Woman in Red (40 page)

Even so, Eleanor hesitated. What wife, however self-absorbed, would believe such an excuse? Martha would wonder why he hadn’t telephoned earlier, and what kind of car trouble it was that would keep him away all night. No, she thought, it was far too risky. And he’d risked so much already. Still, she lingered on the doorstep. “I couldn’t ask
that of you,” she said. “Not after . . . after what . . .” She swallowed hard, unable to complete the sentence.

He nodded gravely. He seemed to have aged a dozen years over the course of the day, his face all planes and shadows, his eyes glinting amid hollowed sockets. “Let’s talk about it inside,” he said, taking her by the arm and gently propelling her through the doorway.

This time Eleanor didn’t protest. She allowed herself to be led down the hall and into the kitchen, docile as a sleepy child, her step faltering only once as they passed the living room that would be forever be stained with the blood of her former lover, if only in her mind.

“I think we both need a drink,” he said, retrieving the bottle of whiskey from the cupboard by the stove and pouring them each a glass.

“What I need even more is a shower,” she told him. “I feel as if I haven’t bathed in a week. Do you mind?”

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

As she was undressing in the bedroom, she could hear him dialing the phone out in the hall, followed by the low murmur of his voice. She stood alert, listening for any change in its tenor that would signal an angry wife at the other end, but there was none, and after a moment she relaxed.

In the bathroom, as she stood in the old-fashioned clawfoot tub that Joe had fitted with a shower nozzle, hot water coursing over her skin, Eleanor marveled at the simple pleasure of it and the ease with which she found herself slipping back into routine, even after what she’d been through today. She imagined it must have been like that for Joe, too, that amid the horrors of war there had been days aboard ship with nothing to do but swap stories and play cards, when the only thing on his mind hadn’t been
getting home in one piece but how he was going to play the hand he’d been dealt. Was it really possible to go on as though nothing had happened? She would have to. For Lucy’s sake. For her own, as well.

After she’d toweled herself dry, she dressed in a worn pair of Levi’s and an old flannel shirt that had belonged to Joe. By the time she rejoined William, he’d drunk at least a quarter of what had been left in the bottle, though he seemed none the worse for it. If anything, it was having a salutory effect. Some of the color had returned to his face and he appeared more relaxed. He smiled faintly as he poured her a drink and pushed it across the table to her.

“Here. Drink up. It’ll help you sleep.”

“I don’t think anything could help me sleep,” she told him, reaching for the glass nonetheless.

They sat in silence, Eleanor sipping her whiskey. The house’s usual nighttime noises wrapped themselves around her, the creak of it settling on its foundation and grumbling of the furnace in the cellar, the hum of the icebox and ticking of the clock over the stove. It hardly seemed possible that an hour earlier they’d been digging a man’s grave.

“What did your wife have to say?” Eleanor ventured after a bit.

“I think she was more upset at being woken up than anything else. Which doesn’t mean I won’t catch hell later on.” He spoke lightly, but she could see that he was troubled.

“I don’t want this to come between you and Martha,” she said firmly.

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that.” He gave her a long look, and in his naked, bloodshot gaze, stripped of all pretense by the day’s ordeal, she saw the true depths of his feelings for her.

And, yes, Eleanor was glad, may her soul be eternally damned to hell for it. She was glad, and at the same time frightened, not wanting to cause any more damage than that which had already been done. “You can still make it right,” she said. “You don’t know until you try.”

“I’m done with trying.”

“You say that now, but you’ll feel differently in the morning,” she insisted. “You can’t be thinking clearly right now.”

“My head’s as clear as it will ever be,” he said, in that strange, hollow voice that seemed to rise from the bottom of a well, those burning eyes of his fixed on her with unwavering intensity.

Eleanor turned her gaze to the darkened window, a shudder going through her as the image of Lowell’s leering face loomed before her unseeing eyes. She emptied her glass, in a single medicinal gulp that burned its way down her throat.

“Unless you have another bottle stashed away, I’m afraid that’s the last of it,” William said.

