Peril

She felt a modest surge of accomplishment, a sense of being useful, then returned to the kitchen and began clearing the table. She’d just finished wiping milk from Nicky’s mouth when she saw Denise fly down the stairs and bolt out into the yard. Kids, Della thought, they’re so crazy now.

“Okay, I’m off,” Mike said as he lumbered back into the kitchen. He glanced out the window to where Denise stood waiting for her bus. “She okay?”

“Getting to be a teenager, that’s all.”

“Anything I should know about?”

“She talks to you as much as me.” She drew Nicky out of the high chair. “Say bye to your dad.”

Mike kissed Nicky on the cheek. “You be a good boy now,” he said brightly. He looked at Della, and his big, clownish face warmed her. “See you tonight.”

“We’re having tuna melt,” she told him. His favorite.

He kissed her, walked to the car, and got in. Denise offered a grudging, halfhearted wave as he drifted backward into the cul-de-sac.

Della returned Nicky to his chair, then began to load the dishwasher. The school bus arrived and Denise bounded onto it. Then the bus pulled away, and Della glimpsed her friend Sara’s house across the cul-de-sac. It looked cold and cheerless and abandoned, everything her house was not, and she felt inexpressibly lucky to have found a guy who’d take care of her, make sure she had everything she needed, provide a life that was truly without peril.

STARK

As he strolled idly down the aisle of the antique shop, he thought of time, then death, then the sweetness of oblivion, how much he’d come to yearn for the end of life. So easy, he told himself, so easy just to let it go, this chain of days that stretched ahead of him. He imagined the moment, the feel of the pistol in his mouth, the shattering impact, and felt himself instantly disintegrate, burst like a vase of air, leaving nothing behind.

Literally nothing save the few luxurious items he’d purchased because the high craft employed in making them lifted his spirits and took his mind off Marisol.

But now, as he approached the anniversary of her murder, he realized that the power of a beautifully cut piece of glass or a perfectly woven scarf to change his mood had waned enormously during the preceding twelve months. He suspected that his getting older was part of it, though he was only fifty-three. The rest was loneliness, and the fading hope that there would ever be an end to it while he lived on earth. He’d loved once, and overwhelmingly lost that love in a whirl of violence, then lived on in the aftermath of that explosion, its shattering echo forever in his mind. Now, more than anything, as he admitted to himself this morning, he wanted an end to memory. Beyond life he saw a world of utter stillness and eternal dark, and yet he harbored the hope that somewhere in that darkness the soul of Marisol waited for him patiently. The nurturing of this hope, he knew, was an act of will. But if he abandoned it, Henderson would win, and Lockridge would win, and they could win only at the cost of Marisol.

Stark shook his head at the morbidity of his thoughts and glanced about the shop, hoping some small, precious thing would catch his eye.

Over the years, he’d spent almost everything he made because he saw no reason to hold on to anything. He had no wife, no children, no one whose later survival meant anything at all to him. And as for saving for that rainy day when he would be old and sick, he knew that he would never reach such a point. If he got sick beyond recovery, he would simply kill himself. When he got old, when the last small joys were gone, he would tuck the barrel of his nine-millimeter automatic against the roof of his mouth and pull the trigger. There would be no rainy days.

And so Stark spent whatever he had on clothes and restaurants and obsessive grooming. But more than anything, he spent money on delicately wrought objects, usually of glass or porcelain. They were tremendously expensive, these little statues or figurines, but in the past they’d kept him afloat. In them he’d been able to find something good in life, something done for the love of it, something to which an otherwise ordinary human being had applied the full measure of his skill.

In the past these things had soothed him like a soft, warm light.

But no longer.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Stark faced the dealer, noted the small rosebud in his lapel, thought it foppish.

“It’s sixteenth century,” the dealer added with a nod toward the fluted glass at which, Stark realized, he must have been gazing.

“Not my thing,” Stark said coolly.

The dealer looked as if he’d been gently pushed away, perhaps with the nose of a silver derringer. “Well, if I may be of help . . .”

“I’ll let you know,” Stark said.

“Of course,” the dealer said, then vanished.