The burnt orange sunrise bam-4

by David Handler

  Still, she had to admit that he’d sounded like his bubbly old self on the phone this morning when he called to tell her they’d been invited to dinner at Astrid’s Castle. More excited than she’d heard him in weeks. So maybe it had passed, whatever the hell it was.

  Then again, maybe it hadn’t.

  She was tied up at the barracks for well over an hour filling out her incident report, requisitioning a new pair of boots from the quartermaster, and responding to one smirky male query after another about that pungent new perfume she seemed to be wearing. It was already six o’clock by the time she started home to her cottage overlooking Uncas Lake. Mitch was expecting to pick her up in twenty minutes. No way. She phoned him on her cell to say she’d have to meet him there. No problem. Mitch was used to her unpredictable work schedule.

  Bella Tillis was busy whipping up an apple cake in the big open kitchen when Des got there. A round, fierce little Brooklyn-born widow in her mid-seventies, Bella Tillis was bunking with Des while she looked for a place of her own. Bella had been her next-door neighbor in the New Haven suburb of Woodbridge back when Brandon had ditched Des for Tamika, a U.S. congressman’s daughter with whom he’d started sleeping back when he and Tamika were classmates at Yale Law School. In fact, Brandon had never stopped sleeping with Tamika, not even after he’d married Des. Which had taught Des one very valuable lesson in life: Dont ever trust lawyers. And caused her to make one very solemn vow to herself: I will never get married again for as long as I live. Because no man on this planet was ever going to get the chance to hurt her that bad again. Never. Utterly shattered by Brandon’s betrayal, Des had stopped going to work, stopped leaving the house and stopped eating. Until, that is, Bella came barging in one morning, Tupperware tub of stuffed cabbage in hand, and recruited Des for her feral stray rescue program. They were best friends now. When Des relocated to Dorset, Bella unloaded her own big house and followed her. As far as Des was concerned, she could stay as long as she wanted. Bella was good company and a dynamite housekeeper and it was nice to have her there when Des felt like staying over with Mitch.

  “Oy-yoy, Desiree, what is that awful smell?” she demanded when Des came charging through the back door into the laundry room, shivering from the wind.

  “It’s raccoon urine,” Des replied as she stood there on the mud rug, unlacing her spare boots. Not an easy proposition when she had five house cats studying her socks with keen, busy-nosed interest.

  Bella appeared in the laundry-room doorway, scrunching up her face. “Forgive me, it sounded like you just said-”

  “You asked, I answered.”

  “Take those socks off at once, tall person. I will not have you tracking that-that smell all over my clean floor.”

  “Um, okay, I like to think of it as our clean floor.”

  “Off!” she roared, hurling herself in Des’s path. Des towered over her, but Bella was as wide as a nose tackle.

  “All right, all right.” She yanked them off and tossed them out the door into the snow. “Feel free to burn them.”

  “Oh, I shall. Believe me.”

  Barefoot, Des hurried across the kitchen toward her bedroom. When she’d bought the place she’d torn out walls so that her kitchen, dining room and living room all flowed together. Her studio was in the living room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake. “Bella, I am feeling so not glamorous right now. And I am late, late, late. Tell me what to put on.”

  “Well, for starters, forget glamorous.” Bella went back to work on a Granny Smith with a paring knife, slicing it rapid-fire into a mixing bowl. “You’re not about glamour.”

  Des stopped in her tracks, hands on hips. “Was that supposed to be a compliment?”

  “No, that was honesty,” she replied, hurling cinnamon, brown sugar and nutmeg into the bowl with the apple slices. She made cakes just like Des’s granny did. Never measured, never used a recipe. Hell, there was no recipe. “Glamour is a facade, Desiree. Strictly for tsotskes who are trying to hide something. You don’t have to hide a thing. You’re the real goods.”

  “Does that mean I should or shouldn’t wear a dress?”

  Bella puffed out her cheeks in disgust. “Covering your tuchos with a dress is like putting a veil over the Mona Lisa. I forbid it.”

