Dancing with the Dead (19 page)

She pasted a liberal number of stamps on the envelope, then walked to the mailbox at the corner and dropped it in. It landed hard at the bottom of the obviously empty metal box. She peered at the pickup schedule and saw that the mail had been collected an hour ago, but there was another pickup at midnight.

In a few days, Rene should call and tell her he’d received the envelope.

He’d be grateful, she was sure.

T
HE WEEKEND CRAWLED
past, then Monday, and Rene hadn’t called to confirm he’d received the envelope. Mary began to wonder if she’d pasted on enough stamps. She tried to reassure herself by thinking the worst that could happen was that the envelope would be delivered with postage due. But did it work that way if the recipient had a post office box? If it didn’t, would the envelope be returned to her with “Insufficient Postage” stamped on it in officious red letters? Was it even now wending its way back toward its origin while Rene nervously awaited its arrival in Baton Rouge?

She found herself thinking too often about the envelope, even to the point where it interfered with dance practice.

“Don’t let your feet wander along with your mind,” Mel admonished her with a smile, as she stepped sideways in the wrong direction during a tango.

“Sorry,” Mary said, embarrassed, “I was doing fox-trot.”

“Better not get the two mixed up in Ohio,” Mel said, sharply this time. He wasn’t smiling now, and there was a hard pinpoint of light in his eyes.

It wasn’t like him, or any of the Romance Studio instructors, to be openly critical. Mary felt her blood rush hotly to her cheeks, but before she could stammer an apology he led her through a series of pivots and backward basics.

“Mel—” She gasped, a little breathless from the pivots.

“ ’S’okay, Mary. You’re doing terrific.” Despite his reassuring manner, there was an intensity about him she hadn’t seen before. The way he was staring at her . . .

When the music stopped, he wasn’t breathing hard. She was.

“I need a break,” she gasped, raising a hand palm-out as if to halt something advancing on her.

“Sorry,” he said. “Guess I got wound up and needed to wind down. Doesn’t happen very often.”

“So, are you?”

He backed away and stood with his hands on his slim dancer’s hips; the man probably had a waist smaller than Mary’s. “Am I what?”

“Wound down.”

Mel cocked his head sideways, did a perfect spin, and grinned at her. “Tell you what, Mary, the lesson’s about over, and I don’t have anyone coming in for another half hour. Let’s go next door to the sandwich shop, get a soda or something, and talk about the competition.”

She didn’t know what to think. “You usually do that with students before they compete?”

“No. But there’s some stuff we need to get straight.” His eyes slid sideways, then back, like those of a schoolboy plotting a classroom conspiracy. “I suppose we can talk here if you want.”

Helen was smooth dancing with Nick, staring curiously at Mary over his perfectly squared shoulder. Helen was a human seismograph able to detect the slightest irregular tremor in any relationship.

“Next door’s better,” Mary said.

The Hungry Hobo sandwich shop adjoined the studio in the strip shopping center, so there was only a short distance to walk through rain so gentle it was almost mist. Before leaving the studio, Mary and Mel sat on the vinyl bench and changed to their street shoes. Step in a puddle with suede-soled dancing shoes and they were useless for anything other than expensive bedroom slippers.

Helen was still craning her neck to see them as they left the studio together.

When they’d settled into a booth near the window, Mary ordered a diet Pepsi, and Mel absently told the waitress he’d have the same.

Mel sat staring out the window at the damp evening until the drinks were brought, then he looked directly at Mary. She was used to seeing him in the overhead lighting of the studio, but now his lean face was starkly sidelighted and appeared older and more serious, youth with a hint of mortality.

He took a sip of soda through his straw but didn’t seem to taste it. He said, “Mary, when I say you’re getting better fast, I really mean it.”

“ ’Course you do.” She said nothing more, waiting for him to toss back the conversational ball, wondering where this little impromptu talk was talking them.

“We, uh, speaking in confidence?”

“Sure, if you want it that way, Mel.”

“ ’Cause I’m gonna run a risk in what I say.”

“There’s no risk saying anything to me,” Mary assured him.

