The Mural. Michael Mallory

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СКАЧАТЬ you didn’t know that at the time,” Jack said, concentrating on his enunciation.

      “No. But I had a bitch of an afternoon, and all I want to do now is soak in a hot tub.”

      “Go ahead.”

      “How can I do that and deal with Robynn both?” she asked.

      “Why don’t you put her in with you?” Jack asked.

      “What?”

      “I said, put her in the tub with you. She’d probably love it.”

      “The entire point of a hot soak is to take it by yourself. It’s personal time. It’s the only ‘me’ time I have, Jack, and I have to forego it tonight.”

      “Maybe after she’s in bed you can take a bath.”

      “Then I’d be laying there in the tub worrying that she’d wake up at any second and call for me,” Elley argued. “It wouldn’t be the same.”

      Jack hoped his sigh didn’t register loudly on the other end of the phone connection. “I should be home tomorrow early evening. Then you can go to the spa if you like.”

      “I just might.”

      “Fine. If there’s nothing else exciting, I have to be up and out early tomorrow and go back to the site for some more pictures. The ones I took today somehow got shrewd...screwed up. I should be home by dinner tomorrow, barring any disasters.”

      “All right. She misses you, you know.”

      “I miss her, too.”

      “And me?”

      Jack did not answer right away. He knew he was taking too long. He knew the pause between the end of her question and his response was so great that there could be no other interpretation except that he was forcing himself to say how much he missed her. But for some reason, he could not force his tongue to make the words. Say something, dammit, he demanded of himself. “You’ve no idea how much I miss the woman I married.”

      “Why do you turn sweet only when you’re away from me?” she asked, oblivious to the irony of his words. “See you tomorrow.” Elley hung up without saying goodbye, as was her fashion.

      “Right,” Jack said to the dead phone line.

      Room 207. She’s there. She’s there now. Elley will never know. Why else would Dani have given you her room number? That business about knowing where to find her in the morning was just a chess move. Why are you waiting? Jesus, Hayden, that smile, those eyes, those freckles, those legs, those tits!

      Jack sighed deeply, then said, “No.” Disappointed or not, he would leave Dani Lindstrom to her business in her room. Most men, he knew, would not. Most men would have torn a leg muscle getting down to the motel sundry shop for a package of condoms, and then be slavering at her door like a wolf smelling meat. Broarty, for instance; he was forever making comments about what he would do, or had done, with women inside if he ever had the chance. So far as Jack knew, Yolanda had managed to deflect any non work-related demands from her horny boss. He also knew, but Broarty didn’t, that she kept journal of all Marc’s dirty little comments and casual pats on the bottom in just in case she ever needed to file a sexual harassment suit complaint.

      Perhaps that was why he was staying put, so as not to be like Broarty. It was as good a working definition of “conscience” as any: to act in such a way as Marcus Broarty, Asshole, wouldn’t.

      Jack picked up the phone and called the bar, and ordered another beer to be delivered to his room...hell, two beers...and Broarty could damn well pay for the room service charge. Then he set his travel alarm for 6:30, switched on the television and settled in for the night.

      Room 207. Just upstairs.

      “Shit,” Jack muttered, getting up off the bed and walking into the bathroom where he splashed cold water on his face and waited for the beers to arrive.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Strangely, Althea Kinchloe found herself in her parent’s house, the home that had been destroyed by fire more than fifty years before. But now the house was back and in its former glory. Actually, greater than its former glory: the colors on the walls and the drapes seemed richer and brighter than at any time when she was still living there, and it was certainly cleaner than her last memory of the place.

      There were no sign of Althea’s parents, both of whom died in the conflagration, though there was another figure with her. It was Althea’s sister Bernia, but not Bernia the way she had been the last time Althea saw her, withered and emaciated from the cancer. It was Bernia as she was when they were young girls during the Depression.

      “You need to go somewhere,” Bernia was saying, directing Althea’s attention to a door set in one wall of the living room, where a door had never been before.

      My heavens, am I dead? Althea thought. Then the truth came to her. No, it has to be a dream; a very peculiar one, but a dream nonetheless.

      Althea Kinchloe had always possessed the ability to recognize when she was experiencing a dream, which this most definitely had to be. But before she could step outside of her experience any further, the door opened. Behind it was a staircase leading down to the basement. She went down.

      It was dark at the bottom, but not so dark that Althea could not see. A washing machine sat to one side, the old fashioned kind that looked like a drum on legs and had a hand roller to squeeze out the water, the kind her mother had used, and which she herself had used for the first several years of her marriage. Beyond the laundry room was a long, dark corridor, which she started down. The basement corridor reeked of musty dankness, which was hardly surprising. But as she walked, the musty smell was overwhelmed by another one—it was unmistakably the scent of oil paint. It was a familiar odor from her younger days; the smell of an art studio, like the one in which she and Howard used to meet, using the cover story that she was posing for one of his paintings. If her father had known what had really gone on in that studio, he would have taken a shotgun to both of them.

      How Althea had loved Howard Kearney. When he became one of the tens of thousands who did not return from the Great War, so young and suddenly so dead, she thought her life was over. That, though, had been seven decades worth of life ago; seven decades that had encompassed a forty-eight year marriage to a fine, if unexciting, man, two children, five grandchildren, and now two great-grandchildren. Her life had not ended when Howard died on the battlefield any more than it had when Barry, her husband, suffered a heart attack and died while on a fishing trip two months before his eightieth birthday. Both tragedies had changed her life, though she often mused that overcoming Howard’s death when he was young had in some way prepared her for Barry’s death when she was old. The fact that both had been separated from her at the times of their passing left her each time with feelings of emptiness that was painfully hard to overcome, but ultimately she had overcome them. As her grandmother used to say, it was amazing how much people were able to bend in the wind without breaking.

      Althea Kinchloe, née Dorneman, had done a lot of bending in the wind.

      She continued to walk down the dark corridor, the walls of which were covered with paintings of people, all engaged in some kind of activity. She recognized the artwork instantly, and her pulse raced. A figure stepped out from the shadows. “Howard!” Althea cried, rushing toward him. “Oh, Howard!”

      Howard СКАЧАТЬ