"How did that make you feel toward Pam?"

He didn't answer. He picked a small framed photograph off a shelf in the bookcase and looked at it as if he hadn't seen it in a very long time. A photograph of himself with Pam and Josie at about five. His family, intact.

"She was so pretty," he whispered.

Setting the frame aside, he turned toward Annie again. "Like you, Detective. Pretty brown eyes." He reached up with a hesitant hand to brush her bangs to the side. "Pretty smile." He touched the corner of her mouth. "Better watch out. I'll want to marry you."

Annie held herself still, wondering how much of this talk was Donnie and how much was the liquor. Then the doorbell buzzed, and whatever had been in Donnie's head vanished.

"Pizza man," he announced, walking out.

She wondered just how stable he was. His logic seemed perilously close to the classic pattern of the obsessive stalker everyone had pegged Renard to be. She wondered how angry he might have been seeing Pam with Stokes. She wondered how a man who reportedly chased every skirt in town could find any moral outrage at his estranged wife having lunch with another man. Even if Stokes had had designs on Pam, Pam had not reciprocated. "It was nothing," Lindsay had said; she had been reluctant even to raise the subject, it seemed so insignificant.

And yet she had raised the subject with Stokes the very day she had quarreled with Donnie… and that same night someone had tried to silence her forever.

The pieces sifted through her mind: Donnie, desperate, losing a wife and a safety net for his business. Donnie, unable to cope with the idea of rejection. Donnie, in financial straits. Donnie, angry, driven to a dangerous limit by his problems and by the sight of his wife enjoying the company of another man-a man whose race might have added to the outrage in Donnie's mind. Pushed to that thin dark line, might he have crossed it in a moment of madness? Killed her in a fit of rage and covered the crime with atrocities no one would ever attribute to him?

The sudden ringing of the telephone broke Annie's concentration. She expected an answering machine to pick up, but none did. Who called a business line at this hour? A client? A girlfriend? A legitimate associate? A not-so-legitimate associate?

She picked up the receiver when the phone stopped ringing. Eyes on the door, she dialed star 69 and waited while the call chased itself back home.

On the fourth ring a man's voice answered. "Marcotte."

35

"When will you paint that, Marcus? I want no reminders," Doll said with drama. "My nerves are still ragged tonight. They're worse, in fact. It's as if it's all coming back to me because of it being evening. My evenings will never be the same. The joy of my evenings has been robbed from me. I will never again be able to sit at this table and enjoy a cup of coffee after dinner. Certainly not with the wall looking that way. When will you paint it?"

"Tomorrow, Mother."

Marcus scraped the last of the excess wet patching compound from the wall and into the can he had used to mix the concoction. He was no expert at repairing walls, let alone a bullet hole, but then no expert had been willing to do the job. Every call had been the same: They heard his name and hung up.

He had boarded up the broken French door himself. When the replacement glass arrived, he would have to learn about glazing, he supposed. Until then, the heavy drapes would be pulled across the door. Doll had closed every shade and drape in the house to block the view of any potential voyeur or sniper.

"The sheriff's office should have to pay for fixing that hole," Doll said. "It's their fault we have people shooting at us. The way they've railroaded you when you're guilty of nothing but making a fool of yourself over a woman. They're lazy and corrupt, and we'll all end up murdered in our beds because of them."

"They're not all that way, Mother. Annie said she'd do her best to check into what happened last night."

"Annie," she said with disapproval. "Don't delude yourself, Marcus. You think she's some kind of angel. She's no better than the rest."

Tuning out his mother's droning, Marcus knelt to clean up his work area. He imagined what it would be like to move away from here and start fresh without the burden of his family or his reputation. He envisioned a house of his own design, perhaps on the Gulf Coast of Texas or Florida. Something open and bright, with a large deck facing the water.

He thought of coming home after work to cook dinner for Annie. She wasn't the domestic sort. He would take pleasure in teaching her. They would work side by side in the kitchen, and he would show her the proper way to fillet a fish. His hand would close over hers on the knife and guide her. He could almost feel the delicate bones of her hand beneath his, the smooth handle of the knife filling her palm. It would remind them both of the night before, when he had closed her hand around the shaft of his penis. Warmth flooded his groin.

"Marcus, are you listening to me?"

Doll's shrill tone tore through the fabric of his fantasy, ruining it. He briefly imagined surging to his feet with a roar, swinging the can of plaster mix, striking his mother across the face with it, plaster and blood spraying across the wall as she crumpled to the floor. But of course he didn't do that. It was only a moment's madness, there and gone. He wiped his hands on the damp towel and folded it neatly.

"What was that, Mother?"

"Will the paint match?" she asked with exasperation. "I have a premonition that the spot will always stand out. That the color won't match no matter what we do, and every time I look at that wall I'll be taken with the fear."

Marcus rose with the bucket in one hand and toolbox in the other. "I'm sure it will match-so long as we allow the plaster to cure properly before we paint it."

Doll drummed her fingertips against her sternum, frowning sourly. "I wish you would paint it tonight."

"If I paint it tonight, the spot will show." He walked away as she clucked her tongue behind him.

He wanted out of the house, needed air, needed quiet. He wanted to see Annie. He had tried to call her, to thank her again for coming to his rescue, to ask her if she had made any progress on his case, but she wasn't home, which made him wonder what she was doing. As much as he didn't want to, he couldn't help but question if she was with a man tonight.

The thought aroused his jealousy. Men would want her. He did. And she might take a lover, not fully realizing yet what could be between them. He imagined tearing her from the arms of another man, striking her, punishing her, disciplining her for betraying him, taking her sexually with force and dominance. She would realize her mistake then. She would see the truth of his feelings for her. And in seeing that truth she would recognize her own feelings.

Strange, he thought as he washed the plaster residue from his hands, after Elaine had died, he hadn't wanted anyone to take her place for a long time. He hadn't expected to think of another woman after Pam's death. He still grieved for her. He still missed her. But the sharpness of that pain had faded and was being replaced by something else-hunger, need. Pam had ultimately rejected him. She had believed the lies of her husband and Stokes, and failed to see the truth of his devotion to her. He thought less and less of Pam, more and more of Annie, his angel.

He went through his bedroom to his sanctuary and turned on the lights and radio. A Haydn string quartet played softly as he took the portrait from its special place in the small secret storage cupboard hidden behind a panel of wainscoting. The cubbyhole had been there for more than a century. No telling what the original owners of the house had protected in it. Marcus lined the shelves with keepsakes he would share with no one. Treasured mementos of past loves. Things he wanted no one in his family to taint with so much as their mere knowledge of them. He touched several pieces now.