The Eyes of Darkness

Chapter Ten

Tina didn’t get home from the opening-night party until shortly before two o’clock Wednesday morning. Exhausted, slightly tipsy, she went directly to bed and fell into a sound sleep.

Later, after no more than two dreamless hours, she suffered another nightmare about Danny. He was trapped at the bottom of a deep hole. She heard his frightened voice calling to her, and she peered over the edge of the pit, and he was so far below her that his face was only a tiny, pale smudge. He was desperate to get out, and she was frantic to rescue him; but he was chained, unable to climb, and the sides of the pit were sheer and smooth, so she had no way to reach him. Then a man dressed entirely in black from head to foot, his face hidden by shadows, appeared at the far side of the pit and began to shovel dirt into it. Danny’s cry escalated into a scream of terror; he was being buried alive. Tina shouted at the man in black, but he ignored her and kept shoveling dirt on top of Danny. She edged around the pit, determined to make the hateful bastard stop what he was doing, but he took a step away from her for every step that she took toward him, and he always stayed directly across the hole from her. She couldn’t reach him, and she couldn’t reach Danny, and the dirt was up to the boy’s knees, and now up to his hips, and now over his shoulders. Danny wailed and shrieked, and now the earth was even with his chin, but the man in black wouldn’t stop filling in the hole. She wanted to kill the bastard, club him to death with his own shovel. When she thought of clubbing him, he looked at her, and she saw his face: a fleshless skull with rotting skin stretched over the bones, burning red eyes, a yellow-toothed grin. A disgusting cluster of maggots clung to the man’s left cheek and to the corner of his eye, feeding off him. Tina’s terror over Danny’s impending entombment was suddenly mixed with fear for her own life. Though Danny’s screams were increasingly muffled, they were even more urgent than before, because the dirt began to cover his face and pour into his mouth. She had to get down to him and push the earth away from his face before he suffocated, so in blind panic she threw herself over the edge of the pit, into the terrible abyss, falling and falling—

Gasping, shuddering, she wrenched herself out of sleep.

She was convinced that the man in black was in her bedroom, standing silently in the darkness, grinning. Heart pounding, she fumbled with the bedside lamp. She blinked in the sudden light and saw that she was alone.

“Jesus,” she said weakly.

She wiped one hand across her face, sloughing off a film of perspiration. She dried her hand on the sheets.

She did some deep-breathing exercises, trying to calm herself.

She couldn’t stop shaking.

In the bathroom, she washed her face. The mirror revealed a person whom she hardly recognized: a haggard, bloodless, sunken-eyed fright.

Her mouth was dry and sour. She drank a glass of cold water.

Back in bed, she didn’t want to turn off the light. Her fear made her angry with herself, and at last she twisted the switch.

The returning darkness was threatening.

She wasn’t sure she would be able to get any more sleep, but she had to try. It wasn’t even five o’clock. She’d been asleep less than three hours.

In the morning, she would clean out Danny’s room. Then the dreams would stop. She was pretty much convinced of that.

She remembered the two words that she had twice erased from Danny’s chalkboard — NOT DEAD — and she realized that she’d forgotten to call Michael. She had to confront him with her suspicions. She had to know if he’d been in the house, in Danny’s room, without her knowledge or permission.

It had to be Michael.

She could turn on the light and call him now. He would be sleeping, but she wouldn’t feel guilty if she woke him, not after all the sleepless nights that he had given her. Right now, however, she didn’t feel up to the battle. Her wits were dulled by wine and exhaustion. And if Michael had slipped into the house like a little boy playing a cruel prank, if he had written that message on the chalkboard, then his hatred of her was far greater than she had thought. He might even be a desperately sick man. If he became verbally violent and abusive, if he were irrational, she would need to have a clear head to deal with him. She would call him in the morning when she had regained some of her strength.

She yawned and turned over and drifted off to sleep. She didn’t dream anymore, and when she woke at ten o’clock, she was refreshed and newly excited by the previous night’s success.

She phoned Michael, but he wasn’t home. Unless he’d changed shifts in the past six months, he didn’t go to work until noon. She decided to try his number again in half an hour.

After retrieving the morning newspaper from the front stoop, she read the rave review of Magyck! written by the Review-Journal’s entertainment critic. He couldn’t find anything wrong with the show. His praise was so effusive that, even reading it by herself, in her own kitchen, she was slightly embarrassed by the effusiveness of the praise.

She ate a light breakfast of grapefruit juice and one English muffin, then went to Danny’s room to pack his belongings. When she opened the door, she gasped and halted.

The room was a mess. The airplane models were no longer in the display case; they were strewn across the floor, and a few were broken. Danny’s collection of paperbacks had been pulled from the bookcase and tossed into every corner. The tubes of glue, miniature bottles of enamel, and model-crafting tools that had stood on his desk were now on the floor with everything else. A poster of one of the movie monsters had been ripped apart; it hung from the wall in several pieces. The action figures had been knocked off the headboard. The closet doors were open, and all the clothes inside appeared to have been thrown on the floor. The game table had been overturned. The easel lay on the carpet, the chalkboard facing down.

Shaking with rage, Tina slowly crossed the room, carefully stepping through the debris. She stopped at the easel, set it up as it belonged, hesitated, then turned the chalkboard toward her.

“Damn!” she said, furious.

Vivienne Neddler had been in to clean last evening, but this wasn’t the kind of thing that Vivienne would be capable of doing. If the mess had been here when Vivienne arrived, the old woman would have cleaned it up and would have left a note about what she’d found. Clearly, the intruder had come in after Mrs. Neddler had left.

Fuming, Tina went through the house, meticulously checking every window and door. She could find no sign of forced entry.

In the kitchen again, she phoned Michael. He still didn’t answer. She slammed down the handset.

She pulled the telephone directory from a drawer and leafed through the Yellow Pages until she found the advertisements for locksmiths. She chose the company with the largest ad.

“Anderlingen Lock and Security.”

“Your ad in the Yellow Pages says you can have a man here to change my locks in one hour.”

“That’s our emergency service. It costs more.”

“I don’t care what it costs,” Tina said.

“But if you just put your name on our work list, we’ll most likely have a man there by four o’clock this afternoon, tomorrow morning at the latest. And the regular service is forty percent cheaper than an emergency job.”

“Vandals were in my house last night,” Tina said.

“What a world we live in,” said the woman at Anderlingen.

“They wrecked a lot of stuff—”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“—so I want the locks changed immediately.”

“Of course.”

“And I want good locks installed. The best you’ve got.”

“Just give me your name and address, and I’ll send a man out right away.”

A couple of minutes later, having completed the call, Tina went back to Danny’s room to survey the damage again. As she looked over the wreckage, she said, “What the hell do you want from me, Mike?”

She doubted that he would be able to answer that question even if he were present to hear it. What possible excuse could he have? What twisted logic could justify this sort of sick behavior? It was crazy, hateful.

She shivered.

Chapter Eleven

Tina arrived at Bally’s Hotel at ten minutes till two, Wednesday afternoon, leaving her Honda with a valet parking attendant.

Bally’s, formerly the MGM Grand, was getting to be one of the older establishments on the continuously rejuvenating Las Vegas Strip, but it was still one of the most popular hotels in town, and on this last day of the year it was packed. At least two or three thousand people were in the casino, which was larger than a football field. Hundreds of gamblers — pretty young women, sweet-faced grandmothers, men in jeans and decoratively stitched Western shirts, retirement-age men in expensive but tacky leisure outfits, a few guys in three-piece suits, salesmen, doctors, mechanics, secretaries, Americans from all of the Western states, junketeers from the East Coast, Japanese tourists, a few Arab men — sat at the semielliptical blackjack tables, pushing money and chips forward, sometimes taking back their winnings, eagerly grabbing the cards that were dealt from the five-deck shoes, each reacting in one of several predictable ways: Some players squealed with delight; some grumbled; others smiled ruefully and shook their heads; some teased the dealers, pleading half seriously for better cards; and still others were silent, polite, attentive, and businesslike, as though they thought they were engaged in some reasonable form of investment planning. Hundreds of other people stood close behind the players, watching impatiently, waiting for a seat to open. At the craps tables, the crowds, primarily men, were more boisterous than the blackjack aficionados; they screamed, howled, cheered, groaned, encouraged the shooter, and prayed loudly to the dice. On the left, slot machines ran the entire length of the casino, bank after nerve-jangling bank of them, brightly and colorfully lighted, attended by gamblers who were more vocal than the card players but not as loud as the craps shooters. On the right, beyond the craps tables, halfway down the long room, elevated from the main floor, the white-marble and brass baccarat pit catered to a more affluent and sedate group of gamblers; at baccarat, the pit boss, the floorman, and the dealers wore tuxedos. And everywhere in the gigantic casino, there were cocktail waitresses in brief costumes, revealing long legs and cleavage; they bustled here and there, back and forth, as if they were the threads that bound the crowd together.

Tina pressed through the milling onlookers who filled the wide center aisle, and she located Michael almost at once. He was dealing blackjack at one of the first tables. The game minimum was a five-dollar bet, and all seven seats were taken. Michael was grinning, chatting amicably with the players. Some dealers were cold and uncommunicative, but Michael felt the day went faster when he was friendly with people. Not unexpectedly, he received considerably more tips than most dealers did.

Michael was lean and blond, with eyes nearly as blue as Tina’s. He somewhat resembled Robert Redford, almost too pretty. It was no surprise that women players tipped him more often and more generously than did men.

When Tina squeezed into the narrow gap between the tables and caught Michael’s attention, his reaction was far different from what she had expected. She’d thought the sight of her would wipe the smile off his face. Instead, his smile broadened, and there seemed to be genuine delight in his eyes.

He was shuffling cards when he saw her, and he continued to shuffle while he spoke. “Hey, hello there. You look terrific, Tina. A sight for sore eyes.”

She wasn’t prepared for this pleasantness, nonplussed by the warmth of his greeting.

He said, “That’s a nice sweater. I like it. You always looked good in blue.”

