The Burnt Orange Sunrise (2 page)

“Not human.
Her”

“Will she feel any pain?”

“Not one bit. She’ll never even know what hit her.”

He ran a gloved hand over his face, distraught. “I don’t know, it feels so wrong.”

“There’s no such thing as wrong. There’s bold and there’s frightened.” She studied him carefully in the dimly lit car. “Which are your

“Right now, I’d say you have balls enough for both of us.”

She let out a soft laugh. She had a delicious laugh. She had been told this by any number of men. “It’s the right move. We need to do this.”

He gazed at her pleadingly. “How do I know for sure that you love me?”

So that was it. She relaxed now, knowing what he wanted, knowing that everything was going to be okay. Turning in her seat, she reached over and gently unzipped his pants, searching for him with her deft sure fingers, caressing him, squeezing him, feeling him grow under her touch.

“There, there…” she whispered lovingly.

He drew his breath in but remained stone-still, as if he were afraid she’d stop if he so much as moved a muscle.

“There, there…”

She wriggled sideways and knelt before him, taking him deep into her mouth, teasing him with her lips and tongue. Slowly, she moved her head up and down on him, up and down. Steadily, his breathing grew more rapid.

It bothered some women, performing this particular task on a
man. A couple of her friends disliked it so intensely they flat-out refused to do it, even for their own husbands. Her it had never bothered. In fact, she found an open-mouthed kiss to be infinitely more off-putting. Some guy jamming his tongue into her mouth, forcing his spit and his gastric juices down her throat. That was supposed to be romantic? No, for her this was nothing. Besides, when she had a man’s zipper down, she was in charge of him. And she was always happiest when she was. She knew this about herself.

He climaxed in no time, his hands gripping her head tightly, feet kicking out at the floorboards, that strange gurgling noise of his coming from his throat. Then she zipped him back up, gave him an affectionate pat and sat back in her seat.

He stared straight ahead, waiting for his breathing to return to normal. “I love you,” he said, his voice painfully earnest. “You do know that, don’t you?”

“I do,” she said. “And I love you back.”

He put the car in gear and eased it out into the darkness of the parking lot, away from the floodlit platform.

“So what do you say?” she asked, gazing at him.

“I say the mean old woman’s in our way,” he replied solemnly. “And she has to die. She just has to.”

Delighted, she leaned over and kissed his cheek and said, “So she’ll die.”

I
T WAS
M
ITCH’S FIRST
stay on the Connecticut Gold Coast in February—the official off-season. As in a lot of Dorset, locals shut off their water, bled their pipes and headed somewhere—anywhere—else. Mitch was discovering that there was a very good reason for this. Those refreshing summer sea breezes off of Long Island Sound were now howling thirty-five-miles-per-hour arctic blasts that never let up. Especially out on Big Sister Island, where Mitch’s quaint little antique post-and-beam carriage house offered very little in the way of insulation. Make that none. His big bay windows, with their breathtaking water views in three different directions, offered so little wind resistance that they might as well have been thrown open wide. It was very difficult to keep the temperature inside his house above a gusty fifty-five degrees, even with the furnace running nonstop and the fireplace stoked with hickory logs.

And then there were the storms.

Like the wicked Nor’easter that blew in on the last day of January, flooding his kitchen and crawl space, ripping half of the roof from his barn and, for good measure, washing away a section of the quarter-mile wooden causeway that connected the forty-acre island to the mainland, rendering it unsafe for vehicular traffic. The only way Mitch could cross it now was on foot.

All of this plus it happened to be the snowiest winter anyone under the age of ninety could remember. It seemed as if every three days another six inches fell. Mitch had personally measured seventy-eight inches since the first flakes appeared back on Thanksgiving Day. The banks of plowed snow that edged the town roads had to be ten feet high.

In spite of these rigors, Mitch Berger, lead film critic for the most
prestigious, and therefore the lowest-paying, of New York’s three daily newspapers, stayed on. This was his off-season, after all. The season when the studios released only what was officially known in the movie trade as “Post-Holiday Crap.” Nothing was due out until Memorial Day that didn’t star either Martin Lawrence or David Spade. Or, God forbid, Martin Lawrence
and
David Spade. Besides, Mitch was finding the beach a surprisingly beautiful place to be in the winter. He had never seen a full moon shine so brightly as it did on a cover of pure white snow. He had never seen sunsets such as these; the crystal-clear winter sky offered up such awe-inspiring pink-and-red light shows that he’d taken to photographing them many afternoons. Honestly, he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to leave such a winter wonderland.

