Woman in Red (33 page)

“I know what she looks like,” he said.

Eleanor was taken aback, not only by his response but by the ease with which he’d spoken. It was as if he knew everything there was to know about Lucy. The unease she felt deepened, and for the first time she felt a flutter of real panic.

She lowered herself onto the sofa opposite him, smoothing her skirt over her knees. If he’d been an invited guest she would have offered him a cup of coffee or something to eat. But Lowell wasn’t welcome, and she didn’t care if he thought her rude. “Well. I suppose we should get this over with,” she began, when it appeared he was in no hurry to leave. “I’ve given it some thought and, if you still insist, I’m prepared to take whatever it is you want to give me in terms of . . . of compensation. On one condition: This is in no way entitles you to anything as far as Lucy’s concerned. You’re to keep away from her.” She fixed him with a hard, uncompromising stare. “Do I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly.” A smile broke across his face. He seemed as relaxed as if he’d had it all planned out, right down to her response.

“You
do
understand, this isn’t in exchange for visits . . . or anything of that nature,” she emphasized.

He nodded, saying mildly, “I don’t think that would be in either of our best interests.”

“Well, then. I’m glad we can agree on that much, at least.” Her fears should have eased, but for some reason she
remained on guard. With Lowell’s next words, she understood the real reason for this visit.

“You drive a hard bargain,” he said, the smile lingering on his lips. “But that doesn’t mean
we
can’t see each other.”

Eleanor was rendered speechless. It wasn’t until Lowell rose from his chair and came over to where she sat, sinking down beside her on the sofa, that she found her voice. Jumping to her feet and pacing over to the fireplace, she said, “I think you’d better go.”

Lowell stood up as if to leave, but instead of going to retrieve his hat and coat, he walked over to where she stood. “What’s the matter, Eleanor? We’re both adults, and it’s not as though you’d be cheating on your husband.” He cast a glance at the framed photo on the mantel, of Eleanor and Joe on their wedding day, Joe with his arm around her, appearing somewhat dazed, as if he still couldn’t believe his good fortune, and Eleanor in her pale pink bridal suit, looking grimly determined to make a go of it. “Besides, we both know you wouldn’t have married him if you hadn’t been pregnant. With my child,” he added, bringing his gaze back to her, his lips curled in a lazy, vulpine smile.

All at once Eleanor hated him, more than she had ever hated anyone in her life. “My husband was a good man. A good
father
,” she said in a voice as cold as the ashes in the fireplace. “So I’ll thank you not to drag him into whatever sordid little scheme you have in mind.”

“Your loyalty is admirable, my dear,” Lowell said, leaning with his elbow against the mantel, one ankle crossed insouciantly over the other, as perfectly at home in her house as if he owned it, “but I’m afraid your husband is no longer in a position to object.”

Eleanor, seared by the callous insolence of his remark, lashed back. “He fought and died for his country! Which is more than I can say for you.”

She could see that she’d hit a nerve—Lowell was at an age, late forties, when he was no longer eligible for the draft—for his smirk fell away. But he recovered quickly, giving a coarse laugh.

“Why go to war when there are so many pretty widows in need of comforting?”

He slid his arms around her waist, pulling her close. She was too stunned at first to resist, but she quickly recovered her wits and attempted to push him away, to no avail. He merely tightened his hold. She was only able to draw back far enough to take a swing at him, an open-handed blow that caught him clean across the jaw. He winced in pain, but it only seemed to inflame him further. He brought his mouth down against hers, not tenderly as in the past but with a roughness that was bruising.

Eleanor used all her might to wrench free. “If you don’t leave this instant, I’m calling the police,” she threatened with a bravado that might have been convincing if her voice hadn’t been trembling. Lowell’s response was to laugh. She glared at him. “You think I won’t? Try me.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt you’re capable of anything you set your mind to,” he replied, in that lazy, mocking voice of his that was made all the more horrid by the knowledge that she’d once imagined herself in love with him. “But you don’t really want the police in on this, do you? Think how it would look. The widow Styles entertaining her former lover when no one’s home. People might get the wrong idea.”

“You bastard!” she hissed, taking another swing.

He ducked, and she missed him. He straightened, forking back with his fingers the hair that had fallen over his forehead, which seemed as artfully placed as that of some movie villain: the heartless but irresistible rogue he no doubt fancied himself to be. His smile widened. “If I’m a bastard, there was a time it suited you just fine. I seem to recall, my dear, that before you joined the ranks of the respectable you couldn’t get enough of this.”

“Please. Just leave.” It was more of a warning than a plea, for Eleanor felt certain that if he didn’t something terrible would happen. Something irreversible.

“Gladly,” he said. “But not until I’ve gotten what I came for.”

With that, he fell on her.

Eleanor struggled against him, but it was useless. He quickly overpowered her. As she was dragged to the floor, her hip struck the end table by the sofa, and the lamp that stood on it came toppling down, its ceramic base shattering in an explosion of shards that dug into her like tiny sharp teeth when he threw her down on the rug. Then she forgot her pain, and there was only the terror, as Lowell straddled her, pushing her dress up over her thighs, tugging at her underpants. His breath came in hot little bursts against her face and neck, which made her feel dirtier somehow than what he was doing with his hands. She threw her head back and screamed but there was no one to hear. No one to prevent him from doing what no decent woman would have permitted, however foolishly she’d behaved in the past.