She smiled uneasily and tried to remember that she had come here to accuse him of cruelly harassing her. “Michael, I have to talk to you.”

He glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a break coming up in five minutes.”

“Where should I meet you?”

“Why don’t you wait right where you are? You can watch these nice people beat me out of a lot of money.”

Every player at the table groaned, and they all had comments to make about the unlikely possibility that they might win anything from this dealer.

Michael grinned and winked at Tina.

She smiled woodenly.

She waited impatiently as the five minutes crawled by; she was never comfortable in a casino when it was busy. The frantic activity and the unrelenting excitement, which bordered on hysteria at times, abraded her nerves.

The huge room was so noisy that the blend of sounds seemed to coalesce into a visible substance — like a humid yellow haze in the air. Slot machines rang and beeped and whistled and buzzed. Balls clattered around spinning roulette wheels. A five-piece band hammered out wildly amplified pop music from the small stage in the open cocktail lounge beyond and slightly above the slot machines. The paging system blared names. Ice rattled in glasses as gamblers drank while they played. And everyone seemed to be talking at once.

When Michael’s break time arrived, a replacement dealer took over the table, and Michael stepped out of the blackjack pit, into the center aisle. “You want to talk?”

“Not here,” she said, half-shouting. “I can’t hear myself think.”

“Let’s go down to the arcade.”

“Okay.”

To reach the escalators that would carry them down to the shopping arcade on the lower level, they had to cross the entire casino. Michael led the way, gently pushing and elbowing through the holiday crowd, and Tina followed quickly in his wake, before the path that he made could close up again.

Halfway across the long room, they stopped at a clearing where a middle-aged man lay on his back, unconscious, in front of a blackjack table. He was wearing a beige suit, a dark brown shirt, and a beige-patterned tie. An overturned stool lay beside him, and approximately five hundred dollars’ worth of green chips were scattered on the carpet. Two uniformed security men were performing first aid on the unconscious man, loosening his tie and collar, taking his pulse, while a third guard was keeping curious customers out of the way.

Michael said, “Heart attack, Pete?”

The third guard said, “Hi, Mike. Nah, I don’t think it’s his heart. Probably a combination of blackjack blackout and bingo bladder. He was sitting here for eight hours straight.”

On the floor, the man in the beige suit groaned. His eyelids fluttered.

Shaking his head, obviously amused, Michael moved around the clearing and into the crowd again.

When at last they reached the end of the casino and were on the escalators, heading down toward the shopping arcade, Tina said, “What is blackjack blackout?”

“It’s stupid is what it is,” Michael said, still amused. “The guy sits down to play cards and gets so involved he loses track of time, which is, of course, exactly what the management wants him to do. That’s why there aren’t any windows or clocks in the casino. But once in a while, a guy really loses track, doesn’t get up for hours and hours, just keeps on playing like a zombie. Meanwhile, he’s drinking too much. When he does finally stand up, he moves too fast. The blood drains from his head—bang! — and he faints dead away. Blackjack blackout.”

“Ah.”

“We see it all the time.”

“Bingo bladder?”

“Sometimes a player gets so interested in the game that he’s virtually hypnotized by it. He’s been drinking pretty regularly, but he’s so deep in a trance that he can completely ignore the call of nature until — bingo! — he has a bladder spasm. If it’s really a bad one, he finds out his pipes have blocked up. He can’t relieve himself, and he has to be taken to the hospital and catheterized.”

“My God, are you serious?”

“Yep.”

They stepped off the escalator, into the bustling shopping arcade. Crowds surged past the souvenir shops, art galleries, jewelry stores, clothing stores, and other retail businesses, but they were neither shoulder-to-shoulder nor as insistent as they were upstairs in the casino.

“I still don’t see anyplace where we can talk privately,” Tina said.

“Let’s walk down to the ice-cream parlor and get a couple of pistachio cones. What do you say? You always liked pistachio.”

“I don’t want any ice cream, Michael.”

She had lost the momentum occasioned by her anger, and now she was afraid of losing the sense of purpose that had driven her to confront him. He was trying so hard to be nice, which wasn’t like Michael at all. At least it wasn’t like the Michael Evans she had known for the past couple of years. When they were first married, he’d been fun, charming, easygoing, but he had not been that way with her in a long time.

“No ice cream,” she repeated. “Just some talk.”

“Well, if you don’t want some pistachio, I certainly do. I’ll get a cone, and then we can go outside, walk around the parking lot. It’s a fairly warm day.”

“How long is your break?”

“Twenty minutes. But I’m tight with the pit boss. He’ll cover for me if I don’t get back in time.”

The ice-cream parlor was at the far end of the arcade. As they walked, Michael continued to try to amuse her by telling her about other unusual maladies to which gamblers were prone.

“There’s what we call ‘jackpot attack,’” Michael said. “For years people go home from Vegas and tell all their friends that they came out ahead of the game. Lying their heads off. Everyone pretends to be a winner. And when all of a sudden someone does hit it big, especially on a slot machine where it can happen in a flash, they’re so surprised they pass out. Heart attacks are more frequent around the slot machines than anywhere else in the casino, and a lot of the victims are people who’ve just lined up three bars and won a bundle.

“Then there’s ‘Vegas syndrome.’ Someone gets so carried away with gambling and running from show to show that he forgets to eat for a whole day or longer. He or she — it happens to women nearly as often as men. Anyway, when he finally gets hungry and realizes he hasn’t eaten, he gulps down a huge meal, and the blood rushes from his head to his stomach, and he passes out in the middle of the restaurant. It’s not usually dangerous, except if he has a mouthful of food when he faints, because then he might choke to death.

“But my favorite is what we call the ‘time-warp syndrome.’ People come here from a lot of dull places, and Vegas is like an adult Disneyland. There’s so much going on, so much to see and do, constant excitement, so people get out of their normal rhythms. They go to bed at dawn, get up in the afternoon, and they lose track of what day it is. When the excitement wears off a little, they go to check out of the hotel, and they discover their three-day weekend somehow turned into five days. They can’t believe it. They think they’re being overcharged, and they argue with the desk clerks. When someone shows them a calendar and a daily newspaper, they’re really shocked. They’ve been through a time warp and lost a couple of days. Isn’t that weird?”

Michael kept up the friendly patter while he got his cone of ice cream. Then, as they stepped out of the rear entrance of the hotel and walked along the edge of the parking lot in the seventy-degree winter sunshine, he said, “So what did you want to talk about?”

Tina wasn’t sure how to begin. Her original intention had been to accuse him of ripping apart Danny’s room; she had been prepared to come on strong, so that even if he didn’t want her to know he’d done it, he might be rattled enough to reveal his guilt. But now, if she started making nasty accusations after he’d been so pleasant to her, she would seem to be a hysterical harpy, and if she still had any advantage left, she would quickly lose it.

At last she said, “Some strange things have been happening at the house.”

“Strange? Like what?”

“I think someone broke in.”

“You think?”

“Well… I’m sure of it.”

“When did this happen?”

Remembering the two words on the chalkboard, she said, “Three times in the past week.”

He stopped walking and stared at her. “Three times?”

“Yes. Last evening was the latest.”

“What do the police say?”

“I haven’t called them.”

He frowned. “Why not?”

“For one thing, nothing was taken.”

“Somebody broke in three times but didn’t steal anything?”

If he was faking innocence, he was a much better actor than she thought he was, and she thought she knew him well indeed. After all, she’d lived with him for a long time, through years of happiness and years of misery, and she’d come to know the limits of his talent for deception and duplicity. She’d always known when he was lying. She didn’t think he was lying now. There was something peculiar in his eyes, a speculative look, but it wasn’t guile. He truly seemed unaware of what had happened at the house. Perhaps he’d had nothing to do with it.

But if Michael hadn’t torn up Danny’s room, if Michael hadn’t written those words on the chalkboard, then who had?

“Why would someone break in and leave without taking anything?” Michael asked.

“I think they were just trying to upset me, scare me.”

“Who would want to scare you?” He seemed genuinely concerned.

She didn’t know what to say.

“You’ve never been the kind of person who makes enemies,” he said. “You’re a damn hard woman to hate.”

“You managed,” she said, and that was as close as she could come to accusing him of anything.

He blinked in surprise. “Oh, no. No, no, Tina. I never hated you. I was disappointed by the changes in you. I was angry with you. Angry and hurt. I’ll admit that, all right. There was a lot of bitterness on my part. Definitely. But it was never as bad as hatred.”

She sighed.

Michael hadn’t wrecked Danny’s room. She was absolutely sure of that now.

“Tina?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have bothered you with this. I’m not really sure why I did,” she lied. “I ought to have called the police right away.”

He licked his ice-cream cone, studied her, and then he smiled. “I understand. It’s hard for you to get around to it. You don’t know how to begin. So you come to me with this story.”

“Story?”

“It’s okay.”

“Michael, it’s not just a story.”

“Don’t be embarrassed.”

“I’m not embarrassed. Why should I be embarrassed?”

“Relax. It’s all right, Tina,” he said gently.

“Someone has been breaking into the house.”

“I understand how you feel.” His smile changed; it was smug now.

“Michael—”

“I really do understand, Tina.” His voice was reassuring, but his tone was condescending. “You don’t need an excuse to ask me what you’ve come here to ask. Honey, you don’t need a story about someone breaking into the house. I understand, and I’m with you. I really am. So go ahead. Don’t feel awkward about it. Just get right down to it. Go ahead and say it.”

She was perplexed. “Say what?”

“We let the marriage go off the rails. But there at first, for a good many years, we had a great thing going. We can have it again if we really want to try for it.”

She was stunned. “Are you serious?”

“I’ve been thinking about it the past few days. When I saw you walk into the casino a while ago, I knew I was right. As soon as I saw you, I knew everything was going to turn out exactly like I had it figured.”

“You are serious.”

“Sure.” He mistook her astonishment for surprised delight. “Now that you’ve had your fling as a producer, you’re ready to settle down. That makes a lot of sense, Tina.”

Fling! she thought angrily.

