Free Cold Night (Jack Paine Mysteries) by Al Sarrantonio Page A

them from the realm of human debate and made them part of nature. For the first time since he was a young boy and had lain out on the grass under the clouds, imagining himself one with those clouds, moving east with them through the thin pure blue air out to sea, he forgot who he was. He was not Jack Paine but a process, a force like the clouds or wind. There was no thought or time attached to what he was—he was outside thought or time. He was both bathed in release and horribly frightened.
    Sometime during the night, it ended, and he became Jack Paine again.
    She lay on the bed, and he lay next to her, and there were two of them again instead of one.
    Paine stared at the ceiling. "How long did you wait for me outside the door?"
    She shrugged, distracted. The flush had receded from her face. She turned gently away from him on the bed, slipping one hand under her head and staring at the window, away from him. For a moment he thought she had fallen asleep.
    "I don't know if I'm in love with you or not," she said.
    If she had said it a different way, Paine might have laughed. But the way she spoke, as if her mind was as unsure as her body had been sure, made him say instead, "Does it matter?"
    She shrugged, or maybe it was a shudder.
    "I never loved Gerald," she said.
    "That's easy to believe."
    "I don't know if I've ever really loved anybody, except maybe Dolores." She spoke almost to herself.
    Paine let her have silence.
    "When we were little girls, Dolores and I played together when she wasn't reading. We had a cat then, and we dressed him up like he was a baby. Dolores was the father and I was the mother. I had to cook on a toy wooden stove I'd gotten one Christmas. I always had to make turkey, because that was Dolores's favorite meal. We always had it on Thanksgiving and then on Christmas, and Dolores said if we had it all the time then it would always be Christmas. I had a toy ironing board, and a little toy iron from F.A.O. Schwarz that really plugged into the wall and got a little warm on the bottom. I had to iron clothes for the cat, and I had to clean and make dinner. My mother never did those things because we had servants for all that, but in our game that was the way we did it.
    "As the father, Dolores would come home from her job, and I would lay out the turkey dinner on our play table, with a real little red checkered tablecloth on it, and with plastic vegetables and even plastic cranberry sauce. Dolores would get my father's Times from the morning and read it at the table. She even had one of my father's old pipes, and she pretended to smoke it after the meal was finished. We always had chocolate cake for dessert, because Dolores liked it. She had chocolate cake every birthday, with chocolate icing. I fought with her sometimes, because I wanted to be the father and try the pipe and read the paper, but she never let me."
    She turned her head on the pillow and lay staring at the ceiling, her face suffused with what looked like dreams. Paine watched the track of a single tear ride the corner of her eye down into the trimmed, unbrushed wave of her hair.
    "I think she got it all from books," Rebecca said, and then she was quiet for a time before she rolled to Paine like a weeping child.
    He held her, felt his hands around her and wanted to take whatever was gnawing through her and tear it out and kill it and then take the ripped pieces of her and fit them back together again. He had never felt like this before.
    "I think I'm in love with you," he said.
    "Don't say that," she sobbed gently, and he continued to hold her.
    At the end of the night, he awoke and looked at her. Sleep, or what they had done, or his words, perhaps, or her words, had loosened the spring that had been wound so tight within her, and had left her limp and free to dream. Her head lay on the side of the pillow, her mouth slightly open. The hollows around her closed eyes, the dark circles of makeup, made her look as if her eyes would be larger than