Free Dancing with the Dead by John Lutz Page A

make everything perfect. Buttons. Strings. Duke. Her professors at the University of Missouri. The past was gone, no longer existed, yet it seemed to illuminate and shadow her life like time-delayed light from a dead star.
    “Some things have been happening to me,” Mary said, trying to get Angie’s mind off Jake. She told her about the knife marks on her apartment door, but not about the Casa Loma incident with the dead bird. She didn’t want Angie to worry too much.
    Angie waggled her cigarette and said, “Jake.”
    “Jake isn’t into that kinda thing, Angie, believe me!”
    “Maybe he’s got reasons you don’t know about.”
    “Not likely. I understand Jake.”
    “Nobody understands anybody.”
    The couple who’d been bothered by the smoke stood up to leave. The man laid a dollar bill on the table for a tip and shook his head at Angie before walking away, as if to say it would be hopeless to try reasoning with her. A woman and a young man with a dark beard were shown to the table and sat down. They wore jeans and matching turquoise sweatshirts. The man was carrying a fat Sunday paper. Mary found herself peering at it to see if there was anything about the Danielle Verlane murder case, then decided she shouldn’t be so interested. It was something that had happened in New Orleans, not here in St. Louis. It was coincidental and irrelevant that the victim had been a ballroom dancer like Mary, and, like Mary, Mel’s student.
    But suddenly it occurred to her why she might be intrigued by the story. She and Danielle Verlane were somewhat the same type. Not only did they both dance, but both had the same general facial shape, approximate hair color, and there was something in common about their individual features, especially the eyes. That was how Mary saw it, anyway, insofar as anyone actually knew what they really looked like to other people. But it did seem Danielle Verlane was a slightly younger version of Mary. It gave Mary an eerie feeling, as if someone had tapped her on the shoulder, and when she turned around, no one was there.
    “More coffee, hon?”
    The waitress was hovering above her with a bulbous glass pot. It reminded Mary of a detached eye with the brown orb of its iris rolling sightlessly at the bottom. She nodded, then moved her hand off the table and out of the way while the waitress topped off her cup. Angie waved the pot away with her cigarette hand, leaving a tracer of gray hanging over the breakfast debris like smoke over a bombed city.
    “You always had a kinda pluck,” Angie said. “I’m counting on that to overcome the family weakness for the wrong men. Don’t take Jake back this time.” The waitress glided away and veered toward another table with the coffee pot. “Don’t do it. Can you promise?”
    Mary thought, Promise, hell! “Didn’t you tell me on the drive over here you were gonna forgive Fred?”
    “But Fred never hit me, not once.”
    “There’s other kinds of abuse, Angie. Some of them worse.”
    Angie sat back and smoked. Said nothing.
    Mary didn’t feel like sitting and letting the awkwardness and pall of tobacco smoke build. She touched the puddle of maple syrup in her plate and licked her finger. “That’s tasty.”
    Angie didn’t answer.
    “You think there really is an Uncle Bill?”
    “Sure,” Angie said. “We just ate his pancakes. You gotta believe.”
    That night Mary awoke just before midnight, and there was Jake in the shadows of her bedroom, poised like a stork on one leg and calmly taking off his pants. Her first thought was that she was dreaming. But she lay flat on her back with her head raised, her eyes wide and staring. The room with its subtle noises and smells, the slow-motion turning and bending of the quiet figure now laying the folded pants on the chair, the soft night sounds of distant traffic, the summer breeze drifting in through the window with its gently swaying curtains—it was all real.
    Jake was real.
    Here in her