He still persisted in regarding her as a flighty woman who wanted to take a fling at being a Vegas producer. The insufferable bastard! She was furious, but she said nothing; she didn’t trust herself to speak, afraid that she would start screaming at him the instant she opened her mouth.

“There’s more to life than just having a flashy career,” Michael said pontifically. “Home life counts for something. Home and family. That has to be a part of life too. Maybe it’s the most important part.” He nodded sanctimoniously. “Family. These last few days, as your show’s been getting ready to open, I’ve had the feeling you might finally realize you need something more in life, something a lot more emotionally satisfying than whatever it is you can get out of just producing stage shows.”

Tina’s ambition was, in part, what had led to the dissolution of their marriage. Well, not her ambition as much as Michael’s childish attitude toward it. He was happy being a blackjack dealer; his salary and his good tips were enough for him, and he was content to coast through the years. But merely drifting along in the currents of life wasn’t enough for Tina. As she had struggled to move up from dancer to costumer to choreographer to lounge-revue coordinator to producer, Michael had been displeased with her commitment to work. She had never neglected him and Danny. She had been determined that neither of them would have reason to feel that his importance in her life had diminished. Danny had been wonderful; Danny had understood. Michael couldn’t or wouldn’t. Gradually Michael’s displeasure over her desire to succeed was complicated by a darker emotion: He grew jealous of her smallest achievements. She had tried to encourage him to seek advances in his own career — from dealer to floorman to pit boss to higher casino management — but he had no interest in climbing that ladder. He became waspish, petulant. Eventually he started seeing other women. She was shocked by his reaction, then confused, and at last deeply saddened. The only way she could have held on to her husband would have been to abandon her new career, and she had refused to do that.

In time Michael had made it clear to her that he hadn’t actually ever loved the real Christina. He didn’t tell her directly, but his behavior said as much. He had adored only the showgirl, the dancer, the cute little thing that other men coveted, the pretty woman whose presence at his side had inflated his ego. As long as she remained a dancer, as long as she devoted her life to him, as long as she hung on his arm and looked delicious, he approved of her. But the moment that she wanted to be something more than a trophy wife, he rebelled.

Badly hurt by that discovery, she had given him the freedom that he wanted.

And now he actually thought that she was going to crawl back to him. That was why he’d smiled when he’d seen her at his blackjack table. That was why he had been so charming. The size of his ego astounded her.

Standing before her in the sunshine, his white shirt shimmering with squiggles of reflected light that bounced off the parked cars, he favored her with that self-satisfied, superior smile that made her feel as cold as this winter day ought to have been.

Once, long ago, she had loved him very much. Now she couldn’t imagine how or why she had ever cared.

“Michael, in case you haven’t heard, Magyck! is a hit. A big hit. Huge.”

“Sure,” he said. “I know that, baby. And I’m happy for you. I’m happy for you and me. Now that you’ve proved whatever you needed to prove, you can relax.”

“Michael, I intend to continue working as a producer. I’m not going to—”

“Oh, I don’t expect you to give it up,” he said magnanimously.

“You don’t, huh?”

“No, no. Of course not. It’s good for you to have something to dabble in. I see that now. I get the message. But with Magyck! running successfully, you won’t have all that much to do. It won’t be like before.”

“Michael—” she began, intending to tell him that she was going to stage another show within the next year, that she didn’t want to be represented by only one production at a time, and that she even had distant designs on New York and Broadway, where the return of Busby Berkeley — style musicals might be greeted with cheers.

But he was so involved with his fantasy that he wasn’t aware that she had no desire to be a part of it. He interrupted her before she’d said more than his name. “We can do it, Tina. It was good for us once, those early years. It can be good again. We’re still young. We have time to start another family. Maybe even two boys and two girls. That’s what I’ve always wanted.”

When he paused to lick his ice-cream cone, she said, “Michael, that’s not the way it’s going to be.”

“Well, maybe you’re right. Maybe a large family isn’t such a wise idea these days, what with the economy in trouble and all the turmoil in the world. But we can take care of two easily enough, and maybe we’ll get lucky and have one boy and one girl. Of course we’ll wait a year or so. I’m sure there’s a lot of work to do on a show like Magyck! even after it opens. We’ll wait until it’s running smoothly, until it doesn’t need much of your time. Then we can—”

“Michael, stop it!” she said harshly.

He flinched as if she’d slapped him.

“I’m not feeling unfulfilled these days,” she said. “I’m not pining for the domestic life. You don’t understand me one bit better now than you did when we divorced.”

His expression of surprise slowly settled into a frown.

She said, “I didn’t make up that story about someone breaking into the house just so you could play the strong, reliable man to my weak, frightened female. Someone really did break in. I came to you because I thought… I believed… Well, that doesn’t matter anymore.”

She turned away from him and started toward the rear entrance of the hotel, out of which they’d come a few minutes ago.

“Wait!” Michael said. “Tina, wait!”

She stopped and regarded him with contempt and sorrow.

He hurried to her. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault, Tina. I botched it. Jesus, I was babbling like an idiot, wasn’t I? I didn’t let you do it your way. I knew what you wanted to say, but I should have let you say it at your own speed. I was wrong. It’s just — I was excited, Tina. That’s all. I should’ve shut up and let you get around to it first. I’m sorry, baby.” His ingratiating, boyish grin was back. “Don’t get mad at me, okay? We both want the same thing — a home life, a good family life. Let’s not throw away this chance.”

She glared at him. “Yes, you’re right, I do want a home life, a satisfying family life. You’re right about that. But you’re wrong about everything else. I don’t want to be a producer merely because I need a sideline to dabble in. Dabble! Michael, that’s stupid. No one gets a show like Magyck! off the ground by dabbling. I can’t believe you said that! It wasn’t a fling. It was a mentally and physically debilitating experience — it was hard—and I loved every minute of it! God willing, I’m going to do it again. And again and again. I’m going to produce shows that’ll make Magyck! look amateurish by comparison. Someday I may also be a mother again. And I’ll be a damn good mother too. A good mother and a good producer. I have the intelligence and the talent to be more than just one thing. And I certainly can be more than just your trinket and your housekeeper.”

“Now, wait a minute,” he said, beginning to get angry. “Wait just a damn minute. You don’t—”

She interrupted him. For years she had been filled with hurt and bitterness. She had never vented any of her black anger because, initially, she’d wanted to hide it from Danny; she hadn’t wanted to turn him against his father. Later, after Danny was dead, she’d repressed her feelings because she’d known that Michael had been truly suffering from the loss of his child, and she hadn’t wanted to add to his misery. But now she vented some of the acid that had been eating at her for so long, cutting him off in midsentence.

“You were wrong to think I’d come crawling back. Why on earth would I? What do you have to give me that I can’t get elsewhere? You’ve never been much of a giver anyway, Michael. You only give when you’re sure of getting back twice as much. You’re basically a taker. And before you give me any more of that treacly talk about your great love of family, let me remind you that it wasn’t me who tore our family apart. It wasn’t me who jumped from bed to bed.”

“Now, wait—”

“You were the one who started fucking anything that breathed, and then you flaunted each cheap little affair to hurt me. It was you who didn’t come home at night. It was you who went away for weekends with your girlfriends. And those bed-hopping weekends broke my heart, Michael, broke my heart — which is what you hoped to do, so that was all right with you. But did you ever stop to realize what effect your absences had on Danny? If you loved family life so much, why didn’t you spend all those weekends with your son?”

His face was flushed, and there was a familiar meanness in his eyes. “So I’m not a giver, huh? Then who gave you the house you’re living in? Huh? Who was it had to move into an apartment when we separated, and who was it kept the house?”

He was trying desperately to deflect her and change the course of the argument. She could see what he was up to, and she was not going to be distracted from her main intention.

She said, “Don’t be pathetic, Michael. You know damn well the down payment for the house came out of my earnings. You always spent your money on fast cars, good clothes. I paid every loan installment. You know that. And I never asked for alimony. Anyway, all of that’s beside the point. We were talking about family life, about Danny.”

“Now, you listen to me—”

“No. It’s your turn to listen. After all these years it’s finally your turn to listen. If you know how. You could have taken Danny away for the weekend if you didn’t want to be near me. You could have gone camping with him. You could have taken him down to Disneyland for a couple days. Or to the Colorado River to do some fishing. But you were too busy using all those women to hurt me and to prove to yourself what a stud you were. You could have enjoyed that time with your son. He missed you. You could have had that precious time with him. But you didn’t want it. And as it turned out, Danny didn’t have much time left.”

Michael was milk-white, trembling. His eyes were dark with rage. “You’re the same goddamn bitch you always were.”

She sighed and sagged. She was exhausted. Finished telling him off, she felt pleasantly wrung out, as if some evil, nervous energy had been drained from her.

“You’re the same ball-breaking bitch,” Michael said.

“I don’t want to fight with you, Michael. I’m even sorry if some of what I said about Danny hurt you, although, God knows, you deserve to hear it. I don’t really want to hurt you. Oddly enough, I don’t really hate you anymore. I don’t feel anything for you. Not anything at all.”

Turning away, she left him in the sunshine, with the ice cream melting down the cone and onto his hand.

She walked back through the shopping arcade, rode the escalator up to the casino, and made her way through the noisy crowd to the front doors. One of the valet-parking attendants brought her car, and she drove down the hotel’s steeply slanted exit drive.

She headed toward the Golden Pyramid, where she had an office, and where work was waiting to be done.

After she had driven only a block, she was forced to pull to the side of the road. She couldn’t see where she was going, because hot tears streamed down her face. She put the car in park. Surprising herself, she sobbed loudly.

At first she wasn’t sure what she was crying about. She just surrendered to the racking grief that swept through her and did not question it.

After a while she decided that she was crying for Danny. Poor, sweet Danny. He’d hardly begun to live. It wasn’t fair. And she was crying for herself too, and for Michael. She was crying for all the things that might have been, and for what could never be again.

In a few minutes she got control of herself. She dried her eyes and blew her nose.

She had to stop being so gloomy. She’d had enough gloom in her life. A whole hell of a lot of gloom.