  “Girl, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “I don’t either, quite frankly.”

  Des whipped off her uniform en route to her bedroom and jumped into the shower, toweling off while she searched frantically through her closet. She was not what anyone would call delicate. Des knew this. She was broad-shouldered, high-rumped and cut with muscle. Nor was she a girlie-girl. She kept her hair short and nubby, and wore no war paint or nail polish. But she did have alluring almond-shaped pale green eyes, and a dimply wraparound smile that could melt titanium from a thousand feet away. And Des knew this, too. She settled on her black cashmere turtleneck, gray flannel slacks and black boots with chunky two-inch heels.

  By now it was a quarter to seven. She’d already reloaded her weapon at the barracks. She tossed it and her shield into her shoulder bag. Her cell phone and pager she wore on her belt. On her way out she shoved her gloves into a pocket of the hooded, buttery-soft shearling coat that she’d bought in Florence on her honeymoon. She loved that damned coat so much she’d worn it around their hotel room naked. Brandon hadn’t exactly minded. God, that was ages ago.

  “Yum, what am I smelling?” she wondered, pausing in the kitchen to say good-bye.

  “I already had the oven going, so I figured I may as well do my brisket, too. When I thawed it this morning I didn’t know you had plans.”

  “Sure, we can have it tomorrow. Mitch loves your brisket.”

  “Of course he does. This is a man of discerning tastes.”

  “If that’s the case, then how do you explain his American chop suey?”

  “This is also a man,” Bella replied, glancing at her. “What’s with you tonight? You nervous about meeting Ada?”

  “Should I be? I don’t know her films.”

  “She was one of my heroes when I was a girl,” Bella recalled, her face creasing into a smile. “So smart and gutsy and beautiful. Her husband, Luther, was a very fine playwright. The two of them were hounded out of the country by those thugs during the McCarthy era. That was a terrible time, Desiree. A girlfriend of mine whose father wrote for the radio, he ended up committing suicide.” She peered at Des shrewdly. “What is it then?”

  “What is what?”

  “You’re acting meshuga tonight.”

  “Am not. I’m just in a rush.”

  “Whatever you say,” Bella said doubtfully. “Have fun.”

  “I’ll do my best.” Des was halfway to the door, car keys in hand, before she came back and said, “It’s Mitch. I think he has a problem with our relationship.”

  “Tie that bull outside, as we used to say on Nostrand Avenue.”

  “Bella, I have never understood what that expression means.”

  “Well, what’s the problem-is it the lovemaking?”

  “God, no. He’s still the Wonder from Down Under. But the man has something serious on his mind, Bella. He keeps getting all quiet and far away. Which I’m, like, he is never.”

  “Maybe it’s that book he’s been trying to write. How is that going?”

  “It’s not, near as I can tell.”

  “Then that’s probably it. Men can get very strange when their work isn’t going well.”

  “Men can get very strange come rain or come shine. But it’s not the book, Bella. His words say otherwise.”

  “Why, what did he say?”

  Des took a deep breath before she replied, “He said, and I quote, ‘I wonder if we’re getting in too deep.’”

  Bella’s face dropped. “Oh, I see… And what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Why, do you think we are?’ To which he replied, and I quote, ‘It could certainly appear that way.’ To which I said, ‘Appear that way t
o whom?’”

  “Hold on, you actually said to whom?”

  “I did. This girl’s got herself a proper education.”

  “And what did Mitch say to that?”

  “Jack. Not one damned word.”

  Bella considered this carefully. “Desiree, I’m not necessarily hearing qualms here. Mitch could simply be trying to engage you in a dialogue about your feelings.”

  “No sale. If he’s not getting cold feet, then why raise it at all?”

  “You do have a point,” Bella admitted, sticking out her lower lip.

  “Besides, when we first got together we swore we’d never do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “There are two subjects we agreed that we’d never, ever obsess about-our slight cultural differences and our future. That’s written in stone, Bella. It’s a rule.”

