Now You See Her (6 page)

“No, you weren't.” He was smiling again, very
faintly Glancing up, he saw that they were almost at her apartment building. “The trip didn't take very long,” he noted, and didn't sound pleased.

She didn't tell him why all the traffic lights had turned green or traffic mysteriously detoured out of their way

“Will you have dinner with me tonight?” He turned back to her, and somehow he was closer than he had been before, his shoulder touching hers, his left leg against her right one. She felt his body heat like a lodestone all down her right side, triggering an insane impulse to get closer and see just how warm he could get her. Plenty warm, she bet. On fire. Melting.

“Good God, no!”

He laughed. “Please, don't spare my feelings.”

Sweeney blushed like a teenager. One day, maybe when she was ninety years old, she might learn the art of the polite lie. She had done well enough with the McMillans, but obviously that was her quota for about a year.

“I didn't mean . . . It's just that you'd be a big complication, demanding time and sex and things like that, and I have all I can handle right now.” Great. He was laughing again, and when she realized what she had just said, she wanted to bury her face in her hands. Instead she doggedly plowed on. “And then there's Candra. She's been good to me, promoting me when a lot of other gallery owners wouldn't. Even though you've been separated for almost a year . . . Anyway, I don't think it would be a good idea.”

He didn't say anything for a long time, just watched her with a completely unreadable expression on his face. “I'll ask again,” he finally said.

She wasn't sure how those three words could sound almost like a threat, but they did. Richard Worth wasn't a man who was used to being turned down “You do that,” she said, as the Mercedes slid to a stop in front of her apartment building. “And I'll turn you down again.” She removed his coat and gave it back to him, and reached for the door handle.

“Don't be ridiculous,” he said, staying her hand. “There's no point in getting wet. I have an umbrella, and I'll walk you to the door.”

“I can manage, thanks.”

“What about your portfolio?”

There was that, damn it. The rain was really coming down. She scowled at him. “You don't have to look so satisfied,” she growled, knowing he had her.

His mouth quirked as he reached for the umbrella. “Honey, you don't have any idea how I look when I'm satisfied.”

No, but she could imagine, and her mental image knotted her stomach. He bent his head and kissed her sulky mouth, the contact light and warm and devastating. “Think about it,” he whispered, then opened the door and extended the umbrella out, opening it so it provided a circle of protection. He climbed out and held it for her as she slid from the car.

“Think about it,” she mimicked savagely, making him laugh. “Damn you.” She was so annoyed she
didn't care that sliding across the seat made her skirt ride high on her thighs. Let him look; that was all he was going to do.

Together they dashed across the sidewalk to the sheltered doorway. He took care that her portfolio didn't get splashed, and she appreciated his concern, even though she wanted to give him a good swift kick. He left her there and strode quickly back to the waiting car. She didn't wait until he left, but went inside immediately. He didn't need any ego stroking, and she definitely needed to get back to her safe, isolated world, away from temptation.

She needed order, not disorder; peace, not excitement. Most of all, she needed to paint. With a brush in her hand, she could shut out the world.

C
HAPTER
    T
HREE

T
hink about it. Well, she had. Despite her best efforts, and to the point where she was about to have a screaming fit, she had. With hours stretching before her in which she could paint, instead she continually found herself standing in front of the canvas with an idle brush in her hand while she stared off into space like some giddy adolescent. The problem, of course, wasn't so much Richard's attraction to her as her attraction to him. What disturbed her most was her inability to stop thinking about him. Other men had been distinguished by their total lack of distinction; she could put them out of her mind, if indeed they had ever entered it, and go on with her life as usual. None of them had ever tempted her. She couldn't say that about Richard.

She felt silly, obsessing about a man. Nothing was
ever going to come of her attraction, she would see to that, so it was stupid to waste time mooning over him. Not that any other man would have had a better chance, but the fact that this was
Richard
kept stunning her over and over again, hitting her right between the eyes. Of all the men in the world she might have expected to appeal to her hitherto nonexistent libido, Richard wasn't even on the list. Richard was married, he was married to a business associate of hers, and now the two were involved in an acrimonious divorce, which was an even better reason to stay the hell away from him.

Okay. Her mind got the message. Now, if the word would just seep farther down, she might be able to get some work done.

The rain had stopped but the day remained cloudy, and though she had installed bright lights in her studio, it wasn't the same as sunlight. Normally that wouldn't have bothered her, but today it did. She wanted bright sunlight. She had been working from a photo she'd taken of the St. Lawrence, which remained one of her favorite subjects, but without sunlight she couldn't get the colors right. Disgusted, she thrust the brush into the can of turpentine and swished it around. Who was she kidding? She couldn't get the colors right anyway. She hadn't been able to get the colors right for a year.

She wished she could put her finger on any one event that had obviously triggered the change, but she couldn't. Nothing stood out in her mind. Why would she have noticed Clayton's lone traffic light turning green? It did on a regular basis. She had
noticed that her plants looked unusually happy, but at first had simply written that off as acclimation or her having stumbled across some hardy plants that could withstand her haphazard care. Maybe that was still all it was. Before, though, she had had to replace them on a fairly regular basis, but now, no matter what she did, they were thriving. Not even the move to the city had disturbed them. The Christmas cactus was blooming merrily as it already had several times this year, her bromeliads were fat and succulent, her ferns lush, and the finicky ficus kept its leaves no matter how often she moved it around the apartment.

She didn't want to be different. She had seen her parents use their talent as an excuse for all sorts of god-awful, selfish, self-aggrandizing behavior, and seen the havoc they had wrought in other people's lives. She didn't want to be like that. She wanted to be a perfectly normal person who happened to have a talent for painting; that was different enough, but she could handle that. But an artist who screwed up electronic timers, affected nature, and saw ghosts—whoa, that was way out there. Not even her mother had gone that far, though she had gone through a period when she sought inspiration in the metaphysical. As Sweeney remembered it, that had consisted mostly of toking on a joint. Excuses were where you found them.