“Think positive,” she said aloud. “Maybe the past wasn’t so great, but the future seems pretty damn good.”

She inspected her face in the rearview mirror to see how much damage the crying jag had done. She looked better than she expected. Her eyes were red, but she wouldn’t pass for Dracula. She opened her purse, found her makeup, and covered the tear stains as best she could.

She pulled the Honda back into traffic and headed for the Pyramid again.

A block farther, as she waited at a red light, she realized that she still had a mystery on her hands. She was positive that Michael had not done the damage in Danny’s bedroom. But then, who had done it? No one else had a key. Only a skilled burglar could have broken in without leaving a trace. And why would a first-rate burglar leave without taking anything? Why break in merely to write on Danny’s chalkboard and to wreck the dead boy’s things?

Weird.

When she had suspected Michael of doing the dirty work, she had been disturbed and distressed, but she hadn’t been frightened. If some stranger wanted her to feel more pain over the loss of her child, however, that was definitely unsettling. That was scary because it didn’t make sense. A stranger? It must be. Michael was the only person who had ever blamed her for Danny’s death. Not one other relative or acquaintance had ever suggested that she was even indirectly responsible. Yet the taunting words on the chalkboard and the destruction in the bedroom seemed to be the work of someone who felt that she should be held accountable for the accident. Which meant it had to be someone she didn’t even know. Why would a stranger harbor such passionate feelings about Danny’s death?

The red traffic light changed.

A horn tooted behind her.

As she drove across the intersection and into the entrance drive that led to the Golden Pyramid Hotel, Tina couldn’t shake the creepy feeling that she was being watched by someone who meant to harm her. She checked the rearview mirror to see if she was being followed. As far as she could tell, no one was tailing her.

Chapter Twelve

The third floor of the Golden Pyramid Hotel was occupied by management and clerical personnel. Here, there was no flash, no Vegas glamour. This was where the work got done. The third floor housed the machinery that supported the walls of fantasy, beyond which the tourists gamboled.

Tina’s office was large, paneled in whitewashed pine, with comfortable contemporary upholstery. One wall was covered by heavy drapes that blocked out the fierce desert sun. The windows behind the drapes faced the Las Vegas Strip.

At night the fabled Strip was a dazzling sight, a surging river of light: red, blue, green, yellow, purple, pink, turquoise — every color within the visual spectrum of the human eye; incandescent and neon, fiberoptics and lasers, flashing and rippling. Hundred-foot-long signs—five-hundred-foot-long signs — towered five or even ten stories above the street, glittering, winking, thousands of miles of bright glass tubing filled with glowing gas, blinking, swirling, hundreds of thousands of bulbs, spelling out hotel names, forming pictures with light. Computer-controlled designs ebbed and flowed, a riotous and mad — but curiously beautiful — excess of energy consumption.

During the day, however, the merciless sun was unkind to the Strip. In the hard light the enormous architectural confections were not always appealing; at times, in spite of the billions of dollars of value that it represented, the Strip looked grubby.

The view of the legendary boulevard was wasted on Tina; she didn’t often make use of it. Because she was seldom in her office at night, the drapes were rarely open. This afternoon, as usual, the drapes were closed. The office was shadowy, and she was at her desk in a pool of soft light.

As Tina pored over a final bill for carpentry work on some of the Magyck! sets, Angela, her secretary, stepped in from the outer office. “Is there anything more you need before I leave?”

Tina glanced at her watch. “It’s only a quarter to four.”

“I know. But we get off at four today — New Year’s Eve.”

“Oh, of course,” Tina said. “I completely forgot about the holiday.”

“If you want me to, I could stay a little longer.”

“No, no, no,” Tina said. “You go home at four with the others.”

“So is there anything more you need?”

Leaning back in her chair, Tina said, “Yes. In fact, there is something. A lot of our regular junketeers and high rollers couldn’t make it to the VIP opening of Magyck! I’d like you to get their names from the computer, plus a list of the wedding anniversaries of those who’re married.”

“Can do,” Angela said. “What’ve you got in mind?”

“During the year, I’m going to send special invitations to the married ones, asking them to spend their anniversaries here, with everything comped for three days. We’ll sell it this way: ‘Spend the magic night of your anniversary in the magic world of Magyck!’ Something like that. We’ll make it very romantic. We’ll serve them champagne at the show. It’ll be a great promotion, don’t you think?” She raised her hands, as if framing her next words, “The Golden Pyramid — a Magyck! place for lovers.”

“The hotel ought to be happy,” Angela said. “We’ll get lots of favorable media coverage.”

“The casino bosses will like it too, ’cause a lot of our high rollers will probably make an extra trip this year. The average gambler won’t cancel other planned trips to Vegas. He’ll just add on an extra trip for his anniversary. And I’ll be happy because the whole stunt will generate more talk about the show.”

“It’s a great idea,” Angela said. “I’ll get the list.”

Tina returned to her inspection of the carpenter’s bill, and Angela was back at five minutes past four with thirty pages of data.

“Thank you,” Tina said.

“No trouble.”

“Are you shivering?”

“Yeah,” Angela said, hugging herself. “Must be a problem with the air-conditioning. The last few minutes — my office got chilly.”

“It’s warm enough in here,” Tina said.

“Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m coming down with something. I sure hope not. I’ve got big plans tonight.”

“Party?”

“Yeah. Big bash over on Rancho Circle.”

“Millionaire’s Row?”

“My boyfriend’s boss lives over there. Anyway… happy new year, Tina.”

“Happy new year.”

“See you Monday.”

“Oh? Oh, yeah, that’s right. It’s a four-day weekend. Well, just watch out for that hangover.”

Angela grinned. “There’s at least one out there with my name on it.”

Tina finished checking the carpenter’s bill and approved it for payment.

Alone now on the third floor, she sat in the pool of amber light at her desk, surrounded by shadows, yawning. She’d work for another hour, until five o’clock, and then go home. She’d need two hours to get ready for her date with Elliot Stryker.

She smiled when she thought of him, then picked up the sheaf of papers that Angela had given her, anxious to finish her work.

The hotel possessed an amazing wealth of information about its most favored customers. If she needed to know how much money each of these people earned in a year, the computer could tell her. It could tell her each man’s preferred brand of liquor, each wife’s favorite flower and perfume, the make of car they drove, the names and ages of their children, the nature of any illnesses or other medical conditions they might have, their favorite foods, their favorite colors, their tastes in music, their political affiliations, and scores of other facts both important and trivial. These were customers to whom the hotel was especially anxious to cater, and the more the Pyramid knew about them, the better it could serve them. Although the hotel collected this data with, for the most part, the customers’ happiness in mind, Tina wondered how pleased these people would be to learn that the Golden Pyramid maintained fat dossiers on them.

She scanned the list of VIP customers who hadn’t attended the opening of Magyck! Using a red pencil, she circled those names that were followed by anniversary dates, trying to ascertain how large a promotion she was proposing. She had counted only twenty-two names when she came to an incredible message that the computer had inserted in the list.

Her chest tightened. She couldn’t breathe.

She stared at what the computer had printed, and fear welled in her — dark, cold, oily fear.

Between the names of two high rollers were five lines of type that had nothing to do with the information she had requested:

The paper rattled as her hands began to shake.

First at home. In Danny’s bedroom. Now here. Who was doing this to her?

Angela?

No. Absurd.

Angela was a sweet kid. She wasn’t capable of anything as vicious as this. Angela hadn’t noticed this interruption in the printout because she hadn’t had time to scan it.

Besides, Angela couldn’t have broken into the house. Angela wasn’t a master burglar, for God’s sake.

Tina quickly shuffled through the pages, seeking more of the sick prankster’s work. She found it after another twenty-six names.

Her heart seemed to be pumping a refrigerant instead of blood, and an iciness radiated from it.

Suddenly she was aware of how alone she was. More likely than not, she was the only person on the entire third floor.

She thought of the man in her nightmare, the man in black whose face had been lumpy with maggots, and the shadows in the corner of her office seemed darker and deeper than they had been a moment ago.

She scanned another forty names and cringed when she saw what else the computer had printed.

That was the last disturbing insertion. The remainder of the list was as it should be.

Tina threw the printout on the floor and went into the outer office.

Angela had turned the light off. Tina turned it on.

She went to Angela’s desk, sat in her chair, and switched on the computer. The screen filled with a soft blue light.

In the locked center drawer of the desk was a book with the code numbers that permitted access to the sensitive information stored not on diskette but only in the central memory. Tina paged through the book until she found the code that she needed to call up the list of the hotel’s best customers. The number was 1001012, identified as the access for “Comps,” which meant “complimentary guests,” a euphemism for “big losers,” who were never asked to pay their room charges or restaurant bills because they routinely dropped small fortunes in the casino.

Tina typed her personal access number — E013331555. Because so much material in the hotel’s files was extremely confidential information about high rollers, and because the Pyramid’s list of favored customers would be of enormous value to competitors, only approved people could obtain this data, and a record was kept of everyone who accessed it. After a moment’s hesitation the computer asked for her name; she entered that, and the computer matched her number and name. Then:

She typed in the code for the list of complimentary guests, and the machine responded at once.

Her fingers were damp. She wiped them on her slacks and then quickly tapped out her request. She asked the computer for the same information that Angela had requested a while ago. The names and addresses of VIP customers who had missed the opening of Magyck! — along with the wedding anniversaries of those who were married — began to appear on the screen, scrolling upward. Simultaneously the laser printer began to churn out the same data.

Tina snatched each page from the printer tray as it arrived. The laser whispered through twenty names, forty, sixty, seventy, without producing the lines about Danny that had been on the first printout. Tina waited until at least a hundred names had been listed before she decided that the system had been programmed to print the lines about Danny only one time, only on her office’s first data request of the afternoon, and on no later call-up.

She canceled this data request and closed out the file. The printer stopped.

Just a couple of hours ago she had concluded that the person behind this harassment had to be a stranger. But how could any stranger so easily gain entrance to both her house and the hotel computer? Didn’t he, after all, have to be someone she knew?

But who?

And why?

What stranger could possibly hate her so much?

