Red Dragon - Thomas Harris [95]
Dolarhyde watched her from his van. His feelings made him uneasy; they were dangerous in daylight.
For a moment under the lowering sun, windshields, puddles, high steel wires splintered the sunlight into the glint of scissors.
Her white cane comforted him. It swept the light of scissors, swept scissors away, and the memory of her harinlessness eased him. He was starting the engine.
Reba McClane heard the van behind her. It was beside her now.
“Thank you for inviting me.”
She nodded, smiled, tapped along.
“Ride with me.”
“Thanks, but I take the bus all the time.”
“Dandridge is a fool. Ride with me . . . “ – what would someone say? – “for my pleasure.”
She stopped. She heard him get out of the van.
People usually grasped her upper arm, not knowing what else to do. Blind people do not like to have their balance disturbed by a firm hold on their triceps. It is as unpleasant for them as standing on wiggly scales to weigh. Like anyone else, they don’t like to be propelled.
He didn’t touch her. In a moment she said, “It’s better if I take your arm.”
She had wide experience of forearms, but his surprised her fingers. It was as hard as an oak banister.
She could not know the amount of nerve he summoned to let her touch him.
The van felt big and high. Surrounded by resonances and echoes unlike those of a car, she held to the edges of the bucket seat until Dolarhyde fastened her safety belt. The diagonal shoulder belt pressed one of her breasts. She moved it until it lay between them.
They said little during the drive. Waiting at the red lights, he could look at her.
She lived in the left side of a duplex on a quiet street near Washington University.
“Come in and I’ll give you a drink.”
In his life, Dolarhyde had been in fewer than a dozen private homes. In the past ten years he had been in four; his own, Eileen’s briefly, the Leedses’, and the Jacobis’. Other people’s houses were exotic to him.
She felt the van rock as he got out. Her door opened. It was a long step down from the van. She bumped into him lightly. It was like bumping into a tree. He was much heavier, more solid than she would have judged from his voice and his footfalls. Solid and light on his feet. She had known a Bronco linebacker once in Denver who came out to film a United Way appeal with some blind kids.
Once inside her front door, Reba McClane stood her cane in the corner and was suddenly free. She moved effortlessly, turning on music, hanging up her coat.
Dolarhyde had to reassure himself that she was blind. Being in a home excited him.
“How about a gin and tonic?”
“Tonic will be fine.”
“Would you rather have juice?”
“Tonic.”
“You’re not a drinker, are you?”
“No.”
“Come on in the kitchen.” She opened the refrigerator. “How about . . . “ – she made a quick inventory with her hands – “a piece of pie, then? Karo pecan, it’s dynamite.”
“Fine.”
She took a whole pie from the icebox and put it on the counter.
Hands pointing straight down, she spread her fingers along the edge of the pie tin until its circumference told her that her middle fingers were at nine and three o’clock. Then she touched her thumbtips together and brought them down to the surface of the pie to locate its exact center. She marked the center with a toothpick.
Dolarhyde tried to make conversation to keep her from feeling his stare. “How long have you been at Baeder?” No S’s in that one.
“Three months. Didn’t you know?”
“They tell me the minimum.”
She grinned. “You probably stepped on some toes when you laid out the darkrooms. Listen, the techs love you for it. The plumbing works and there are plenty of outlets. Twotwenty wherever you need it.”
She put the middle finger of her left hand on the toothpick, her thumb on the edge of the tin and cut him a slice of pie, guiding the knife with her left index finger.
He watched her handle the bright knife. Strange to look at the front of a woman as much as he liked.