“Sylvia was really a beauty,” I said.
“Well, Wade wasn’t so bad himself,” Donna said with an edge, and I remembered her jealousy.
“Christ, I didn’t mean anything by it. I just meant that she was very attractive before she started having her breakdowns.”
“Yeah, but it was the way you said it. You haven’t sounded enthusiastic about anything all day, and then you see this old photo of Sylvia and you really get enthusiastic. How would you feel?”
“I don’t get jealous as easily as you do.”
“Don’t get jealous? God, Dwyer, if you really believe that then you should see Kern.”
“I thought we were gathering evidence here to help out Wade.” But I knew her and knew what she was like when she got mad.
“How about the other night in the pizza place?”
I felt myself flush. I’d thought my reaction had been noticeable only to myself. “What pizza place?”
She mocked me. “ ‘What pizza place?’ The one where the blond guy named Kevin came up. The guy I used to date? The guy who kept telling me how great I looked and didn’t seem to notice you there at all?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, “that pizza place.”
“Right. That pizza place.”
“What about it?”
“What about it? Are you crazy? You were so jealous you hardly spoke to me for about three hours afterwards, and when I invited you in, you said you had a headache.” She shook her red hair. “A headache. Boy, Dwyer, I expected more of you than that.”
“I had a headache. No big deal.”
“The big deal is, Dwyer, that I can admit I’m the jealous type and you can’t.”
“It’s because I’m not.”
“You’re blushing, Dwyer.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit. You... are... blushing. And you know why? Because you’re telling a lie.”
Just as she said that, two things happened. The playbills fell out of my hands and I saw the bill that featured David Ashton alone on it. I was starting to reach for it when the second thing happened — downstairs, out in the rain, a car door slammed.
“Somebody’s here,” I said.
But her temper was not to be put off. She grabbed my sleeve. “I won’t let you do anything until you admit it.”
“Admit what?”
She made one of those faces that one pro wrestler makes to another just before he’s going to put the Mongolian Motherfucker on the poor guy. Except in Donna’s case, she was serious. She grabbed my sleeve and twisted it. “Admit that you get jealous just like I do.”
Then I heard a second car door slam.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll admit it, but only because somebody’s coming.”
The Mongolian Motherfucker expression had yet to leave her face. “You’re going to pay for this, Dwyer. I promise you.”
I stuffed the playbill with David Ashton into the pocket of my sport coat and jumped to the window.
“This is really getting crazy,” I said.
“Who is it?” She’d calmed down enough to get interested in investigation again.
“Anne Stewart and her husband.”
“What are they doing here?”
I shrugged. “We’re about to find out.” I looked around for someplace to hide. The only place I could find was the walk-in closet in the next room. “You coming in?” I called, hearing the doorbell bong downstairs.
“You going to admit you get jealous?”
“All right for God’s sake, I admit it.”
“Good. That time you sounded serious.”
I reached out and pulled her in and pushed us both down into the gloom at the back of the closet. Then I leaned up and slid the doors closed.
“Now what?” Donna said.
Right after she said it, we heard the glass in the door break downstairs. Anne Stewart and her husband seemed very anxious to get in for some reason. Because we’d parked in the deep forest behind the cabin, well out of sight, the Stewarts would naturally assume the place was empty.
There was another sound of shattering glass, the door creaked open, and we heard tramping feet. The Stewarts were inside.
12
For a long time we heard nothing. Just our breathing in the closeness of the closet.
Then a chair scraped downstairs; doors were jerked open, banged shut. Above us rain hammered the roof. I could smell strawberry jam on Donna’s breath; her stomach gurgled symphonically several times (she’s got the only stomach I know that can do arias). Then more chairs scraping, more doors being jerked open and banging shut.
The stairway creaked. The Stewarts were on their way up.
Donna’s nails bit into my wrist. She whispered, “What if they find us in here?”
I whispered back. “If we keep whispering, they damn well will.”
She took great offense. “Oh. Sorry.” Her nails withdrew. “I don’t suppose I’m behaving like a professional detective, am I?”
She scooched away from me, as far to the other side of the closet as possible.
Wonderful.
At the top of the stairs, Anne Stewart said, “I suppose we should split up and start checking rooms.” I thought of Anne sneaking out of Michael Reeves’s office at the theater. Whatever she’d been looking for was obviously still unfound.
“This is a great way to spend a day.” Her husband’s voice was harsh and carried more than a hint of bitterness. I’d met Donald once. He was a short, trim man who divided his life between the white smock of dentistry and the blue togs of Adidas. At fifty, he was apparently a marathoner of some repute.
Anne said, “Maybe you should wait in the car.”
“Maybe I should go see my lawyer.”
“That’s up to you, Donald. All I care about is that you give up your whining.”
“Maybe I could if I could get a certain image out of my mind. You on his bed with your legs spread—”
“Goddamn you!” The slap was gunshot sharp. In the silence afterwards were unspoken rage and the rain.
Then there were tears. She mustn’t have been practiced at crying, Anne Stewart, because she more choked than sobbed.
“Can’t you at least fucking hold me?” she said after a time. Now it was her turn for bitterness. “I’m your wife.”
“You only seem to remember that when it’s convenient.”
She started choking again. Finally tears came pure. She sounded almost like a little girl. He let her cry. Maybe he thought letting her cry was good for her. Or maybe he hated her so much he couldn’t bring himself to touch her.
In the darkness, Donna’s hand found mine and squeezed. The gesture told me what she was feeling. A terrible kind of awe in the face of two human beings destroying each other.
“I’ll try this room first,” Donald Stewart said as his wife’s tears began to subside.
“Wait. I want to say something.”
“We’ve said it fucking all,” Donald said. The anger was back in his voice. There was weariness there now, too.
“I never for a moment loved him. I wasn’t unfaithful in that way.”
“No, you just let him screw your brains out.”
Pity shook him, but you knew right away it was for himself and not for any notion of them as a couple. “I wish I could get somebody to cut the thoughts I have out of my brain. I mean that, Anne. Just cut them out like a cancer so that I didn’t know that you’d slept with him and didn’t know that you wrote him those letters—”
“It hasn’t been easy for me. You’ve changed — ever since you started embezzling.” She meant to hurt him and obviously she had. He was silent.
“But why did you have you tell Reeves about it?” he said after a time, miserably.
“Let’s just see if the letters are here someplace and not talk,” Anne said. “I’m so damn tired of talking.”