“The way a dance studio like Romance works,” he said, “is that we gotta make sure the students walk out feeling good so they wanna sign up for more lessons, or for our night on the town, or some party or other. Maybe the Romance Studios’ intercity competition. Long-term contracts, competitions, that kinda thing’s gotta be our top priority.”

“You have to make money,” Mary said. “I’m not naive, Mel; I realize it’s a business.”

“Some women don’t. They get too emotionally involved. That can lead to a kinda gigolo aspect, if you know what I mean.”

Mary knew. She was sometimes visited by an image of a middle-aged spinster trying to hold back time, making a fool of herself, and hoped it wasn’t her, the Ghost of Mary Future.

“That’s a small part of the dance scene,” Mel said. “Older women being escorted by their young instructors, each one fawning over the other. Usually there’s nothing real intimate going on, but I guess sometimes there must be.”

“Sure. People are people.”

“Rich divorcees, or widows with their husband’s insurance money, that’s what keeps a studio like Romance out of the red. Among ourselves, we instructors call those students Cadillacs, and we’re told to give them special treatment.”

“Cadillacs, really?”

He shook his head, as if frustrated that he wasn’t getting through to her. “The in-house competitions between the Romance Studios in different cities, like the one coming up in Miami, aren’t exactly fixed, Mary, but they come close.”

She’d noticed how almost everyone who entered came home with some sort of medal or trophy, so it had struck her before that the Romance competitions must not be too critically judged, but still she was surprised to hear Mel admit it. She supposed she was guilty of seeing only what she wanted, and closing her eyes to the rest. But why was Mel opening her eyes?

“What about the Ohio Star Ball?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

“That’s a different story. That kinda competition’s sanctioned by the National Dance Council of America and is on the up-and-up. If you do well there, you
know
you can compete. Except for a few cases of politics maybe, among the top pros, it’s honest and you’ll only win what you deserve.”

“Then how come you’re telling me this?”

“ ’Cause I’m not just going up to Ohio with you as part of my job so the studio makes money. Maybe it was mostly work before, but things have changed. You’ve improved tremendously the past few months. More’n I thought you could, tell you the truth. You can win, Mary.
We
can win.” He reached across the table and touched his fingertips to the back of her hand; the contact was electric. “I want to win up there, Mary. Before I commit myself to it completely, I gotta know you feel the same way.”

Something in Mary’s breast expanded; hope and confidence combining to form a helium swell of exhilaration, of supreme confidence. “I’ve felt that way for weeks, Mel.” She clutched his hand, barely realizing she’d swept her arm across the table.

He withdrew his hand, but he said, “This isn’t an act to get you all enthused. Not a standard studio con job to milk more money out of you. I need to know you believe me.”

“Con job. Milk more money. Would the studio actually do something like that?”

“Sure. You should be a fly on the wall during one of our staff meetings. It’s a rough business, Mary.”

She stared at him over her kinked straw. “You’ll find out I can be a determined competitor, Mel. Maybe not in other areas of my life, but in this I can fight and win.”

The wind blew and peppered the window with rain. “Well, ballroom dancing’s not exactly fighting,” Mel said, rotating his cup in its circle of dampness.

“Depends on who’s doing the dancing.”

Mel looked at her in a way she’d never seen; his studio mask had been removed to reveal who he really was. And now he was seeing who she was.

“I do think you mean it, Mary.”

Mary said, “Believe it.”

S
LUMPING DOWN IN
the booth, Mary watched Mel stride out the door to return to the studio. She could see him out the window, a graceful figure viewed through a plane dividing inside from outside. It seemed to Mary that always there was a pane of glass between her and the people she tried to love, to really talk to, invisible but solid, keeping her on the outside. But tonight she’d been inside, with Mel. As he hunched his shoulders against the rain and jogged out of sight, lightning illuminated the parking lot like a cosmic flashbulb.

In a daze, Mary slowly sipped the rest of her Pepsi, trying to assess the significance of her conversation with Mel. Her world had changed in a way subtle but profound, a shifting on its axis that altered time and climate.

