High Fall (37 page)

Now she did squeeze his hand.

In a moment he went on. “Lark was so good. She wasn’t a natural, but she had talent and drive like I haven’t seen anywhere, even in Hollywood. She inspired me. It had been so long since I’d even been able to push off into the Move, I just wanted to
do
it again. It was like discovering a photo of a dead lover: it’s not her, but you stare at it so hard, you get caught in the ‘pretend,’ and for an instant it is her, you know? I knew I would never do the Move again like I did on the screen when I practiced every day and I had the second unit director telling me he could only afford one take. But just to feel the air twisting around me as I did the flip and the punchback …” He shrugged. “I thought it would be enough. Like looking at the photo until the spark of life leaves, and it’s just a piece of paper.

“But it wasn’t. Lark went crazy over the Move. She begged me to teach her. Against all logic I did, because—at least this is what I thought at the time—because I really wanted the excuse to practice again and to assure myself I could still do it.” He shrugged.

“And could you? Could you still master it?”

“Not quite. For a while I told myself that it had been seven years since I tried it; I was out of shape; I just needed more practice. Now I had the gym to practice in; I could come as early as I wanted, stay as late, even get a kid with a video camera to record it so I could see my faults. I could
have
it again. But the truth was, I could have it and
not
have it.”

“What do you mean?”

“To have it, I had to give it to Lark.” He waited till Kiernan nodded in acknowledgment. “I didn’t deal with that for a while—you know they always tell us it’s getting to the top that’s hard.” He shook his head. “Climbing’s the easy part. Sliding down the other side, that’s the hard part. In a couple of months, Lark was doing the Move better than I was. It was really her Move then. That’s when I decided Greg Gaige really was dead. That was my great realization. And I knew I had courted danger too long there and I had to move on before someone recognized me.”

“And yet you took this job on the set here. Talk about taking chances!” Thinking back to the Baltimore gym, Kiernan smiled. “I remember you going out of your way for a girl who needed it. Did you take this chance now because Lark wanted you to be here to see her Move?”

He shrugged. “Part for Lark, part for me. I didn’t just
take
this catering job, I sought it out. It was a stupid idea. I told myself I just wanted to stand in the shadows and see the Move performed again before the cameras with everyone watching and the cast and crew bursting into applause when she climbed out of the catcher. Or maybe I just couldn’t resist being near
my
Move again. Maybe I haven’t really given it up.” He closed his fingers tighter around hers. “I don’t know anymore. I just don’t know.”

She sat unwilling to move. The sky had lightened, but the damp cold had seeped beneath her skin and penetrated her spine. A bolt of sunlight cut the clouds, warmed her face, and vanished. His hand lay on top of hers, but it no longer felt real. “So Greg, what are you going to do now?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know that, either. Things have changed again so completely. I’ve gotten used to being Luke Correra. Now I’ll have to be Greg Gaige again and tie up ends I left hanging,
people
I left hanging.” He stared out over the water. He hadn’t released her hand, and now he tapped his forefinger on it. “But I’ll be able to get a passport. That’s really great. I can go wherever I want now. Hokkaido, New Milford Sound, Lhasa, Rangoon.” He turned to her, his beard twitching as he smiled. “Want to come?”

Greg Gaige really was dead, she thought, and yet he wasn’t. She leaned into the crook of his shoulder. Below, the morning light had faded the water to a silky blue-green, the waves swelled, arched, crashed, spreading into a lacy froth and pulled back teasingly. The welcome mat to the world beyond.

There would be more ends to be tied than he suspected, more complications. Nothing was certain. Maybe Rangoon would turn out to be Seattle or Del Mar. After this flash of closeness burned out there might be nothing but embers. Or maybe—But she’d never been deterred by a challenge. Long odds only whetted her appetite and made the prize all the more succulent. Dreams of childhood coming true, what were the odds on that? No matter how long the odds, she knew she wouldn’t let go of Greg Gaige.

“You do have a passport?” he said.

She linked her arm through his and felt the warmth of his body permeate hers. “Yes.”

Susan Dunlap (b. 1943) is the author of more than twenty mystery novels and a founding member of Sisters in Crime, an organization that promotes women in the field of crime writing.

Born in New York City, Dunlap entered Bucknell University as a math major, but quickly switched to English. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of North Carolina, she taught junior high before becoming a social worker. Her jobs took her all over the country, from Baltimore to New York and finally to Northern California, where many of her novels take place.

One night, while reading an Agatha Christie novel, Dunlap told her husband that she thought she could write mysteries. When he asked her to prove it, she accepted the challenge. Dunlap wrote in her spare time, completing six manuscripts before selling her first book,
Karma
(1981), which began a ten-book series about brash Berkeley cop Jill Smith.

After selling her second novel, Dunlap quit her job to write fulltime. While penning the Jill Smith mysteries, she also wrote three novels about utility-meter-reading amateur sleuth Vejay Haskell. In 1989, she published
Pious Deception
, the first in a series starring former medical examiner Kiernan O’Shaughnessy. To research the O’Shaughnessy and Smith series, Dunlap rode along with police officers, attended autopsies, and spent ten weeks studying the daily operations of the Berkeley Police Department.

Dunlap concluded the Smith series with
Cop Out
(1997). In 2006 she published
A Single Eye
, her first mystery featuring Darcy Lott, a Zen Buddhist stuntwoman. Her most recent novel is
No Footprints
(2012), the fifth in the Darcy Lott series.

In addition to writing, Dunlap has taught yoga and worked for a private investigator on death penalty defense cases and as a paralegal. In 1986, she helped found Sisters in Crime, an organization that supports women in the field of mystery writing. She lives and writes near San Francisco.