“Be patient,” she repeated. “I’ve so much to do today, so much to be finished with. But there are beautiful days ahead of us.”
As she picked up the tote and the dress and headed toward the hallway, David said, “Was that blood?”
She halted and glanced back at him. “What—the dress?” A light, seemingly genuine laugh escaped her. “No, no, no. Wine. Just wine.”
“You always carry a bottle of spot remover?”
“A lot of the time, yeah. I can be such a klutz.”
As far as he had seen, she was grace personified.
“Now I’ve really got to run,” she said, and hurried off to take a shower.
| 29 |
On the windowsill by the back door, the house key gleamed in the morning sunlight, a mundane object yet as fateful looking as King Arthur’s enchanted sword drawn from a block of stone. It had not been there when David had gone to bed the previous night.
When he picked up the key, it was warm in his hand.
He had not given her a key.
He stepped onto the back porch where two rocking chairs stood with a wrought-iron glass-topped table between them. He overturned one of the chairs and looked at the small key box attached to the frame. He pressed the lid, and it dropped open, revealing an empty container. He replaced the key and clicked the lid shut and put the chair upright.
He had never told her where the spare key was hidden. Emily had known, but Maddison had not.
Standing at the head of the porch steps, he regarded the roses as white as innocence and as red as blood. Barely stirred by a faint breeze, the Australian tree fern in one corner of the property cast a lazily undulant shadow like the wimpling fins of a manta ray.
David crossed the yard to the man-size door that served the two-stall garage. When he peered through the window, just enough light allowed him to see that only his car was parked inside.
He walked around the side of the garage. Her vintage Mercedes wasn’t on the brick apron between the big roll-up doors and the alleyway blacktop.
When he went to the front of the house, her car was not parked anywhere along the block.
Once more in the kitchen, less because he wanted coffee than because he needed something to do, he brewed a pot. Like him, she took hers black.
In the hallway, as he carried two mugs to the master bedroom, he heard her talking softly to someone. As he crossed the threshold, she terminated the call and dropped the iPhone in her tote.
“You’re a doll,” she declared as she accepted the mug that he offered.
She wore a bra, panties, camisole, and high heels. She had dried her hair with a towel, but though it was still damp, it fell in an artful shag as black as raven’s wings. Breathtakingly erotic, she nevertheless looked vulnerable as well, and suddenly David feared for her.
She took a long drink of the coffee—“Mmmmm”—and another. She carried the mug into the bathroom, put it on the granite countertop. The yellow dress hung from a hook on the back of the door. Maddison slipped it off the hanger and shrugged into it. “Zip me up?”
As he obliged her, he realized that in the night, when she had been naked and his to explore, he had failed to look for the small, flat, golden birthmark an inch below her navel. The light had been dim, and passion had pressed out all thought of satisfying that eccentric curiosity.
Connecting the tiny hook and eye at the apex of the zipper, he told himself there could be no birthmark identical to Emily’s, for this wasn’t the woman he lost. To believe she’d returned without having aged a day, to think that somehow she was Emily preserved and resurrected . . . Well, it would have been a little creepy to make love to her. No matter how desirable she was, no matter how much he wanted to erase the past ten years, no matter how he had been taken off guard when she slipped into his bed, he wouldn’t have melted into her arms so easily if he genuinely embraced the possibility that she was the long-missing and thought-dead Emily.
Besides, no matter what the circumstances of her disappearance, Emily would not have made a mystery of her return to him, would not have toyed with him by claiming to be an assassin, or by leaving the flowers at the grave.
And what did it say about him that he would indulge Maddison’s deceits and game playing in the hope that with her he could have at least a semblance, a simulation, of the life he might have had with Emily? Did he see her as a medicine for grief? A cure for guilt? Those were questions he needed to answer, but at the moment could not address. The mere presence of this woman left him without the power of introspection.
Anyway, the mystery of Maddison Sutton was not whether she was Emily Carlino. Her mysteries were many. How could she be a dead ringer for Emily? Why had she contrived to come into his life? She had planned that first encounter in the restaurant; he had no doubt of that. How did she know things that only he or Emily could know—where he kept the spare key, Emily’s favorite color and flower and time of day, that a two-plot grave marker waited for names to be cut into the stone. How did she know the way that Emily kissed, as no other woman but Emily had ever kissed him like that?