“Did you bring it?” Mayfield demanded as I was ushered into the room with the starry ceiling.
“Bring…it?”
“The exact hour of your birth. For your chart.” He planted a bony index finger onto some papers on the desk in front of him.
“I forgot,” I admitted as I reached his desk.
“Forgot?”
“I’ve had a lot on my mind.”
He was staring at me as though he couldn’t believe his ears.
I said, hoping to redeem myself a little, “I do have an astrology-related question, though.”
He put his head to the side as though considering whether he should deign to listen to it. Then he nodded.
“Would Sagittarius and Aries make a good team?”
The mismatched eyes lit with interest, although he asked sardonically, “Were you thinking of playing baseball or getting married?”
“I’m just curious,” I said. “This is mostly theoretical.”
“Isn’t everything? Hmmm…the Archer and the Ram. Yes, that’s a very good match indeed. In fact, it’s a 5-9 sun sign pattern, what we call trine—which means positive and harmonious vibrations. Depending on the moon and other aspects, your chances for finding happiness and love in a permanent relationship with an Aries are excellent. In fact, the empathy and emotional fulfillment you’ll find with an Aries will rarely be as effortlessly achieved with another sign.”
I felt a weird desire to burst out laughing. Maybe Mayfield read something in my expression because he tilted his head to the side and said, “Any misunderstandings with this person will soon be cleared up.”
“That’s a relief.”
He shrugged. “Mock if you will, but the stars don’t lie.”
“I wouldn’t know about the heavenly ones, but the human ones sure do.”
After a moment he indicated the chair behind me with his finger. I sat down. I felt nervous—not afraid. The only real danger, I believed, was that I might be wrong. I might be way off base in my speculations, but I didn’t think I was.
“What have you learned?” Mayfield asked.
“I think I know who killed Eva. And I think I know how. What I don’t know is why. That’s the part that puzzles me.”
“That’s the only thing that puzzles you?” His tone was dry.
“Well, I’m not sure why you agreed to talk to me,” I admitted. “And I’m not sure why you stuck that tarot card on my door. It’s almost as though you wanted me to…”
“Discover the truth?”
I nodded.
He smiled. “Fifty years is a long time to carry the burden of grief and guilt, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes. I suppose so.”
“Yes.” He stared up at the cobalt blue ceiling with its blazing gold stars and mysterious moons. “My time is coming to a close.”
“Is that what the stars say?”
“It’s what my doctor says.” He permitted himself a grim smile. “And two specialists. It’s a cliché, but as my hour wanes, I feel the need to…make peace with the past.”
Since I had already worked out this much, I’m not sure why it felt like such a jolt to hear it out loud. “You killed Eva?” I remembered the horror of those blood-drenched photos and I just couldn’t seem to reconcile that manic violence with this quiet, gentle man.
“You already know that, my dear.” When I didn’t have an answer, he said, almost reminiscently, “She’d discovered that Tony was queer. Eva was a naïve girl in many ways, but even so it shouldn’t have been such a shock to her. She was disgusted by what she had seen and it made her cruel.”
“To you?”
He nodded “She was angry and bitter and more than a little wild that night, and I…was in love with her.”
“You were?” That hadn’t occurred to me. I had pegged him as gay; that he might be bisexual never entered my mind.
“Very much so. And I made the mistake of trying to tell her so that night.”
“Oh.”
“Yes.” A strange smile touched his pale mouth. “And, you see, at the time I had been experimenting with peyote—mostly for spiritual reasons, though not entirely—and we all drank a good deal all the time back then.”
“You’re saying it was drugs and alcohol?”
“The drugs and alcohol didn’t help, certainly.” He was silent for a moment. I thought of the times he had canceled our interviews, and I held my tongue.
At last he said, “I was the only one by the pool when she came out of the hotel and walked through the courtyard to Ball’s villa. I followed her inside. We argued. It was unlike either of us, really, those ugly, horrible things we said that night. She couldn’t separate me from Tony, you see, she thought we were the same, and she was worse after I told her I loved her.”
He fell silent. I said, “And so you picked up a knife?”
“There was a fruit basket on the table. She was cutting apples and pears up—using the wrong size knife, which was so like her—and—I don’t remember. I really don’t. I only remember standing there after it was over. It seemed like a dream. Far away and long ago—it felt more like a distant memory then than it does now. I remember I was very angry with her for making me do that. I picked up the tarot card from the table, and I placed it on her.”
“Reversed,” I said.
His strange gaze rested on me. “That’s right. The Lovers betrayed.”
“And the fingerprints didn’t matter because the card was yours to begin with.”
“That’s true.”
“And then you went outside to the pool and jumped in.”
“There was still no one in the pool. I jumped in and washed off the knife and let it sink to the bottom of the drain. By the time Stephen walked outside, the pool was full of people again, but everyone was so drunk that no one remembered who had been there first. I wasn’t clever at all, but somehow the fates worked to protect me, and I suppose I believed there was some purpose to that.”
I didn’t know what to say. He was still the same person who had showed kindness and compassion to me and he had committed an act of monstrous violence.
“And all these years you’ve kept silent.”
