Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [75]
He paddled his kayak along the periphery of the lake and performed a series of sprints, trying to burn off his anger. Between efforts he basked in the sunlight glinting off the choppy water. He couldn’t help replaying Balitnikoff’s words. For months he’d lived in dread of an accusation like that, yet, amazingly, at the crucial juncture, he’d found himself unable to respond. Bobbing along in the lake, a thousand snappy comebacks sprang to mind, pencil-sharp rejoinders that had eluded him on the apparatus floor. Diana had been supportive and appropriately silent afterward, which somehow helped staunch his venom.
He couldn’t help thinking his ex-wife, Laura, never would have defended him the way Diana had. In his late twenties Finney had fallen in love with and married a woman several years his junior who, over the course of three years of matrimony, slowly dressed herself in the notion that she was born to be a citizen of the world, that life in Seattle was too restrictive and parochial, that her spirit needed the nourishment of travel, the taste of life in Europe or Russia, where she would write a novel or pen poetry or even compose music—although she’d never shown any inclination to write and everyone knew she had a tin ear.
Nothing he said dissuaded her, and after their divorce she made various sojourns abroad, eventually settling in Sweden. To date she’d penned six unpublished novels, sending each to him for his evaluation. Though he tried to be encouraging, they were uniformly horrid. She was living with a widowed proctologist who had six children, and she claimed she’d never been happier.
Late that afternoon Finney tried to nap, but after twenty minutes on the sofa, he gave up and made a telephone call to his auto insurance company and then to a couple of body repair shops. An hour later, the insurance adjuster arrived and snapped pictures of the Pathfinder.
Shortly after six Finney shaved and showered, climbed into his costume, and abruptly fell asleep on his face on the kitchen table. The house and sky were dark when he woke to the sound of knocking. It took a few moments to realize where he was.
Diana was dressed in a form-fitting black skin suit and wore a tall, red-and-white-striped hat, a floppy red silk bow at her neck, and four-fingered white gloves. Her cat whiskers twitched beguilingly when she smiled at Finney. Who would have thought the Cat in the Hat could look so seductively sexy? As far as Finney was concerned, this was Dr. Seuss’s finest hour.
“Listo, señor?”
Finney waved his black Zorro cape. “At your service, señorita. You look terrific.”
“You look suitably dashing yourself.”
“I hope I don’t cut myself on this sword.”
“I hope I don’t let all the little cats out of the big hat.”
“Wasn’t that Bartholomew Cubbins?”
“You might be right.”
“Nice houseboat,” Diana said, stepping inside.
“I’m remodeling.”
“So I see.”
Her Jeep, she explained as she drove, had taken her through college, several summer jobs, and twice to Alaska. It was now one year older than she had been when she bought it, a virtual relic on Seattle’s streets filled with shiny new SUVs and lightweight trucks.
Although the day had been clear and sunny, an evening chill had brought a dense fog that was beginning to trap airborne pollutants; the fog left a vaguely metallic tang in the back of Finney’s throat.
Seattle was experiencing an autumn inversion, one of several in succession in the past month, where warm air stagnated in the basin between the Olympic Mountains to the west and the Cascades to the east, trapping cooler air over the city. In the