Fear, like an uncoiling snake, twisted and slithered inside of her, and she shivered.

Then she realized it wasn’t only fear that made her quiver. The air was chilly.

She remembered the complaint that Angela had made earlier. It hadn’t seemed important at the time.

But the room had been warm when Tina had first come in to use the computer, and now it was cool. How could the temperature have dropped so far in such a short time? She listened for the sound of the air conditioner, but the telltale whisper wasn’t issuing from the wall vents. Nevertheless, the room was much cooler than it had been only minutes ago.

With a sharp, loud, electronic snap that startled Tina, the computer abruptly began to churn out additional data, although she hadn’t requested any. She glanced at the printer, then at the words that flickered across the screen.

The message blinked and vanished from the screen. The printer fell silent.

The room was growing colder by the second.

Or was it her imagination?

She had the crazy feeling that she wasn’t alone. The man in black. Even though he was only a creature from a nightmare, and even though it was utterly impossible for him to be here in the flesh, she couldn’t shake the heart-clenching feeling that he was in the room. The man in black. The man with the evil, fiery eyes. The yellow-toothed grin. Behind her. Reaching toward her with a hand that would be cold and damp. She spun around in her chair, but no one had come into the room.

Of course. He was only a nightmare monster. How stupid of her.

Yet she felt that she was not alone.

She didn’t want to look at the screen again, but she did. She had to.

The words still burned there.

Then they disappeared.

She managed to break the grip of fear that had paralyzed her, and she put her fingers on the keyboard. She intended to determine if the words about Danny had been previously programmed to print out on her machine or if they had been sent to her just seconds ago by someone at another computer in another office in the hotel’s elaborately networked series of workstations.

She had an almost psychic sense that the perpetrator of this viciousness was in the building now, perhaps on the third floor with her. She imagined herself leaving her office, walking down the long hallway, opening doors, peering into silent, deserted offices, until at last she found a man sitting at another terminal. He would turn toward her, surprised, and she would finally know who he was.

And then what?

Would he harm her? Kill her?

This was a new thought: the possibility that his ultimate goal was to do something worse than torment and scare her.

She hesitated, fingers on the keyboard, not certain if she should proceed. She probably wouldn’t get the answers she needed, and she would only be acknowledging her presence to whomever might be out there at another workstation. Then she realized that, if he really was nearby, he already knew she was in her office, alone. She had nothing to lose by trying to follow the data chain. But when she attempted to type in her instruction, the keyboard was locked; the keys wouldn’t depress.

The printer hummed.

The room was positively arctic.

On the screen, scrolling up:

The screen glowed with those words — then went blank.

Again, she tried to feed in her questions. But the keyboard remained frozen.

She was still aware of another presence in the room. Indeed the feeling of invisible and dangerous companionship was growing stronger as the room grew colder.

How could he make the room colder without using the air conditioner? Whoever he was, he could override her computer from another terminal in the building; she could accept that. But how could he possibly make the air grow so cold so fast?

Suddenly, as the screen began to fill with the same seven-line message that had just been wiped from it, Tina had enough. She switched the machine off, and the blue glow faded from the screen.

As she was getting up from the low chair, the terminal switched itself on.

“Get you out of where?” she demanded. “The grave?”

She had to get a grip on herself. She had just spoken to the computer as if she actually thought she was talking to Danny. It wasn’t Danny tapping out those words. Goddamn it, Danny was dead!

She snapped the computer off.

It turned itself on.

A hot welling of tears blurred her vision, and she struggled to repress them. She had to be losing her mind. The damned thing couldn’t be switching itself on.

She hurried around the desk, banging her hip against one corner, heading for the wall socket as the printer hummed with the production of more hateful words.

Tina stooped beside the wall outlet from which the computer received its electrical power and its data feed. She took hold of the two lines — one heavy cable and one ordinary insulated wire — and they seemed to come alive in her hands, like a pair of snakes, resisting her. She jerked on them and pulled both plugs.

The monitor went dark.

It remained dark.

Immediately, rapidly, the room began to grow warmer.

“Thank God,” she said shakily.

She started around Angela’s desk, wanting nothing more at the moment than to get off her rubbery legs and onto a chair — and suddenly the door to the hall opened, and she cried out in alarm.

The man in black?

Elliot Stryker halted on the threshold, surprised by her scream, and for an instant she was relieved to see him.

“Tina? What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

She took a step toward him, but then she realized that he might have come here straight from a computer in one of the other third-floor offices. Could he be the man who’d been harassing her?

“Tina? My God, you’re white as a ghost!”

He moved toward her.

She said, “Stop! Wait!”

He halted, perplexed.

Voice quavery, she said, “What are you doing here?”

He blinked. “I was in the hotel on business. I wondered if you might still be at your desk. I stopped in to see. I just wanted to say hello.”

“Were you playing around with one of the other computers?”

“What?” he asked, obviously baffled by her question.

“What were you doing on the third floor?” she demanded. “Who could you possibly have been seeing? They’ve all gone home. I’m the only one here.”

Still puzzled but beginning to get impatient with her, Elliot said, “My business wasn’t on the third floor. I had a meeting with Charlie Mainway over coffee, downstairs in the restaurant. When we finished our work a couple minutes ago, I came up to see if you were here. What’s wrong with you?”

She stared at him intently.

“Tina? What’s happened?”

She searched his face for any sign that he was lying, but his bewilderment seemed genuine. And if he were lying, he wouldn’t have told her the story about Charlie and coffee, for that could be substantiated or disproved with only a minimum of effort; he would have come up with a better alibi if he really needed one. He was telling the truth.

She said, “I’m sorry. I just… I had… an… an experience here… a weird…”

He went to her. “What was it?”

As he drew near, he opened his arms, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to hold and comfort her, as if he had held her many times before, and she leaned against him in the same spirit of familiarity. She was no longer alone.

Chapter Thirteen

Tina kept a well-stocked bar in one corner of her office for those infrequent occasions when a business associate needed a drink after a long work session. This was the first time she’d ever had the need to tap those stores for herself.

At her request, Elliot poured Rémy Martin into two snifters and gave one glass to her. She couldn’t pour for them because her hands were shaking too badly.

They sat on the beige sofa, more in the shadows than in the glow from the lamps. She was forced to hold her brandy snifter in both hands to keep it steady.

“I don’t know where to begin. I guess I ought to start with Danny. Do you know about Danny?”

“Your son?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Helen Mainway told me he died a little over a year ago.”

“Did she tell you how it happened?”

“He was one of the Jaborski group. Front page of the papers.”

Bill Jaborski had been a wilderness expert and a scoutmaster. Every winter for sixteen years, he had taken a group of scouts to northern Nevada, beyond Reno, into the High Sierras, on a seven-day wilderness survival excursion.

“It was supposed to build character,” Tina said. “And the boys competed hard all year for the chance to be one of those selected to go on the trip. It was supposed to be perfectly safe. Bill Jaborski was supposed to be one of the ten top winter-survival experts in the country. That’s what everyone said. And the other adult who went along, Tom Lincoln — he was supposed to be almost as good as Bill. Supposed to be.” Her voice had grown thin and bitter. “I believed them, thought it was safe.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that. All those years they’d taken kids into the mountains, nobody was even scratched.”

Tina swallowed some cognac. It was hot in her throat, but it didn’t burn away the chill at the center of her.

A year ago Jaborski’s excursion had included fourteen boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen. All of them were top-notch scouts — and all of them died along with Jaborski and Tom Lincoln.

“Have the authorities ever figured out exactly why it happened?” Elliot asked.

“Not why. They never will. All they know is how. The group went into the mountains in a four-wheel-drive minibus built for use on back roads in the winter. Huge tires. Chains. Even a snowplow on the front. They weren’t supposed to go into the true heart of the wilderness. Just into the fringes. No one in his right mind would take boys as young as twelve into the deepest parts of the Sierras, no matter how well prepared, supplied, and trained they were, no matter how strong, no matter how many big brothers were there to look out for them.”

Jaborski had intended to drive the minibus off the main highway, onto an old logging trail, if conditions permitted. From there they were going to hike for three days with snowshoes and backpacks, making a wide circle around the bus, coming back to it at the end of the week.

“They had the best wilderness clothing and the best down-lined sleeping bags, the best winter tents, plenty of charcoal and other heat sources, plenty of food, and two wilderness experts to guide them. Perfectly safe, everyone said. Absolutely, perfectly safe. So what the fuck went wrong?”

Tina could no longer sit still. She got up and began to pace, taking another swallow of cognac.

Elliot said nothing. He seemed to know that she had to go through the whole story to get it off her mind.

“Something sure as hell went wrong,” she said. “Somehow, for some reason, they drove the bus more than four miles off the main highway, four miles off and a hell of a long way up, right up to the damn clouds. They drove up a steep, abandoned logging trail, a deteriorated dirt road so treacherous, so choked with snow, so icy that only a fool would have attempted to negotiate it any way but on foot.”

The bus had run off the road. There were no guardrails in the wilderness, no wide shoulders at the roadside with gentle slopes beyond. The vehicle skidded, then dropped a hundred feet straight onto rocks. The fuel tank exploded. The bus opened like a tin can and rolled another hundred feet into the trees.

“The kids… everyone… killed.” The bitterness in her voice dismayed her because it revealed how little she had healed. “Why? Why did a man like Bill Jaborski do something so stupid as that?”

Still sitting on the couch, Elliot shook his head and stared down at his cognac.

She didn’t expect him to answer. She wasn’t actually asking the question of him; if she was asking anyone, she was asking God.

“Why? Jaborski was the best. The very best. He was so good that he could safely take young boys into the Sierras for sixteen years, a challenge a lot of other winter survival experts wouldn’t touch. Bill Jaborski was smart, tough, clever, and filled with respect for the danger in what he did. He wasn’t foolhardy. Why would he do something so dumb, so reckless, as to drive that far along that road in those conditions?”

Elliot looked up at her. Kindness marked his eyes, a deep sympathy. “You’ll probably never learn the answer. I understand how hard it must be never to know why.”

