Stone Cold (18 page)

‘Police officer,’ Ally said clairvoyantly.

‘How the hell did you know that?’

‘I didn’t,’ Ally beamed in delight. ‘But there are no army bases around here, only Air National Guard so I figure he must be retired, you’re a trauma specialist so he’s either suffering from PTSD from his war experiences or he’s had a big trauma while serving on the police force, because that’s where a lot of ex–military end up.’ Ally took a sip of her drink. ‘Close?’

‘What, you’re Sherlock now?’

‘To your Watson,’ Ally agreed. ‘Go on.’

‘There’s nothing to say,’ Kathryn said. ‘He’s suffering, his marriage is breaking down, he’s being watched by his superiors because they’re concerned about his ability to do his job. I’m there to help him.’

‘And are you helping him?’

‘Not so much,’ Kathryn sighed. ‘Not yet, anyway.’

‘That’s the problem with people like you and your policeman friend,’ Ally shrugged.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You’re do–gooders,’ Ally said without a hint of malice. ‘You know, police, soldiers, psychologists or whatever. You’re all brilliant at helping everybody else and useless at sorting yourselves out. Look at you. You’re going through a major crisis of your own and yet you’re sitting here worrying about some cop.’

‘I can’t help who I am,’ Kathryn said in defence. ‘Nor can Scott.’

‘Scott, is it?’ Ally asked as Kathryn cursed. ‘On first name terms already, are we? Handsome, is he?’

‘Cut it out,’ Kathryn said. ‘He’s married.’

‘Unhappily, apparently,’ Ally added. ‘And you didn’t answer my question.’

‘Yes, he’s handsome. But so is Stephen and look where that’s ended up.’

Ally briefly inclined her head and then drained her glass.

‘You think this Scott will get over whatever it is he needs to get over?’ Ally asked. ‘You think that you will too?’

Kathryn sighed and stared at her plate. ‘I honestly don’t know. Griffin’s a soldier, somebody used to dealing with stressful situations. I don’t know that I can.’

Ally looked at Kathryn for a moment longer and then reached out and squeezed her arm.

‘Sometimes, you’ve just got to know when to quit,’ she said. ‘We all do. There’s a whole world out there waiting for us, if we’ve got the guts to get out there and find it. Stephen’s already a lost cause, Kathy.’

‘I won’t give up until I’m sure,’ Kathryn said.

Ally released her arm and glanced up out of the restaurant windows. Kathryn turned and saw an airliner climbing out from the airport on the other side of the city, its lights flashing until it was consumed by scattered clouds rolling in from the west on chinook winds.

‘You see that?’ Ally asked. ‘It’s like a highway, heading off into the unknown. That airplane is too. Somewhere else. Anywhere else. You’ve got to be willing to take your chances and try again, while you’re still young enough to do it.’

‘Like you did?’ Kathryn asked.

Ally smiled. ‘Exactly like I did. I left an unhappy life in England to come here and start over. I’ve never looked back. Almost everybody dreams of starting over at some point in their lives, with a clean slate, somewhere completely new. But few people have the strength to go and actually do it.’

Kathryn sighed.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I want
this
life to work.’

‘Fine,’ Ally replied. ‘There’s a place called Hunter’s Lodge, out west of the city on the plains toward Freezeout Lake. It’s a tourist retreat, horse riding, hiking, all that crap. It’s close by, cheap and easy and tickets are easy to come by, especially at this time of year. But make it work fast between the two of you or get out, because this can’t go on much longer, you understand? Make a decision soon about just how much you want Stephen before he figures out what you’re up to.’

Kathryn sighed and made her decision.

‘I’ll check out their house and their life, and what I see will determine what I do next.’

***

24

It took Kathryn half an hour to drive through the city, most of it spent trying to control the writhing sense of naughtiness squirming in her belly.

Kathryn was by any woman’s standards appallingly sane. As far as she could remember she had never broken a law, never struck another person and had hardly ever had the need to tell anything more than the whitest of lies. She recognised that this was something that made her interminably boring to many. Most of her friends had lost their virginity before their sixteenth birthday and paraded the fact with some pride, regardless of their supposed religions or their parents’ insistence otherwise. Most were drinkers, many were smokers and quite a few had been familiar faces in the local precinct until they settled down with husbands and families.

