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But talk about risk! Just because Anne had been driving all day didn’t mean she wouldn’t have the same idea.
Just then his stomach grumbled loudly. It was saying—no, yelling—Feed me or I’ll keep you awake all night!
The Hawthorn Lounge, illuminated softly by the lights above the bar and electric candles on the tables, was plush and cozy. It was almost deserted at that hour on a weeknight. He scanned the scattered patrons lingering over their drinks and talking in low voices. No Anne.
A wooden bowl of pretzels beckoned from the bar. He climbed onto a stool and was munching away when the young bartender came over.
“Sorry, sir. Stove’s off. No hot food.”
He asked for a beer and more pretzels. They arrived simultaneously, the beer in a tall slim schooner.
Sipping, crunching, and watching his reflection in the smoked-glass mirror behind the display of bottles and glassware, he contemplated the strange, strange direction his life had taken, and so suddenly. Two days ago he’d fretted about the rent. Now he could afford to stay in five-star hotels like the Hawthorn on his own.
“Vodka tonic, please. No twist.”
He jumped as if he’d been jabbed. Someone had slipped onto the adjoining stool while he was daydreaming.
The voice was a husky purr that made his ears burn at the tips. He’d felt that same sensation recently. Where?
Back home, looking at a picture of a woman posing in a yellow sundress in front of a tree.
He jerked his gaze from the mirror, down to his schooner of beer.Don’t look, Dennis. If you can’t see her, maybe she can’t see you.It had worked with monsters under the bed when he was little.
“That’s flattering. Girl takes a seat right next to a guy in an empty bar—she could sit anywhere, but she decides to sit here—and he doesn’t even give her a glance.”
He looked then. Their eyes met in the mirror. At close range and in person, she was even more striking than her double in his painting.
CHAPTER 9
THE BARTENDER BROUGHT her drink and drifted back to the other end of the bar. Cooke turned her way. She continued to look in the mirror. She had a clean profile, straight nose, round firm chin. Her hair was secured behind her ears with combs; still, it caught the muted overhead light and threw it back in blue haloes. Her skin was pale, almost translucent—in the age of sunlamps and weekends on the beach of Lake Michigan—but her most startling features were her eyelashes. They were long enough to cast shadows on her cheeks, and so far as he could tell they were natural.
“You don’t have to stare that hard to remember me next time,” she told his reflection. “These days everyone has a camera in his pocket.”
She wore a pale-yellow top without sleeves, a dark skirt. Her legs were crossed, showing a bare knee. Her calves were smoothly defined. No jewelry showed, and if she had on makeup it wasn’t discernible. The scent she wore was barely more noticeable, but it was there. It had an ethereal quality, like mist rising from blossoms alien to this plane.
Bluff it out. What’ve you got to lose?“I’m sorry if I was rude. You startled me. I didn’t hear you come up.”
She hadn’t touched her drink. She opened the clutch in her lap, took something out and slid it between her lips. He wondered if he was expected to offer her a light, like a character in an old film, before no-smoking laws. Then she drew on it and blew a jet of bluish mist. It was an e-cigarette, feeding nicotine from a cartridge without need of flame. “That was some storm,” she said.
“It was. It—” Too late. He’d given away the fact that they’d been traveling in the same direction and had both decided to put in at the same hotel, in the same city, in a gang of competing establishments.
But many motorists had been caught in the downpour; there was nothing suspicious in one or two of them checking into the Hawthorn Arms.
If only he hadn’t stopped in midsentence. He’d exposed himself by checking his swing.
She lifted her glass then and sipped, toasting herself on her victory.
“I saw you in the convenience store just before I got on the freeway,” she said, “and again at a rest stop. Could’ve been a coincidence. Not.”
“I get that sometimes. I’ve got one of those faces.”
“One of those cars too. It was parked across the street from my house this morning. Also the rest stop and now it’s parked outside. It’s a mild night. I took a walk.” She drew a lungful of fog and let it out through her nostrils. Then she dropped the thing back into her handbag and turned to face him. “Who are you?”
He had nothing to lose by telling the truth. “I’m an artist.”
“And I’m Julia Roberts.”
He always carried drawing pencils in a pocket protector. He took one out, plucked a cocktail napkin off a stack of them on a saucer, and sketched her profile from memory. He pushed the napkin her way with the pencil.