She didn’t hear the car pulling up outside.

For William these past months had been a quiet agony. Eleanor had refused to see him and he hadn’t been able to reach her by phone. He would have slipped a note under the door, but what if her little girl should be the one to find it? So in the end he’d said nothing, holding all his feelings inside, where they grew like a cancer, until he began to know the true meaning of heartsick. It wasn’t just a figure of speech, it was a real sickness that left you weak and feverish. It robbed you of your appetite while at the same time eating at you until you could concentrate on little else. It left you lying awake, night after night, hating the wife sweetly slumbering beside you, whose only crime was in not being the one you loved. Whatever he’d felt for Eleanor before, it was magnified a thousand times over by his forced exile.

All he had left was the portrait.

These days, it was his sole occupation, devoting himself to it at the expense of commissions that would have brought in money. With painstaking brushstrokes, he went over each fold of her dress, the light illuminating her face, the dozen different shades of her hair, making sure it was rendered perfectly. It haunted him even when he wasn’t at his easel. At night, it was there behind his closed eyelids, a gallery with but one work, a show of a single artist’s obsession.

When he wasn’t holed up in his studio, he was out walking the lonely stretches of shoreline that bordered his property. He would walk for miles, with no destination in mind, the dog his only companion. Anyone who might have happened upon him during one of those peregrinations would have been struck by the sight of him: a tall blade of a man with his unruly black hair blowing in the wind, lurching along the path with the aid of a walking stick, his border
collie trotting at his side, William wearing a frown of concentration so fierce it made him appear slightly mad.

He knew he needed to get a grip. Martha had begun to remark on his odd behavior and frequent absences, and soon she’d wonder what he’d been doing holed up in the studio all those hours when he had nothing to show for it. But just as a man wracked with delirium must wait for the fever to break, so it was with him: He had no choice but to ride it out and hope this madness ended before any real damage was done.

The morning of Lowell’s ill-fated visit to Eleanor’s house, William had gone into town to pick up the gallon of turpentine he’d ordered from the hardware store. Martha had given him a list of items she needed as well, so afterward he headed over to the market. His mind was occupied, as usual, with thoughts of Eleanor. It had been several weeks since he’d been to her house, so he bought some things he thought she might need. If she wouldn’t see him, then he could at least provide for her.

He understood the reason for his exile, that in her mind he’d somehow become tangled up in her husband’s death, but that didn’t make it any easier to bear. As he negotiated the winding roads to her house in his Packard he was thinking that if he’d been free to pursue her he’d have pounded on her door until she had no choice but to open it, torn it off its hinges if necessary. He wouldn’t have allowed her to hide away, steeping in misguided guilt. But he
wasn’t
a free man. He had a wife and son. And what right did he have to disrupt Eleanor’s life any further when he had nothing to offer her but love?

He noticed the other car as soon as he pulled into the drive, a Cadillac convertible, midnight blue, with white-wall
tires. Who did Eleanor know who would drive such a car? It must be someone on official business.

His first thought was that it had something to do with the bank loan she’d alluded to in one of their conversations. Even with Joe’s military pay, she’d been having trouble keeping up with the payments. Was the bank coming to personally deliver the bad news of a foreclosure? He couldn’t bear the thought of Eleanor and her daughter being forced out in the cold. Whatever he had to do, even if meant getting her to swallow that stubborn pride of hers and take money from him, he’d make sure that didn’t happen.

He got out of his car and strode up the front path on legs that seemed to grow stronger with each step. He was barely limping by the time he reached the house. But there was no answer when he knocked on the front door. After a moment’s hesitation he tried the knob, and the door swung open. He stepped inside and was about to call out her name when he heard a noise coming from the next room, a thump followed by a muffled sound that might have been a cry of distress.

William didn’t stop to think; he acted on pure instinct, snatching the shotgun from atop the oak hall stand, where it was stowed. A woman all alone out in the country couldn’t be too careful, Eleanor had reasoned, when he’d questioned its necessity. And he’d smiled at the time, thinking the threat of a wild animal or an intruder remote.

He wasn’t smiling now.

As William catapulted into the living room, shotgun in hand, he encountered a scene that made his blood rise in a silent howl of outrage: Eleanor, in a welter of disheveled clothes and hair, held pinned to the floor by a large, dark-haired man. She was struggling to free herself, but she was
no match for her attacker—he had to have outweighed her by at least eighty pounds. He was holding her down with one knee while reaching under her skirt to tug at her underthings, blind to anything but his sick purpose.

William froze for an instant, scattered bits of memory swirling in his brain, memories of the last time he’d held a shotgun in his hand, so many moons ago the smoothness of the oiled stock against his palm, the heft of the barrel along his forearm, shouldn’t have felt as familiar as it did. In a series of rapid stereoscopic images, he saw the blood flowing from the wound in his brother’s arm, blooming on his shirtsleeve like some hideous crimson flower; Stu, pale as birch bark, the doctor hovering over him; and the look their father had given him later on, as Stu lay dead.

William lifted the gun and fired.