The House of Love and Death by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Penzler Publishers

14

Winter’s voice trailed off and he gazed into the middle distance, lost in the memory of that kiss. Margaret Whitaker studied his profile. She was, as always, struck by the vividness of him. In that brown and tan room, built for reflection and analysis, he always seemed so alive with suffering and color and passion.

“She stayed with you that night,” she said finally. She wanted to be sure she understood.

Distracted by his own thoughts, Winter nodded vaguely.

“You made love to her under false pretenses,” said Margaret.

He glanced at her, smiled a little. “Were they? False? That’s just it. I wasn’t sure. I’m not sure now.”

Margaret took the time to choose her next approach carefully. She wanted to bring him back, back into the present with her. She didn’t want to push him too far too fast. This story had been like a wall between them from the beginning of their work together. More than that, it was a wall not only between the two of them, but between him and any connection with anyone, any chance of love, of life. She didn’t want the wall to crumble all at once. She thought the shock of intimacy might be too sudden. It might scare him away. Let him take his wall down brick by brick, she thought, as fast or slow as he felt he could tolerate.

“What’s going on with those murders you were looking into?” she asked him finally.

The question brought him out of his memories, brought him back into the room with her, which is exactly what she’d meant for it to do.

“I went back there the other day, in fact. To Maidenvale. I saw these three women . . .” His brow furrowed as he considered this, as if there were some puzzle to it. “Very impressive women, each in her own way. One just a girl really, a teenager, then a married woman, and the third was one of the victims. I watched a video of her.”

“Tell me about the second one,” Margaret said.

Startled, he laughed. “How do you do that?”

“Practice,” she told him.

“No, really.”

“Well, you’re not going to moon over some teenager. That would be creepy. You’re not the type. You might moon over a dead girl. You are that type. But when you describe someone as a married woman, I can’t help thinking that perhaps she has other character traits as well, but that’s the one you’re stuck on.”

“Amazing, Sherlock.”

“Elementary, my dear Winter,” said Margaret Whitaker.

“Yes. I was taken with her, I admit. Disappointed by the wedding band and the pictures of her children and so on. But I manfully set all that aside and got on with my business.”

“Hm,” said the therapist.

“It’s just . . .” Again he had to puzzle something out. She waited for him. “I’m closing in on forty, but suddenly the world is as full of womanhood as it was when I was seventeen. Women seem very present to me, more present than anything else. They come off the page of life, three-dimensional, the way nothing else does.

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