So he stayed. He also had his responsibilities, after all. He’d promised the other islanders, all of whom had migrated south to the Peck family compound in Hobe Sound, that he’d keep an eye on their houses for them. Plus three of Dorset’s elderly shut-ins were counting on him to deliver their groceries. This, Mitch had learned, was part of the social contract when you lived in a small town. Those who were able-bodied looked out for those who were not.

And Mitch was not exactly idle professionally. He was busy making notes for
Nothing But Happy Endings
, a book he wanted to write about the pernicious influence of Hollywood escapism on contemporary American politics. Washington and Hollywood were one and the same, Mitch felt. The nation’s halls of power nothing more than sound stages, its politicians merely actors mouthing carefully scripted, substance-free dialogue, its journalists nothing more than compliant pitchmen eager to peddle that day’s feel-good story line. Every policy issue, no matter how knotty and complex, was now being reduced to a simplistic, highly commercial morality tale. Even war itself was nothing more than just another cable entertainment choice, complete with blood-free battles, awesome computer-generated graphics and soaring background music. As Mitch had watched Hollywood’s escapist mind-set steadily engulf and devour
the nation’s public discourse, he’d found himself growing more and more alarmed, because if there was one thing he knew, it was this:

Life is not a movie.

And so he wanted to write about it. At age thirty-two, Mitch had written three books so far, all of them lively film encyclopedias that were popular with armchair video and DVD fans. But he had never written a serious book, a book that required a lot of long walks on the beach and solitary evenings spent before the fire, searching his soul while he squeezed out notes on his beloved sky-blue Fender Stratocaster. It was something he needed to do. Mitch wanted his career to be about something more than a mountain of film trivia. Sure, he could readily provide the answer to a question like, say, “Who is Sonny Bupp?” (Sonny Bupp was the child performer who played Orson Welles’s son in
Citizen Kane.)
But so what? Mitch was a critic, not a game-show contestant. Partly, his desire to write
Nothing But Happy Endings
was fueled by the new, socially involved life he was leading in Dorset. Partly it was the influence of Dorset’s tall, gifted and babe-a-licious resident trooper, Desiree Mitry, whose commitment to her art and her work was boundless.

The only problem was that he really couldn’t seem to get started on it. Oh, he had lots of ideas. Just no coherent structure or vehicle for them. No outline. No plan. No, well, book. Possibly, he didn’t have it in him. Possibly, he was out of his league. Such thoughts had occurred to him. But he would not give in to them. Just kept on walking the beach and making more notes, believing that his breakthrough would soon come.

Mitch also had a certain matter weighing on his mind that he needed to get straight with Des. It was something heavy, something unavoidable, something he had to tell her. And he would, when the time was right. But to date, beyond one oafish attempt that he desperately wished he could take back, he still hadn’t gotten it done. And it was beginning to create some tension between them. Because anytime he edged anywhere near the subject, a melon-sized lump would form in his throat. Sensing his discomfort, Des would immediately morph from his green-eyed sweet patootie into a taut, six- foot-one-inch
predatory cat. Her Wary, Scary Look, he’d taken to calling it.

Quickly, he would change the subject. She did carry a loaded semiautomatic weapon, after all.

Still, Mitch looked forward to each winter day out on Big Sister with great enthusiasm. All except for this getting-out-of-bed part, he had to admit as he lay there listening to the early-morning snowflakes patter softly against the skylight over his head. Mitch’s sleeping loft happened to be unheated, aside from the open trapdoor in the floor. During the summer the trapdoor helped to ventilate the loft. Now it allowed the heat from the kitchen below to waft upward at suppertime, warming the loft just enough so that Mitch didn’t have to look at his breath when he climbed into the feathers. Trouble was, by morning it was a meat locker—and Mitch was just so nice and warm buried there under two Hudson Bay blankets, a goose-down comforter, a Clemmie and a Quirt. Quirt, who was Mitch’s lean, sinewy, outdoor hunter, had taken to sleeping on his chest. Clemmie, his lazy meat loaf of a house cat, lay on Mitch’s belly. The cats assumed these same sleeping positions every night, by some territorial arrangement that they’d worked out between themselves. They never varied.

