Bill Pronzini - With an Extreme Burning

The desk next. Drawers, cubbyholes, accordion files; canceled checks, paid bills—by mutual consent she had done most of the bill-paying—and correspondence. Then the boxes in the closet: old tax records, old Christmas and holiday cards, and little else. He even poked through the cartons of paint supplies and the two sketchpads, one filled, one partially filled, of her charcoal drawings of places, objects, people.

Memories, little surprises and curiosities—nothing else.

Nothing incriminating.

Well, what the hell had he expected to find? A diary full of steamy references to a lover? A packet of compromising letters? Nude photos, for Christ's sake?

He felt relieved, yet vaguely disappointed and angry at himself for being disappointed. Not finding proof of infidelity should have helped put the doubts to rest, but it hadn't; they still lingered, like splinters under the surface of his mind. Maybe at some level he wanted to believe Katy was guilty, that her death had been a kind of divine punishment; at least that would give it some meaning, some justification however frail and hateful. Down deep he was angry at her, too. For dying, for leaving him alone.

His head ached. And he still felt foggy—fuzzy-skulled, Katy had termed it—from the Nembutal he'd taken the previous night. He always had that next-day reaction to sleeping pills, but it was either take one or spend the whole night lying awake, thinking too much. Maybe a swim would help clear his head. He hadn't done his fifty morning laps yet.

Outside, on the terrace, he could hear church bells in the distance. Old St. Thomas, down on Park Street, where he'd once been an altar boy. Where Katy's funeral services had been held. She hadn't been particularly religious, but she had gone to services on Good Friday and Easter Sunday and Christmas Eve, and it had been her wish to have a Catholic funeral and to be buried in consecrated ground. None of that for him, though. Lapsed Catholic. Lost his faith somewhere along the way. He hadn't even felt comfortable at the service, sitting and kneeling in the front pew, fingering Katy's rosary and Bible, listening to the priest talk about God the Father and Christ the first fruits and life everlasting, and thinking only: She's gone, she's gone, I'll never see her again in this life or any other.

Now, listening to the tolling of the bells, he found himself remembering his childhood, all those Sunday mornings when he'd had to get up at five A.M., in the cold dark, so his father could drive him to St. Thomas's in time for six o'clock Mass. Putting on the black and white cassock and the surplice. Preparing the Eucharist, the bread and wine that were the body and soul of Jesus Christ. The liturgy was still in Latin in those days: the robed priest with his back to the laity, chanting Dominus vobiscum , and then replying along with the congregation, Et cum spiritu tuo . The opening words of the Lord's Prayer in Latin, indelible even after all these years: Pater noster, quies in caelis; sanctificeteur nomen tuum; adveniat regnum tuum; fiat voluntas tua sicut in caelo et in terra . Fingering his own beads while he pondered the fifteen meditations on the mysteries in the lives of Jesus and Mary; while he recited an Ave Maria in English: “Hail Mary full of grace … blessed art thou amongst women … Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death, amen.” Those words were indelible, too, and yet he hadn't been able to speak them at the funeral service. Kyrie eleison . She's gone, she's gone.…

It would have been, would be, so much easier if he still believed. And what made it even harder was that he wasn't sure why he didn't, or just what it was that made him lose his faith.

He was in the garage, working on the sideboard, when he heard the car come up the hill and swing into his driveway. Now, who was that? Cecca? Yesterday he'd as much as invited her to stop by whenever she felt like it. He put down the router he'd been using, went out through the side door.

Not Cecca—Jerry Whittington. Dix felt a small letdown. Jerry was a good guy and he meant well, but he had a tendency, like Eileen Harrell, to be pushily cheerful, as if he thought it was his mission in life to infect others with his viral sunniness. They had been friends for over three years, since just after Jerry moved to Los Alegres from Washington State, and his upbeat disposition had been easy enough to take before the accident. The past three weeks, though, Jerry had made a crusade out of trying to cheer him up, drag him back into their circle of mutual friends and activities. Mostly Dix resented the hands-on intrusion. He knew the dangers of prolonged, solitary grieving and he had no intention of succumbing to them. He needed time, that was all. He just couldn't seem to make Jerry understand that.

“ 'Morning,” Jerry said. “Hey, what're you doing in those clothes? It's ten o'clock.”

“Working in the garage.”

“Well, hurry up and change. We've got an eleven o'clock tee time.”

“Golf? I'm not up to a round of golf.”

Jerry had a way of squinting lopsidedly when he was bemused. “Why'd you change your mind?”

“I didn't. What made you think I wanted to play?”

“Didn't you get my message?”

“What message?”

“The one I left on your machine. Yesterday afternoon.”

“No. I was out most of yesterday and I haven't gone near the phone since.”

“Oh. Damn. I thought it'd be a good idea for you to get out, get some fresh air and a little exercise. When you didn't call back, I went ahead and set up a foursome with Tom and George.”

“Jerry, I'm sorry. But I just don't feel up to it.”

“Do you a world of good.”

“I don't think so, not today.”

Jerry gave him a long, probing look. He was a couple of years Dix's junior, trim and sinewy from all the golf and tennis he played. Electric-blue eyes and craggy blond good looks that kept him well supplied with female companionship. You might take him, as Dix had the first time they'd met, for someone in an outdoor trade: builder, engineer. In fact he was a CPA. And a good one; he'd saved the Mallory's several hundred dollars in taxes last year. He was divorced and lived alone. The divorce, which must have been painful because he wouldn't talk much about it, was the reason he'd moved to California. The reason he'd picked Los Alegres, he claimed, was that it was a town with fewer CPAs per its population than any other he'd found. Jerry was nothing if not practical.

“You holding up all right?” he asked.

“More or less. Don't I look it?”

“A little ragged around the edges.”

“I didn't sleep too well last night.”

“Any particular reason? I mean … well …”

“I know what you mean.” He had no intention of telling Jerry about the tormentor; theirs was not the serious, confiding kind of friendship. For that matter, he wouldn't have felt comfortable confiding in any of his male friends. Maybe that was why he'd blurted it out to Elliot last night: Elliot invited confidence. Today, though, he wished he hadn't. Talking about it hadn't done him any good, had it? “No, no particular reason,” he said. “Just a bad night.”

“You eating regularly? Look a little thin.”

“Thin, hell. I'm as fit as you are. I told you how I got rid of the pot belly I was growing.”

“Hundred laps a day in the pool, right.”

“Hundred and fifty.”

“I'm impressed. If this country ever forms a Senior Olympics swim team, I'll write you a letter of recommendation.”

“Thanks a bunch.”

“But you still need to get out into the world again, see your friends, take up the old pursuits. Sure I can't talk you into at least nine holes today?”