She sighed as she cleaned her brushes. The St. Lawrence was out of the question today, not that she had been making much progress anyway. The river didn't fascinate her the way it once had, didn't hold the lure of even the most ordinary face.

The hot dog vendor's face popped into her mind, complete with sweet smile. Sweeney cocked her head, considering the image. He looked so young in her mind, despite the gray hair. How had he looked when he was twenty? Or ten? She thought of him as a six-year-old with here-and-there teeth, beaming at the world.

Absently whistling through her teeth, Sweeney reached for her sketch pad. It would be interesting to do him at different ages, a collage of faces on the same canvas and all of them his.

Some artists only did rough blocking to get the right proportions, but Sweeney was a good sketch artist, too. She usually spent more time than she should on the preliminary sketches because she couldn't resist adding in shadings and details. To her delight, the vendor's sweet expression didn't elude her pencil this time. Everything fell into place, in a way it hadn't done in a long time.

*   *   *

The vendor's name was Elijah Stokes. Today he closed his stand at the usual time, counted the day's take, and made out a deposit slip, then walked to the bank and stood in line for maybe fifteen minutes. He could have dropped the deposit in the overnight slot, but he liked to deal with humans, not holes. He liked to walk away with the stamped deposit receipt in his pocket, and the first thing he did when he got home was put the receipt in a file. He was real careful with his paperwork, partly because his mama had been that way, but mostly because, as he grew older, he saw that being careful
with the details always saved him some trouble on down the line.

Elijah had been married to the same woman for forty-four years, until her death five years before. They had raised two fine boys, put them through college, and had the pleasure of seeing them become fine men, get good jobs, marry, and begin raising their own families as they had been raised. There was a lot of satisfaction in knowing you had done something right, and Elijah knew he had done right by his boys.

He could have closed his stand a long time ago; he had saved his money, made some small but careful investments, and seen them prosper. He didn't need the money; with Social Security and his dividends, he could live just as he was living now, because most of what he made still went into savings. But every time he thought about retiring, he'd think about his boys, and the five beautiful grandchildren he had, and how every penny he saved now would help pay for their education later. It wouldn't hurt him to work a couple of more years; seventy seemed like a good age to retire.

The rain began again as he walked home, driving people off the sidewalks. He just pulled his cap down more snugly on his head and trudged on. A little rain never hurt nobody. The clouds had brought on an early twilight, making the streetlights wink on. Summer was leaving in a hurry; he could smell the crispness of fall in the rain, as if it had come straight down from Canada. Spring and fall were his favorite seasons, because the weather was better, not
too hot and not too cold. He hated winter; the cold made his bones ache. Sometimes he thought about going south to retire, but he knew he wouldn't leave his boys and those grandkids.

He was still three blocks from home when the neighborhood began to deteriorate. Some rough characters hung around the streets these days. His kids wanted him to move, but he had lived there since the oldest was only a year old, and it was hard to leave all those memories. His wife had cooked thousands of mouth-watering meals in that old kitchen, and he had listened to his kids running across those worn floors. His wife had fixed the place up nice over the years, though he hadn't done anything to it since she died and everything was beginning to look shabby. He just hadn't wanted to make any changes. Somehow he could remember her better if he left things just the way she'd wanted.

Normally he paid more attention when he was walking, but this time, this one time, he let his guard down. A punk slid out of an alley to block his way, feral eyes gleaming. Elijah barely had time to notice the pimply complexion and bad teeth before the left side of his head exploded with pain.

The force of the blow knocked Elijah to the ground. The punk leaned down and grabbed the old man, dragged him back into the shadows. Maybe four seconds had lapsed since he had stepped out of the alley. He swung the club two more times, just because it felt good, even though the old man hadn't struggled at all. Then he leaned down and grabbed the wallet from the old guy's pocket and fumbled
the money out, shoving it into his own pocket without bothering to count it. There weren't any credit cards. Shit. In disgust he tossed the wallet aside and pelted out of the alley, head down. The whole operation, refined by practice, took about twenty seconds.

Elijah Stokes, a careful man, never carried much cash on him. The punk's take was twenty-seven dollars. Elijah lay in the twilight shadows of the alley and felt the light rain on his face, but the sensation was oddly distant. In a brief flash of clarity he knew he was dying, and he wanted to think about his kids, but his brain felt funny and their faces just wouldn't form. His wife, though ... ah, there she was, smiling her angel's smile, and that was good enough for Elijah.

*   *   *

“This is
Jeopardy!
” the announcer crowed, dragging out each word. Sweeney sat down in her ultra-comfortable, overstuffed chair and curled up with a big bowl of popcorn in her lap. The three contestants were identified, and as usual she watched their faces, not even hearing their names. The one in the middle, she thought. He would win. He looked quick, his eyes lively with intelligence. She liked to play a game with herself, trying to guess beforehand which contestant would win. Lately it hadn't been much of a challenge.

The streak of luck was getting on her nerves. Traffic signals were one thing, but if the weird stuff started affecting
Jeopardy!,
she was going to get testy. She loved the show.

Alex Trebek came out and began the game by reading the categories.
“Mystery Writers.”

“Dick Francis,” said Sweeney, popping a salty kernel in her mouth.

“Potent Potables.”

“Absinthe,” she responded.

“British Royalty.”

“Charles the Second. This is too easy.”

“
Science.
”

“Cold fusion—you wish.”

“The States.”

“Delaware. Try not to be so obvious.”