“Just as well. Any more and I wouldn’t be fit for polite company.” The idea of her being fit for any company whatsoever, polite or otherwise, struck her as funny, and she began to giggle. Before long she was doubled over with hysterical laughter, gasping for breath.

William rose and took her by the hand, pulling her to her feet. “Come, let’s get you to bed.”

With a last hiccough, all the hilarity went out of Eleanor, leaving her limp and drained. William guided her down the hall and into the bedroom, Eleanor teetering like a frail old woman. She fell onto the bed, not even bothering to undress. He drew a blanket over her, dropping a chaste kiss onto her forehead, and he was about to tiptoe out of the room when she caught hold of his wrist. In the light from
the hallway that fell across his lean, hawk-nosed face she could see the worry in his eyes. It was the look of a man who knows his life is about to change, not for the better.

“Don’t go,” she whispered.

He shook his head, saying gently. “You get some rest. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

“No. Please. I don’t want to be alone.”

Wordlessly, he nodded, then sat down on the end of the bed to pry off his shoes. As he crawled under the blanket and stretched out beside her, the comfort of his presence warmed her like the shot of whiskey, the bulwark of his body nestled against hers, his arm curled protectively about her shoulders. He smelled of tonight’s clandestine activities—sweat and dirt and piney resin from the branches with which they’d covered Lowell’s grave—but for some reason it only made her love him more.

She snuggled up against him, saying in a groggy voice, “It’s strange, isn’t it? The two of us in bed together. All the times I’ve thought about it, I never imagined it would be like this.”

“Me either,” he murmured thickly in her ear.

“So you’ve thought about it, too?”

“More than you want to know.”

“Is there something wrong with us, do you think, talking like this after we’ve just buried a man?”

“I think we threw out the rule book a long time ago,” he said, his fingers brushing her cheek in the darkness. His voice was scratchy with exhaustion and his breath smelled of whiskey. “Now why don’t we get some sleep. We can talk in the morning.”

She started to say something else, but William was already fast asleep, snoring lightly. Moments later Eleanor drifted off, too.

She slept straight through until morning, waking to the sound of the dogs barking outside. Even then, she kept her eyes shut, suspended somewhere between the blissful ignorance of sleep and the dark thing hovering at the edge of consciousness. Then, all at once, the memory of yesterday’s events came rushing up behind her closed eyelids. For a moment, in her half-awake state, she felt sure that she must have dreamed it, then she opened her eyes and saw William lying wide awake beside her, in his dirty, rumpled clothing, sporting a day’s growth of beard, and she knew that it was all too real.

“It really happened, didn’t it? For a moment I thought I’d dreamed it,” she said. He gave a somber nod, and she fell back with a low moan. What had seemed possible in last night’s befogged state struck her now, in the light of day, as utterly insane. They would never get away with this. What had made her think they could? “So what do we do now?”

“The usual things. Get up, get dressed, have breakfast. Unless you have a better idea.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any point in turning ourselves in.”

“None at all.”

“They might still track us down, you know.”

“If they do, I’m the one they’ll arrest. You did nothing wrong.”

“Who would believe that?”

William brought a hand to her face, running his thumb over her cheek. “Don’t worry, they won’t find out. The last thing Lowell would have done was leave word with anyone about where he was going, so no one even knows he was here,” he reasoned, with more conviction than she guessed he felt.

Eleanor, desperate to grasp at any straw, told herself he was right. She had to believe that. It was the only thing to hold on to at the moment.

“Even if we don’t go to jail, we could go to hell,” she said. “Some would call it a sin, what we did.” Her father’s image rose in her mind, his pious face and his hands folded about his bible.

William held her gaze, her chin still cupped in his hand. “When I pulled that trigger, the only thing I was thinking was that if I didn’t aim straight he’d hurt you. I can live with what I did, Eleanor, but
that
would have been unbearable.”

