Joyce lay propped on the pillows of her bed, surfing through the TV channels. She skipped over innumerable true crime, unsolved mysteries, and autopsy shows and settled for an old Peter Sellers movie. She found an emery board in her purse and began doing her nails.
If only the evening had ended there! she thought. But then the thing on the stairs had to happen. Gawd, of course, Murphy's Law.
They had turned out the lights in the upper central room and Joyce was following Ron down the stairway. She had deliberately not let him carry the toolboxes or the rolled plans for her so as to not invite assumptions or patronizing displays. And as a result she was burdened and couldn't see the stairs as well as she might have. Ron had just reached the floor and she was about three steps above him. He half turned to say something, and at that instant she lost her footing and pitched forward and down. And big handsome Ronald adroitly caught her in his arms.
And as if that wasn't bad enough, she didn't pull away immediately! Ron held her firmly against his broad chest, arms around her, supporting almost her whole weight, and she was so shocked by her fall, by suddenly finding his face so close to hers, by how… interesting his arms and chest and thighs felt pressed against her, that she hesitated. For all of five wordless seconds, probably.
At last she regained her wits enough to pull away. Ron didn't resist, just sort of let his hands trail off her shoulders and hip to show he let go only reluctantly.
"My God, excuse me!" Joyce said. "God, what a klutz I am!" Completely flustered, like a teenager. She bent to recover the things she'd dropped and held them to her chest as if they'd shield her. "I'm so sorry!"
"My pleasure, I assure you," Ron had said. Then he went to the security panel, paused with his hand over the keypad, and said nonchalantly, "Remind me – what was it ol' Doc Freud said about accidents, again?"
"He also said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," she'd rejoined. And then realized that for Ron, that would carry all kinds of suggestive overtones, too.
They'd gotten out the door without further mishaps. Out on the sidewalk, she'd declined his invitation to go out for drinks. "Some other time, then," he'd said as a farewell. "I'll most definitely look forward to it."
Joyce winced at the memory. She hoped that her own lapses of professionalism wouldn't impede this case in some unforseen way. Cree had described Ron as a womanizer – unnecessarily, because anyone could tell that within the first thirty seconds of meeting him. But he was handsome and rich and he smelled good and this was New Orleans. And though true love was a terrific idea, Joyce had been divorced long enough to know that a good roll in the hay with someone who knew how to roll could be awfully damned terrific, too – in many ways preferable to a "relationship" and the sticky complications that too often came with. Ron was no doubt a loser, but his confidence in dealing with women probably had some basis in experience. It could come across as smug, if you didn't have comparable confidence yourself. Which Joyce prided herself on having.
So why had she let the encounter fluster her? Maybe because there were other things besides weakness and lust in his eyes – something hidden, something dark and repellent. Dangerous? Maybe. More obviously, she decided, some kind of internal desperation. No, that wasn't quite right. Cree would be better at giving it a name -
Cree! Joyce glanced at the clock radio again and was shocked to find that it was eleven-thirty. She had to be definitive: Would Cree, or would she not, call to let her know where she was? Ordinarily, yes, she would: A, because she wouldn't want Joyce to worry, and B, because tonight in particular Cree would be very interested in the outcome of the architectural work.
Okay, so would Cree, or would she not, call to let her know she was at Paul Fitzpatrick's, either staying very late or spending the night?
This was tougher to answer. Being a considerate person, Cree would probably want to call, but in certain situations the opportunity to do so gracefully might not present itself. Joyce sincerely hoped exactly those situations had arisen tonight.
So the real question, Joyce decided, was: Would Joyce nee Wu formerly Feingold, or would she not, solely on the basis of her current anxiety, call Cree's possible lover's house to make sure she was okay?
She gave it another ten minutes of rising concern and decided that damn straight she would. She dialed information and got the number for Dr. Paul Fitzpatrick, already rehearsing her apologies.
32
The clatter and bump of things falling, the jolt and jar of hitting and rolling, merged with another noise – a harsh banging and rattling that didn't stop when the other noises did. Cree's head lolled dizzily as the geometric pattern of dark and darker above her spun and stabilized and she realized that she was looking up at the open rectangle of the stairwell and the line of the balustrade. She was lying diagonally on the stairs just below the landing. Her breath left her chest as she felt the boar-headed man moving up there, but with the clacking and banging at the door he seemed to withdraw, like a toxic smoke sucked away, inhaled by the house again.
She moved one arm and slid bruisingly down another step, barely catching herself before she tipped and rolled the rest of the way down.
"Cree! Cree! Are you there? Open the door!" A muffled voice accompanied the clacking. That heavy brass door knocker, that's what it was. And Joyce.
"Cree" referred to her. She wasn't Lila. Some relief in that.
Carefully, Cree rotated her body until her feet were lower than her head, disturbing a couple of broken balustrade rails that slid noisily down. When she sat up, her arms and legs and spine felt as if their component bones didn't fit any more, as if she'd been wrenched apart and put together incorrectly. Her hips hurt and her head was bruised, but the worst pain came from her left index finger, which must have gotten bent wrong when she landed. It had taken only a split second: flipping over the balustrade, knees smashing the rails hard enough to break several loose. Flailing into space. Her hands and head had hit the wall an instant before the rest of her had landed half on the landing and half on the steps just below it. It was a drop of only about six feet. She'd been lucky she hadn't fallen farther toward the front of the stairwell, or impaled herself on one of the broken rails that fell with her.
Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack! Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack!
Not ready to stand, she moved her butt down one step and then another and then another. When her feet hit the floorboards, she lurched upright and staggered to the front door. It was hard to unlock in the dark with her uncooperative index finger, but after a moment of fumbling she got the door open and Joyce burst in with a shaft of blue light from the street.
"Cree! Are you all right?"
"There is a doorbell, Joyce. Jesus!" That didn't seem appropriate. Joyce had asked her something, and after a hesitation, Cree remembered what. "I'm shitty. But I'm okay," she muttered. Her jaw felt joined wrong, too. She turned to the security panel and reset it, feeling a little proud of herself for being so lucid. No point in bringing the gendarmes or whatever they'd be called here.
Joyce brushed past her, groping on the walls until she found the light switch. The chandelier came on and there was Joyce, face fierce, eyes wide, can of pepper spray at the ready. The stairway was littered with broken rails, and Cree saw one of her shoes there, too. She hadn't realized she'd lost it until that moment. She had only one shoe on, which helped account for some of the difficulty of standing. That was nice, she thought, because it meant you could put on your other shoe and then maybe your legs would work right.