Determined that no one would see any change in his life, Bern immediately accepted several jobs that had been waiting for him when he returned. To the few people who asked where he had been for a couple of days, he mentioned something about a spur-of-the-moment minivacation, a break from a hectic schedule. His leg injury he explained away as a fall on the rocks while working on his quay. Susana was introduced as an old friend from Cuernavaca. Eventually, of course, a better explanation would be made to Dana and Philip Lau, but time and friendship would take care of that.
Bern began working on the quay again as soon as he was able to support himself on his leg. It was tricky business, negotiating the lakeside rocks on a muscle-ripped leg, and at first he did little more than piddle. He and Susana would get up around sunrise, have coffee on the terrace, then put on their swimsuits and go down to the water’s edge and begin hauling rocks to the pile that he would eventually cover with concrete. After the sun cleared the point, they would quit and go for a late-morning swim in the cove.
Alice resumed her visits to the studio as well and, much to Bern’s surprise and relief, she accepted Susana’s presence with equanimity. He had feared, at the very least, an awkward period of adjustment, but, in fact, Alice treated her as if she were a very interesting object that had turned up at Bern’s studio-an exotic seashell or a wonderfully smooth river stone that Bern had brought home. Alice liked looking at her, and she liked being around her.
For her part, Susana was comfortable with Alice’s quirky, lively behavior from the beginning. She seemed to intuit even better than he the jumbled meanings in Alice’s symbolist gabbling. She was completely at ease responding to Alice’s verbal nonsense in a kind of pigeon palaver of her own, sometimes peppering it with Spanish, which delighted Alice, often making her laugh uproariously for no apparent reason.
On the mornings when Alice came, they all went to the studio, where Bern worked while Alice and Susana read and listened to music. In the afternoon, Alice and Susana would swim in the cove while Bern continued to work. Sometimes when Dana arrived to pick up Alice, she would bring her suit and join them for a swim and then stay for a glass of wine.
But the late afternoons belonged to Bern and Susana. Often he cooked on the terrace around sunset, and then they would swim in the cove once again as night fell across the lake. Afterward, they would sit in lounge chairs with drinks and watch the night boats move across the water against a backdrop of scattered lights on the far shoreline.
It was during these hours that they talked about what they had been through. Gradually, they disclosed their lives to each other by an intricate progression of small revelations, as if they were providing each other with a mosaic of themselves that could only be assembled slowly, over time, piece by piece with the mortar of insight and understanding. It was an unconscious process, which in its unfolding brought them closer together than either of them had anticipated.
But for Bern, the nights were troublesome. He never slept for more than a couple of hours at a time before waking up with nightmares, sweating. Over and over, he jolted awake at the very instant that Mondragon’s blood exploded across his face. Time and time again, Carleta de Leon’s brains splattered into his eyes, and Jude’s face-his own face-appeared on Kevern’s body, or on Mondragon’s, or on Baida’s. Over and over, Mondragon’s flayed head stared back at him when he looked into dream mirrors. This happened so often and with such vivid effect that Bern began to dread looking into mirrors even when he was awake.
But with time, the nightmares began to subside. As the heat of late summer slowly retreated and the harsh light of August softened into September, Bern began to assemble a perspective of what had happened in Mexico City that allowed him a rough peace with those events. He couldn’t have done that without Susana. She had become the Angel of Solace for his restless discontent.
At the end of the second week in September, Dana Lau’s mother underwent heart surgery in Chicago, and Phil and Dana flew up to be with her for a few days. Alice stayed with Bern and Susana for the weekend. The weather had been sultry and heavy as a seasonal tropical storm roiled westward along Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, pushing wet, heavy clouds inland. It had drizzled for several days, and then a little cool front came down across the plains and pushed the low-pressure system back out into the Gulf. The temperatures dropped to the high eighties, and the sky cleared to a clean, brilliant azure. It was the first real break in the oppressive weather of the season, and it gave everyone hope that the withering summer heat was not, after all, interminable.
Bern spent all of Friday morning interviewing the sole survivor and witness of an armed robbery that had ended in a triple homicide. He had promised the homicide detectives who had flown from Dallas with the woman that he would work up a series of drawings of each of the two assailants over the weekend and have them ready by Monday. He planned to work all weekend.
Around seven o’clock, when the shadows covered the terrace and the water’s edge, Bern grilled fresh vegetables and, following Susana’s directions, prepared camarones al ajillo, shrimp grilled with garlic and chilies. They ate while watching the sun set on the far shore. After clearing the dishes, they returned to the studio, where Bern continued working while the girls played a card game that Alice loved, and they listened to a CD of serene Duke Ellington selections.
Around 9:40, Susana brought their attention to the nearly full moon rising above the hills across the lake. Using the remote he kept in his pocket, Bern turned off the lights in the studio, and they moved to the sofa to watch one of the lake’s loveliest spectacles. After a little while, Bern noticed that Alice was nodding off in her corner of the sofa.
Susana got up and poured a Glenfiddich for herself and one for Bern, and then she wandered over to the glass wall, leaned on the window frame, and stared out at the palely luminous landscape. Bern lost track of time, but Charlie Haden’s sax was only a few bars into “Passion Flower” when he sensed the mood in the room change, and he looked at Susana, who had turned her head to look at him, the right side of her face illuminated by the moonlight.
Instantly, a warm flush of alarm washed over him.
“There’s a boat in the cove,” she said. There was almost a hint of the incredulous in her voice.
Alice, so sensitive to voice tone, stirred awake, and in the moon glow flooding the room, Bern could see her face as she looked at Susana.
“ In the cove?” he asked. “Not on the point?”
“In the cove,” she answered, and the incredulity was gone and something harder had taken its place.
Alice, sensing their concern, sat up. Bern reached for the remote control and snapped off the music as he stood. Alice got up from the sofa, too.
“You don’t see anybody?” he asked as Susana reflexively moved back along the wall.
“No, just the boat. A powerboat.”
Bern and Alice joined her at the window, where the moonlight created the illusion that the boat was floating in the air about a foot above the water.
“You recognize it?” Susana asked.
“No.”
“If ever there was a blue tree, I wouldn’t know myself, either,” Alice whispered, taking Susana’s arm.
“What about the doors?” Susana asked.
But Bern was already heading toward the front. He heard a noise behind him: A drawer was opened and closed in the cabinet that stood a few feet from the studio door that led out to the terrace.
“We shouldn’t… we shouldn’t open our eyes for the singers to be scared,” he heard Alice say in a dramatic stage whisper.
He had cleared the steps and was crossing to the front door that opened into the courtyard corridor at the same moment that Susana was approaching the door that led to the terrace. Just as Bern reached out to put his hand on the dead bolt, Susana hissed, “Paul-”
Suddenly, both doors flew open, knocking them back into the room. Bern staggered backward, falling on the steps and tumbling down to the floor in front of his drawing tables. Alice screamed as Susana was hurled into her, sending both women reeling, overturning chairs and a side table and smashing a lamp.
A man yelled something in Spanish. Alice screamed back something unintelligible, which was followed by a second sharp bark of Spanish.
Silence.