She saw the love blazing from his eyes, and it was almost more than she could absorb in her current, fragile state. Her throat seized up on her, and when she spoke it was in a choked whisper. “Oh, William. When I think what might have happened if you hadn’t come along . . . ”

She buried her face against his chest. He kissed her tenderly on the top of the head, then when she raised herself up, not so tenderly on the mouth. The shock of his lips against hers went through her like a bolt of lightning, igniting something in her, something beyond all thought and reason and more powerful than any whispered endearments.

Later on, Eleanor would have no recollection of either of them getting undressed. Their coming together happened so naturally, it was as if they’d been born again in each other’s arms. With the morning sunlight warming their bare limbs, they made love with an urgency that was like a living thing apart from them. She was consumed by it. Biting and bucking, crying out with an abandon that would have shocked her husband.

William became a different person as well. Gone was the quiet, considerate soul she’d grown to love, in his place a man barely able to contain himself. A beautiful wild creature who saw nothing wrong with what they were doing, who in fact celebrated it. They clung to each other as if otherwise they might be swept away, their sweat mingling, his hands covering every inch of her that wasn’t already covered by his body, his fingernails, still embedded with dirt, digging into her flesh, making her arch with pleasure.

Even when it was over and Eleanor utterly spent, she was left wanting more. And after a few minutes, apparently, so was William. The next time, they took it slow, exploring every inch of each other’s bodies, reveling in the minutest of touches, the least little flicker of a tongue, each brush of lips over bare skin. Soon enough it would be time for William to go, but for now they were in their own world, lost to the one beyond these walls.

Finally he could no longer put off the inevitable. He rose from the bed and Eleanor reluctantly followed suit. She fixed breakfast while he took a shower and put on the clothes she’d given him to wear, an old shirt and a pair of trousers that had belonged to Joe. The shirt was so big it flapped on him, as if on a clothesline, and the cuffs of the trousers barely covered his ankles, but William didn’t seem to mind; they were clean at least.

They ate their breakfast in silence, but it wasn’t a heavy silence like before, more the intimate one of lovers for whom there was no need for conversation. And what was there to say? Words wouldn’t have changed a thing. Yesterday she’d watched a man die and this morning she’d made love to a married man. Not the sort of things that made for a happy ending.

William attempted to put a good face on it nonetheless. “It doesn’t always have to be this way,” he whispered in her ear, as he was leaving. They were standing in the doorway, cheek to cheek with their arms wrapped around each other, William taking slow, deep breaths, as if he couldn’t get enough of her scent.

Eleanor drew back, her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t. You’ll only make it worse.”

“I could ask for a divorce,” he went on in that same reckless tone. “Martha doesn’t need me. She hasn’t for a long time.”

“What about your son? He still needs you.”

“Danny knows I love him. Nothing will ever change that.” William’s voice grew hesitant nonetheless.

“Yes, and that means you’d cut your arm off before you’d see him get hurt,” she said, thinking of the lengths she would have gone to protect Lucy. “Now go home to your wife and son.” She gave him a none too gentle shove before she could weaken and give in.

“Will I see you again?” he asked, his eyes searching her face.

Eleanor longed to tell him what he wanted to hear, but they would only be fooling themselves, she knew. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea,” she told him.

“Maybe not, but who gives a damn?”

“I do, and so will you, once you’ve had a chance to think it through.”

He shook his head, pulling her to him, roughly almost. He was holding her so tightly she could scarcely breathe. “You really believe that? That I’ll think better of it?” He gave a hoarse laugh. “God, I almost wish you were right. Life would be a damn sight easier. But don’t you see? It’s too
late for that. I love you, Eleanor. I love you so much I can’t bear the idea of us being apart. I want us to be together
always.
”

Eleanor wanted nothing more at that moment than to remain in his arms forever, damn the consequences, but she drew back to give him a sorrowful look. “We don’t have that luxury. It’s not just your family I’m thinking of. If we don’t handle this just right . . .” She didn’t have to remind him that they weren’t out of the woods yet as far as Lowell was concerned. If a search party was launched and his body discovered, people might start to put two and two together. Any suspicious behavior on their part would be noted.