Wild Orchids Read online

  By the time we got back to the house, I was on top of the world and I was wondering if there were any olives around. I still had my little fantasy about Jackie, and I thought that tonight might be the time to enact it.

  But when I turned off the engine, I saw that Jackie was sound asleep, and when I tried to wake her, I couldn’t.

  I was going to have to wait to get my hands and mouth on Jackie’s sweet little body.

  I opened the passenger side, caught her before she fell out, and ended up carrying her into the empty house and all the way up the stairs. To keep my mind off the way my heart was pounding from the exertion, I chanted, “I am Rhett Butler and you are Scarlett,” all the way up. Of course I was hoping that Jackie would wake up, laugh, and we’d end up in bed together.

  But that didn’t happen. Instead, I pulled off her jeans, gave a couple of ferocious sighs full of self-pity, then went downstairs.

  No one was in the house. I was sure that Noble and Allie were together somewhere, and no doubt Toodles was with Miss Essie Lee, and both thoughts made me feel even lonelier.

  I went into the kitchen, poured myself some bourbon, and walked back into the living room.

  There was a man sitting there. A tall, slim man who was devastatingly handsome.

  Russell Dunne.

  Maybe I’m flattering myself, but right away, I noticed things that weren’t right. The scene was like a drawing in a kid’s magazine: Find six things that are wrong in this picture.

  For one thing, everything was too perfect. The flowers that Jackie had put in the room three days ago and that were ready to be thrown out, were fresh again—and they were perfect. There were no leaves half eaten by bugs, no brown spots on the petals. The faded chintz on the secondhand couch that Jackie had bought was now bright and new.

  And, oh, yeah, even though it was about three A.M., the room was full of sunlight. And the sunlight was not coming from the windows.

  I wanted to run away and hide, but I couldn’t. I don’t know if it was him pulling me to him or my own curious nature, but I couldn’t stop myself from entering that room.

  He lit a cigarette, one of those little gold-tipped black ones that look like elegant cigars, and gazed at me through a haze of smoke.

  “I think you have some questions for me,” he said in a beautiful voice.

  God help me, but I could see why Jackie had believed herself to be in love with him. And I could even understand why she’d spent three days in a daze after she’d met him.

  “A few,” I said, then cleared my throat because my voice was breaking. Surely he hadn’t shown up just to answer my questions about a murder?

  “Why,” he said. “You always want to know why.” He smiled, letting me know that he knew all there was to know about me. “I liked that woman, that Amarisa,” he said after a while. “Did anyone tell you that she had visions? Just now and then, nothing of importance, but she did manage to stop a few of my projects. But what really made Jackie’s mother angry was the fact that her husband helped Amarisa when she had visions.”

  “Like Jackie and me,” I said.

  I was scared, true, but also, inside, I was jumping up and down. I was talking to the devil. The real, honest-to-gosh devil. Fumbling about as though I were blind, I found a chair and sat down facing him. I didn’t want to blink. I might not live through tonight, but if I did, I wanted to be able to record every word, every look, every nuance of what I was seeing, hearing, feeling.

  Instead of answering me, he smiled. “Amarisa could see me and she saw me as handsome. And little Jackie saw me as Santa Claus. You can’t imagine how tired I get of being depicted as red with a tail. How banal.”

  The chapter heading flashed across my mind: “The Angst of the Devil.” Or should it be “Life from the Devil’s Point of View”?

  “Amarisa used to talk with me. Did they tell you that the preacher put the first stone on her? He’s in my house now.” He smiled sweetly. “I have many so-called holy men with me.”

  I quit being flippant, because what he was saying sent a little shiver down my spine.

  “But Amarisa was different. She wasn’t afraid of me. She—”

  “You were in love with her,” I heard myself say, astonished at my bravery—or stupidity—for saying it.

  That smile again. “Love? Perhaps, for even I have feelings. Let’s just say that there are some people I want more than others.”

  That gave me more chills and I wanted to ask what my rank was on his “want” list. Top? Bottom?

  “Her mother”—he nodded upward toward Jackie’s room—“was jealous of Amarisa because she was good. She was…inside good. I don’t see that much.”

  While he was talking, behind him, beautiful colored smoke floated up from the floor to the ceiling. I couldn’t seem to look away from it as it wove in and out, around and about. It was only gradually that I realized the smoke was forming itself into a scene.

  Slowly, I began to see scenes of my life with Pat. I saw Pat with her parents. The three of them were laughing together, glancing at each other now and then. Then, I saw Pat’s father fishing. The scene changed, and I saw him on his front porch with his tools, with Pat’s mother in the kitchen cooking.

  She was baking her special cookies, the ones that were made of a combination of spices and raisins that used to fill the house with fragrance. Right now, yet again, I could smell them. For a moment I closed my eyes and inhaled. When I opened my eyes, Pat’s mother was in front of me and she was holding out a plate full of them.

  Instinctively, I reached for one. But it was just a vision and my hand went through the plate.

  “Sure?” he said to me, as he took a cookie off the plate and began to nibble at it. “Very good. Now where was I?”

  I guess he was used to people being too dumbfounded to answer him, because he continued without my saying a word. But I wasn’t thinking about him. I was remembering Pat. The smell of the cookies hung in the air, and as he talked, he was waving one of those precious cookies around. One bite, I thought. Let me have one bite and let me remember clearly. Truly remember.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, “you want more information. Let’s see. Where should I begin?” He got up from his chair and walked about the room. He was a very elegant man, beautifully dressed. “I was surprised you never guessed that I was the one who threw the rock over the wall. You were becoming much too complacent for my taste and I was a little concerned that you might stop searching altogether. And if that had happened, well…” He shrugged to let me know that he and I were here now because of his planning.

  He pointed the cookie at me, then looked at it in surprise. “Does this bother you?” In an instant the cookie was gone and he gave me that winning smile of his. “I want to make it clear that I have a very, very easy job. People think I go around whispering in their ears, enticing them to do evil. But I don’t. I just leave them to their own devices and they do all the evil that I could never even think of. Humans are much more imaginative than I am. You’ve heard of the people who get their ideas for their crimes from novels, haven’t you?”

  I nodded but since I don’t write horror novels, I knew he wasn’t talking about me.

  He read my mind.

  “You think your books haven’t caused anything bad because they’re so sweet? Back in…oh, well, I’m not good with years. 1283, 1501, they’re all the same to me. But you remember how you wrote about your cousin Ronny drowning and how all of you were glad?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer.

  “A boy in California killed his cousin. He drowned him because he didn’t like the kid. Got the idea from your book.”

  I slumped back against the chair at that one.

  “So, now, where was I? Oh, yes, Amarisa. She didn’t have an affair with me like people later said. I find it interesting what people make up to justify their actions, don’t you? You see, what only two people on earth knew was that Amarisa was going to have a baby. Remember the preacher?”

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