“I couldn’t see any value in speaking. It wouldn’t bring her back, and—I was afraid. But I’m not afraid anymore, and I was almost happy when I heard this book was to be written. I thought that if you could discover the truth, I would confirm it for you, but you would have to do the work yourself.”
“What do you expect me to do now?”
“Write your book, of course.”
“But…”
He waved his hand in one of those vague, graceful gestures. “If you feel you must inform the police, go ahead.” His smile was acrid. “It’s not as though I’m a danger to society.”
I stared at him. “It’s not like you paid your debt to society either.”
Mayfield said quietly, “You have no idea what I’ve paid. But if you’d like a price tag, I’ve contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity—and there will be millions more upon my death.”
“How…long have the doctors given you?”
“Six months at the outside.”
If that were true he’d be dead long before the book was published.
I said, “Why are you leaving this up to me? I don’t want to have to make this kind of decision.”
“This is the hand you’ve been dealt,” he pronounced, for all the world like the Sphinx delivering its riddle. “Sagittarius is the truth-seeker. Now you have the truth.”
* * * * *
Jasmine scented the twilight—as did the smell of pot roast escaping from Jack’s kitchen window. I knocked on his door and a moment later it swung open. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that emphasized the strong brown column of his throat and the muscles in his arms.
“I left you a couple of messages,” he said.
“I know.” I handed him Bud Perkins’s file. “I thought you might want this back.”
“Are you done with it?”
“Yeah.”
He studied my face. “Do you know who killed Eva Aldrich?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“Who?”
“I guess you’ll have to read the book.”
He didn’t say anything, just stared. Finally he said, “Did you want to come in?”
“Not really.”
His face did change then. He said, “I think we need to talk, Tim.”
I said tiredly, “Maybe I can save us both some time. You feel like things are moving too quickly between us and we both need to take a step back. And I agree. It’s better if we leave it at friends.”
He said, after a pause, “I see.”
I risked a look at his face, and found I couldn’t read it easily. “Isn’t that what you were going to say?”
“No.”
“Oh.” I blinked. “What were you going to say?”
“I guess it’s moot at this point.”
He moved back as I stepped inside the doorway. I closed the door behind me and said, “What were you going to say?”
He shoved his hands inside his jeans and offered a funny smile. “That I think I could be falling in love with you, and I’m not going to let that happen unless—” His eyes rested on my face. “It’s sort of beside the point now, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. “I thought you were going to say—” I think I was more shocked than he was when my voice gave out.
He didn’t move a muscle and I got control of myself and said, “I guess I was trying to beat you to the punch.”
Jack frowned. “This is one of the things I don’t understand about you, Tim. It’s one of the things that worries me about getting involved with you.”
I had that dizzy, breathless feeling, like when you’re a kid playing crack the whip, and you find yourself at the end of the whip. Things were moving too fast for me. I put my back against the door and said, “I’ve lost my nerve. I’m afraid to hope for too much, to trust that things can work themselves out. I thought you were—repulsed.”
“By your seizures?”
I nodded.
“I’m not repulsed. They scare me. Not the seizures themselves, but—” He swallowed as though his mouth was suddenly dry. “You would have drowned the other morning, Tim. If I hadn’t been next to you, you’d have slipped back in the water and drowned. You don’t remember that, do you?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t look away from Jack’s face. He looked…stricken.
“You reached for me, and then you seized. I had to drag you out of the pool. You’re not dumb. You have to know the danger, but you swim out there morning after morning by yourself.”
“Is that why you don’t want to take a chance on me?”
“I am willing to take a chance on you,” he said, “but you’ve got to be willing to take a chance too, and stop risking your life for no good reason. You’ve got to commit to keeping yourself alive and well before I commit—”
I interrupted, “You said you couldn’t stand me crying.”
His brows drew together. Then he said, “It’s not what you think. It rips my heart out when you cry. I want to fix it for you, and I can’t.” He reached a hand out, brushing my jaw. “I can’t do anything but love you, and I’m not sure that’s what you want.”
I found that I couldn’t meet his gaze anymore. “Yeah, it’s what I want.” I stared down at my hands knotted in fists on my thighs, and I consciously relaxed them. “I think I’ve…loved you from the first time we ever went out.” I smiled a little, but it still hurt remembering how he had cut me loose, how quickly and easily he’d dropped me before.
As though he read my mind, Jack said, “Me too. I knew six months ago when I couldn’t stop noticing you, wondering about you. I told myself I couldn’t afford to get involved with you, that it wasn’t going to work, but I couldn’t help watching you, wondering how you were doing, if there wasn’t some way…”
“You hid it pretty well.”
“You just weren’t looking. I used to drink my morning coffee watching you swim, waiting for you to get into trouble. I kept trying to think what the hell I was going to do about you.”
Those dusk-gray eyes met mine steadily, and something hard and dry and twisted inside me softened and let go. I muttered, “Okay, I’ll wear a Medic Alert bracelet or even a damn dog collar if that’s what you want.”
It was a relief to be pulled roughly into his arms. “I think the bracelet is a good idea.” His mouth found mine. “While we’re on the subject of jewelry, how do you feel about rings?”