Sweetheart (25 page)

He had been asleep awhile. He could tell because his body ached and he felt cold and jittery. He needed more pills. He put his socked feet on the carpet. She had taken his shoes off and he saw them sitting side by side next to the bed and he reached down to put them on. His head pounded and he had to pause for a moment before he could move. Then he put his feet into his shoes and tied them and sat up. He glanced for the pill bottles from the car but they weren’t on the dresser or the bedside table. The closet door was cedar plank. He opened it and found it full of clothes. He wondered who they belonged to and then realized that they were all new. She had bought them for him. She was either planning on his being around awhile, or she wanted him to think she was. Corduroys. Tan pants. Blue button-down shirts, white button-down shirts, sweaters, and a few professorial sport coats. It looked just like his closet at home. Predictability was always one of his flaws.

He turned and walked to the window and opened the shade. It was dusk or early morning. He saw only trees. Ponderosa pines. They didn’t grow west of the mountains. She’d taken him east. Into the high desert. Maybe they were still in Oregon. Maybe not.

There was music. Classical. It was faint but definitely coming from somewhere in the house. He glanced back at the window. He could open it. Climb out. Walk away. They could be miles from anywhere. But he could still do it. He could still abandon his plan, still leave her. Try to get home.

He considered it for another moment, before he turned back toward the light streaming from the open door and walked into the hallway. There were several doors. The hallway was also cedar plank. The hallway floor was gray carpet, the kind of speckled industrial stuff you’d put in a rental or vacation house. The music was coming from down the hall, where the hallway opened into a living space.

He walked toward it.

There was a bank of windows in the living room that looked out onto a deck and more trees. The light had darkened another notch. It was evening, not morning. A staircase with a wrought-iron banister led up to a loft that overlooked the living room. There was a leather sectional and a fireplace with a huge stone mantel. A fire crackled and growled in the fireplace. Gretchen was sitting in a leather chair next to it, a laptop on her lap. Her hair was loose and she wasn’t wearing makeup and the glow of the fire made her flawless skin look angelic.

She glanced up at him and smiled. “Your pills are in the kitchen,” she said. She looked to the left, and he followed her gaze to where the floor lifted a step and he could see a kitchen that opened out onto the main room. The pill bottles were lined up on the counter by the sink. He walked over and opened a few cupboards before he found a glass. He filled it with water from the sink and took four Vicodin. Then reconsidered and took one more.

“Do you want a drink?” he heard her ask.

He turned around and saw that she was standing up now, next to a small rattan bar. She was wearing a gray cashmere sweater and fitted gray slacks and was in her stocking feet. She held up a bottle of something.

This wasn’t real. This wasn’t happening. “Sure,” he said.

“Scotch okay?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. He didn’t move, his hands behind him, holding on to the edge of the counter.

He watched her as she poured the drink, scooping ice from an ice bucket then pouring the alcohol over it, no water. Her glossy blond hair settled on her shoulder blades, swinging slightly as she moved.

She turned back and held the glass out toward him, arm extended.

He stood there another moment, and then pushed himself off the counter and walked toward her and took the glass. As he took the glass, their fingers met. The contact made his head swim, his vision darken for a moment, but he was careful not to flinch, not to show it on his face. He raised the drink to her and then drank the Scotch in several swallows. He didn’t know much about Scotch, but it went down easily and tasted expensive. When he was done, he handed her back the glass, now just ice.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I need to take a shower,” he said.

“It’s down the hall,” she said. “Second door on the left. You’ll find everything you need.”

“My sanity?” he said.

She leaned forward as if to kiss him, but instead put her lips next to his ear, her cheek millimeters from his. The smell of her made him dizzy. Her breath was warm but sent a cold shiver down his spine.

“Long gone, darling,” she whispered.

He had showered and changed into some clothes from the closet. A pair of tan corduroys and a blue button-down shirt. An undershirt. Underwear. Socks. They all fit perfectly. The pills had hit him in the shower, and the body aches and pain in his liver had subsided to be replaced by a white noise that felt soft and comfortingly familiar. It wasn’t like it used to be. There was no more euphoria. But the pills dulled his sensations enough that he felt almost pleasant.

It was fully dark outside by the time he returned to the living room.

Gretchen had moved to the leather couch. The fire had died down a little, but still bathed the room in a warm orange glow. Archie sat down on the chair Gretchen had been in earlier. The laptop was gone.

“Do you want another drink?” she asked.

“Why not?” Archie said.

She got up and moved between the couch and the chair, brushing his arm with her fingertips as she did. He kept his eyes straight ahead, trying not to look at her. He could hear her behind him, putting the ice in the glass, pouring the Scotch. The liquid crackling on the ice. The ice clinking against the side of the glass. She returned and handed him the glass and then sat on the arm of the chair he was in. His body tensed. He couldn’t disguise it; his hand tightened around the glass, his knees went rigid.

She laughed lightly and leaned against him, stretching an arm along the top of the back of the chair. He could feel the cashmere of her sweater lick the back of his neck. The glass stayed frozen in his hand.

“It will happen faster, the more you drink,” she said.

He focused on the glass. It was heavy crystal with a silver lip. He took a sip of the Scotch, this time slowly, letting the alcohol sit on his tongue, savoring the taste.

“The liver failure,” she continued. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

He felt his body relax a notch, and lifted his glass at her and said, “To my health.”

She picked up his free hand and turned it over in hers. His nail beds were white, his skin a shade too yellow. “It won’t be long now,” she said softly.

He needed enough time. Maybe days. “How long?” he asked.

