Woman in Black (48 page)

On his hands and knees, he crawled toward the door, the way he'd been taught to do in school fire drills. But it was like an optical illusion: The closer he got to the door, the farther away it seemed. Downstairs, he could hear the dog's frenzied barking. Brewster was trapped inside, too, just like him and Phoebe, he realized with a sickening lurch of his belly.

With a mighty effort, Neal pushed himself the last few feet. Unthinkingly, he reached up to grab hold of the doorknob, and a searing bolt of pain shot through his hand and up his arm, causing him to cry out. But the pain had a galvanizing effect. The clogged pipe in his head opened another centimeter to allow a trickle of adrenaline into his bloodstream.

He had the presence of mind to pull off his shirt and wrap it around his throbbing hand, forming a sort of mitt, before he reached up to grab hold of the doorknob again. Then he was in the hallway, still on his hands and knees, battling his way toward the landing through onrushing waves of heat and roiling smoke. Downstairs, the dog went on barking in high, frantic yips. The only other sound was the crackling of flames from below. A comber of panic rose and crested in some unmuddled part of Neal's brain. This wasn't the city, where firemen would be crawling all over the place by now. They were out in the middle of fucking nowhere. No one was coming to rescue them. Even if he made it out alive, it would be too late for Phoebe by the time help arrived.

Dinner was an
unexpectedly lively affair. Karim had taken Lila to a Turkish restaurant, where along with their meal had come entertainment in the form of belly dancing and a live trio playing traditional Turkish music. If she'd feared that their first real evening out would take place in an intimate restaurant where he'd try to seduce her over a romantic, candlelit dinner, she'd fallen victim instead to something far more insidious: a good time.

“I can't remember the last time I had this much fun,” she said when the check finally arrived.

Karim smiled at her across the low table at which they sat, or rather reclined, on the plump tapestry cushions piled on the floor around it. He looked perfectly at home, like a Bedouin entertaining her in his tent. “You sound as if you weren't expecting it,” he replied with a laugh.

“No, I can't say that I was.” Lila, realizing how it must have sounded, was quick to say, “I'm sorry. That came out all wrong. It's just that since my husband …” She paused, waiting for the little catch in her chest that always accompanied any reminder of Gordon. But it didn't come. Another surprise on this evening full of surprises. “It hasn't been easy for me to kick back and relax. Nothing's ever the same after something like that. It's always there, in the back of your mind.”

“Yes, I know.” Karim nodded in sympathy. It wasn't just words—he
did
know. “Which is why I must thank you.”

She smiled at him, perplexed. “Thank me? Why?”

“For allowing me to accompany you on this journey.”

She knew what he meant, but she made light of it, feeling herself on shaky ground all of a sudden. “What, are we going somewhere I don't know about?”

He reached across the table to place a hand over hers. His eyes were black in the candle's mellow glow, and his mouth curled in a smile that sent a flood of warmth through her, as if she'd just tossed back a shot of vodka. “That's for you to decide,” he said.

At the coat check, he helped her on with her raincoat. He paused to say a few words in Turkish to the owner, a courtly older man with a luxurious head of silver hair, as they were on their way out. The owner said something back to him, grinning as he clapped Karim on the shoulder while casting a meaningful glance at Lila, which she didn't have to speak Turkish to catch the drift of. She was blushing as they stepped through the door.

Any pleasant fuzziness from the wine they'd drunk with dinner ended with the gust of wind that came at them like a rude shove: the tail end of the storm that had broken earlier in the evening. Lila held tightly to Karim's arm as they made their way toward the parking lot. She felt a bit precarious, and not just from the wine. His presence, as always, had her off balance. The man ought to come with a warning label, she thought:
Beware! Can cause side effects such as dizziness, uneven heart rate, and loss of equilibrium
.

“You're very quiet,” Karim observed when they reached his truck.

