out of town on business a lot, still is… his firm handles cases all over the place”), though doting on her younger sister who didn’t bear such a painfully close resemblance to their dead mother. Her surrogate father, however, the kindly old Broker, didn’t shun Carrie for looking like her mother, rather his reaction was to worship the child for it. And she liked the attention of a doting father figure; she had settled for that, in lieu of the real thing. “I always told him I was going to marry him, when I grew up,” she said, “and I did. And if you want to make something sick out of that, that’s your problem.”

She’d been frank with me, but there was one thing she’d sluffed over, and I had to go back to it, even at the risk of upsetting her further.

“Your mother,” I said.

“What about my mother?”

“You said she died. You didn’t say how.”

“She was an alcoholic.”

“That doesn’t have to kill you.”

“It did her. I was a little girl when it happened. She killed herself in a car.”

“An accident.”

“Or something. Look, I really don’t want to talk about any of this anymore, if you don’t mind. I mean, it’s not really… relevant to anything, after all, is it? And, I… well, I have certain… wounds that never really healed over, in my life, you know? So don’t ask me to go picking at them.’’

“Okay.”

She dropped the blanket to the floor in a woolen puddle and sat on my lap and put her arms around my neck. “Why don’t we go sit by the fire. It’s going to die out if you don’t tend to it.”

“Let me ask you something first.”

She sighed. Stiffened.

“I won’t pick at any wounds,” I said. “I promise.”

“Go ahead and ask, then.”

“Your husband… did he do much work down here, at the cottage? You said he was down here a lot.”

“He was, and he did do some work down here, sometimes, but nothing important, I don’t think. Just fiddled.”

“What do you mean?”

“He just worked on minor stuff down here. Like his mail-order businesses. Checking the books and like that. He liked checking his own books. He had a streak of accountant in him. Now, are you going to keep that fire going or not?” She nuzzled my neck.

Earlier, after making love, she’d got me to take a shower with her, in this same coaxing way.

“You win,” I said, and dumped her onto the blanket on the floor.

“Ouch! You’re a bully.”

I picked her up, blanket and all, and deposited her in front of the dwindling fire. It didn’t take long to get the fire going again, and she put her head on my lap, supposedly to go to sleep, but since my lap was her pillow she began smoothing it like one, and then pretty soon her head was in my lap, and then later, finally, she did fall asleep, curling into a fetal position, cuddling in against me, the blanket around her. I sat with her an hour watching the fire, not feeding it any more wood, letting it sputter and die, since the fog might lift and chimney smoke betray us.