Free Possession by Ann Rule Page A

back—but he did.
    He had never been exposed to a really intelligent woman before. He had never approached a woman who seemed to care so little whether he showed up or not. And yet Sam found himself standing at Nina's door night after night, his head bent against the icy spray that whipped off the lake, feeling the boards beneath his feet creak and groan with the undulating swells of the water that cradled her floating home. The houseboat was in terrible shape, listing to port where the logs had rotted away, the eaves leaking rain on his exposed back.
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    She was always home, although she was slow to open the door. She admitted him with a shrug, letting him pick his way through the debris on the floor and clear his own spot on the old plush couch. She seemed to expect that he would come, but she showed neither pleasure nor annoyance at his arrival. She never fed him. Other women tried to coddle him with home cooking; he sometimes wondered if Nina cooked at all. Rather, he worried about her and brought her pizzas and greasy take-out chicken and urged her to eat. She ate pickishly, giving most of it to the gray cat, Pistol. She was never without a tumbler of scotch, laced sparingly with tap water.

    Sam gradually stopped seeing other women, content to spend his evenings and nights with this intense woman who sat cross-legged on the floor with her elbows on her tender-boned knees and talked to him, listened to him. She understood the law and its intricacies in a way he had never grasped before. He had never believed that a woman might know more than he did; but he learned from her, reliving what had taken place during her long days in the courthouse, understanding for the first time the dynamics of a trial.

    He asked her suddenly one night, "Why do you want me here?"

    "Who says I want you?"

    "You let me in. You've unbarred your doors."

    "Some of them .. ."

    "Do you like me?" He was afraid to hear her answer.

    She studied him solemnly and then touched his cheek. "Sure, I like you. You're smarter than anybody else over in your little Kiddy Cop Station. You think. You even think abstractly if I push you. I like your face; it doesn't hide anything. I like the gap in your teeth, and I like your dimples." She poked a finger in the indentation next to his mouth; he moved away and rubbed his face.

    "It's a wrinkle."

    She shook her head. "The rest are wrinkles; that's a dimple, Officer."

    "Do you miss me when I'm not here?"

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    "You're always here."
    She stood up to fill her glass, gliding deftly through the piles of junk on the floor, effectively shutting him out.
    But he worried it, following her, blocking her way from the cramped Pullman kitchen. He pinned her arms with his and forced her to look at him.
    "I need to know that you give a shit whether I show up or not. I need . . . something. Hell, are you my girl or aren't you?" She laughed. "Your girl? Why does that matter? Do you want to take me to the policeman's ball? Ahh, do you want me to be the policeman's ball?
    Is that it? You're angry because I won't sleep with you?" He let her go. It was true; she wouldn't sleep with him, not even when she was so drunk she couldn't make her way across the room. And he wanted to sleep with no one else. He could touch her wrist and be as aroused as he'd been before with a fully naked woman beneath him, responding to him, but she refused him access to her the way a thoroughbred mare might deny a plowhorse. Sometimes she let him hold her, and she felt only of narrow bones and a heart beating in his arms. It made him crazy.
    "It's control, isn't it," he said angrily. "You have to have control over everything? You deny both of us because you need the control."
    "But Samuel, I have no control. Or at least so little. Would you take that away from me?"
    He left, slamming the door behind him, plunging onto the dock with such force that the houseboat deck was awash with water.
    He always came back, and she showed no surprise at his