“I was just thinking about Neal,” she said. It was partly true. She'd been thinking about her son on and off, all evening. “I was expecting him to give me a hard time when I told him you were taking me to dinner, but he acted like he couldn't care less. It was the weirdest thing.” As if Neal had been a million miles away looking down at her from outer space. “Like he'd forgotten he even had a mother.”

“He's in love,” Karim observed with a chuckle as they climbed into the truck. “When I was his age, I once drove a donkey cart off the road into a ditch while in a similar state of mind.”

She tried to picture the scene and found herself wondering briefly who the girl was that Karim had been so enamored of before her mind was drawn back to Neal. “Maybe that was it.… But I can't help wondering, if he's so in love, why is he miserable all the time?” It would make sense if Phoebe were giving him the cold shoulder, but she seemed just as crazy about him. “Isn't love supposed to make you feel like the world is your oyster? That's how it was with Gordon and me.”
And the way it was tonight with you
, she added silently.

“Perhaps it's not love as we define it,” Karim speculated. “Perhaps it's only that he and Phoebe give each other what they need.”

“That's part of it, I'm sure,” she said. “It's just that, with them, I always get the feeling that they belong to some secret society, like Skull and Bones, only it's a membership of two.”

Karim switched on the engine, but made no move to put the truck into gear. He just sat there, staring straight ahead. The only sound was the spattering of rain against the windshield. “I've observed this, too,” he said after giving it some thought. He turned to her. “But is it not typical adolescent behavior? It's the same in my country, young people rebelling against their parents. Though perhaps not quite so dramatically as here,” he added, smiling.

“Neal's never been the rebellious type.”

“Nor was I. But when I was his age, I had a battle with my parents that was so epic, my mother insists she still hasn't fully recovered from it.”

She tilted her head to eye him curiously. “What about?”

“They wanted me to marry a girl they'd chosen for me—the daughter of close friends of ours—and I had my heart set on going to Cambridge, where I'd been granted a scholarship.”

She smiled. “I don't have to ask who won.” Karim nodded, though he didn't look happy about having been the cause of such parental displeasure. “But I don't think it's like that with Neal,” she went on. “Something tells me this has more to do with his dad than with me.”

“I'm sure that part of his unhappiness has to do with the fact that his mother is spending so much time with a man who isn't his father,” Karim ventured more cautiously.

“No doubt. I told him we were just friends, but he's not buying it.” Lila spoke briskly to counteract the flurries of emotion buffeting her like the gusts of wind rocking Karim's truck.

Karim rephrased it more accurately: “In other words, he has eyes in his head.”

Lila felt herself grow warm, but she maintained her no-nonsense tone as she replied, “Okay, you've got me there. I won't deny it. But that doesn't mean I have to give in to those feelings.” She might have been in a doctor's office, describing symptoms of an ailment. “I'm an adult. And adults are supposed to be able to control their impulses.”

“They can, yes. But does that mean they should?”

He reached across the shadowy void that separated them and gently traced the outline of her jaw with his fingertips, his feather touch bringing an answering tug below her waist. He might have been running his hand between her thighs, so electric was the sensation. She was paralyzed by it, unable to pull away as those same fingertips traveled, light and sure as a safecracker's, down her neck to locate the curve of her collarbone—a part of her anatomy to which she seldom paid any attention but of which she was now acutely aware.

Still a little tipsy from the wine, she ignored all caution and leaned in to kiss him. She parted her lips and let his tongue play over hers. He tasted faintly of some exotic spice. She ran her fingers through the tight coils of his hair, which were unexpectedly soft, like lamb's wool. The only thing standing between them now, she noted with irony, was the rather awkwardly placed gearshift. But no matter. The newly liberated and somewhat inebriated Lila simply hitched up her skirt and climbed over it, plunking herself down without ceremony into Karim's lap.

Kissing him and letting him kiss her back, she refused to listen to the voice of reason in her head whispering that this wasn't just about sex. That there would be consequences far more serious than an attack of morning-after regrets. She could fall in love with this man. She could end up wanting more than this—his hands reacquainting her with her body, his lips moving light as a hummingbird's wings over her skin, his desire making its presence known through several layers of clothing—only to have her life shattered once again. Perhaps irreparably this time.

