Patricia Cornwell - Book of the Dead

“If you intend to see other people, if you’re interested in other men, I can’t say I blame you. But tell me. That’s all I ask. Don’t put on displays like you did all day. And tonight. Don’t play fucking high school games with me.”

“Displays? Games?”

“He was all over you,” Benton says.

“And I was all over everywhere else trying to move away from him.”

“He’s been all over you for all day long. Can’t get close enough to you. Stares at you, touches you right in front of me.”

“Benton…”

“And I know he’s this good-looking, well, maybe you’re attracted to him. But I won’t tolerate it. Right in front of me. Goddamn it.”

“Benton…”

“Same with God knows who. Down there in the Deep South. What do I know?”

“Benton!”

Silence.

“You’re talking crazy. Since when, in the history of the universe, have you ever worried about my cheating on you? Knowingly.”

No sound but their footsteps on stone, their labored breathing.

“Knowingly,” she repeats, “because the one time I was with someone else was when I thought you were…”

“Dead,” he says. “Right. So you’re told I’m dead. Then a minute later you’re fucking some guy young enough to be your son.”

“Don’t.” Anger begins to gather. “Don’t you dare.”

He is quiet. Even after the bottle of wine he drank all by himself, he knows better than to push the subject of his feigned death when he was forced into a protected witness program. What Benton put her though. He knows better than to attack her as if she’s the one who was emotionally cruel.

“Sorry,” he says.

“What’s really the matter?” she says. “God, these steps.”

“I guess we can’t seem to change it. As you say about livor and rigor. Set. Fixed. Let’s face it.”

“I won’t face whatever it is. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no it . And livor and rigor are about people who are dead. We’re not dead. You just said you never were.”

Both of them are breathless. Her heart is pounding.

“I’m sorry. Really,” he says, referring to what happened in the past, his faked death and her ruined life.

She says, “He’s been too attentive. Forward. So what?”

Benton is used to the attention other men pay to her, has always been rather unperturbed by it, even amused, because he knows who she is, knows who he is, knows his enormous power and that she has to deal with the same thing — women who stare at him, brush against him, want him shamelessly.

“You’ve made a new life for yourself in Charleston,” he says. “I can’t see your undoing it. Can’t believe you did it.”

“Can’t believe…?” And the steps go up and up forever.

“Knowing I’m in Boston and can’t move south. Where does that leave us.”

“It leaves you jealous. Saying ‘fuck,’ and you never say ‘fuck.’ God! I hate steps!” Unable to catch her breath. “You have no reason to be threatened. It’s not like you to feel threatened by anyone. What’s wrong with you?”

“I was expecting too much.”

“Expecting what, Benton?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“It certainly does.”

They climb the endless flight of steps and stop talking, because their relationship is too much to talk about when they can’t breathe. She knows Benton is angry because he’s scared. He feels powerless in Rome. He feels powerless in their relationship because he’s in Massachusetts, where he moved with her blessing, the chance to work as a forensic psychologist at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital too good to ignore.

“What were we thinking?” she says, no more steps, and she reaches for his hand. “Idealistic as ever, I suppose. And you could return a little energy with that hand of yours, as if you want to hold mine, too. For seventeen years we’ve never lived in the same city, much less the same house.”

“And you don’t think it can change.” He laces his fingers through hers, taking a deep breath.

“How?”

“I suppose I’ve entertained this secret fantasy you’d move. With Harvard, MIT, Tufts. I guess I thought you might teach. Perhaps at a medical school or be content to be a part-time consultant at McLean. Or maybe Boston, the ME’s office. Maybe end up chief.”

“I could never go back to a life like that,” Scarpetta says, and they are walking into the hotel’s lobby that she calls Belle Époque because it is from a beautiful era. But they are oblivious to the marble, the antique Murano glass and silk and sculptures, to everything and everyone, including Romeo — that really is his name — who during the day is a gold-painted mime, most nights a doorman, and of late, a somewhat attractive and sullen young Italian who doesn’t want any further interrogations about Drew Martin’s murder.

Romeo is polite but avoids their eyes and, like a mime, is completely silent.

“I want what’s best for you,” Benton says. “Which is why, obviously, I didn’t get in your way when you decided to start your own practice in Charleston, but I was upset about it.”

“You never told me.”

“I shouldn’t tell you now. What you’ve done is right and I know it. For years you’ve felt you really don’t belong anywhere. In a sense, homeless, and in some ways unhappy ever since you left Richmond — worse, sorry to remind you, were fired. That goddamn piss-ant governor. At this stage in your life, you’re doing exactly what you should.” As they board the elevator. “But I’m not sure I can stand it anymore.”

She tries not to feel a fear that is indescribably awful. “What do I hear you saying, Benton? That we should give up? Is that what you’re really saying?”

“Maybe I’m saying the opposite.”

“Maybe I don’t know what that means, and I wasn’t flirting.” As they get out on their floor. “I never flirt. Except with you.”

“I don’t know what you do when I’m not around.”

“You know what I don’t do.”

He unlocks the door to their penthouse suite. It is splendid with antiques and white marble and a stone patio big enough to entertain a small village. Beyond, the ancient city is silhouetted against the night.

“Benton,” she says. “Please, let’s don’t fight. You’re flying back to Boston in the morning. I’m flying back to Charleston. Let’s don’t push each other away so it somehow makes it easier to be away from each other.”

He takes off his coat.

“What? You’re angry that I’ve finally found a place to settle down, started again in a place that works for me?” she says.

He tosses his coat over a chair.

“In all fairness,” she says, “I’m the one who has to start all over again, create something out of nothing, answer my own phone, and clean up the damn morgue myself. I don’t have Harvard. I don’t have a multimillion-dollar apartment in Beacon Hill. I have Rose, Marino, and sometimes Lucy. That’s it, so I end up answering the phone myself half the time. The local media. Solicitors. Some group that wants me as a luncheon speaker. The exterminator. The other day, it was the damn Chamber of Commerce — how many of their damn phone directories do I want to order. As if I want to be listed in the Chamber of Commerce directory as if I’m a dry cleaner or something.”

“Why?” Benton says. “Rose has always screened your calls.”

“She’s getting old. She can do but so much.”

“Why can’t Marino answer the phone?”

“Why anything? Nothing’s the same. Your making everyone think you were dead fractured and scattered everyone. There, I’ll say it. Everybody’s changed because of it, including you.”

“I had no choice.”

“That’s the funny thing about choices. When you don’t have one, nobody else does, either.”