Thomas Perry: Blood Money

She kept her eyes on him as she walked quietly toward the door. She let herself adore his long legs and his big feet and the peaceful little-boy look his face acquired when he was dreaming. I had this, she thought. If I die now, at least I recognized and accepted the best thing that life offered to me.

She looked down to be sure her bare foot touched the two pieces of hardwood floor closest to the hinge of the door, where it never creaked, then slipped down the long second-floor hallway to the best of the spare bedrooms. She showered in the bathroom there, then put on an old sweatshirt and jeans and went downstairs to start making her husband’s breakfast.

When Jane had let Carey sleep as long as she dared, she went back up to the bedroom and kissed his cheek. He didn’t move. She kissed his neck, then kept her lips pressed to his cheek and watched his eyelids. “Hypocrite,” she said. “You’re awake already.”

“I’m playing dead,” he said. “Waiting to see just how far you’re willing to go.”

She stood up. “Mother was right. Men are too dumb to do anything but keep going until you tell them to stop.” She dropped her pillow on his head. “The good ones, anyway.”

He swung his feet to the floor and stood up. She pretended not to look at his long, lean body, and ached to hear him say she had made a mistake, that it was Saturday. He said, “I smell something good.”

“That’s right. I want you to have time to taste it and wake up before you go to the hospital and try to cut something out of somebody.”

“Very responsible of you,” he said.

She put her arms around him and held him. He stood still, facing away. He said, “I was afraid I’d wake up and you would be gone.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m home now, and I’m going to be the wife of your dreams.”

He turned, his face intrigued. “Oh?”

She nodded. “It’s because you didn’t say anything about my hair. You hate it, but you didn’t say it. That means you’re too smart to just throw away.”

She went downstairs and waited for him, then sat at the table with him and pretended to eat so she could be close to him. After a few minutes, he asked quietly, “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

“Yes,” she said. “But there’s too much to tell now. It’s over and I’m home.”

“Why didn’t you call again?”

Here it was, so soon. No, this wasn’t soon. It seemed abrupt, because it was something that she should have said in the first seconds, and hadn’t. “Things turned out to be much … stranger than I expected. There wasn’t anything I could have said that would have made you less worried.”

He stared at her for a second, then went back to his breakfast. She could sense what he wasn’t saying. She put her hand on his. “I love you,” she said. But that was just what people said when there was nothing else to say—like a dog nuzzling up to lick his face. “You know why I went. Somebody needed help. I felt I had to help her.”

“Just like Richard Dahlman,” Carey said. “That wasn’t what you were going to say, because we both know it. I understand. I made you promise never to do this again, and then, when it was somebody I cared about, I asked you to save him.”

Jane shook her head. “You’re wrong. We have to get this story straight right now, or it will be between us forever. You didn’t make me promise. I just promised. It wasn’t hard. I wasn’t giving up something. It was just part of being married to you, and I made it to myself before you ever thought of it—before you knew that there was going to be a need to ask for it.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is what you want now. Today.”

Jane took a deep, painful breath, and kept the tears out of her voice. “I want more than anything to stay here with you. I want to call Joy at your office and have her cancel your surgery and your afternoon appointments and maybe never let you out of my sight again. We’re thirty-four years old, and we might have forty or fifty years left. I want every day of that so much that I don’t want to let any of them slip by when I don’t reach out and touch you at night before I close my eyes.”

“But this girl came along, and you heard her story, and off you went.”

“The promises we made to ourselves about the nice life we were going to have were in place. They just had to be forgotten until I had done what was required to keep my self-respect.”

“That’s what we said when we decided to help Richard Dahlman.”

“I guess it is. They’re both proof that when you make rules about what’s going to happen in the future, the universe doesn’t always hear what you say.”

“So a promise is like a wish,” he said. He stood up.

Jane had tears in her eyes now. “No. Or I guess it’s yes. What I’m trying to say is that this isn’t fair. I did something good. I can’t forget what I know, or who I am. If the same thing happened in the same way tomorrow, I would do it again. Just because I risked my life a year ago to save Dahlman, I shouldn’t lose the kind of closeness to my husband that I had.” The tears came, and she stood to face him. “Don’t you see? I don’t want you to shut up and stand aside. I want you to say what you think—that your breakfast tastes like soap, or my haircut looks funny, or—”

“You’d drop me like a twelve-point buck on the first day of hunting season.”

“No.” She threw her arms around his neck and held him. “No, I wouldn’t. Especially if it was that you loved me and would rather I didn’t go out and get killed. Maybe we’ll get to choose what will happen, and maybe we won’t. I told you what I wanted if I get to choose.”

Carey pulled her closer and gave her a long, tender kiss. Suddenly, she put her hands on his chest and held him farther away. “Now get your hands off my ass and go to work. Honestly.”

Carey smiled. “Sorry. I’m just a romantic at heart.”

“More like that twelve-point buck,” she said. She hugged him again, then spun him around. “It’s twenty minutes to seven. Get going.”

He took three long steps into the back entry, stopped, and looked at her once more. Then he was out the door. Jane walked through the dining room listening to the car engine, then watched through the living room window as he backed his black BMW out the driveway and drove off toward the hospital.

Jane made her proprietary tour of the house. When she was not here, Carey seemed not even to pass through the rooms that weren’t in his way during his routine movements. He came in the back entrance near the garage, used the kitchen, climbed the stairs to the master bedroom, and went to sleep. He was not an especially neat person, but his profession had given him a cold-eyed view of microbes, so the kitchen was spotless. All she had to do was keep an eye out for the pots, pans, and utensils that he had put in the wrong places, and move them back where they belonged while she put away the dinner dishes and washed the new batch.

An hour later she backed the rental car out of the long driveway. She drove west to the Niagara, turned and headed north looking at the river until she reached the house where she had grown up in Deganawida.

Jane pulled the car all the way into the garage so it wouldn’t attract attention, then stepped to the front porch, unlocked the door, and used the next few seconds to scan the neighborhood for any sight she had not seen a thousand times before.

She swung the door open and stepped inside to punch the code on her keypad to turn off the alarm. Then she lingered in the doorway for a few seconds. There was no sound. The air was still and a little stale because the house had been tightly sealed. She closed the door and lifted the telephone beside the couch off the hook to hear the dial tone reassure her that the wires had not been cut. She relaxed her muscles. Nobody had been here while she had been away.