Travis McGee 14 - The Scarlet Ruse by John D. MacDonald

Author:John D. MacDonald
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-03-20T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

I awoke, and the candles had burned out. I could hear the sea and, approaching across the sea, a hard night rain, a bumble and thud of thunder. As I sat up, a vivid green-white flash filled the room, leaving me with the after-image of her pillowed head beside me, eyes awake and looking toward the dark ceiling.

I got out on my side and went around the bed to the big doors. The first driving rain came just as I was closing the second one, spattering and bouncing as high as my belly. The doors closed out the rush of wind, the storm sounds, and muted the thunder. I found the pulls and slid both sets of draperies across the doors. The storm was no longer something alive. It was on tape on a television set next door.

I put a breath of air conditioning back on to keep the air in the room from turning stale, and when she called me, I went to her side of the bed. She found my hand and tugged at me. When I bent to her, she pushed and said, “We didn’t talk.”

She hitched over, and I sat on the bed, against a solid warmth of hip under percale. She said, “Over the phone you said you wanted to talk. We didn’t talk that kind of talk, did we?”

“No. We talked bad lines from old movies, I think.”

She was in a total blackness. When I closed my eyes, nothing changed. She said, “It’s funny. You know? They’ve all said so many things so many ways, there’s nothing left for people to really say to each other. I mean I can say things, but behind it I can hear Cher saying it to Sonny.” She changed to a thin, squeaky little voice. “I am Gabby Gabriele, your very own talking doll. Pull my string and I’ll say anything you want.”

I said, “Sometimes Jack Lemmon is speaking, sometimes Jack Lord, sometimes George Peppard, sometimes Archie Bunker.”

I heard and felt the depth of her sigh. “That’s it,” she said. “Nothing is really real, and then Jane Lawson is dead, and that is very very real. She’d talk about her kids and the house, and she’d sound like Erma Bombeck, and that wasn’t real. You wanted to talk about Jane, and then you did, and I didn’t ask you.”

“Sooner or later, Mary Alice, we have to talk about her, so I guess now is okay. I’ve got some facts. You have to help me put them together.”

“Me help?”

“The damage to the house was done after somebody cracked her neck.”

“After! But how-”

“Let me cover the ground first. It wasn’t kids, because too many of the things kids take were still there. The trashing didn’t have the usual pattern. It was imitation trashing, a diversion. The person involved wore gloves. There wasn’t even a fresh oil-smudge on all the glass and pottery things that were broken. The trashing could have been a diversion for another reason too, to cover up evidence of careful search.

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