Most shockingly of all, about a third had indulged or were positively up to their necks in extra–marital affairs, at least one of them with another woman. Kathryn had long puzzled over this, as so many of the women she knew seemed otherwise remarkably sane, rational and family–loving individuals whom she might have considered far above such indiscretions. More to the point, some of their husbands were genuinely lovely men whom Kathryn would have been proud to marry. Of course, many others were also slovenly, chauvinistic bastards who spent more time in their local bars than they did raising families, but still…

Kathryn figured that sometimes people were just not meant to be together, despite being in possession of all the ingredients that supposedly made up the perfect couple. Convention, tradition, family pressure and faith often took precedence over personal happiness, and the entirely human fear of embarrassment and social rejection sustained the suffering over months, years and even decades. Few were strong enough or brave enough to break out and start over, even when their supposed beloved husbands frequently enjoyed battering them after a night on the booze.

Ally’s advice to give Stephen a wide berth echoed through her mind as she negotiated the dense city traffic, and once again she saw the airliners lifting off and vanishing into the distant darkness. Somewhere else. Anywhere else. Better places, filled with happier people doing happier things with happier spouses and beautiful children in lovely homes with bright, shiny futures. Kathryn knew that the imagery she was creating was in truth filled with the same daily worries about money, jobs, bills and the kid’s futures as any other, but what was the future but a fantasy? What was aspiration without a dream to follow? Life
could
be that good, surely? It just boiled down to how badly somebody wanted it and what they were willing to do to achieve it.

Kathryn gripped the steering wheel a little tighter as she drove toward the suburban district on the opposite side of the city to the airport. The streets and homes became cleaner and quieter than the bustling metropolis, leafy cul–de–sacs and gated mansions with glowing lanterns outside.

She had prepared herself to find something a little more luxurious than the cramped, damp apartment she shared with Stephen, but as she drove she found herself gaping at the sheer opulence before her. Some of the homes probably had bathrooms bigger than her entire apartment, gardens the size of football pitches, with pools and games rooms and televisions the size of tennis courts sunk into gargantuan walls.

The GPS beeped and a digital voice told her she had arrived. She drove past the house and turned into a side road, then pulled the Lincoln into the sidewalk and switched off the lights and clattering engine. Kathryn got out of her car and locked it, not for the first time wondering why she bothered locking a car that was barely functional, before strolling back along the road until she reached the house.

The house was not gated like some of the others, but perfectly manicured lawns stretched up to a broad, grand Colonial style home. Two giant trees flanked the house like ancient guardians. Stone lions sat either side of an ornate flight of steps that led up to a broad, dark oak front door. The place looked like something out of Beverly Hills.

Kathryn walked up the garden path. She scanned the windows of the house but everything was dark inside. She reached into her handbag and retrieved the key she had copied from Stephen’s collection, and then with her heart beating hard and fast in her chest she pushed the key into the lock and turned it. The lock clicked and the door swung smoothly open to reveal a vast and dark interior of unknowns.

A dim flashing light blinked on and off as she stepped onto the expensively tiled foyer, and she turned to see a touchpad set into the wall. The alarm system. Kathryn stepped across to it and touched a series of keys, memorised from a file in Stephen’s laptop that she had surreptitiously accessed some nights before as he showered. The alarm beeped softly once and the flashing light vanished. She smiled to herself, turned and gently pushed the front door closed again.

A wide, sweeping staircase ascended opposite the front door to the upper rooms, while to her left and right were doorways to adjoining rooms. Either side of the staircase were passages leading toward the rear of the house. The foyer itself was larger than her and Stephen’s apartment and much higher. An ornate chandelier style light, with faux candles, dominated the ceiling above her. Kathryn reached out for a bank of switches on the wall near the alarm system, and the chandelier glowed into life and illuminated the grandly decorated foyer.

