Mortal Sins. Penn Williamson

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      She was still trying to seduce him. But this morning there was a brittleness, an edgy desperation, to her. She was more believable somehow, this Remy.

      He cut his eyes off the road and back to her again. There was that luminescent quality about her that shone through so strongly on the movie screen, a shimmering, like an icicle melting in the sun, but she gripped the flask so hard her knuckles had bled white, and he could see faint black stains left by the fingerprinting.

      “Don’t you think you ought to be getting yourself a lawyer?” he said.

      She took another long pull of the scotch. “That’s what Mama told me—well, Mama didn’t tell me exactly, since we aren’t speaking. She had Belle telephone this morning and pass along the wisdom: that I need to get me a lawyer. ’Course, Mama isn’t worried about me being arrested so much as she is about me not getting the house. You know how Mama feels about Sans Souci.”

      “So are you going to get the house? Does it come to you in St. Claire’s will?”

      “You are such a cop anymore, Day. Now you’re thinking I killed him for a house.”

      She had pushed her lips into a little pout, playing with him, being obvious about it and not even caring that he would see right through her, not caring that he knew she had coveted Sans Souci the whole of her life.

      He slammed on the brakes and the Bearcat slewed to a stop, tires screeching and burning rubber. He stared at her and she stared back at him, unblinking. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

      Then, as he watched, her eyes slowly filled with tears. She turned her head away, to look across an empty pasture toward an old dairy barn. The barn, once painted red, was now the color of rust. You could see, just barely, the faded image of a spotted cow on the steeply slanted roof.

      He gripped her chin and pulled her head around to face him. “My, my, just look at you—the grieving widow all of a sudden. But who are the tears for, baby? For yourself, or for him? Do you want me to believe you’re sorry he’s dead?”

      She shook her head, and he felt a splash of wetness on the back of his hand. “Don’t be like this, Day, please,” she said, so softly he could barely hear her. “Don’t hate me like this.”

      He let go of her as if she’d suddenly caught on fire. She was setting him up, twisting him inside out, with her truths and her lies. He knew that if he let himself listen to her long enough, he would find a way to believe whatever she told him.

      He listened to her cry for a while, until her cheeks were all puffy and wet, and her nose had turned red. He had seen her cry like this before, both for real and in her movies—hard, brutal tears that could make her seem so human as to be almost ugly. That she wasn’t so beautiful when she cried made it even easier to believe her. But then she probably knew that as well.

      “I am sorry for Charles,” she was saying. “For his dying and the horrible way of it, and for all the pain we’d brought to each other in these last months.”

      She looked at him, with her lips partly open, her eyes so wet and dark and deep. Like her tears, everything about her had the potential to be a lie. He gripped the steering wheel, hard, to keep from touching her, and drove off the road, turning onto a track that cut through the pasture toward the old dairy barn. The barn had been converted into a hangar, where a couple of Spad fighter planes and a Jenny trainer had been relegated as surplus from the war. One of the pastures had been turned into an airfield, although nothing stirred there now but the cattails and the crows. Even the wind sock hung listless in the thick, sultry air.

      He had gone to war after she had left him that summer, the summer of 1916. The Great War, they called it, and great it had been from the way it consumed blood and flesh and bones by the trenchload. America hadn’t joined in the carnage yet, but there had been a French flying squadron of American volunteers, the Lafayette Escadrille. Daman Rourke had gone to France hoping to die, and instead he had renewed his love affair with danger in the form of tracer bullets blazing out of the blinding sun. He had discovered inside himself new and terrible talents, for fighting and killing and jousting in the sky.

      He’d had to stop the killing after the war was over, but he hadn’t been able to give up the flying. It was so easy, he had discovered, and so very sweet, to take an airplane out on the screaming edge and dance.

      Usually for stunt flying he flew one of the Spads, but he rolled the Jenny out of the barn now and began a preflight check, running his hands over the struts, testing the tension of the flying wires, tightening nuts and bolts. Remy walked around the plane the way she’d walked around the Bearcat, touching it, taking in the fragile contraption of wood and wire and fabric.

      “Is it your intention to take me flying in this thing?” she finally said.

      “Well, you did allow as how you wanted to go fast. Guaranteed thrills, and your money back if you get killed.” He put a whole lot of challenge and just a touch of meanness into his smile. “It’s double-dare time, Remy Lelourie.”

      She only laughed.

      He helped her to put on goggles, helmet, and one of his old leather jackets, and then he lifted her up into the front cockpit’s worn wicker seat. Even though she wouldn’t be doing the piloting, because of her much lighter weight she would have to ride up there to prevent the aircraft from being nose-heavy.

      She sat in the cockpit, watching him, and he thought he could feel the excitement in her, the life, like a vibration along the plane’s flying wires. She watched his every move as he checked to be sure the ignition switch was off and that both the air- and gasintake valves were open before he hand-pumped air pressure into the gas tank. He went to the front of the plane and flipped the propeller four times clockwise, then came back to the cockpit and slowly shut down the air valves and turned on the magneto switch. He went around up front again, put his palms on the propeller blade, and heaved.

      The engine coughed and roared to life even as he was jumping clear of the flying propeller blades. He swung up onto the wing as the plane began to roll.

      He climbed into the cockpit and took the Jenny up. The horizon was strung with wisps of gray clouds, like dirty feathers, but the sky above them glowed with a soft, saffron light. They went up and up, flying, until the palmettos, the water oaks and willows, were all reduced to green splashes on brown earth, and the oyster and shrimp boats looked small as doodlebugs on the water. They flew, soaring high toward the sun, and he widened his eyes so that he saw the whole world below, above and around him.

      He cruised for a while, getting the feel of the plane, and then he warmed up with a few barrel rolls and a couple of loop-the-loops. At the end of the last loop, he fell out into a slight dive, then climbed to full power until he was flying completely upside down. At the top of the circle, instead of cutting his engine and diving down to complete yet another loop, he held full power and rolled a half turn to the left and back again into an upright position, and then he twisted the plane around into a long, straight spin, going down and down and down, and he held it, held it, held it, as the ground came rushing up to meet them.

      He waited until the last possible second to pull out of the spin, waited until he was a heartbeat away from being too late, reaching for that belly-clenching, breathless place between greased lightning and the sweet spot where it hits.

      Any other woman in the world would have screamed. Death was screeching at them on the press of the wind, but Remy Lelourie was laughing.

      She hadn’t changed.

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