The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [46]
He leaned over and whispered in her ear. “Rise and shine, Nance.”
She stirred slightly, bending one tanned leg.
“Gotta get going.”
She rolled his way and snuggled up against him, murmuring something into his chest that he couldn’t hear. He stroked her back, running his hand down over her hip. She responded instinctively, reaching down between his legs.
He was sorely tempted, not to mention encouraged by his own quick response, but the lingerings of his uneasiness held sway. He followed her hand down and moved it away, kissing her at the same time. “Gotta go,” he repeated. “We don’t need him hunting you down. He thinks you’re out shopping, right?”
She sighed and rolled away to the edge of the bed, dropping her feet over and sitting up, her back to him. He watched her with regret as she rose and quickly replaced her clothes, her movements reflecting both her natural energy and a touch of anger.
She finally turned as he too began dressing. “Why’re we so worried about him all the time?”
Ellis pulled up his jeans and paused, saddened that the inevitable had finally been broached. It wasn’t that the subject had never occurred to him, or even that it seemed a problem without solution, which it did. It was more the familiarity of that dreaded, oft-encountered moment when a decision was called for and he felt himself quailing.
“Don’t you think we should be?” he asked, as if ducking a small thrown object. He reached for his T-shirt.
Curiously, this actually seemed to stump her for a moment. “Other people break up all the time,” she said quietly. “Mel and me don’t even have kids, and it’s not like we own much. He could keep the trailer.”
Ellis said nothing, sitting back down to put on his socks and boots.
“You’d like that to happen, wouldn’t you?” she asked, her voice almost timid. “For you and me to work out?”
He looked over his shoulder at her, one boot in hand. “Jeez, Nance. What d’ya think? Sure I would.”
But Mel might as well have been standing in the room for all the strength of their conviction. Such was his hold over them.
Nancy appeared to collapse in the face of an argument that hadn’t even begun. “It’s so unfair,” she said miserably.
He rose and circled the bed to put his arms around her, an awkward bear hugging a child. “It’ll work out.”
But he hadn’t the slightest idea how.
Far to the south, in Hartford, Connecticut, Joe Gunther was ushered into a basement office with a picture window overlooking not the outdoors but a vast, low-ceilinged room lined with metal filing cabinets. Sitting behind a desk decorated with an incongruously colorful vase of cut flowers and a carved wooden nameplate was a tall, middle-aged woman with suspiciously uniform black hair. The nameplate spelled out “Jennifer Joyce.”
“Special Agent Gunther?” she asked, extending her hand.
He shook hands but moved to the window rather than sit opposite her. “Holy smokes, this is impressive.”
Joyce laughed with embarrassment. “Looks are deceiving. It’s just a huge graveyard, really.”
He turned toward her. “But where exhumations are as steady as burials, I bet. What amazes me is that most people think facilities like this don’t exist anymore—that everything’s on computers.”
“Don’t I wish,” she said. “It would sure make my life easier.” Her face brightened. “The index is computerized, at least. That’s something. We used to have to walk up and down the rows, hunting for what we were after.”
Joe smiled back agreeably, although in truth he had a preference for just that kind of digging. It appealed to the hunter in him and satisfied his need to see things as they really were rather than as shimmering characters on a screen, as seemingly evanescent as the electricity giving them life.
But he didn’t need to fear any debate on the subject. His hostess had already returned to the task that had brought them together.
“Dr. Hillstrom’s fax seems perfectly in order, and the director just e-mailed me his approval allowing you access to the case, so I guess there’s no more to it than to give you a cubby and let you have at it.