Dark wood panels, tastefully subtle magnolia painted walls, modern art canvasses adorning the corridors. A bouquet of flowers on a glass table, a couple of expensive looking
American Contemporary Art
magazines tossed casually alongside the vase in the way that nobody ever does unless they actually want people to see them.

Kathryn followed the left hand passage, her sneakers making no sound on the polished tiles as she moved past the staircase. To her left, an open door led into a spacious office where a widescreen monitor stood on a mahogany desk with a wireless keyboard. No wires or cables. A roller–ball mouse was set into the surface of the desk alongside a glossy black phone. Everything polished and perfectly aligned, more like a show home than a working office.

On the wall, a picture of Stephen and his wife on a paradise beach somewhere, him in shorts and shirt, her in a long, flowing dress that looked as though it were some kind of native attire, like a sarong, all flowing waterfall shades of blue and green that matched her eyes. Kathryn studied the image of the woman for some time before moving on.

Kathryn moved into the kitchen at the rear. Granite worktops, black–tiled floors and ice–white cabinets and décor. Everything was flawlessly polished, dusted and tidied away. Kathryn figured the place was disinfected every day and probably fumigated by the Centre for Disease Control once a week. Even the chiller was bigger than Kathryn’s shower.

She crossed the kitchen and followed the other corridor back toward the foyer, passing on her left a doorway that led into a beautiful games room. A billiard table in the centre near an ornate chess–board with carved ivory figurines of goblins, kings, dragons and princesses.

Kathryn walked back into the foyer, an unsettling nausea poisoning her innards as she turned left and walked into a grand dining room. A long, immaculately polished table with ten seats: four down each side and two at each end. Lovely soft carpets, indirect lighting casting soft patches of light across the walls, a mirror–polished serving set arrayed in the centre of the table.

Kathryn stared at the table for a moment and then moved back across the foyer and into the room on the opposite side of the house.

In Kathryn’s apartment, Stephen had once used a cushion to demonstrate how it was possible, just, to swing a cat without touching the walls. In Stephen’s other house, she would have been able to demonstrate how it was possible, just, to throw a cat the length of the room.

A giant, cream leather sofa and two matching armchairs were still dwarfed by the wide open lounge that led onto broad French windows at the far end of the room. A faux mantelpiece contained a fireplace into which was set a glossy–black screen that she guessed was probably some kind of electrical fireplace.

Above it, set into the wall, was what looked like a three–thousand inch plasma screen. Miles more soft carpet, a smoked–glass coffee table large enough to lay down on, scattered with more sickeningly modern art catalogues and magazines and a telephone wired to what looked like a modem or similar. A canvass was mounted on one wall that looked like thirty deranged chimpanzees had hurled coloured paints at it for half an hour, yet was probably worth more than Kathryn earned in a year.

Kathryn felt a pinch of grief sting the corners of her eyes as she turned away and walked back to the staircase. She switched off the lights, just in case somebody showed up, and stared up at the staircase for several long minutes before she finally walked up the steps one at a time and turned onto the landing.

She could see in the half–light that there were several bedrooms, most with the doors shut, but two large doors opened out onto what could only be the main bedroom. She walked across to it and stood in the doorway.

Like everything else in the damned place it was overbearingly large. The bed was big enough for Venus Williams to practice serving on. An on–suite that Kathryn could not be bothered to look at was visible through an open doorway and looked to be larger than her bathroom anyway. Walk–in wardrobes featured on both sides of the bed.

Kathryn walked across to one of them, the side that she knew belonged to Stephen’s wife by the romance novel and small box of tissues on her bedside table. Kathryn slid the doors open and like the Tardis it opened out and a light came on automatically to illuminate its cavernous interior.

Clothes, clothes and more clothes above endless orderly ranks of shoes. Enough fabric to dress the population of Spain, enough footwear to make a queen blush. Kathryn edged into the wardrobe, ran one hand along the impossible soft and clean dresses and business suits hanging in their hundreds. As she surveyed them, a flash of blue caught her eye. She moved toward it and parted the dresses to reveal waterfall colours flowing down a dress.