Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

He suspected that she would have seemed bright and witty at about eight o’clock, but right now, he was not in the mood to be the butt of any more feminine teasing. “Well, I’d better show you where your room is. It’s getting late.”

She stood, but she took her glass with her and sipped from it as she headed for the stairs. “Just what I was thinking.”

He led the way up the stairs and turned right to take her down the hallway. “This is the best of the guest rooms,” he said. He flipped the light on and walked her into the room.

She sat on the bed, bounced a little, looked at the walls, the curtains over the big window. “It’s very pretty.”

He pointed to the door on the side wall. “Your bathroom is right there. Everything you need should be in the drawers—clean towels, shampoo, soap, even toothbrushes.”

Susan glanced in that direction with little interest. She set her champagne glass on the nightstand, stood up, turned her back on him, and bent her neck forward. “Unzip me.”

Carey stepped forward. He tried to lift her long hair out of the way without touching her neck, and carefully grasped the zipper without touching her back. He tugged the zipper down eight inches, to where he judged she could reach it, and stepped back. “There. If there’s anything you can’t find, I’ll be in the room at the other end of the hall. Good night.”

He began his retreat, but she said, “Not so fast.” He stopped and turned. She was holding her hair up off her neck. “What do you think I am—a contortionist? I can’t reach that.”

“Sorry.” He stepped forward, stopped three feet from her, reached out, and pulled the zipper down a few more inches. There was an instant—perhaps two seconds—when several things seemed to happen at once. She was still holding her hair up when she turned a little to say over her shoulder, “That’s more like it.” But her slight turn inside the dress seemed to spread the two unzipped sides of it apart. There was a tantalizing view of the white skin of the lower part of her back, where it softened and curved inward toward her hips. But worse, the front of the dress had nothing to hold it up. She quickly released her hair and hugged the dress to cover herself, but not before Carey had been presented with a glimpse of her left breast in profile.

“Good night,” Carey muttered. As he backed quickly out the door and closed it, the last thing he saw was Susan Haynes facing him, holding the front of her dress up, her big green eyes looking into his with that knowing, amused stare. When he reached his own room at the end of the hall, he closed the door and leaned against it for a moment. The stare was still with him. “Taking her to a hotel wouldn’t have been such a bad idea,” he muttered. He locked his bedroom door, then undressed and got into bed. He lay in the dark with his eyes closed, but what he had seen came back to him again and again. “That,” he thought, “is what the end of a marriage looks like.”

At three o’clock, he awoke, lying on the bed on his back. He imagined for a moment that he could feel Jane’s soft, silky hair on his arm. He turned to touch her, then remembered. He lay for a moment feeling sad and empty, and then he realized he could hear a voice. Someone was talking.

Carey sat up quickly and looked around him, but he saw nothing. He switched on the lamp beside the bed and squinted against the searing light to see the door. It was still closed, and the room was empty. It must have been a dream. As he reached for the lamp, he heard the voice again. It had to be Susan Haynes. It didn’t seem possible that there could be somebody here with her. He got to his feet and walked into the hallway. As he reached the second-floor landing, he followed her voice and looked over the railing. She was facing away, sitting on the couch near the fireplace. The sight of her obliterated the lingering clouds of sleep. She appeared to be wearing only a bedsheet, her legs folded under her and her purse beside her. She turned to look up and the green eyes focused on him, and then she hung up the telephone.

She put a plastic card back into her purse, fastened the white sheet under her arm, and stood up. As he looked at her from a distance like this, the thought that overwhelmed all others was her perfection—the long shiny hair, the smooth, white shoulders and arms, the graceful veiled curve of hip and thigh. When she turned toward him, he saw she was aware that he had been staring at her intently. In order to look up at him she tossed her hair in a gesture that should not have been intriguing because it was self-conscious and calculated, but it was mesmerizing because she was posing for him, trying to look more beautiful. “I was just calling my machine in San Francisco. I didn’t want to use the phone upstairs and wake you up. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I just wondered—”

“Don’t worry, though. I used a credit card, so it won’t be printed on your phone bill.”

He felt a sick chill. It had not occurred to him before that he had somehow become a man who was in the business of hiding evidence from his wife: first the champagne, and now the telephone bill.

Susan seemed to forget about him for a moment. She hitched her shoulder uncomfortably, then did a poor job of retucking the bedsheet she was using as a sarong. She frowned, unwrapped a little of it, and tried again. It was as though she had unaccountably forgotten she was not alone. But then she abruptly looked up into his eyes, pretended to follow his line of sight and be surprised to find her own eyes looking down at the translucent sheet that covered her body. As she tucked the sheet under her arm she looked up again with the knowing, amused expression.

“Something else on your mind?” The smile was still on her face as she moved up the stairs toward him. She walked so lightly that her feet seemed not to touch, as though she were floating.

He shook his head, as much to clear it as to communicate with her. “No,” he said, already backing away. “No. I was afraid it was a burglar or something. But it was just you. See you in the morning.” As he walked back to his room and closed his door, he wondered why it was that virtue had to be so clumsy and inept.

22

Earl sat up and looked out his hotel window at Pete Hatcher’s car. He was through staring at its dusty finish, each day picking out new spots of birdshit on the windshield with his binoculars, never seeing a human being go near it. Now he needed to think ahead. He unfolded his road map and studied it, then picked up the telephone again and dialed.

He heard the sleep in Lenny’s voice. “Yeah?”

“It’s me,” said Earl. “Listen. I want you to close the place up and get on a plane right away. Get a suite at the Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, Montana. Stay there until I call. It could be two weeks, or the phone could be ringing when you walk in the door.”

Earl could hear rustling noises and groaning. Lenny must be sitting up in bed. Lenny coughed to clear his throat. “The place already is closed up. I went to bed an hour ago. What’s up?”

“Did you understand what I said? This isn’t a dream.”

“Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, Montana. Wait there for you. Right.” Earl could almost hear him thinking. “Hey—Rusty and T-Bone. What do I do with the dogs?”

“Bring them.”

Earl hung up before Lenny could start protesting about the difficulty of flying dogs around. If people did it with fancy show dogs, then it certainly wouldn’t harm two big, muscular beasts like the Rottweilers, and he didn’t care what it did to Lenny.

He walked into the bathroom and turned the water on cold, then stepped under the icy stream. He gasped, then slowly let the water warm up. He was fully awake now, confident that he was thinking clearly. It would take ten minutes to dress, pack, and clean his prints off everything he had touched. It might take another ten minutes to check out and get on the road.