It was as simple as that. You can’t leave. She looked at him and beamed. “I know,” she said. “You’re right. I can’t.”
“Divorce him. Live with me. I want us to have a normal life, go places together like everyone else, go out for dinner, go to the movies, take vacations.”
It was everything she wanted too. “Do you mean it, Ray?”
“Of course I mean it.” He paused. “I love you, Laura.”
Tears came to her eyes. “Oh my God.” She kissed him and told him she loved him too, and a few minutes later they resumed the conversation. “I can’t divorce him,” Laura said.
“Why on earth not?”
“For one thing, he’s a Catholic. He’s not practicing or anything, but he doesn’t believe in divorce.” Or more importantly, Laura thought, his poor dead father, who was devout in a bugger-the-choirboy sort of way, didn’t believe in it.
“And...?”
“Well, there’s the money.”
“What about the money?”
“It’s mine. I mean, I inherited it from my father. He was an inventor and he came up with one of those simple little additives that keep things fresh for years. Anyway, he made a lot of money, and I was his only child, so I got it all. I’ve been financing Lloyd’s post-production career from the beginning, before it started doing as well as it is now. If we divorced, with these no-fault laws we’ve got now, he’d get half of everything.
That’s not fair. It should be all mine by rights.”
“I don’t care about the money. It’s you I want.”
She touched his cheek. “That’s sweet, Ray, and I wouldn’t care if we didn’t have two cents between us as long as we were together, honest I wouldn’t. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The money’s there. And everything I have is yours.”
“So what’s the alternative?”
She put her hand on his chest and ran it over the soft hair down to his flat stomach and beyond, kissed the eagle tattoo on his arm. She remembered it from the TV commercial and the magazine, had thought it was sexy even then. The dogs stirred for a moment at the side of the bed, then went back to sleep. They’d had a lot of exercise that morning. “There’s the house too,” Laura went on, “and Lloyd’s life insurance. Double indemnity, or something like that. I don’t really understand these things, but it’s really quite a lot of money. Enough to live on for a long time, maybe somewhere in the Caribbean? Or Europe. I’ve always wanted to live in Paris.”
“What are you saying?”
Laura paused. “What if Lloyd had an accident?... No, hear me out. Just suppose he had an accident. We’d have everything then. The house, the insurance, the business, my inheritance. It would all be ours. And we could be together for always.”
“An accident? You’re talking about—”
She put her finger to his lips. “No, darling, don’t say it. Don’t say the word.”
But whether he said it or not, she knew, as she knew he did, what the word was, and it sent a delightful shiver up her spine. After a while, Ray said, “I might know someone. I did an unusual job once, impersonated a police officer in Montreal, a favor for someone who knew someone whose son was in trouble. You don’t need to know who he is, but he’s connected. He was very pleased with the way things worked out and he said if ever I needed anything...”
“Well, there you are then,” said Laura, sitting up. “Do you know how to find this man? Do you think he could arrange something?”
Ray took her left nipple between his thumb and forefinger and squeezed. “I think so,” he said. “But it won’t be easy. I’d have to go to Montreal. Make contact. Right at the moment, though, something a bit more urgent has come up.”
Laura saw what he meant. She slid down and took him in her mouth.
Time moved on, as it does. The days cooled, but Ray and Laura’s passion didn’t. Just after Thanksgiving, the weather forecasters predicted a big drop in temperature and encouraged Torontonians to wrap up warm.
Laura and Ray didn’t need any warm wrapping. The rose-patterned duvet lay on the floor at the bottom of the bed, and they were bathed in sweat, panting, as Laura straddled Ray and worked them both to a shuddering climax. Instead of rolling off him when they had finished, this time Laura stayed on top and leaned forward, her hard nipples brushing his chest. They hadn’t seen each other for a week because Ray had finally met his contact in Montreal.
“Did you talk to that man you know?” she asked after she had caught her breath.
Ray linked his hands behind his head. “Yes,” he said.
“Does he know what... I mean, what we want him to do?”
“He knows.”
“To take his time and wait for absolutely the right opportunity?”
“He won’t do it himself. The man he’ll put on it is a professional, honey. He knows.”
“And will he do it when the right time comes? It must seem like an accident.”
“He’ll do it. Don’t worry.”
“You know,” Laura said, “you can stay all night if you want. Lloyd’s away in Vancouver. Probably looking for property.”
“Are you sure?”
“He won’t be back till Thursday. We could just stay in bed the whole week.” Laura shivered.
“Cold, honey?”
“A little. Winter’s coming. Can’t you feel the chill?”
“Now that you mention it...”
Laura jumped out of bed and skipped over to the far wall. “No wonder,” she said. “The thermostat’s set really low. Lloyd must have turned it down before he went away.” She turned it up and dashed back, jumped on the bed, and straddled Ray. She gasped as he thrust himself inside her again. So much energy. This time he didn’t let her stay in control. He grabbed her shoulders and pushed her over on her back, in the good old missionary position, and pounded away so hard Laura thought the bed was going to break. This time, as Laura reached the edges of her orgasm, she thought that if she died at that moment, in that state of bliss, she would be happy forever. Then the thermostat clicked in, the house exploded, and Laura got her wish.
TWO DOGS PERISH IN BEACHES GAS EXPLOSION, Lloyd Francis read in the Toronto Star the following morning. HOUSE-OWNERS ALSO DIE IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT. Well, they got that wrong on two counts, thought Lloyd. He was sitting over a cappuccino in his shirtsleeves at an outdoor café on Robson Street in Vancouver. While the cold snap had descended on the east with a vengeance, the West Coast was enjoying record temperatures for the time of year. And no rain.
Lloyd happened to know that only one of the house’s owners had died in the explosion, and that it hadn’t been an accident. Far from it. Lloyd had planned the whole thing very carefully from the moment he had found out that his wife was enjoying a grand passion with an out-of-work actor. That hadn’t been difficult. For a start, she had begun washing the bedsheets and pillowcases almost every day, though she usually left the laundry to Alexa. Despite her caution, he had once seen blood on the sheets. Laura had also been unusually reluctant to have sex with him, and on the few occasions he had persuaded her to comply, it had been obvious to him that her thoughts were elsewhere and that, in the crude vernacular, he had been getting sloppy seconds.
Not that Laura hadn’t been careful. Lord only knew, she had probably stood under the shower for hours. But he could still tell. There was another man’s smell about her. And then, of course, he had simply lain in wait one day and seen them returning together from the beach. After that, it hadn’t been hard to find out where the man, Ray Lanagan, lived, and what he did, or didn’t do. Lloyd was quite pleased with his detective abilities. Maybe he was in the wrong profession. He had shown himself to be pretty good at murder too, and he was certain that no one would be able to prove that the explosion in which his wife and her lover had died had been anything but a tragic accident. Things like that happened every year in Toronto when the heat came on. A slow leak, building over time, a stray spark or naked flame, and BANG!