The Burnt Orange Sunrise (5 page)

And now here she was, Master Sergeant Des Mitry, getting dissed by stranded mesomorphs.

This was the price she’d paid to pursue her dream, and she was willing to pay it. Happy to pay it. But there were moments, like right now, when it was growing dark and she was driving along in the middle of snowy nowhere, swearing she could still smell raccoon piss, that Des missed the action.

Even though that action had nearly torn her apart. Mostly, it was the faces of the murder victims. She could never seem to forget those faces. Especially the babies. The fact that her marriage to Brandon was falling apart certainly hadn’t helped. In order to cope with it all, she had brought home crime scene photos and started making drawings of them. Transferring the horror from her nightmares to the page, line by line, shadow by shadow. Injecting the images with fearsome emotional power. Turning them into one gut-wrenching portrait after another. Thanks to the twist of fate that had barreled her headlong into Mitch Berger, Des’s therapy became her salvation. Her portraits had gained her admittance to the world-renowned Dorset Academy of Fine Arts, where she was presently studying long-pose figure drawing two nights a week, thereby shining a light on every single weakness in her game. Still, a pair of her most recent victim portraits had been included in this month’s prestigious student show, and that was not shabby for a freshman. Des still had much more to learn, and she knew this. Yet she’d found herself getting itchy in class lately. Anxious to move on. She wasn’t sure where. She wasn’t sure why.

She wasn’t sure about Mitch, either. She could not imagine her life without him in it, even though they made no sense at all together.
None. But lately her beloved, exceedingly chatty doughboy had grown strangely quiet and remote on her. Something was eating at him. He would not say what. All she had to go on was the lone grenade he’d lobbed at her across the dinner table a few weeks back—a cryptic, highly unsettling question that had instantly filled her with a million doubts. Doubts that Mitch had, thus far, done squat to assuage. Anytime it seemed that he was about to spill his guts he’d swallow hard and out would come…
nada.
His Great Big Fat Nothing Gulp, she’d taken to calling it. Des was terribly thrown by his behavior, more than she could have thought possible. In fact, Mitch’s strained silences were making her so tense that she was experiencing the recurrence of a dreaded nervous thing that she thought she’d said good-bye to back when she was a gawky, vision-impaired giraffe of a high school girl.

Still, she had to admit that he’d sounded like his bubbly old self on the phone this morning when he called to tell her they’d been invited to dinner at Astrid’s Castle. More excited than she’d heard him in weeks. So maybe it had passed, whatever the hell it was.

Then again, maybe it hadn’t.

She was tied up at the barracks for well over an hour filling out her incident report, requisitioning a new pair of boots from the quartermaster, and responding to one smirky male query after another about that pungent new perfume she seemed to be wearing. It was already six o’clock by the time she started home to her cottage overlooking Uncas Lake. Mitch was expecting to pick her up in twenty minutes. No way. She phoned him on her cell to say she’d have to meet him there. No problem. Mitch was used to her unpredictable work schedule.

Bella Tillis was busy whipping up an apple cake in the big open kitchen when Des got there. A round, fierce little Brooklyn-born widow in her mid-seventies, Bella Tillis was bunking with Des while she looked for a place of her own. Bella had been her next-door neighbor in the New Haven suburb of Woodbridge back when Brandon had ditched Des for Tamika, a U.S. congressman’s daughter with whom he’d started sleeping back when he and Tamika were
classmates at Yale Law School. In fact, Brandon had never stopped sleeping with Tamika, not even after he’d married Des. Which had taught Des one very valuable lesson in life:
Dont ever trust lawyers.
And caused her to make one very solemn vow to herself:
I will never get married again for as long as I live.
Because no man on this planet was ever going to get the chance to hurt her that bad again. Never. Utterly shattered by Brandon’s betrayal, Des had stopped going to work, stopped leaving the house and stopped eating. Until, that is, Bella came barging in one morning, Tupperware tub of stuffed cabbage in hand, and recruited Des for her feral stray rescue program. They were best friends now. When Des relocated to Dorset, Bella unloaded her own big house and followed her. As far as Des was concerned, she could stay as long as she wanted. Bella was good company and a dynamite housekeeper and it was nice to have her there when Des felt like staying over with Mitch.

