soft pale skin of midriff above the waistband of her half-slip. The tears spilt down again as they had before, her soundless crying. Then she rushed at him, and locked her arms around his neck, kissing him, and slipping her hand down between his legs.
It was a fait accompli, as they say. And then there was her faint whisper as they snuggled together on the carpet.
“Don’t worry about it.”
He was sleepy; he listed; he didn’t fall deep; he couldn’t; there was too much right there before his mind’s eye. He started humming. How could he not worry about everything? He could not close his eyes. He hummed and softly sang.
“Violetta’s waltz,” she said. “Just hold on to me for a little while, will you?”
It seems he slept, or sank into some sort of approximate peaceful state, his fingers on her sweaty adorable little neck, and his lips pressed to her forehead. But then the doorbell sounded, and he heard Eugenia in the hall, taking her time to answer, talking aloud as she always did, “On my way, I’m comin’.”
The report had been delivered. He had to see it. How to get it without revealing the sleeping child on the rug, he didn’t know. But he had to see it. It hadn’t taken a half hour for that file to get here. He thought of Rowan and he felt such dread that he couldn’t form words about it, or make decisions, or even reflect.
He sat up, trying to regain his strength, to shake off the languor of sex, and not see this naked girl on the carpet asleep, head cradled on a nest of her own red hair, her belly as smooth and perfect as her breasts, all of her luscious and inviting to him. Michael, you pig, that you could do this!
There was the dull vibration of the big front door slamming shut. Eugenia passed again, steady tread, silence.
He put on his clothes, and then combed his hair. He was staring at the phonograph. Yes, that was exactly the one he had seen in the living room, the one which had played for him the ghost waltz. And there sat the black disk on which the ghost waltz had been recorded many decades ago!
He was confounded for a moment. Trying to keep his eyes off the gleaming child, pondering and wondering that for a moment he had gone calm in the midst of all of it. But you did this. You could not stay at top pitch every moment. And so he thought, My wife may be alive; she may be dead; but I have to believe she’s alive! And she’s with that thing. That thing must need her!
Mona turned over. Her back was flawless and white, her hips for all their smallness proportioned like those of a little woman. Nothing boyish about her in her youth; resolutely female.
Tear your eyes off her, man. Eugenia and Henri are both around somewhere. You are pushing your luck. You are asking to be bricked up in the cellar.
There is no cellar.
I know that. Well, then the attic.
He opened the door slowly. Silence in the big hall. Silence in the double parlor. But there was the envelope on the hall table—where all mail and deliveries were placed. He could see the familiar embossed name of Mayfair and Mayfair. He tiptoed out, took the envelope, fearful that any moment Eugenia or Henri would appear, and then he went into the dining room. He could sit at the head of the table and read the thing, and that way, if anybody went near that library door, he could stop them.
Sooner or later, she would wake up and get dressed. And then? He didn’t know. He just hoped she didn’t go home, that she didn’t leave him here.
Rotten coward, he thought. Rowan, would you understand all this? Funny thing was, Rowan might. Rowan understood men, better than any woman he’d ever known, even Mona.
He switched on the floor lamp by the fireplace, then sat down at the head of the table and removed the packet of Xeroxes from the envelope.
It was pretty much what they’d told him.
The geneticists in New York and Europe had gotten a bit sarcastic about the specimens. “This seems to be a calculated combination of genetic material from more than one primate species.”
It was the eyewitness material from Donnelaith that killed him. “The woman was sick. She stayed in her room most of the time. But when he went out, she went