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  “It ruins your self-respect,” Susan said.

  “Yes,” Rachel said. “You feel worthless. That’s just right. You feel contemptible, almost as if you deserve the mistreatment. As if you’re somehow at fault for being where you are.”

  “And the sexual mistreatment merely intensifies the feeling, I should think.”

  Rachel nodded. I opened another beer and drank most of it. I had little to offer in this conversation. I gestured the beer bottle at Susan. She shook her head.

  Rachel turned and looked at me. She sipped some bourbon and held the glass toward me. “And you,” she said. For the first time there was just a faint blurring in her speech. “There are things I need to say to you. And they are not easy to say. While I lay back in your bathtub and tried to soak some of the filthiness of this all away, I thought about what I should say to you and how.” She looked at Susan. “You are invited,” Rachel said to Susan, “to help me with this. Maybe you have some sense of where my problems lie.”

  Susan smiled. “I’ll pitch in as needed,” she said. “I suspect you won’t need me.”

  “There are a lot of things that don’t need to be said,” I said.

  “But these things do,” Rachel said. “I always knew that if someone found me, it would be you. Somehow whenever I fantasized being rescued, it was never the police, it was always you.”

  “I had more reason,” I said.

  “Yes, or you would see yourself as having more reason, because you would perceive yourself as responsible for me.”

  I didn’t say anything. The beer was gone. I got up and got another bottle and opened it and came back and sat down.

  “And you did it the way I expected you would. You bashed in the door and shot two people and picked me up and took me away. Tarzan of the Apes,” she said.

  “My brain is small, I have to compensate,” I said.

  “No. Your brain is not small. If it were, you wouldn’t have found me. And having found me, you probably had to do what you did. And it’s what you could do. You couldn’t remain passive when they wanted to eject me from the insurance company. Because it compromised your sense of maleness. I found that, and I do find that, unfortunate and limiting. But you couldn’t let these people kidnap me. That, too, compromised your sense of maleness. So what I disapproved of, and do disapprove of, is responsible in this instance for my safety. Perhaps my life.”

  She stopped. I didn’t say anything. Susan was sitting with her heels caught over the bottom rung of the chair, her knees together, leaning forward, her chin on her left fist, looking at Rachel. Her interest in people was emanant. One could almost feel it.

  Rachel drank some more bourbon. “What I am trying to do,” she said, “is to thank you. And to say it as genuinely as I can. I do thank you. I will remember as long as I live when you came into the room and got me, and I will always remember when you killed them, and I was glad, and you came and we put our arms around each other. And I will always remember that you cried.”

  “What’ll you charge not to tell?” I said. “Makes a mess of my image.”

  She went on without pausing. “And I shall in a way always love you for those moments.” Her glass was empty. I filled it. “But I am a lesbian and a feminist. You still embody much that I must continue to disparage.” She had trouble with disparage. “I still disapprove of you.”

  “Rachel,” I said, “how could I respect anyone who didn’t disapprove of me?”

  She got up from the dinner table and walked softly and carefully around to my side and kissed me, holding my face in her hands. Then she turned and went to my bedroom and went to sleep on my bed.

  We just got the table cleared when the cops came.

  32

  They were with us a long time: the chief of the Belmont force and two other Belmont cops; a man from the Middlesex DA’s office; Cronin, the twerp from the Suffolk DA’s office; Quirk and Belson.

  Cronin wanted to roust Rachel out of bed, and I told him if he did, I would put him in the hospital. He told Quirk to arrest me, and Quirk told him if he couldn’t be quiet, he’d have to wait in the car. Cronin’s face turned the color of a Christmas poinsettia, and he started to say something, and Quirk looked at him for a minute, and he shut up.

  We agreed that I could give them a statement and that they would wait until morning to take a statement from Rachel Wallace. It was late when they left. Cronin gave me a hard look and said he’d remember me. I suggested that his mind wasn’t that good. Susan said she was very pleased to have met everyone and hoped they’d have a Merry Christmas. Quirk gave her hand a small squeeze, Belson blew smoke at me, and everyone left.

  In the living room Susan and I sat on the couch. The fire was barely alive, a few coals glowing in the gray ash.

  “We’ve spent a lot of time here the last few days,” Susan said.

  “There are worse places,” I said.

  “In fact,” Susan said, “there aren’t too many better.”

  “We may spend a lot more time here, because she’s in our bed.”

  “The final sacrifice,” Susan said.

  “We could think of ways to make the best of it,” I said.

  “You had to kill two people today,” Susan said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Bother you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Sometimes people need to get feelings out,” Susan said.

  “Perhaps I could express them sexually,” I said.

  “Well, since it’s for therapy,” Susan said. “But you’ll have to be very quiet. We don’t want to wake Rachel up.”

  “With half a quart of bourbon in her?” I said.

  “Well, it would be embarrassing.”

  “Okay, you’ll have to control your tendency to break out with cries of atta boy then.”

  “I’ll do my best,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

  Much later we heard Rachel cry out in her sleep, and I got off the couch and went in and sat on the bed beside her, and she took my hand and held it until nearly dawn.

  About the Author

  ROBERT B. PARKER lives north of Boston with his wife, Joan, and their two sons, David and Daniel. This is his seventh novel. His fourth, Promised Land, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for the best novel of 1976.