“Oy-yoy, Desiree, what is that awful smell?” she demanded when Des came charging through the back door into the laundry room, shivering from the wind.

“It’s raccoon urine,” Des replied as she stood there on the mud rug, unlacing her spare boots. Not an easy proposition when she had five house cats studying her socks with keen, busy-nosed interest.

Bella appeared in the laundry-room doorway, scrunching up her face. “Forgive me, it sounded like you just said—”

“You asked, I answered.”

“Take those socks off at once, tall person. I will not have you tracking that-that smell all over my clean floor.”

“Um, okay, I like to think of it as our clean floor.”

“Off!”
she roared, hurling herself in Des’s path. Des towered over her, but Bella was as wide as a nose tackle.

“All right, all right.” She yanked them off and tossed them out the door into the snow. “Feel free to burn them.”

“Oh, I shall. Believe me.”

Barefoot, Des hurried across the kitchen toward her bedroom. When she’d bought the place she’d torn out walls so that her kitchen, dining room and living room all flowed together. Her studio was in
the living room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake. “Bella, I am feeling
so
not glamorous right now. And I am late, late, late. Tell me what to put on.”

“Well, for starters, forget glamorous.” Bella went back to work on a Granny Smith with a paring knife, slicing it rapid-fire into a mixing bowl. “You’re not about glamour.”

Des stopped in her tracks, hands on hips. “Was that supposed to be a compliment?”

“No, that was honesty,” she replied, hurling cinnamon, brown sugar and nutmeg into the bowl with the apple slices. She made cakes just like Des’s granny did. Never measured, never used a recipe. Hell, there was no recipe. “Glamour is a facade, Desiree. Strictly for
tsotskes
who are trying to hide something. You don’t have to hide a thing. You’re the real goods.”

“Does that mean I should or shouldn’t wear a dress?”

Bella puffed out her cheeks in disgust. “Covering your
tuchos
with a dress is like putting a veil over the Mona Lisa. I forbid it.”

“Girl, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“I don’t either, quite frankly.”

Des whipped off her uniform en route to her bedroom and jumped into the shower, toweling off while she searched frantically through her closet. She was not what anyone would call delicate. Des knew this. She was broad-shouldered, high-rumped and cut with muscle. Nor was she a girlie-girl. She kept her hair short and nubby, and wore no war paint or nail polish. But she did have alluring almond-shaped pale green eyes, and a dimply wraparound smile that could melt titanium from a thousand feet away. And Des knew this, too. She settled on her black cashmere turtleneck, gray flannel slacks and black boots with chunky two-inch heels.

By now it was a quarter to seven. She’d already reloaded her weapon at the barracks. She tossed it and her shield into her shoulder bag. Her cell phone and pager she wore on her belt. On her way out she shoved her gloves into a pocket of the hooded, buttery-soft shearling coat that she’d bought in Florence on her honeymoon. She loved
that damned coat so much she’d worn it around their hotel room naked. Brandon hadn’t exactly minded. God, that was ages ago.

“Yum, what am I smelling?” she wondered, pausing in the kitchen to say good-bye.

“I already had the oven going, so I figured I may as well do my brisket, too. When I thawed it this morning I didn’t know you had plans.”

“Sure, we can have it tomorrow. Mitch loves your brisket.”

“Of course he does. This is a man of discerning tastes.”

“If that’s the case, then how do you explain his American chop suey?”

“This is also a man,” Bella replied, glancing at her. “What’s with you tonight? You nervous about meeting Ada?”

“Should I be? I don’t know her films.”

“She was one of my heroes when I was a girl,” Bella recalled, her face creasing into a smile. “So smart and gutsy and beautiful. Her husband, Luther, was a very fine playwright. The two of them were hounded out of the country by those thugs during the McCarthy era. That was a terrible time, Desiree. A girlfriend of mine whose father wrote for the radio, he ended up committing suicide.” She peered at Des shrewdly. “What is it then?”

“What is what?”

“You’re acting
meshuga
tonight.”

“Am not. I’m just in a rush.”

“Whatever you say,” Bella said doubtfully. “Have fun.”

“I’ll do my best.” Des was halfway to the door, car keys in hand, before she came back and said, “It’s Mitch. I think he has a problem with our relationship.”