“Hard,” she said. “Very hard.”

She returned to the couch.

He took her glass out of her hand. It was empty. She didn’t remember finishing her cognac. He went to the bar.

“No more for me,” she said. “I don’t want to get drunk.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “In your condition, throwing off all that nervous energy the way you are, two small brandies won’t affect you in the slightest.”

He returned from the bar with more Rémy Martin. This time she was able to hold the glass in one hand.

“Thank you, Elliot.”

“Just don’t ask for a mixed drink,” he said. “I’m the world’s worst bartender. I can pour anything straight or over ice, but I can’t even mix vodka and orange juice properly.”

“I wasn’t thanking you for the drink. I was thanking you for… being a good listener.”

“Most attorneys talk too much.”

For a moment they sat in silence, sipping cognac.

Tina was still tense, but she no longer felt cold inside.

Elliot said, “Losing a child like that… devastating. But it wasn’t any recollection of your son that had you so upset when I walked in a little while ago.”

“In a way it was.”

“But something more.”

She told him about the bizarre things that had been happening to her lately: the messages on Danny’s chalkboard; the wreckage she’d found in the boy’s room; the hateful, taunting words that appeared in the computer lists and on the monitor.

Elliot studied the printouts, and together they examined the computer in Angela’s office. They plugged it in and tried to get it to repeat what it had done earlier, but they had no luck; the machine behaved exactly as it was meant to behave.

“Someone could have programmed it to spew out this stuff about Danny,” Elliot said. “But I don’t see how he could make the terminal switch itself on.”

“It happened,” she said.

“I don’t doubt you. I just don’t understand.”

“And the air… so cold…”

“Could the temperature change have been subjective?”

Tina frowned. “Are you asking me if I imagined it?”

“You were frightened—”

“But I’m sure I didn’t imagine it. Angela felt the chill first, when she got the initial printout with those lines about Danny. It isn’t likely Angela and I both just imagined it.”

“True.” He stared thoughtfully at the computer. “Come on.”

“Where?”

“Back in your office. I left my drink there. Need to lubricate my thoughts.”

She followed him into the wood-paneled inner sanctum.

He picked up his brandy snifter from the low table in front of the sofa, and he sat on the edge of her desk. “Who? Who could be doing it to you?”

“I haven’t a clue.”

“You must have somebody in mind.”

“I wish I did.”

“Obviously, it’s somebody who at the very least dislikes you, if he doesn’t actually hate you. Someone who wants you to suffer. He blames you for Danny’s death… and it’s apparently a personal loss to him, so it can hardly be a stranger.”

Tina was disturbed by his analysis because it matched her own, and it led her into the same blind alley that she’d traveled before. She paced between the desk and the drapery-covered windows. “This afternoon I decided it has to be a stranger. I can’t think of anyone I know who’d be capable of this sort of thing even if they did hate me enough to contemplate it. And I don’t know of anyone but Michael who places any of the blame for Danny’s death on me.”

Elliot raised his eyebrows. “Michael’s your ex-husband?”

“Yes.”

“And he blames you for Danny’s death?”

“He says I never should have let him go with Jaborski. But this isn’t Michael’s dirty work.”

“He sounds like an excellent candidate to me.”

“ No. ”

“Are you certain?”

“Absolutely. It’s someone else.”

Elliot tasted his cognac. “You’ll probably need professional help to catch him in one of his tricks.”

“You mean the police?”

“I don’t think the police would be much help. They probably won’t think it’s serious enough to waste their time. After all, you haven’t been threatened.”

“There’s an implicit threat in all of this.”

“Oh, yeah, I agree. It’s scary. But the cops are a literal bunch, not much impressed by implied threats. Besides, to properly watch your house… that alone will require a lot more manpower than the police can spare for anything except a murder case, a hot kidnapping, or maybe a narcotics investigation.”

She stopped pacing. “Then what did you mean when you said I’d probably need professional help to catch this creep?”

“Private detectives.”

“Isn’t that melodramatic?”

He smiled sourly. “Well, the person who’s harassing you has a melodramatic streak a mile wide.”

She sighed and sipped some cognac and sat on the edge of the couch. “I don’t know… Maybe I’d hire private detectives, and they wouldn’t catch anyone but me.”

“Send that one by me again.”

She had to take another small sip of cognac before she was able to say what was on her mind, and she realized that he had been right about the liquor having little effect on her. She felt more relaxed than she’d been ten minutes ago, but she wasn’t even slightly tipsy. “It’s occurred to me… maybe I wrote those words on the chalkboard. Maybe I wrecked Danny’s room.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Could have done it in my sleep.”

“That’s ridiculous, Tina.”

“Is it? I thought I’d begun to get over Danny’s death back in September. I started sleeping well then. I didn’t dwell on it when I was alone, like I’d done for so long. I thought I’d put the worst pain behind me. But a month ago I started dreaming about Danny again. The first week, it happened twice. The second week, four nights. And the past two weeks, I’ve dreamed about him every night without fail. The dreams get worse all the time. They’re full-fledged nightmares now.”

Elliot returned to the couch and sat beside her. “What are they like?”

“I dream he’s alive, trapped somewhere, usually in a deep pit or a gorge or a well, someplace underground. He’s calling to me, begging me to save him. But I can’t. I’m never able to reach him. Then the earth starts closing in around him, and I wake up screaming, soaked with sweat. And I… I always have this powerful feeling that Danny isn’t really dead. It never lasts for long, but when I first wake up, I’m sure he’s alive somewhere. You see, I’ve convinced my conscious mind that my boy is dead, but when I’m asleep it’s my subconscious mind that’s in charge; and my subconscious just isn’t convinced that Danny’s gone.”

“So you think you’re — what, sleepwalking? In your sleep, you’re writing a rejection of Danny’s death on his chalkboard?”

“Don’t you believe that’s possible?”

“No. Well… maybe. I guess it is,” Elliot said. “I’m no psychologist. But I don’t buy it. I’ll admit I don’t know you all that well yet, but I think I know you well enough to say you wouldn’t react that way. You’re a person who meets problems head-on. If your inability to accept Danny’s death was a serious problem, you wouldn’t push it down into your subconscious. You’d learn to deal with it.”

She smiled. “You have a pretty high opinion of me.”

“Yes,” he said. “I do. Besides, if it was you who wrote on the chalkboard and smashed things in the boy’s room, then it was also you who came in here during the night and programmed the hotel computer to spew out that stuff about Danny. Do you really think you’re so far gone that you could do something like that and not remember it? Do you think you’ve got multiple personalities and one doesn’t know what the others are up to?”

She sank back on the sofa, slouched down. “No.”

“Good.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Don’t despair. We’re making progress.”

“We are?”

“Sure,” he said. “We’re eliminating possibilities. We’ve just crossed you off the list of suspects. And Michael. And I’m positive it can’t be a stranger, which rules out most of the world.”

“And I’m just as positive it isn’t a friend or a relative. So you know where that leaves me?”

“Where?”

She leaned forward, put her brandy snifter on the table, and for a moment sat with her face in her hands.

“Tina?”

She lifted her head. “I’m just trying to think how best to phrase what’s on my mind. It’s a wild idea. Ludicrous. Probably even sick.”

“I’m not going to think you’re nuts,” Elliot assured her. “What is it? Tell me.”

She hesitated, trying to hear how it was going to sound before she said it, wondering if she really believed it enough even to give voice to it. The possibility of what she was going to suggest was remote.

At last she just plunged into it: “What I’m thinking… maybe Danny is alive.”

Elliot cocked his head, studied her with those probing, dark eyes. “Alive?”

“I never saw his body.”

“You didn’t? Why not?”

“The coroner and undertaker said it was in terrible condition, horribly mutilated. They didn’t think it was a good idea for me or Michael to see it. Neither of us would have been anxious to view the body even if it had been in perfect shape, so we accepted the mortician’s recommendations. It was a closed-coffin funeral.”

“How did the authorities identify the body?”

“They asked for pictures of Danny. But mainly I think they used dental records.”

“Dental records are almost as good as fingerprints.”

“Almost. But maybe Danny didn’t die in that accident. Maybe he survived. Maybe someone out there knows where he is. Maybe that someone is trying to tell me that Danny is alive. Maybe there isn’t any threat in these strange things happening to me. Maybe someone’s just dropping a series of hints, trying to wake me up to the fact that Danny isn’t dead.”

“Too many maybes,” he said.

“Maybe not.”

Elliot put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. “Tina, you know this theory doesn’t make sense. Danny is dead.”

“See? You do think I’m crazy.”

“No. I think you’re distraught, and that’s understandable.”

“Won’t you even consider the possibility that he’s alive?”

“How could he be?”

“I don’t know.”

“How could he have survived the accident you described?” Elliot asked.

“I don’t know.”

“And where would he have been all this time if not… in the grave?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

“If he were alive,” Elliot said patiently, “someone would simply come and tell you. They wouldn’t be this mysterious about it, would they?”

“Maybe.”

Aware that her answer had disappointed him, she looked down at her hands, which were laced together so tightly that her knuckles were white.

Elliot touched her face, turning it gently toward him.

His beautiful, expressive eyes seemed to be filled with concern for her.

“Tina, you know there isn’t any maybe about it. You know better than that. If Danny were alive, and if someone were trying to get that news to you, it wouldn’t be done like this, not with all these dramatic hints. Am I right?”

“Probably.”

“Danny is gone.”

She said nothing.

“If you convince yourself he’s alive,” Elliot said, “you’re only setting yourself up for another fall.”

She stared deeply into his eyes. Eventually she sighed and nodded. “You’re right.”

“Danny’s gone.”

“Yes,” she said thinly.

“You’re really convinced of that?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Tina got up from the couch, went to the window, and pulled open the drapes. She had a sudden urge to see the Strip. After so much talk about death, she needed a glimpse of movement, action, life; and although the Strip sometimes was grubby in the flat glare of the desert sun, the boulevard was always, day or night, bustling and filled with life.

