John Lutz - Scorcher

Adam sat at the head of the rectangular glass-topped table, Elana at the opposite end. Nadine had answered Carver’s ring and, after leading him to the veranda, took her seat again before a partly eaten half-grapefruit with a sprinkling of sugar over it. Carver tried to imagine Paul seated opposite his sister but couldn’t.

“Care for some breakfast, Carver?” Adam Kave asked. He was wearing a white-on-white shirt and blue-striped tie today, as if he might be going somewhere or was prepared to meet someone. The breeze tried to ruffle his slicked-back graying hair but couldn’t manage; a victory for Brylcreem.

Carver declined the offer of breakfast, but he sat down at the table, where Paul might have sat had he been there. The proximity of his quarry in space if not time felt eerie. “I’ve been to see Emmett,” he said.

Elana dabbed nervously at her lips with her pink cloth napkin. She had on the same delicately laced robe she’d worn yesterday. Adam sipped his coffee from a dainty cup that looked lost and imperiled in his big hand, and peered at Carver over the rim. There was a pink flowery design on the cup, traversed by a hairline crack. Carver for some reason remembered vaguely a line from an Auden poem memorized in school, something about a crack in the side of a teacup being a lane to the land of the dead.

“Guess you had to go there,” Adam said. “I don’t like Emmett involved in family matters, though.”

“Sometimes it can’t be helped,” Nadine said. “There’s no changing the fact he’s your brother.”

“Stay out of this,” Adam said casually but with unmistakable authority.

Carver thought Nadine might snap an answer at her father, but three beautifully pitched, melancholy chimes sounded from nearby. The doorbell. End of this round.

Nadine glared at Adam, then rose and left the veranda. She was wearing a white tennis outfit with shorts, and her tanned legs were thick but surprisingly shapely. Calf muscles rippled above her soft-soled court shoes, and the firm flesh of her thighs danced with each step. She would probably be strong at sports, Carver thought. Strong at a number of things.

Adam said, “I suppose Emmett asked you not to tell me Paul’s been in the habit of driving over to Kissimmee and seeing him.”

Carver was surprised. His face must have shown it.

Adam smiled and took another nibble of coffee from the dainty cup. “I won’t put you on the spot and ask if you promised him you wouldn’t mention it. Maybe you traded that promise for some useful information.”

“I traded it for Emmett’s further cooperation,” Carver said. “If what he says is true-and you seem to confirm it-Paul might well contact him for help. Emmett promised to call me if that happened.”

“Emmett’s promises are about as solid as that sand,” Adam said, sweeping a backhand motion toward the ocean breaking on the beach below. A large, errant night moth, lost and dazzled by the light, pinged off the screen twice, then flitted away across the bright green lawn toward an uncertain future.

Elana stood up and smiled at Carver. The smile was out of context, as if she hadn’t been present during Carver and her husband’s conversation. Maybe people looking squarely at death did so from their own intensely personal and narrowed worlds.

“I’m feeling the heat somewhat, Mr. Carver,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse me while I take myself upstairs.”

Adam stood up hastily, causing his pink napkin to slide from his lap onto the floor. Carver stood with him and they watched Elana walk into the house. She moved with her apparently customary slowness, but so gracefully Carver thought there was a dreamlike quality to her. A breeze rose and the canvas cracked overhead, a reminder of reality.

“It isn’t the heat,” Adam said. “She gets tired faster now.” There was the slightest catch in his gravelly voice.

Carver wondered if Adam realized Emmett knew about Elana’s illness. Or did it matter? “How did you find out about Paul going to see Emmett?” he asked.

“Played detective,” Adam said in a self-congratulatory tone, sitting back down. He poured some more coffee for himself and then held out the elegant silver-and-glass carafe toward Carver, who had also sat down again. “Sure you don’t want some?”

“I’m sure,” Carver said.

Adam placed the carafe back in its stand, above a wavering candle flame. “Last year, somebody I know in Kissimmee mentioned seeing Paul’s car in Emmett’s neighborhood. That old Lincoln’s pretty distinctive, so I thought there might be something to it, even though Paul lied and told me he was someplace else when I asked him about driving to Kissimmee. So what I did was drive to Emmett’s house and back, keeping track of the mileage. And now and then I’d check the odometer in Paul’s Lincoln after he’d been gone awhile. Several times the mileage on his odometer matched exactly the mileage to Emmett’s house and back here, sometimes down to the tenth of a mile.”

No wonder Paul felt constricted, Carver thought. It wouldn’t be difficult to become paranoid with a father like Adam Kave.

Nadine came back onto the veranda, flanked by two men. The one on her right had his arm lightly around her waist. He was about six feet tall and built lean, with straight brown razor-styled hair, a neatly trimmed mustache, and bright blue eyes full of chips of light; the sort of guy who’d look great in any kind of uniform.

The man on Nadine’s left looked like a troll that had crawled out from under a bridge. He was not more than five and a half feet tall, and his neck swelled into shoulders bunched with muscle. His hair was a dark, Medusalike mass of ropy curls. The backs of his gnarled hands were sooted with black hair, and Carver imagined the stocky little man had hair matted over most of his body. His face was swarthy and wide, with a pushed-in nose and protruding brown eyes. He reminded Carver of a Pekingese pup; yet, strangely enough, there was a crude kind of confidence and vitality about him of the sort Carver had seen appeal to women. A beast not quite tamed.

Both men and Nadine were smiling broadly, as if they’d shared a bawdy joke on the walk through the house to the veranda.

The tall one with his arm around Nadine she introduced as her fiance, Joel Dewitt. The troll was Nick Fanning, CEO of Adam’s Inns.

Nadine, Dewitt, and Fanning sat down at the table, and Nadine poured them coffee from the fancy carafe. Carver had to refuse another cup of the stuff.

Fanning seemed very much at home here. “These two tell me the wedding’s set for April,” he said.

Adam shrugged. “That’s what they tell me, too, Nick.”

Fanning looked around abruptly, as if a slight noise had attracted his attention. The smile was still a shadow on his broad face. As he rotated his head, the cords on his muscular neck jumped like taut cables straining to escape from beneath his flesh. “Where’s Elana?”

“Not feeling well this morning,” Adam told him.

“Sorry to hear,” Fanning said. He added cream to his coffee. He kind of jabbed the marbled liquid with his spoon and swirled it around a few times, then rested the spoon on his saucer with a single faint click. Casual.

Silence moved onto the veranda, stayed, and got heavy. Nobody wanted that.

“Some hot morning,” Joel Dewitt remarked.

“Summer,” Adam said, explaining it neatly.

“Summer in hell,” Fanning said.

“How’s the car business?” Carver asked Joel Dewitt.

Dewitt gave him a sharp glance; somebody had been talking about him to Carver. “Booming. I sell Honda cycles, too. New ones. Say, you look like the motorcycle type, Fred.”

“Not me,” Carver said.

“You driving the Olds convertible out front?”