But DesirЋe was to have no respite from her aching conscience that night. James Devereaux answered for Robin and said that she was not well, and Rodney, still housesitting at DesirЋe's parents' home, answered the phone, sounding exhausted and harried, saying that Tanya was out he knew not where.
Of course, he would sound harassed, for in his quest for news of the wild dog pack he had let a great many things go, leaving himself in serious financial difficulties back home. DesirЋe felt sorry for him, so glad that she knew nothing that would interest him, except what Liz had told her months before.
So when Mark was suddenly summoned to a meeting with Sid Buchanan, the guilty young woman was left alone to agonise alone over her behaviour of the day. On the one hand, she was glad that she would not have to spend the evening with Mark while the memory was fresh of herself bending over the sheriff's desk with his huge cock thrusting in and out of her traitorously wet and responsive vagina while Mark unwittingly stared at her from just a few feet away. But it also meant that she, social person that she was, would have to suffer in solitude with the flames of her conscience.
She considered calling Pastor Hemmings, but in her shame discarded that idea. No one must know, least of all the pastor, even though that was what he was there for. So she watched television all night until exhaustion put her to sleep at four o'clock.
However, she felt lucky when she connected the next day with both her friends, Robin and Tanya, and they made plans for a little coffee klatch at the Mitchell mansion for two that afternoon. Tanya was housesitting while DesirЋe's parents were travelling in Europe.
At that hour, they sat comfortably in the great lounge of the house DesirЋe had lived in until just two months earlier, and it was Tanya, little devil that she sometimes could be, that introduced the idea of adding whiskey to the coffee, and then gin and vodka to tonic, until even Robin, the only one of them still in her teens, began to show a certain lightheadedness.
They talked, as women love to talk, and Robin mentioned the day Priscilla had ridden out into the hills and come back with Dr. Hemmings.
"She's been in there ever since," Robin said, "and I've only seen her once. Uncle Jim has been in there with her, and he's raised the reward on the dog pack."
Tanya looked up knowingly, but said nothing. She had no intention of telling them what she knew about Lobo and his offspring. "What do you suppose happened out there, Robin?" Tanya asked. "Think it was the dogs?"
Robin's blue eyes opened wide in fright. "I don't know. I hadn't thought of that? Do you suppose…"
"It's too horrible to think about," DesirЋe hastened to say. "Even to a girl like Priscilla."
Tanya said, "Maybe Priscilla got just what she needed."
"Tanya, that's mean," DesirЋe said.
"Don't I get to speak an opinion?" Tanya shot back.
"Of course," said Robin. "But I wouldn't wish that on anyone." The youngest girl's eyes seemed to cloud over with her own thoughts. Her lovely mouth turned down at the corners and her eyes misted with obvious consternation.
"What's wrong, baby?" Tanya asked, moving over to sit beside her younger friend. "What's wrong? Come on, you can tell us."
Robin looked up at Tanya, then to DesirЋe. "I-I'm too ashamed to say."
DesirЋe moved over to Robin's other side and put her arm around her friend's shoulders. "Whatever you tell us goes no farther than this room."
Robin dropped her face to her hands, stifled a sob, and dried her cheeks of the tears that suddenly began to course down them. "I'm having an affair."
DesirЋe was shocked. Robin, an affair?
Tanya was nowhere near upset or shocked. "Good for you, darling."
"Tanya!" DesirЋe exclaimed reprovingly.
"No, no, why not?" Tanya retorted. "I'm having one too."
DesirЋe's eyes widened. "Does Rodney know?"
"'Course not," Tanya said. "He's too busy chasing the Pulitzer pups. His dick has gone so limp he could rope a dog with it."
"Tanya!" said DesirЋe and Robin in unison.
"Well, that's the way it is," the older girl said. "I've always been true blue, except for a few erotic fantasies, but house sitting isn't all it's cracked up to be when you're totally alone and there's no money to even go out for a hamburger."
"Who is it?" Robin asked.
Tanya shook her head. "No, sweetie, you first."
Tanya and DesirЋe looked expectantly at the innocent-faced teenager. "I don't think…" She looked at her friends. "No, it's just too awful."
DesirЋe didn't press her, but Tanya did. "Come on, darling, let's play the game."
DesirЋe was surprised to hear her old friend speak this way. She sounded a bit like her other friend Liz when she spoke thus.
"Uncle-Uncle Jim," she said under her breath.
"Say again," Tanya urged. "You're going to have to talk a bit louder for us deaf girls."
Robin took a deep breath and said loudly, "Uncle Jim. It's my Uncle Jim Devereaux. We've done it three times and I feel terrible about it."
To DesirЋe's chagrin, Tanya laughed. Where had Tanya lost her sense of propriety? She certainly wasn't the girl she had known in high school. That Tanya would have been at least mildly shocked, but Tanya's laugh seemed callous.
"Tell me more," Tanya said. "With Rodney out chasing this phantom dog pack, I don't get much excitement at all."
DesirЋe shivered at the mention of the dogs. Something in the back of her mind was trying to get out, and whatever it was, it frightened her to her delicate bones.
Robin sniffed, wiped her pretty cheeks, and then the words seemed to tumble out, like a repentant Catholic girl in a confessional.
"I was riding, oh, three days ago. It was the day Priscilla had some trouble out in the hills and came back all beat up. I was trying to catch her, but I wasn't good enough at riding to control the horse. He bolted, ran away with me and I'd have gone over the ravine if Uncle Jim hadn't caught me. Pulled me right off the horse's back as if he were Superman."