Now the early winter dusk settled over the city. In waves of dazzling color, millions of lights winked on in the enormous signs. Hundreds of cars progressed sluggishly through the busy street, taxicabs darting in and out, recklessly seeking any small advantage. Crowds streamed along the sidewalks, on their way from this casino to that casino, from one lounge to another, from one show to the next.

Tina turned to Elliot again. “You know what I want to do?”

“What?”

“Reopen the grave.”

“Have Danny’s body exhumed?”

“Yes. I never saw him. That’s why I’m having such a hard time accepting that he’s gone. That’s why I’m having nightmares. If I’d seen the body, then I’d have known for sure. I wouldn’t be able to fantasize about Danny still being alive.”

“But the condition of the corpse…”

“I don’t care,” she said.

Elliot frowned, not convinced of the wisdom of exhumation. “The body’s in an airtight casket, but it’ll be even more deteriorated now than it was a year ago when they recommended you not look at it.”

“I’ve got to see.”

“You’d be letting yourself in for a horrible—”

“That’s the idea,” she said quickly. “Shock. A powerful shock treatment that’ll finally blow away all my lingering doubts. If I see Danny’s… remains, I won’t be able to entertain any more doubts. The nightmares will stop.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps you’ll wind up with even worse dreams.”

She shook her head. “Nothing could be worse than the ones I’m having now.”

“Of course,” he said, “exhumation of the body won’t answer the main question. It won’t help you discover who’s been harassing you.”

“It might,” Tina said. “Whoever the creep is, whatever his motivations are, he’s not well-balanced. He’s one sort of sickie or another. Right? Who knows what might make a person like that reveal himself? If he finds out there’s going to be an exhumation, maybe he’ll react strongly, give himself away. Anything’s possible.”

“I suppose you could be right.”

“Anyway,” she said, “even if reopening the grave doesn’t help me find who’s responsible for these sick jokes — or whatever the hell they are — at least it’ll settle my mind about Danny. That’ll improve my psychological condition for sure, and I’ll be better able to deal with the creep, whoever he is. So it’ll work out for the best either way.” She returned from the window, sat on the couch again, beside Elliot. “I’ll need an attorney to handle this, won’t I?”

“The exhumation? Yeah.”

“Will you represent me?”

He didn’t hesitate. “Sure.”

“How difficult will it be?”

“Well, there’s no urgent legal reason to have the body exhumed. I mean, there isn’t any doubt about the cause of death, no court trial hinging on a new coroner’s report. If that were the situation, we’d have the grave opened very quickly. But even so, this shouldn’t be terribly difficult. I’ll play up the mother-suffering-distress angle, and the court ought to be sympathetic.”

“Have you ever handled anything like this before?”

“In fact, I have,” Elliot said. “Five years ago. This eight-year-old girl died unexpectedly of a congenital kidney disease. Both kidneys failed virtually overnight. One day she was a happy, normal kid. The next day she seemed to have a touch of flu, and the third day she was dead. Her mother was shattered, couldn’t bear to view the body, though the daughter hadn’t suffered substantial physical damage, the way Danny did. The mother wasn’t even able to attend the service. A couple weeks after the little girl was buried, the mother started feeling guilty about not paying her last respects.”

Remembering her own ordeal, Tina said, “I know. Oh, I know how it is.”

“The guilt eventually developed into serious emotional problems. Because the mother hadn’t seen the body in the funeral home, she just couldn’t bring herself to believe her daughter was really dead. Her inability to accept the truth was a lot worse than yours. She was hysterical most of the time, in a slow-motion breakdown. I arranged to have the grave reopened. In the course of preparing the exhumation request for the authorities, I discovered that my client’s reaction was typical. Apparently, when a child dies, one of the worst things a parent can do is refuse to look at the body while it’s lying in a casket. You need to spend time with the deceased, enough to accept that the body is never going to be animated again.”

“Was your client helped by exhumation?”

“Oh, yes. Enormously.”

“You see?”

“But don’t forget,” Elliot said, “her daughter’s body wasn’t mutilated.”

Tina nodded grimly.

“And we reopened the grave only two months after the funeral, not a whole year later. The body was still in pretty good condition. But with Danny… it won’t be that way.”

“I’m aware of that,” she said. “God knows, I’m not happy about this, but I’m convinced it’s something I’ve got to do.”

“Okay. I’ll take care of it.”

“How long will you need?” she asked.

“Will your husband contest it?”

She recalled the hatred in Michael’s face when she’d left him a few hours ago. “Yes. He probably will.”

Elliot carried their empty brandy glasses to the bar in the corner and switched on the light above the sink. “If your husband’s likely to cause trouble, then we’ll move fast and without fanfare. If we’re clever, he won’t know what we’re doing until the exhumation is a fait accompli. Tomorrow’s a holiday, so we can’t get anything done officially until Friday.”

“Probably not even then, what with the four-day weekend.”

Elliot found the bottle of liquid soap and the dishcloth that were stored under the sink. “Ordinarily I’d say we’d have to wait until Monday. But it happens I know a very reasonable judge. Harold Kennebeck. We served in Army Intelligence together. He was my senior officer. If I—”

“Army Intelligence? You were a spy?”

“Nothing as grand as that. No trench coats. No skulking about in dark alleys.”

“Karate, cyanide capsules, that sort of stuff?” she asked.

“Well, I’ve had a lot of martial arts training. I still work at that a couple of days a week because it’s a good way to keep in shape. Really, though, it wasn’t like what you see in the movies. No James Bond cars with machine guns hidden behind the headlights. It was mostly dull information gathering.”

“Somehow,” she said, “I get the feeling it was considerably more… interesting than you make it out to be.”

“Nope. Document analysis, tedious interpretation of satellite reconnaissance photographs, that sort of thing. Boring as hell most of the time. Anyway, Judge Kennebeck and I go back a long way. We respect each other, and I’m sure he’ll do something for me if he can. I’ll be seeing him tomorrow afternoon at a New Year’s Day party. I’ll discuss the situation with him. Maybe he’ll be willing to slip into the courthouse long enough on Friday to review my exhumation request and rule on it. He’d only need a few minutes. Then we could open the grave early Saturday.”

Tina went to the bar and sat on one of the three stools, across the counter from Elliot. “The sooner the better. Now that I’ve made up my mind to do it, I’m anxious to get it over with.”

“That’s understandable. And there’s another advantage in doing it this weekend. If we move fast, it isn’t likely Michael will find out what we’re up to. Even if he does somehow get a whiff of it, he’ll have to locate another judge who’ll be willing to stay or vacate the exhumation order.”

“You think he’ll be able to do that?”

“No. That’s my point. There won’t be many judges around over the holiday. Those on duty will be swamped with arraignments and bail hearings for drunken drivers and for people involved in drunken assaults. Most likely, Michael won’t be able to get hold of a judge until Monday morning, and by then it’ll be too late.”

“Sneaky.”

“That’s my middle name.” He finished washing the first brandy snifter, rinsed it in hot water, and put it in the drainage rack to dry.

“Elliot Sneaky Stryker,” she said.

He smiled. “At your service.”

“I’m glad you’re my attorney.”

“Well, let’s see if I can actually pull it off.”

“You can. You’re the kind of person who meets every problem head-on.”

“You have a pretty high opinion of me,” he said, repeating what she had said to him earlier.

She smiled. “Yes, I do.”

All the talk about death and fear and madness and pain seemed to have taken place further back in the past than a mere few seconds ago. They wanted to have a little fun during the evening that lay ahead, and now they began putting themselves in the mood for it.

As Elliot rinsed the second snifter and placed it in the rack, Tina said, “You do that very well.”

“But I don’t wash windows.”

“I like to see a man being domestic.”

“Then you should see me cook.”

“You cook?”

“Like a dream.”

“What’s your best dish?”

“Everything I make.”

“Obviously, you don’t make humble pie.”

“Every great chef must be an egomaniac when it comes to his culinary art. He must be totally secure in his estimation of his talents if he is to function well in the kitchen.”

“What if you cooked something for me, and I didn’t like it?”

“Then I’d eat your serving as well as mine.”

“And what would I eat?”

“Your heart out.”

After so many months of sorrow, how good it felt to be sharing an evening with an attractive and amusing man.

Elliot put away the dishwashing liquid and the wet dishcloth. As he dried his hands on the towel, he said, “Why don’t we forget about going out to dinner? Let me cook for you instead.”

“On such short notice?”

“I don’t need much time to plan a meal. I’m a whiz. Besides, you can help by doing the drudgery, like cleaning the vegetables and chopping the onions.”

“I should go home and freshen up,” she said.

“You’re already too fresh for me.”

“My car—”

“You can drive it. Follow me to my place.”

They turned out the lights and left the room, closing the door after them.

As they crossed the reception area on their way toward the hall, Tina glanced nervously at Angela’s computer. She was afraid it was going to click on again, all by itself.

But she and Elliot left the outer office, flicking off the lights as they went, and the computer remained dark and silent.

Chapter Fourteen

Elliot Stryker lived in a large, pleasant, contemporary house overlooking the golf course at the Las Vegas Country Club. The rooms were warm, inviting, decorated in earth tones, with J. Robert Scott furniture complemented by a few antique pieces, and richly textured Edward Fields carpets. He owned a fine collection of paintings by Eyvind Earle, Jason Williamson, Larry W. Dyke, Charlotte Armstrong, Carl J. Smith, and other artists who made their homes in the western United States and who usually took their subject matter from either the old or the new West.

As he showed her through the house, he was eager to hear her reaction to it, and she didn’t make him wait long.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Stunning. Who was your interior decorator?”

“You’re looking at him.”

“Really?”

“When I was poor, I looked forward to the day when I’d have a lovely home full of beautiful things, all arranged by the very best interior decorator. Then, when I had the money, I didn’t want some stranger furnishing it for me. I wanted to have all the fun myself. Nancy, my late wife, and I decorated our first home. The project became a vocation for her, and I spent nearly as much time on it as I did on my legal practice. The two of us haunted furniture stores from Vegas to Los Angeles to San Francisco, antique shops, galleries, everything from flea markets to the most expensive stores we could find. We had a damn good time. And when she died… I discovered I couldn’t learn to cope with the loss if I stayed in a place that was so crowded with memories of her. For five or six months I was an emotional wreck because every object in the house reminded me of Nancy. Finally I took a few mementos, a dozen pieces by which I’ll always remember her, and I moved out, sold the house, bought this one, and started decorating all over again.”