  “Tattela, we’re talking about a relationship here, not a nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Rules like that are made to be broken.”

  “Not by me they’re not.”

  “Okay, here’s a kooky idea-have you tried talking to him about it?”

  “I can’t. I get all uptight and then I start feeling this horrible panic thing coming on that I haven’t had since I was fourteen. And, excuse me, but kooky?”

  “So I’m not hip. Shoot me.” Bella furrowed her brow. “What kind of panic thing are we talking about?”

  “We’re not talking about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s incredibly embarrassing, that’s why not.”

  “If you can’t tell me, who can you tell?”

  “No one, I’m hoping.” Des stood there jangling her keys. “He’s met someone else, must be. Someone who he has more in common with. Maybe it’s another movie critic. No, no, that can’t be it. They all look like nearsighted mice. At least, that’s what he told me once. But maybe he was lying to me about that. Maybe they all look like Cameron Diaz. Or maybe he lilies nearsighted mice. Or maybe he…” Des stopped and came up for air. “I don’t know who she is, but when I find out I am going to hurt her.”

  Bella shook her head at her. “Desiree, that man absolutely adores you, and he’d never give another woman so much as the time of day. He is not Brandon.”

  “I do know that.”

  “Do you? I don’t think so. If you ask me, you’re still schlepping your baggage around with you like Willy Loman with his sample cases.”

  Des shot a hurried look at her watch. Past seven now. “Okay, then how do you explain the dead shark?”

  “The dead what?”

  “He made me watch Annie Hall with him last week-I’d never seen it before.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “It was okay, if you like watching white people whine for two hours. But there’s this scene with Diane Keaton on the airplane, when Woody says that a relationship is like a shark, it has to keep moving forward or it dies. ‘What we have on our hands is a dead shark,’ is what he says.”

  “I remember the scene,” Bella said, nodding.

  “Why did Mitch pick that movie for us to watch?”

  “It’s a classic.”

  “World’s full of them.”

  “It’s very romantic.”

  “Bella, it compares true love to a killing machine.”

  “He screened Psycho for you a couple of weeks ago, did he not?”

  “And your point is…?”

  “Has he proceeded to hack you to death in the shower with a big knife?”

  “No,” Des admitted. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “Desiree, I want you to stop and listen to me very carefully,” Bella said sternly. “You have to believe in him. You have to believe in the two of you. If you don’t, you’re going to sabotage the best thing that’s ever happened to you, and you won’t have anyone to blame but yourself.”

  “Bella, I’m not sabotaging anything,” she insisted. “And I’m not playing a head game. I know the signs. I know the man. I know where this is heading.” Des drew in her breath, her chest tightening. “Mitch Berger is getting ready to break my heart. And when he does, you may as well just dig me a hole and shove me in, because I am not going to survive. Not this one. I will die. Hear me? I will absolutely die.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Astrid’s Castle was perched high atop an exposed granite cliff that overlooked the Connecticut River about ten miles upriver from the village of Dorset. For drivers heading north to Boston on Interstate 95, the immense stone replica of a medieval fortress was hard to miss, looming there as it did above the river, so majestic, so improbable, so floodlit. Many people, especially those who wrote travel brochures for the state’s tourism office, thought Astrid’s looked like something straight out of a fairy tale.

  Mitch thought it looked more like the main attraction of Six Flags Dorset. If such a place existed. Which, happily, it did not.

  A gate with stone pillars marked its entrance on Route 156. During the summer, when tourists flocked to the castle by the thousands, there was an attendant in a kiosk there, collecting admission. Now there was no one. Inside the gate, the private drive forked almost at once. The left fork was for visitors who had come to ride Choo-Choo Cholly, the castle’s whimsical, brightly colored narrow-gauge steam train. From May through October, Cholly was a big attraction for day-trippers with kids. It made a couple of stops at scenic overlooks and hiking trails as it chugged its way up the mountain to the castle.

