The Girls He Adored (35 page)

They finished up with “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” then Pender stuffed a twenty into the tip jar and staggered back to his room. Umpqua County, he thought, as he collapsed into bed. Where the hell is Umpqua County?

I
RENE HAD EXPECTED TO
be dining with Maxwell and Miss Miller that evening; instead he brought a covered tray up to her room. A tiny chicken, hardly bigger than a Cornish hen, baked potato, snap beans, and a bottle of Jo'berg Riesling. He and Miss Miller needed to spend some time together, he explained. So if she wouldn't mind staying in her room until tomorrow morning. . . .

The antique escritoire was in the corner of the room. Irene pulled it over to the window and watched the sun setting behind the next ridge while she dined. Living on the shore of Monterey Bay, Irene was no pushover when it came to sunsets. But this one was a keeper—it set the sky on fire and burnished the green meadow grass gold. Her heart filled, then emptied with a rush that left her breathless and despairing. She'd never known homesickness before. She missed her house, her friends. She prayed Barbara was all right. Old Bill and Bernadette, too. She wondered if she'd ever see her father and brothers again. She even missed her young stepmother.

She also worried about her patients. Lily DeVries—they still hadn't followed up on her last breakthrough. The girl would be bound to see it as yet another abandonment, another betrayal.

Hang in there, Lily, she thought, raising her head and looking out at the fiery sunset. As she did so, she caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window.

“You too,” she told the reflection. “You hang in there too, Irene.” And though she was not particularly hungry, she forced herself to finish the meal, washing every other mouthful down with a swig of wine as it turned to ashes in her mouth.

There were no books or magazines in her room, no television. Feeling restless, unable to concentrate on her notes from the day's sessions with Max, she decided to try her hand at a haiku. She'd gone through a haiku phase in college. Frank had illustrated some of them with his pastels—what delicate, feathery strokes his big hands were capable of. She and Frank told themselves that someday they'd publish a book of her haiku and his drawings, but of course it never happened—life, then death, had intervened.

Irene poured herself another glass of wine, turned the notebook to a blank page, began doodling green curlicues around the margins. First line, five syllables. She looked out through the window and the pen began to move.
That two-horned mountain.
Second line, seven syllables:
Black, jagged, it hides the sun.
Third line, five syllables:
And the creek runs cold.

Quality time with Miss Miller. Supper in the dining room, with the good silver, the good china, the candelabra on the white tablecloth. Miss Miller, with effort, dissects her chicken with a knife and fork and insists that Ulysses do the same.

To eat, she unties the bottom string of her green silk surgical mask and shoves the food under. She wears only silk—she can't bear any coarser fabric rubbing against the scar tissue. After dinner, they do the washing up together—she washes, he dries—then walk hand in scarred hand to the chicken coop at the edge of the forest.

Freddie Mercury has already led his harem from the outer yard into the inner coop. Miss Miller locks the gate while Max checks the wire surrounding the yard for breaches, and examines the ground outside the fence for holes.

Reassured that the flock is safe from raccoons and foxes for another night, the master and mistress of Scorned Ridge return to the house, and Miss Miller selects a video from their extensive collection.
Casablanca
—they watch it together at least once a year. The original version, not the colorized. During the last scene, Miss Miller speaks Ilsa's lines along with her; Max does Rick and, at the very end, Renaud as well.

The act of retiring to bed is an intricately choreographed ballet-—a pas de trois, though if Max and Peter execute the switch successfully, as they have for the past several years, Miss Miller will never know it.

They go upstairs together, each to his or her own room. Max
showers, gives Miss Miller time to wash up, then crosses the hall to her bedroom. She's already lying on her stomach with the hem of her nightgown hiked up to the small of her back. He sits on the side of the bed and injects her in the left buttock with one ampoule of pharmaceutical morphine sulfate, and in the right buttock with another.

While they wait for the morphine to come on, Max pulls the blinds, closes the shutters, draws the blackout curtains, and stuffs a towel under the door so no light leaks in from the hallway. Miss Miller insists on the room being pitch-black.

Now comes the tricky part. Standing by the door, Max checks the floor to be sure there are no obstacles lying around, then turns his back to the room and orients himself precisely, right hand on the doorknob, left hand on the light switch, before executing an alter switch. Exit Max, to voluntary darkness; enter Peter, to darkness on the physical plane.

Peter was one of the last alters to be created. His was a difficult birth—almost an act of will on Max's part. Peter shares little memory with the other alters, none of it visual. Born full-grown, eighteen years old and destined to remain so, Peter has been blind from birth. He's never seen a woman—never seen a human being—and only touched one. Only
met
one. Miss Miller. He knows this room intimately; once he has his bearings he can negotiate it like a sighted person.

Blind Peter finds his way back to the bed, helps Miss Miller roll over, and taking great care not to cause her pain, undresses her. She is woozy, quietly euphoric from the double dose of morphine. Her senses dulled, she finds his gentle, feathery caresses bearable, even welcome, as much for the emotional enjoyment as the erotic.