“A few days, a few weeks,” she said. She reached across him, her breasts against his chest, her pale neck at his chin, and lifted his glass from his other hand and then sat back. She smelled different than he remembered. Like some other flower. Roses. Maybe she had never smelled like lilacs. Maybe he had imagined it. He smiled at that, as she took a sip of the Scotch from his glass.

“You smell nice,” he said.

She handed the glass back to him and he took it.

“It might be faster,” she said. “It depends on how efficiently you poison yourself.”

He looked at the exquisite glass in his hand. Not the kind of glass you’d find at a rental house. A vacation house then. She had rented it. Or killed the family. His stomach tightened. He couldn’t think about that now.

The glass. If it all worked, his team would find it later. Both sets of the fingerprints on the glass. Drinking buddies. “Were you really an ER nurse?” he asked.

Gretchen tilted her head and smiled and then unbuttoned the third button down on his shirt and reached under the fabric, her fingers tracing his undershirt, quickly finding the scar where she had sliced him open to remove his spleen. She raised an eyebrow. “You doubt my medical prowess?”

Archie could feel his breath quicken, his chest heave. He took another drink. “Practice makes perfect,” he said.

She kept her hand in his shirt and lifted her right leg over his left, so their thighs were touching.

He searched for something to say, anything, and remembered the laptop. “What were you working on earlier?” he asked.

She didn’t seem surprised by the question. He knew she’d been waiting for him to ask. “A present for you.”

“Your autobiography?” he asked.

“Something like that. You’ll have to wait and see.” She reached up and moved a piece of his hair, smoothing it back behind his ear. “Do you still think about me?” she whispered.

Archie could barely speak. “Yes.”

She put her face right in front of his, her eyes sparkling in the firelight. “Do you think Henry suspects?”

He drained the last of the Scotch and set the glass on the arm of the chair. “No,” he said. It felt strange to talk about it. He’d kept the secret so long. Sat across from her in the prison, knowing what she knew, and wasn’t saying. It ate away at him. “Henry thinks too highly of me to suspect anything.”

“He never asked you about all those late nights?” she said, smiling. “How I had your cell phone number?” She raised an eyebrow. “He never asked why you really came to my house that night I took you?”

Archie shrugged weakly. “I wanted a psych consult about the latest body.”

“And if one thing led to another...” she said, trailing off.

“I had never cheated on my wife,” Archie said. “I loved my family.” How many times had he told himself that over the past three years? And yet he still couldn’t look them in the eye. He was sure his son knew. He didn’t know how. No one else suspected. But Ben knew that Archie had betrayed them.

Gretchen’s breath was feather-light on his cheek. “You were overworked, darling,” she said. “You needed an outlet.” She moved her mouth just over his ear, the words sending shivers down his neck, and took his earlobe in her mouth and bit it. The pain was nice, something he could feel. She suckled his earlobe for a moment and he could feel his heartbeat quicken.

“A lot of men have affairs,” she said.

Archie tried to smile. “Mine just turned out to be with the person I was supposed to be hunting,” he said.

Gretchen’s voice was full of sympathy. “Sin is rarely without complication,” she said.

She leaned in and kissed him. Their tongues met and he tasted the Scotch. In that moment she was all there was, the heat of her mouth, her warm hand still pressed against his rib cage. Surely she could feel his heart, his pulse, the erection pressing against her leg.

She lifted her lips from his and pulled away a few inches, so they were eye to eye. “Would you take it back?” she asked. “That first night you came to my house?”

It had been two
A.M.
He’d come from a crime scene. He could have gone home to his wife but instead he’d gone to Gretchen’s house. He’d planned it. He’d thought about it on the drive there. And when Gretchen opened the door in her nightgown, he’d taken a step inside and then he’d kissed her.

It had been him. He’d started the affair.

He’d brought everything on himself.

And he had loved every minute of it. And later, when she tortured him, he couldn’t help but think that he deserved it. That he had it coming, and at least he would be dead and Debbie would never know the truth.

“Why did you do it?” he asked Gretchen.

She smiled. “Out of love,” she said.

He wasn’t sure Gretchen even knew what he was asking about. The affair? The torture? The fact that she had turned herself in and saved his life? He looked for something in her pale blue eyes. “I would take it all back,” he said. “I wish I’d never met you.” He meant it, too. He meant it more than he had ever meant anything. “I would give anything for it not to have happened.”

She tilted her head, her blond hair folding against her shoulder, and he thought he saw a flash of something authentic, a glimpse of who she really was, something sad and desperate.

Did she know why he was there, what he was planning?

“Do you want to fuck me now?” she asked.

He drew her face to his and kissed her. “Yes,” he said.

S
usan sat in her car two blocks away from the task force offices. With the number of news vans already assembled around the old bank for the press conference, she’d been lucky to park that close. The windows were rolled up, but she still glanced around to be sure there weren’t any other reporters lurking around before she opened up her phone and punched in a
Herald
number.

Derek Rogers picked up.

“It’s me,” she said. “I need you to call every gas station along Highway 22 through Santiam Pass.” “Uh, what?” Derek said.

“There aren’t that many,” Susan said quickly. The press conferance was going to start in fifteen minutes. She flipped down the visor and dug into her purse for some makeup. “I’ve driven that road. It’s all timber towns. Gas every half hour.” She paused to smear on some raspberry-colored lipstick. “But you’d need it. What does a Jag get? Twenty miles per gallon?” She blotted the lipstick with an old receipt she found in her purse. “She’d need gas.”