Burn by John Lutz Read Free Book Online Page B

Jacaranda Lane, figuring he’d be there for a while.
    But half an hour later Marla was back in her car and on the move again. She’d changed to a red blouse, black slacks, and high heels, and she had her hair pulled back and fixed with a bright red ribbon or barrette. She was carrying her purse and a small blue canvas carry-on or attaché case.
    Carver followed her to the Holiday Inn on Magellan, about half a mile from his office. It was a newer luxury hotel that backed onto the sea. Marla parked near the entrance to the cocktail lounge and strode inside, still carrying the blue canvas case. Judging by the slow, abbreviated arc of her arm swing as she walked, it was fairly heavy.
    With the Olds’s windows cranked down, Carver could hear the surf rushing and slapping at the beach. A man and woman and three small children were strolling along the plank walkway toward the sand. The man and all three children were wearing swimming trunks. Only the woman wasn’t dressed to go in the water. She was wearing shorts and carrying a blue-and-white plastic cooler and a wad of folded beach towels. She and the man had on dark sunglasses, and all three of the kids had globs of white sunblock on their foreheads and the tips of their noses so they looked like miniature clowns only partly made up. Family life. Carver had experienced it once, but it had come unraveled. Now his son was dead and his wife and daughter lived in St. Louis, half a continent away. Laura had remarried and now had another family, one that didn’t include Carver. He’d once heard his daughter call Laura’s new husband “Daddy.” When moved by self-pity or masochism, he still probed that wound.
    When the man and woman and kids had disappeared in the direction of the beach, he got out of the Olds and headed toward the lobby.
    There were several people coming and going, or waiting for elevators. A black-and-gold metal sign on a stand was shaped like an arrow and pointed toward registration, out of sight around a corner. To the left were a tourism and ticket desk, car rental agency, and gift shop with a display of nondescript neckties in its window. The lobby was carpeted in green and had lots of artificial potted ferns and comfortable-looking beige chairs scattered about. Carver sank the tip of his cane in the soft carpet and walked around the corner, where he knew the cocktail lounge had an entrance off the lobby.
    He didn’t have to go inside. He found a thickly upholstered beige chair from which he could see into the lounge and sat down, leaning forward to pick up a golf magazine from a bulky dark-wood table with a glass top.
    From where he sat he could see Marla Cloy seated alone in a small booth along the wall. She was staring straight ahead and holding a stemmed glass with both hands. White wine again. He was watching her almost in profile. Her face was one that became more attractive the longer he looked at it. The angle of her nose and the line of her jaw suggested a simple and pleasant serenity that had to be deceptive. He knew it concealed either willful duplicity or genuine fear.
    He looked away from Marla when he noticed a small, skinny, slightly hunched woman in a brown skirt and blazer walk past him into the lounge. She left in her wake the faint scent of mothballs. He saw Marla look at her and smile. The woman picked up speed and scurried rather than walked directly to the booth and sat down opposite Marla, then placed her hands out of sight beneath the table as if she were ashamed of them.
    A barmaid appeared and took the woman’s order, then brought her a drink that looked exactly like Marla’s. Both women sipped their wine simultaneously, pausing as they lifted their glasses to their lips, almost in a toast.
    They talked for about half an hour, sometimes seriously, sometimes laughing at what might have been a shared joke. Next to Marla, the thin woman looked particularly drab in her brown suit and with her lifeless brown hair. Her coloring and