Train (Vintage Contemporaries) by Dexter Pete

Author:Dexter, Pete [Dexter, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2005-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

7

BEVERLY HILLS

SHE WANTED TO SEE WHERE HE LIVED. SHE wanted to look at his bed and in his closet; she wanted to open the refrigerator and see what he ate. She wanted to know what music he listened to, what books he read.

“Well,” he said, “I knew somebody once who played the English horn.”

He was sitting on the edge of her pool; she was beneath him, resting an elbow on each of his legs. A wild scar ran the length of his upper leg, from his knee to the hip. His suit was lying near the drain at the bottom of the pool. They were still flushed, just catching their breath.

It was two months now, and he would not talk to her about what had happened on the boat. When she brought it up, he would tell her to think of it as a story with other people in it. He didn’t tell her what those people did afterwards.

Maybe he only wanted her to smile; he wanted someone to smile with him at strange times.

He came to the door the day after the funerals with an Orange County sheriff’s report, which he’d typed up himself, and she initialed all six pages and signed at the end without looking at it, and then he’d stepped in and closed the door and sealed the deal, right there on the stairway, and she was looking up at a chandelier all the time, seeing herself and Miller Packard in a thousand tiny reflections, and no one from Orange County ever called or came to the house, and no one ever asked how her name might have ended up in Clarence Holmes’ address book.

She looked at him now and wondered what he’d done to head them off. She guessed the address book was gone, misplaced in some evidence room or thrown over the side of some other boat into the ocean, or ashes now, but the book had been a fact, and her name had been written inside it. And he had seen it there. Matter cannot be created or destroyed—that was right out of Mr. Sanders’ science class at Peabody Laboratory School. And she had seen an execution—another matter. They had each seen what they’d seen, and he wanted her to think of it as a story about other people.

They were already like a little family, the kind that kept busy all day and never discussed unpleasantries at dinner.

And he wanted her. In the car, on the lawn, in the pool. Morning, noon, and night. He stopped the Mercedes once on Wilshire Boulevard, suddenly pulled it to the side, without a word, two wheels on the curb, and dragged her into the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, paid for a room in cash, and took her to the ninth floor. And even then he couldn’t wait; he lifted her skirt in the elevator and had it inside her on the way up. Her back pushed into the buttons, and the door began opening on the fifth floor.

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