“Tie that bull outside, as we used to say on Nostrand Avenue.”

“Bella, I have never understood what that expression means.”

“Well, what’s the problem—is it the lovemaking?”

“God, no. He’s still the Wonder from Down Under. But the man has something serious on his mind, Bella. He keeps getting all quiet and far away. Which I’m, like, he is never.”

“Maybe it’s that book he’s been trying to write. How is that going?”

“It’s not, near as I can tell.”

“Then that’s probably it. Men can get very strange when their work isn’t going well.”

“Men can get very strange come rain or come shine. But it’s not the book, Bella. His words say otherwise.”

“Why, what did he say?”

Des took a deep breath before she replied, “He said, and I quote, ‘I wonder if we’re getting in too deep.’”

Bella’s face dropped. “Oh, I see… And what did you say?”

“I said, ‘Why, do
you
think we are?’ To which he replied, and I quote, ‘It could certainly appear that way.’ To which I said, ‘Appear that way to
whom?’
”

“Hold on, you actually said to
whom?”

“I did. This girl’s got herself a proper education.”

“And what did Mitch say to that?”

“Jack. Not one damned word.”

Bella considered this carefully. “Desiree, I’m not necessarily hearing qualms here. Mitch could simply be trying to engage you in a dialogue about
your
feelings.”

“No sale. If he’s not getting cold feet, then why raise it at all?”

“You do have a point,” Bella admitted, sticking out her lower lip.

“Besides, when we first got together we swore we’d never do this.”

“Do what?”

“There are two subjects we agreed that we’d never, ever obsess about—our slight cultural differences and our future. That’s written in stone, Bella. It’s a rule.”

“Tattela, we’re talking about a relationship here, not a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Rules like that are made to be broken.”

“Not by me they’re not.”

“Okay, here’s a kooky idea—have you tried talking to him about it?”

“I can’t. I get all uptight and then I start feeling this horrible panic
thing coming on that I haven’t had since I was fourteen. And, excuse me, but
kooky?”

“So I’m not hip. Shoot me.” Bella furrowed her brow. “What kind of panic thing are we talking about?”

“We’re not talking about it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s incredibly embarrassing, that’s why not.”

“If you can’t tell me, who can you tell?”

“No one, I’m hoping.” Des stood there jangling her keys. “He’s met someone else, must be. Someone who he has more in common with. Maybe it’s another movie critic. No, no, that can’t be it. They all look like nearsighted mice. At least, that’s what he told me once. But maybe he was lying to me about that. Maybe they all look like Cameron Diaz. Or maybe he
lilies
nearsighted mice. Or maybe he…” Des stopped and came up for air. “I don’t know who she is, but when I find out I am going to hurt her.”

Bella shook her head at her. “Desiree, that man absolutely adores you, and he’d never give another woman so much as the time of day. He is
not
Brandon.”

“I do know that.”

“Do you? I don’t think so. If you ask me, you’re still schlepping your baggage around with you like Willy Loman with his sample cases.”

Des shot a hurried look at her watch. Past seven now. “Okay, then how do you explain the dead shark?”

“The dead
what?”

“He made me watch
Annie Hall
with him last week—I’d never seen it before.”

“Did you like it?”

“It was okay, if you like watching white people whine for two hours. But there’s this scene with Diane Keaton on the airplane, when Woody says that a relationship is like a shark, it has to keep moving forward or it dies. ‘What we have on our hands is a dead shark,’ is what he says.”

“I remember the scene,” Bella said, nodding.

“Why did Mitch pick
that
movie for us to watch?”

“It’s a classic.”

“World’s full of them.”

“It’s very romantic.”

“Bella, it compares true love to a killing machine.”

“He screened
Psycho
for you a couple of weeks ago, did he not?”

“And your point is… ?”

“Has he proceeded to hack you to death in the shower with a big knife?”

“No,” Des admitted. “Not yet, anyway.”

“Desiree, I want you to stop and listen to me very carefully,” Bella said sternly. “You
have
to believe in him. You
have
to believe in the two of you. If you don’t, you’re going to sabotage the best thing that’s ever happened to you, and you won’t have anyone to blame but yourself.”