After considerable foreplay, Miss Miller rolls on her side, facing away from Peter, and he achieves penetration from a horizontal rear-entry position. The morphine often prevents Miss Miller from reaching orgasm, but tonight it only postpones, then prolongs her climax. Afterward he strokes her long soft hair, taking care not to dislodge it, until she falls asleep.

Then he falls asleep. In Peter's case, though, it's not sleep as the rest of us know it, but only a descent into a warmer, welcoming darkness. And as he fades off, without any visible signs of switching, Max awakens, feeling every bit as high on post-orgasmic endorphins as if he'd just finished making love himself. He hears Miss Miller's raspy, steady breathing and slips out of bed. He's halfway across the room when her voice freezes him in his tracks.

“Did you enjoy that, sweetness and light?”

Max winces in the dark. “Of course.”

“Sweetness and light” is an endearment she only uses sarcastically. He's already feeling guilty— he just doesn't know about what. Maybe she wants to be appreciated. “It was wonderful.”

But that wasn't it—her tone is still biting. “Would you like to do it again some night?
Ever again?”

“Of course.”
Get to it, damn it—I can't stand the suspense.

“Enjoying your sessions with your therapist?”

So that's it.
“I'm finding them very helpful.”

“So much so that you've completely forgotten that you have over five weeks of housework to catch up on?”

Oh.
“No, ma'am.”

“Why do I always get the shit jobs?” muttered Alicea rhetorically as she hauled the heavy Kirby back down to the basement.

Of course, Alicea knew perfectly well why she got the shit jobs— except for the old woman, Alicea was the only female of the household. Fortunately she was strong for a girl—she could lift the Kirby with one hand. And tireless—she had already started a load of laundry, vacuumed the first and second floors, and scrubbed the downstairs bathroom. Now she shifted the wet laundry from the washer into the dryer, rotated each of the bottles in the wine rack, and dusted the glass-fronted display case and its contents.

While performing this last chore, she caught sight of herself in the glass. She admired her torso under the too-tight T-shirt, and found herself wishing there were somebody around to appreciate it.

Fat chance of that, though—after the Cortes debacle, Max would probably never again let her out when men were around. Alicea wondered whether Dr. Cogan had any interest in other women—any port in a storm, as Max always said.

After dusting the display case, Alicea decided she'd earned a break, and ascended to the kitchen to make a cup of herbal tea. While she was waiting for the tea to steep, though, she put her head down on the kitchen table for a rest, and soon felt herself slipping back into darkness.

The experience was similar for most of the alters. Slipping into the darkness was like going to sleep. You didn't dream, but when you awoke, either because Max had summoned you or because the system was under extreme stress, you remembered what had happened
while you were sleeping as if it
had
been a dream. And sometimes when you awoke you were in the body, but most times you were still in the darkness. In the latter event, you could always try to force your way back into the body, but usually Max was too strong.

For Max, the experience was different. He only visited the darkness voluntarily, or on the rare occasions when one of the others seized consciousness against his will. And he alone never slept in the darkness. No need: Max was the alter who slept for real, Max was the alter who dreamed.

Another difference: Max was capable of monitoring the others visually from the darkness. He rarely exercised the power, however, as the experience was both dizzying and uncomfortable, like watching life through the viewfinder of a handheld camera, or riding in a car being driven too fast by someone you didn't quite trust.

And when Max raised his head to find himself sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of chamomile tea (which he despised), he recalled everything that had happened while Alicea was in control of the body, not as if he'd dreamed it, or as if he'd experienced it, but rather as if it had occurred in a movie he'd seen recently.

Max's bedroom was directly below Irene's on the second floor. As he undressed for bed, he could hear her moving around overhead. He imagined her undressing up there, showering, climbing into bed, and found himself growing sexually excited—he was even sporting a very un-Maxlike erection.

“So now you want her?” he said disgustedly, giving his penis a backhand slap and watching it bobble. “Where the hell were you yesterday afternoon, when I needed you?”

I
N THE OLD DAYS,
FBI agents had to leave at least three telephone numbers so they could be reached at all times. With the advent of sky pagers and cell phones the rigid call-in procedures had been relaxed—only Thom Davies knew that Pender was staying at the Holiday Inn in Plano. So it came as a surprise when the phone in Pender's room began ringing just as he emerged from the bathroom after his shower on Monday morning, still wearing the plastic Holiday Inn shower cap to protect his injured scalp.

“Pender here.”

“Pender, this is Steve Maheu. I'm calling for Mr. McDougal.”

“He's not here,” said Pender, just to mess with Maheu, a nondrinking, nonsmoking, crew-cut Mormon. For Pender, one of the benefits of having known McDougal since their academy days was not having to go through Steve Too to get to Steve One.

“You know perfectly well what I mean. I'm calling on his behalf, at his request. You really tore it this time, Pender—Steve specifically asked me to tell you that he's not going to pull your ashes out of the fire.”

“What fire?”

“Did you interview a Mr. Horton Hughes yesterday?”

“We had a pleasant poolside chat.”