She continued to think about this as she drove home over rain-slick, iridescent streets, cozy in the car’s scaled-down confines, mesmerized by the
thwump! thwump! thwump!
of the windshield wipers. The talk with Mel had pleased her immensely, even inspired her.

And scared her. So much was expected of her now.

She was still replaying the conversation in her mind when she worked her key into her apartment door and heard her phone ringing.

After flinging the door open, she tossed her dance shoes into the wing chair and ran to the phone. She lifted the receiver and breathed a hello.

“Mary?” Rene’s faint but rich Southern accent, turning her name to honey.

“Yeah, me.”

“It’s Rene. You outa breath?”

“A little. Phone was ringing when I walked in the door.”

“I drove into Baton Rouge today and got the envelope,” he said. “I wanted to thank you.” He didn’t sound as if he was speaking all the way from New Orleans; he might have been right there in the room with her, his mouth near her ear.

“Is the stuff I sent a help?”

“I think it will be. And the schedule of upcoming competitions is a bonus. There are some names on the dance registration lists I can recall Danielle mentioning from time to time. Friends from the competitions.”

“Maybe if you look up those people, talk to them, you can learn something. You know, one of them might know some little piece of information and not realize it’s important.” She felt slightly foolish, like a character in a crime melodrama urging someone to search for the missing piece of the puzzle. As if in real life it always existed.

But he said, “Could be. Though I’m more interested in finding out if any of these women’s names cross-check with the names of murder victims in various cities, especially dance competition cities.” He was quiet for a moment. “I’m not sure I want to see any of the same names on both lists,” he said. “It’d mean there’s a modern-day Jack the Ripper operating in different cities, and the police haven’t picked up a pattern. That prospect’s beneficial to me in my predicament, but it’s still kinda ghastly to think about.”

“Have you considered giving the police the names of the dancers Danielle mentioned? Maybe they’d get busy and figure out something. They’re supposed to be the experts.”

He snorted. “Some experts! I tell you, Mary, the more I have to do with the police the less I trust them. Just the opposite of us; each time we talk I trust you more. There’s some humanity there, some real concern.”

Flattered, she said, “I feel like we know one another, even though we never laid eyes on each other. I mean, sometimes you get a sense about people, a certainty in your heart. Like a kinda instinct that’s never wrong.”

She thought he might reply that he had the same feeling about her, but he said, “You still planning on entering the Ohio competition in November?”

“Still am. I’m getting in all the practice possible. It’s hard work, but I love it and it’s worth it.”

“Dancing meant so much to Danielle.” His voice was a wistful sigh. “It means a lot to you, too, doesn’t it, Mary?”

“Yes. It didn’t start out that way, but now I’m . . . I don’t know, it’s like I’m only truly me when I’m dancing. You understand something like that?”

He laughed sadly. “Yeah, I’ve more or less heard it before. Sometimes, Mary, when we talk I feel I’m on the phone with Danielle.”

Not knowing what to think of that, she said nothing. For an eerie instant she saw herself as some kind of medium: Danielle using Mary and phone lines to communicate from the grave.

“Mary? I meant that as a compliment.”

“Well, we can talk anytime you want.”

Again the sigh, weighted with a sad resignation. “No, I’m afraid we shouldn’t do that.”

Mary wondered what he meant. Did he fear getting involved so soon after the death of his wife? Did Mary frighten him in some deep and tragic manner? But she was being ridiculous; my God, they’d never even met. What would Jake think? She felt a thrust of fear, like a spear deep and cold in her midsection. Jake. He was still in her thoughts, a potent figure lurking in the corridors of her mind.

“I can’t let someone innocent like you get involved in this mess,” Rene said. “I haven’t exactly made it a secret I’m determined to find whoever killed Danielle. The police are watching me, and it’d only be a matter of time before they knew I was contacting you. We’ve run enough of a risk already.”

“I’m not afraid of the police. I haven’t done anything wrong, and neither have you.”

He laughed, as if admiring her pluckiness. “It’s not a question of being unafraid. Or being innocent, for that matter. People don’t really know how the police work until something like this happens. A nightmare that spins a web. I know you understand, Mary.”

Do I?
“Sure. I guess, if you say so, it makes sense.”