Reluctantly, Mitch awakened them, and the three musketeers shared a huge morning yawn. First Clemmie, who passed it to Mitch, who passed it to Quirt. Then, as they began stretching and washing themselves—the cats, that is—Mitch got up and coaxed his pudgy self down the steep, narrow stairs to crank up the heat, shivering in his gray sweatpants and complimentary red sweatshirt for Rob Zombie’s
House of 1,000 Corpses.

Mitch had one very open, good-sized room to live and work in downstairs, with exposed, hand-hewn chestnut posts and beams, a big stone fireplace and views—views everywhere. He had a kitchen and bath. And, upstairs, his sleeping loft. It was a tiny house by most people’s standards. But it was everything Mitch had ever wanted.

There was still a good warm bed of coals in the fireplace. He fed the fire and got it going again, then put his coffeemaker on, first preheating
the pot with hot tap water. If he didn’t, the boiling water would shatter its ice-cold glass on contact. Mitch had learned this the hard way.

The thermometer outside his kitchen window said it was a balmy two degrees this morning. An oil barge was heading for the big tanks in New Haven, riding low. No one else was out on the water. Even though it was snowing pretty steadily, there was a thin sliver of burnt orange sunrise layered in between the waterline and the cloud cover. Mitch had never seen such a sunrise phenomenon before. He went and fetched his camera, but by then it was already gone—all that was left was a faint orange glow on the water. Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. What did orange mean? Was this a good or a bad omen?

He turned on the Weather Channel, which was something he’d taken to doing no more than twenty times a day since winter had arrived. The National Weather Service was predicting three-to-five inches of new snow on the Connecticut shoreline this morning, tapering off to flurries by afternoon and followed by—surprise, surprise—gale-force winds. And this was actually good news. What they were experiencing was the relatively harmless northern edge of winter storm Caitlin, which was heading out to sea south of Long Island by way of the Delmarva Peninsula.

He shaved and drank his coffee while he made himself a large bowl of Irish oatmeal topped with dried cranberries and Vermont maple syrup. Oatmeal was Mitch’s main form of cold-weather sustenance before noon. After that, he moved on to his world-famous American chop suey, which he cooked up by the vast pot load, reheating the pot again and again until it had formed a truly magnificent crust.

Mitch had owned a good, arctic-weight Eddie Bauer goose-down parka for years, but out here it was not nearly enough protection. Not without layers and layers underneath it. First a T-shirt, then a cotton turtleneck, then a wool shirt, then a heavy wool fisherman’s sweater. He’d never needed long Johns when he’d lived in the city. Now he wore a pair made of itch-free merino wool under beefy twenty-four-ounce
wool field pants. He’d never bothered with a hat either. Now he owned a festive red-and-black-checked Double Mackinaw Wool number complete with sheepskin earflaps. His socks were heavy-duty wool. His boots were insulated Gore Tex snow boots. His gloves were lined with shearling. Much of his new winter wardrobe he’d ordered from C.C. Filson and Company, the Victoria’s Secret catalog of foul-weather geeks the world over.

Properly swaddled and insulated, earflaps down, collar up, Mitch slogged his way out into the two-degree snow, feeling very much like the Michelin Man’s heavyset Jewish cousin. The snowflakes stung his cheeks a bit. Otherwise he was plenty warm. Three or so inches of fresh powder had already fallen, the snow creating a wondrous muffled silence, as if cotton batting were wrapped around everything. There had been some frozen rain last night before the snow came. His boots crunched hard against it as he plowed his way toward the barn, where he filled his wheelbarrow with firewood. He rolled it back to the house and stacked the wood by the door under the overhang. Then he trudged down the narrow path toward Big Sister’s beach. Each and every tuft of tall, golden meadow grass was swathed in white. Snowflakes dusted the sharp green of the cedar trees and clung to the gnarly, iron-gray bare branches of the old sugar maples.