  The right fork, which was for guests of the inn and deliveries, led to a private road that climbed for three miles through heavily forested grounds. Mitch’s old truck labored as it made the ascent. The road was steep, twisty and very narrow, especially with the plowed snowbanks crowding in on both sides. Finally, he came around a big bend and crested at the top, and there it was before him in the floodlights, framed by a pair of giant sycamores that flanked the end of the road like sentries. Astrid’s was eye-poppingly massive from close up-wide, vast and three stories high, not counting its trademark tower. There was a moat. For arriving and departing guests, a circular driveway passed over it on a drawbridge to the castle’s main entrance. For Choo-Choo Cholly riders, there was a miniature train station with a platform that was roofed in copper and illuminated by Victorian lamps.

  Mitch eased into the guest parking lot in between a silver Mercedes wagon with Washington, D.C., plates and a rental Ford Taurus from New York. The temperature had moderated since morning, up close to 30, but when he got out he discovered the wind was absolutely howling off the river, especially up on this exposed hilltop. Mitch could see the lights of Essex directly across the river. Yet he could not make out the moon or the stars, which he found a bit peculiar. When it blew this hard it generally meant the sky was clearing. Tonight, it was not.

  The moat was solidly frozen. Mitch clomped his way over it on the wooden drawbridge, half expecting to run into Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone locked in a sword fight.

  Instead he encountered a short, powerfully built young guy hunched over a snow shovel, clearing the remains of the day’s snow from the blue stone path that led to the front door. He wore a heavy wool lumberjack shirt over a hooded sweatshirt. The stocking cap he had on was pulled low over his eyes. His jeans were baggy, his boots scuffed. He wore no gloves. His hands were chapped and red, nails blackened with grease. He halted from his labors to glance up at Mitch. He had a thick reddish beard that grew up unusually close to his eye sockets. Very little skin showed, especially with that knit cap pulled so low over his eyes. Mitch thought it gave him the Lon Chaney, Jr., look, as in when the moon is full, as in Wha-oooo…

  “Get your bags… you, sir?” the Wolfman asked him in a voice so faint that Mitch could barely hear him.

  “I’m not an overnight guest, thanks. Just here for dinner.” Mitch realized on closer inspection that he recognized this particular lycan-thrope. “I see you at the hardware store all the time, don’t I?”

  “Could be,” he replied shyly. “I’m in and out of there a lot.”

/>   “Mitch Berger,” he said, sticking out his hand.

  “Oh, sure. You’re looking after things out on Big Sister. I’m Jase Hearn,” he said, gripping Mitch’s hand. His was so rough it was like grabbing a chunk of firewood. “You’re a brave soul, man, wintering over out there,” he added, his voice growing stronger as he got more at ease.

  “Or possibly just crazy,” Mitch said, grinning at him.

  “They usually just hire some poor doofus to do it.”

  “No need to-they have me for free.”

  “Me, I keep things running here,” Jase said, leaning his weight on his shovel. “Me and my big sister, Jory. She’s head housekeeper, I’m maintenance.”

  “That must keep you pretty busy,” Mitch said, his eyes taking in the hugeness of the place. “Especially this time of year.”

  “She’s a beauty and a beast,” Jase admitted, scratching at his furry face. “Took twenty men five whole years to build her. She’s all native fieldstone. And, man, does she eat up the fuel. Three furnaces, two hot-water heaters, forty-eight guest rooms with forty-eight wood-burning fireplaces. Windows everywhere, on account of the views. You wouldn’t believe what it costs to heat her. Winters, they got to close down the third floor entirely. Lay off most of the staff, too. Me and Jory are the only full-timers.”

  “Business is slow this time of year?”

  “Dead slow, unless we get like a corporate retreat or a wedding. Tonight, we got no paying guests at all. This thing for Mrs. Geiger is huge for us. All kinds of Hollywood celebrities will be staying here. Movie studio’s picking up the whole tab. A hotshot, Spence Sibley, is already here, job-bossing the whole thing. Better him than me. I just keep the fires burning and the road clear.” Jase resumed his shoveling. “Watch out for black ice on your way back down tonight. It can be a real bitch.”