"No, no."

His hand jumped away at the barking command. She sounded a lot like his sister.

"Not yet, honey. I'm not wet yet."

He lost it for a moment, felt himself deflating.

"There, okay, that's nice. Go ahead."

He struggled with a completely unfamiliar closing on the bikini top, then felt a surge of pure joy when suddenly the two skinny straps parted, the front fell off, and her heavy breasts swung free. "Ohhh," he moaned as he put his face into the glorious orbs and nuzzled away. His little man sprang back to life.

"Hey, take it easy. One at a time, lover. Ohh," Lorraine squeaked. "Oh, that's great. Yes, circle the tongue. That's too hard. Yeah, like that. Now the other."

Teddy was hanging off the edge of the chaise. His shoulder, wedged against the arm of the chair, was what kept him from toppling off. Lorraine was leaning closer.

"Yeah. That's good, lower."

He was panting, in the region of her belly button. He peeled the bottom down just a little, felt the pelt. Oh, God. If only she'd shut up and stop trying to make him her perfect lover… hurrah, his hand was in. Ooooo, that was good.

"Ow! Honey, you have a hangnail," Lorraine yelped.

Two fifteen-minute nursing periods passed as Teddy had to go back to square one with his erection killing him. Then it took another fifteen minutes to peel her bottom off, get his condom on just the way she thought it should be, then securely plant himself inside her in exactly the position she liked it. He did not consider it a bad experience when he came almost instantly. In fact, he thought it was a great big plus that he was spared getting any more instruction since he was pretty sure he already knew what to do.

"I always teach my boyfriends how to be my perfect lover," she confided, not seeming to hold a grudge, this time anyway. She reached for a towel and another beer. Then she settled in for a natter and a recap of the plays. He dozed beside her.

Back in the house, Cassie had long since fallen into a deep, drunken slumber. During the poolside frolic, Mitchell Sales heard the mumblings outside and began having trouble breathing.

He made some sounds like "Heel…" Too soft to be heard above the gentle drone of the air conditioner in his room. He became further agitated when no one responded to his distress. This was not like the hospital, where the monitor had been on him day and night.

"Heel…" He tried to move, but had no control of himself at all. He couldn't sit, and when his body convulsed, he fell over against the bars of his bed. Outside, while Lorraine was lecturing on the proper pressure a tongue should exert on a nipple, Mitch stopped struggling. When she looked in on him nearly an hour later, his body had already begun to cool.

CHAPTER 41

THE GRAY-HAIRED OFFICER FROM THE POLICE DEPARTMENT who came to question Cassie e arly the next morning was a paunchy man in a uniform that may have fit him five or ten years ago but wasn't looking so good on him now. She kept thinking that if Mitch were alive to see it, he would be disdainful of the man's chest and tummy tugging at his shirt buttons, getting in the way of all his cop paraphernalia so that if he had to pull his gun on her he probably wouldn't be able to reach it. Deputy Sheriff Lou Archer sat on the stiff, Federal-style sofa in Cassie's living room, cradling his belly and smelling of cigarettes, coffee, and Dunkin' Donuts. It was nine in the morning, and he'd been in the house since eight. Cassie tried not to look at his gun and notebook and handcuffs because they made her hands shake.

Outside, the sun had come up on another magnificent summer day. The fifth of July. The pool sparkled. The brilliantly colored lilies and roses perfumed the air. Cassie was all alone in the house, and everything that could be wrong with the world was wrong with the world.

"Tell me once again in your own words what happened last night, Mrs. Sales," the deputy commanded. Then he licked the tip of his pen as if a different answer would be forthcoming on this, his fourth, foray into the subject.

Cassie faced him in the wing chair, hanging on to the arms as if she were on a turbulent flight thirty thousand feet over a bottomless ocean. She'd been staggering from room to room since around six-thirtyA.M., when Teddy and Lorraine woke her from her profound, alcohol-induced sleep to tell her that her husband had died in his sleep.

For the last thirty-six days she had been up and down on a roller coaster of feelings about her husband and herself, about her stolen identity, about sickness and health, children and death. Now her eyes were red-veined and puffy. They just didn't want to stay open for any more reality. Her head throbbed continuously. After all the effort that had been made to save him, Mitch had died in his sleep. She couldn't take it in herself, much less form an appropriate response to a detective's interrogation. She had her first paralyzing hangover in a quarter of a century and could hardly form a coherent sentence.

Three times Cassie had tried to explain that her husband had been released from the hospital late yesterday afternoon after spending a month in intensive care recovering from a stroke. His condition had been so precarious then that he'd returned home in an ambulance and was immediately put to bed by his nurse, Lorraine Forchette. During the night, between one of the regular fifteen-minute checks Miss Forchette made on him, he must have suffered another stroke and died in his sleep. It was a family tragedy, but nothing more sinister than that.

The deputy sheriff, however, didn't see it that way. He wanted to know why she'd brought her husband home in such vulnerable condition. Cassie peered at him blearily. She thought that was a pretty good question, but didn't want to get into the issue of managed care.

Then he wanted to know why a professional nurse hadn't been hired to look after him; and here, Cassie had to take issue.

"Lorraine Forchette is a professional nurse. She works at North Fork Hospital," she protested.

The clincher came on the fourth go-round. Cassie heard it through a fog. Deputy Archer wanted to know why a physician hadn't signed the death certificate before the body was removed to a funeral home instead of afterward. Some legal question or other that Cassie didn't know anything about. She'd had nothing to do with it. Her hands started shaking. For reasons as yet unexplained, when his father died, Teddy had called Mark Cohen and Martini's Funeral Home instead of waking her and calling 911 as he should have. Cassie had no idea why.

Since Mark immediately concluded on the phone that Mitch's was a natural death, the funeral home had sent a hearse to take his remains away. From what Cassie gathered from the sheriff, this was a shady and illegal thing to do.

"Martini's came in the middle of the night?" the detective demanded yet again.

"No, it was morning. You can call and ask Mr. Martini himself."

"Did you arrange this yourself?"

Cassie shook her head. Teddy had done it. She guessed he'd thought the body was spooky and wanted it out of the house. In any case, when Teddy and Lorraine finally got her awake, she couldn't sit up much less understand what they were talking about. So, it turned out that the remains of the man who'd been her husband for twenty-six years were removed before she knew he'd died. The whole thing gave her a terrible feeling. Terrible. She'd been left out of Mitch's life and now she was left out of his death.

Teddy had stood by her bed and informed her that he was the man of the family now, and he'd take care of everything from now on. But all she'd been able to do was hang over the side of the bed and gag. If she hadn't felt so miserable, she might have reacted with the rage she felt now. Who was Teddy to decide he was the man of the family when she'd told him weeks ago that she was the man of the family? Cassie wasn't sure yet if Teddy was a fucking incompetent who mismanaged every damn thing he touched, or if something sinister had happened and Mona had somehow gotten to him and triumphed over everyone. What if Mitch was actually alive and winking at all of them over on Duck Pond Road? She stared at the detective, wondering what she could do to make him go away so she could lie down.