Almost panting with the excitement, DesirЋe and Tanya looked at her expectantly.
"I-I was so upset," Robin went on. "So shaken up that I lost control – of everything. Wet myself. Uncle Jim took me into the bathroom. I was weak with fear. He took off my clothes. He-he-he licked me. With his tongue. He put his fingers in me, and licked me, underneath. I couldn't move. I wanted to move, I tried, but my arms wouldn't move. Then he-he put his thing in me."
Robin took a deep breath. "I've never felt anything like it, and it felt good. Really, really good, and there must be something wrong with me, because I liked it. Nobody ever told me – Yes, yes, they did, in high school, but I didn't believe them. I didn't believe them. Oh, what will become of me now?"
Robin buried her face in her hands and began to sob. DesirЋe put an arm around her shoulders and spoke softly.
"Don't cry, Robin darling," the blonde girl said. "It happens to every girl someday. And I-I'm having an affair."
Now DesirЋe saw Robin's eyes swing toward her, saw the grin light Tanya's face.
"Wow," the oldest girl said. "Have I been missing something here?" Tanya folded her arms and looked from DesirЋe to Robin jealously. "My silly husband is out trying to track down these dogs, neglecting me, and my best friends are getting shagged at their convenience."
DesirЋe said, "That's not how it was."
"How was it then?" Tanya said.
"I – was coerced," DesirЋe said. "I didn't just sneak off to do it."
"You mean, you were raped." Tanya said.
Robin gasped, but DesirЋe said, "No, of course not. I was lured into a compromising position, and it – just happened."
"Things like that don't just happen," Tanya said.
And now it was DesirЋe's turn to cry. But she didn't have long to dwell on her problems. The phone rang. While the other girls watched her, she went to the phone and caught it on the fourth ring. He face went from expectant to distressed and she hung up. Her friends watched as she spun on her expensive high heels and started for the door.
"Gotta go, Tanya, Robin," she said brusquely, her hand on the doorknob. "I've got to get to Mark." And she was out the door before they could even ask for a clarification.
Tanya and Robin looked at each other quizzically.
As DesirЋe ran to her car, two big, yellow eyes watched her from fifty feet away. She was into her car and moving away so fast that even Lobo, his loins flaming with canine love and lust, could not catch up to her before the trim little car was moving away at speed. He was disappointed to have missed her again, for his occasional trips by her other home were always impeded by barred and locked windows, and only by chance had he come across her in this, the locale of their first lewd coupling over two months previously.
Lobo was in the habit of stopping by this house, nearly every day, to pay a visit to the hot-bodied, darker-haired young woman who had been entertaining his three sons at Liz Clark's house. His bestial balls had learned to expect a daily copulation here with Tanya, and so after a brief wistful look in DesirЋe's direction, he circled around behind the large, rambling house to wait patiently by the bedroom window. He detected the aroma here of three females, one of them, DesirЋe, who had now departed, and one of them Tanya, who he knew well. There was a third fresh and delicate odor, however, with which he was not familiar. It was sweet and pleasant, like DesirЋe, and his male instincts drove him toward it, toward the need to mate and propagate, to plant his seed inside another fresh, young female's pure womb.
And there, at the window of the room where he had first possessed the body of his dear DesirЋe, Lobo sat down to wait, though not patiently…
DesirЋe drove frantically toward the spot where she had been told that Mark lay injured in a twisted wreck. The mysterious voice had filled her with panic as it told her the brief and harrowing story. But what was Mark doing out there on the road to the old Pace farm? He was supposed to be upstate working on some deal with Sid Buchanan. So why wasn't he there when he should have been? He had said he was going straight to the airport yesterday. Why wasn't he where he was supposed to be?
The somewhat uneven road beat at the underside of her tires as she pushed her little car through the countryside, her heart pounding in her chest. Mark! Mark! Mark! I'm coming to you, my darling. Where are you?
And then, over the rise, she saw something. A car. Yes, it must be there! A car, yes, but not Mark's. Sideways across the road, blocking it. She put her foot down on the brake and stopped with a skid. Jumped out. Ran to the car. Yes, the wreck must be just beyond that car. Mark! Two men standing there, and they looked familiar, but from where? Mark! Mark!
"Mark!" she cried, glancing at the two men, then beyond. Nothing. "Where's Mark?" she asked the two men, bracing herself with her hands on the car. "Please!"
The two men smiled, then said, "Get in. We'll take you to him."
"Yes, yes, but let's hurry."
One of them held the door open for her and she clambered into the back. They got into the front seat and, one of them, righting the car in its position on the road, moved the car carefully, and too slowly, down the road toward the Pace estate.
"Oh, please, hurry!" she pled, balling her hands into fists in her lap. "Mark needs me."
One of them turned around with a thin smile and said, "DesirЋe, don't worry about a thing. We'll get you to where you must be right away."
And the car moved ahead into the rolling hills of the countryside where the two men, Sam Quaid and Billy Canning had organized DesirЋe's final day of life, and Billy's ideas of revenge against Clete Anderson, who they knew loved this beautiful blonde girl. There, at the old Pace mansion, where they had set up cameras, plastic bags, and scalpels and a bone saw, they had planned to murder DesirЋe, to photograph her death and the dismemberment that they would subsequently perform on her lovely body, to subsequently send the hacked-off pieces to Clete as revenge for his murder of Billy's brother Johnny.
But DesirЋe, oblivious to their plans, sat quietly, though apprehensively, and they drove her to the horrible fate they planned for her.