“I didn’t realize you’d lost your wife,” Tina said. “I mean, I thought it must have been a divorce or something.”

“She passed away three years ago.”

“What happened?”

“Cancer.”

“I’m so sorry, Elliot.”

“At least it was fast. Pancreatic cancer, exceedingly virulent. She was gone two months after they diagnosed it.”

“Were you married long?”

“Twelve years.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Twelve years leaves a big hole in the heart.”

He realized they had even more in common than he had thought. “That’s right. You had Danny for nearly twelve years.”

“With me, of course, it’s only been little more than a year since I’ve been alone. With you, it’s been three years. Maybe you can tell me…”

“What?”

“Does it ever stop?” she asked.

“The hurting?”

“Yes.”

“So far it hasn’t. Maybe it will after four years. Or five. Or ten. It doesn’t hurt as bad now as it once did. And the ache isn’t constant anymore. But still there are moments when…”

He showed her through the rest of the house, which she wanted to see. Her ability to create a stylish stage show was not a fluke; she had taste and a sharp eye that instantly knew the difference between prettiness and genuine beauty, between cleverness and art. He enjoyed discussing antiques and paintings with her, and an hour passed in what seemed to be only ten minutes.

The tour ended in the enormous kitchen, which boasted a copper ceiling, a Santa Fe tile floor, and restaurant-quality equipment. She checked the walk-in cooler, inspected the yard-square grill, the griddle, the two Wolf ranges, the microwave, and the array of labor-saving appliances. “You’ve spent a small fortune here. I guess your law practice isn’t just another Vegas divorce mill.”

Elliot grinned. “I’m one of the founding partners of Stryker, West, Dwyer, Coffey, and Nichols. We’re one of the largest law firms in town. I can’t take a whole lot of credit for that. We were lucky. We were in the right place at the right time. Owen West and I opened for business in a cheap storefront office twelve years ago, right at the start of the biggest boom this town has ever seen. We represented some people no one else would touch, entrepreneurs who had a lot of good ideas but not much money for start-up legal fees. Some of our clients made smart moves and were carried right to the top by the explosive growth of the gaming industry and the Vegas real-estate market, and we just sort of shot up there along with them, hanging on to their coattails.”

“Interesting,” Tina said.

“It is?”

“You are.”

“I am?”

“You’re so modest about having built a splendid law practice, yet you’re an egomaniac when it comes to your cooking.”

He laughed. “That’s because I’m a better cook than attorney. Listen, why don’t you mix us a couple of drinks while I change out of this suit. I’ll be back in five minutes, and then you’ll see how a true culinary genius operates.”

“If it doesn’t work out, we can always jump in the car and go to McDonald’s for a hamburger.”

“Philistine.”

“Their hamburgers are hard to beat.”

“I’ll make you eat crow.”

“How do you cook it?”

“Very funny.”

“Well, if you cook it very funny, I don’t know if I want to eat it.”

“If I did cook crow,” he said, “it would be delicious. You would eat every scrap of it, lick your fingers, and beg for more.”

Her smile was so lovely that he could have stood there all evening, just staring at the sweet curve of her lips.

Elliot was amused by the effect that Tina had on him. He could not remember ever having been half so clumsy in the kitchen as he was this evening. He dropped spoons. He knocked over cans and bottles of spices. He forgot to watch a pot, and it boiled over. He made a mistake blending the salad dressing and had to begin again from scratch. She flustered him, and he loved it.

“Elliot, are you sure you aren’t feeling those cognacs we had at my office?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Then the drink you’ve been sipping on here.”

“No. This is just my kitchen style.”

“Spilling things is your style?”

“It gives the kitchen a pleasant used look.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to McDonald’s?”

“Do they bother to give their kitchen a pleasant used look?”

“They not only have good hamburgers—”

“Their hamburgers have a pleasant used look.”

“—their French fries are terrific.”

“So I spill things,” he said. “A cook doesn’t have to be graceful to be a good cook.”

“Does he have to have a good memory?”

“Huh?”

“That mustard powder you’re just about to put into the salad dressing.”

“What about it?”

“You already put it in a minute ago.”

“I did? Thanks. I wouldn’t want to have to mix this damn stuff three times.”

She had a throaty laugh that was not unlike Nancy’s had been.

Although she was different from Nancy in many ways, being with her was like being with Nancy. She was easy to talk to — bright, funny, sensitive.

Perhaps it was too soon to tell for sure, but he was beginning to think that fate, in an uncharacteristic flush of generosity, had given him a second chance at happiness.

When he and Tina finished dessert, Elliot poured second cups of coffee. “Still want to go to McDonald’s for a hamburger?”

The mushroom salad, the fettuccine Alfredo, and the zabaglione had been excellent. “You really can cook.”

“Would I lie to you?”

“I guess I’ll have to eat that crow now.”

“I believe you just did.”

“And I didn’t even notice the feathers.”

While Tina and Elliot had been joking in the kitchen, even before dinner had been completely prepared, she had begun to think they might go to bed together. By the time they finished eating dinner, she knew they would. Elliot wasn’t pushing her. For that matter, she wasn’t pushing him, either. They were both being driven by natural forces. Like the rush of water downstream. Like the relentless building of a storm wind and then the lightning. They both realized that they were in need of each other, physically and mentally and emotionally, and that whatever happened between them would be good.

It was fast but right, inevitable.

At the start of the evening, the undercurrent of sexual tension made her nervous. She hadn’t been to bed with any man but Michael in the past fourteen years, since she was nineteen. She hadn’t been to bed with anyone at all for almost two years. Suddenly it seemed to her that she had done a mad, stupid thing when she’d hidden away like a nun for two years. Of course, during the first of those two years, she’d still been married to Michael and had felt compelled to remain faithful to him, even though a separation and then a divorce had been in the works, and even though he had not felt constrained by any similar moral sense. Later, with the stage show to produce and with poor Danny’s death weighing heavily on her, she hadn’t been in the mood for romance. Now she felt like an inexperienced girl. She wondered if she would know what to do. She was afraid that she would be inept, clumsy, ridiculous, foolish in bed. She told herself that sex was just like riding a bicycle, impossible to unlearn, but the frivolousness of that analogy didn’t increase her self-confidence.

Gradually, however, as she and Elliot went through the standard rites of courtship, the indirect sexual thrusts and parries of a budding relationship, albeit at an accelerated pace, the familiarity of the games reassured her. Amazing that it should be so familiar. Maybe it really was a bit like riding a bicycle.

After dinner they adjourned to the den, where Elliot built a fire in the black-granite fireplace. Although winter days in the desert were often as warm as springtime elsewhere, winter nights were always cool, sometimes downright bitter. With a chilly night wind moaning at the windows and howling incessantly under the eaves, the blazing fire was welcome.

Tina kicked off her shoes.

They sat side by side on the sofa in front of the fireplace, watching the flames and the occasional bursts of orange sparks, listening to music, and talking, talking, talking. Tina felt as if they had talked without pause all evening, speaking with quiet urgency, as if each had a vast quantity of earthshakingly important information that he must pass on to the other before they parted. The more they talked, the more they found in common. As an hour passed in front of the fire, and then another hour, Tina discovered that she liked Elliot Stryker more with each new thing she learned about him.

She never was sure who initiated the first kiss. He may have leaned toward her, or perhaps she tilted toward him. But before she realized what was happening, their lips met softly, briefly. Then again. And a third time. And then he began planting small kisses on her forehead, on her eyes, on her cheeks, her nose, the corners of her mouth, her chin. He kissed her ears, her eyes again, and left a chain of kisses along her neck, and when at last he returned to her mouth, he kissed her more deeply than before, and she responded at once, opening her mouth to him.

His hands moved over her, testing the firmness and resilience of her, and she touched him too, gently squeezing his shoulders, his arms, the hard muscles of his back. Nothing had ever felt better to her than he felt at that moment.

As if drifting in a dream, they left the den and went into the bedroom. He switched on a small lamp that stood upon the dresser, and he turned down the sheets.

During the minute that he was away from her, she was afraid the spell was broken. But when he returned, she kissed him tentatively, found that nothing had changed, and pressed against him once more.

She felt as if the two of them had been here, like this, locked in an embrace, many times before.

“We hardly know each other,” she said.

“Is that the way you feel?”

“No.”

“Me, neither.”

“I know you so well.”

“For ages.”

“Yet it’s only been two days.”

“Too fast?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

“Not too fast for me.”

“Not too fast at all,” she agreed.

“Sure?”

“Positive.”

“You’re lovely.”

“Love me.”

He was not a particularly large man, but he picked her up in his arms as if she were a child.

She clung to him. She saw a longing and a need in his dark eyes, a powerful wanting that was only partly sex, and she knew the same need to be loved and valued must be in her eyes for him to see.

He carried her to the bed, put her down, and urged her to lie back. Without haste, with a breathless anticipation that lit up his face, he undressed her.

He quickly stripped off his own clothes and joined her on the bed, took her in his arms.

He explored her body slowly, deliberately, first with his eyes, then with his loving hands, then with his lips and tongue.

Tina realized that she had been wrong to think that celibacy should be a part of her period of mourning. Just the opposite was true. Good, healthy lovemaking with a man who cared for her would have helped her recover much faster than she had done, for sex was the antithesis of death, a joyous celebration of life, a denial of the tomb’s existence.

The amber light molded to his muscles.

He lowered his face to hers. They kissed.

She slid a hand between them, squeezed and stroked him.

She felt wanton, shameless, insatiable.

As he entered her, she let her hands travel over his body, along his lean flanks.

“You’re so sweet,” he said.

He began the age-old rhythm of love. For a long, long time, they forgot that death existed, and they explored the delicious, silken surfaces of love, and it seemed to them, in those shining hours, that they would both live forever.