But it was too late to stop, even if she'd been in the mood to listen to that voice. When he reached under her sweater and unhooked her bra to cup her bare breasts, she moaned with pleasure, pressing against him to relieve the deliciously mounting pressure between her thighs. Oh, God. It had been so long. How had she managed to go this long without sex? She needed no further excuse, when he slipped a hand under her skirt, to wriggle out of her pantyhose. She hadn't made out in a parked car since high school, only now there was no feigned modesty, no murmured protestations when a hand climbed too high or too low.

She knew what she wanted. She wanted
this
. She wanted Karim.

It was the sound of a car engine firing nearby that brought her to her senses. She shrank down, flooded with embarrassment as the car swung past them, its headlights momentarily spotlighting them in its glare. The effect was that of a bucket of cold water dashed over her: She instantly sobered. God, what could she have been thinking? A grown woman with a grown son making out in a parking lot like some hormone-crazed teenager, especially a parking lot where they could easily be spotted—perhaps even by someone who would recognize her from her pictures in the paper. Someone who'd tell the story to a reporter, give it a titillating new angle. The press would dub her the “Merry Widow DeVries.”

When the coast was clear, she crawled back over to her seat, muttering, “Let's just get going, okay?”

Karim looked as though he was about to say something, but whatever it was, he thought better of it. Without comment, he put the truck into reverse and backed out. It wasn't until they were well on their way that she looked over and saw that he was smiling.

“What are you looking so damned pleased about?” she demanded.

“You,” he said. “You're a woman of hidden depths, Lila.”

“Depths, maybe. I don't know about hidden.” Not after tonight.

“You shouldn't feel ashamed. You've done nothing wrong.”

“I'm not ashamed,” she said. “But don't expect an encore performance. Tonight was …”
unexpected, magical, thrilling
. “Well, let's just say I've had a little too much to drink.”

“Oh, so now it's the evil demon alcohol that's to blame?” His smile widened into a grin.

“Just drive,” she ordered gruffly. This kind of talk was only going to lead to more trouble.

They were a mile or so from home when she spotted the smoke rising above the treetops ahead—a charnel smear against the paler clouds from the dissipating storm. It looked as if it were coming from the direction of the house. Lila, her brain permanently rewired by her husband's suicide to always think the worst, felt her heart bump up into her throat.
Could it be …?

No, she told herself. Abigail's house couldn't possibly be on fire.

Concepción was awakened
by the smell of smoke. For a disoriented instant, she thought it was a result of the nightmare she'd been having, the same one she often had, from which she always woke with a lump in her throat and tears streaming down her cheeks.

She dragged herself upright, wincing in pain. Every part of her ached from the cold concrete floor on which she'd lain and from her long walk earlier in the day. Her mouth tasted like the inside of an old boot. Her head throbbed. And though she was shivering, she felt hot, as if with fever. Struggling to her feet, she cracked open the door, peering out. It was still dark outside, but the landscape was queerly illuminated.

That was when she saw that the Señora's house was on fire.

Instantly she was transported back that terrible day when she'd been crawling about in blind terror, calling out her daughter's name as the factory in Las Cruces went up in flames.

It wasn't a conscious decision that sent her pitching out into the open and racing in the direction of the house.

The unfamiliar drive down which she'd stumbled a short while ago proved no obstacle to her now. The house was lit up like a giant torch, its flames casting a sulfurous glow over the surrounding grass and trees, guiding her way. She flew down the drive, splashing through puddles, ignoring the sharp bits of gravel that dug into the flimsy soles of her shoes. Up ahead, she saw someone emerge from the shimmering heat of the inferno: a tall figure weaving drunkenly, like her husband when he used to come staggering home after a night at the bar. She watched the figure lurch a few more feet before collapsing onto the grass in front of the house. A boy, she saw, as she drew near.