Werewolf Cop (22 page)

He parked the red Ford next to her black Mercedes. The house's front door opened as he stepped out onto the gravel of the drive. Margo presented herself in the doorway like a grand hostess welcoming dinner guests. She was dressed in the same skirt and sweater she had worn to church, but the hair ribbon was gone. Her straight silky blond hair spilled free around her porcelain features.

“What can I offer you, darling?” she asked him.

They had come now into the broad main room, an open living room and dining room combined. The furniture was all dark stained wood and floral upholstery, meant to look both rustic and as expensive as it was. There was the sofa on which they'd drunk their wine last time. There was the little corner of wall against which he'd held her while he thrust inside her. There were rows of mullioned windows on two sides, showing the garden to the east and the forest to the south out back. The autumn colors of the leaves were just beginning to grow dim with the coming twilight.

Zach had changed out of his church clothes. He was wearing black jeans and a cowboy shirt and a tan windbreaker. He was looking not at Margo, but at the forest view, brooding on its mysterious depths with his hands jammed in his back pockets. It was a moment before he heard what she'd said.

Then he murmured, “Nothing, thanks.”

“A glass of wine?”

Was that mockery in her voice? The glass of wine was what they'd started with the last time. He couldn't tell. It didn't matter. He faced her. “I'm not going to be here long, Margo. I'm going to have my say and go. I don't want you to threaten me anymore.”

“Threaten you? Zach, I haven't—”

He cut her off. “The e-mails, the calls, showing up at my church. They're all threats, when you get down to it. You're threatening to tell my wife we had sex if I don't pay attention to you or engage with you in some way.”

She started to speak but stammered and fell silent, thrown by his directness, just as she had been in his fantasies driving up.

“I'm not gonna do it,” he said. “Any of it. I'm not gonna answer you, talk to you, anything. This is the last time. I don't want you in my life. I don't want you anywhere near me. I'm sorry as hell I had sex with you. It was weak, stupid. I love my wife more than anything and if she finds out about it, it's gonna hurt her. It's gonna
really
hurt her. I don't know if she'll get over it. I don't know if we'll get past it. We might. Or I might lose everything that matters to me. But that's on me. My choices, my actions, my fault. You do what you want.”

Margo had now recovered from her first confusion. She stood very still while he spoke, listening politely with her hands clasped in front of her breasts, and the faintest trace of a smile on her lips—like a teacher patiently listening to a prized student's book report. Zach knew, even as he went on talking, that she was regrouping, gathering herself for a response. He didn't care. It didn't matter how she responded. He meant to say what he had to say and go.

“But if you think . . .” he went on. “If you think I'm going to hide and creep and crawl for fear of you—if you think I'm going to turn myself into something small and squirrelly you can chase from corner to corner like a rat you're torturing in a maze, you are living in a dream world, 'cause it's not gonna happen. Tell my wife. Don't tell her. Do your worst or go away. You and I have nothing more to say to each other.”

It was that hour of the day when the fall of darkness accelerates so that even during the moments Zach was speaking, the air in the room had dimmed, and the details—of the furniture and appointments, of the people's figures and faces—had lost some of their clarity. Still, Zach saw Margo tilt her head forward in a majestic nod. And, “Well!” she said. “That's quite a speech.”

Her heels clapped on the wood floor as she moved to the wall. She pressed a switch and brought the top light on so they could see each other better.

“Manly, direct, full of bluff integrity,” she continued. “It's all bullshit, of course, but then so much polite conversation is.”

“It's not bullshit, Margo. I mean it.”

“Oh, I know you do, darling. I didn't mean to suggest you didn't. All I meant was: it's none of it true, strictly speaking.” He started to protest, but it was her turn to cut him off. “Oh, I believe you. Don't get me wrong. I believe you're fully prepared to toss me out of your life like a cigarette out of a car window.” Her heels clapped again—then stopped clapping—as she came toward him, stepping onto the braid rug. She stood close enough for him to smell her perfume and her money, her self-certainty and her barely hidden rage. “It's the part about you being sorry about what happened, that's what I don't buy. The part about your family being what matters most to you. About how much you love your wife. Those are things a person says, of course. What an awful bastard you'd be if you didn't say them. Still, I expected a little bit more depth and insight from you. I mean, the way you tell this little story—it doesn't even make sense when you think about it, does it?”

In his mind-rehearsals, Zach had walked out at about this point. In some of his fantasies, she'd agreed to leave him be. In some she was in tears. In some she screamed her threats and curses at his back as he walked to the door. But in any case, in his fantasies, he figured: since nothing she could say was going to change his own actions, there wasn't much point in hanging around to listen.

In real life, however—now, standing here—he found that he didn't walk out, somehow. He just didn't.

And Margo went on. “Let me put forward an alternate theory. Before you stride out heroically to face the consequences. Let me at least explain how I see it, all right? That's why I've been calling you. Because I've wanted to say this. I thought you should hear it before you just decided you could
fuck
me once and forget all about it.”

Anger flashed in her eyes as she spoke the obscenity. Zach realized that, for all her airs, she was beginning to lose control and he really had better get out of there. But he didn't get out. He just didn't. He said: “All right. Say your piece.”

Margo gave another of those majestic nods. She paced away from him a step or two and faced him from a little distance. Now she was standing by a side table decked with crystal candlesticks and an empty fruit bowl. The twilit garden was at her back and so was the little stretch of wall against which Zach had had her. Maybe she'd posed herself purposely so he'd be looking at the place, remembering. He didn't know.

“I will speak my piece,” she said in that rich, warm voice. “If just for one second, you will lay aside your pieties and platitudes. Yes? Maybe? For just one second? If just for one second, you will see the thing clearly, all right? You say your family's the most important thing? You say you love your wife? And you know—you
know
she's such a small-minded little church mouse that she'll throw away everything you have together if you so much as indulge in a meaningless fling. And yet, you go ahead and have that fling? Knowing the consequences? What sense does that make, Zach? Would a man throw away what he truly loves for nothing? For something meaningless? What sense—what sense is there in that? Who could ever believe it but the most self-deceived hypocrite?”

This time the anger not only flashed in her eyes, it made her mouth spasm in a twisting sneer. He could see that the rage was like a red force rising inside her, taking her over, possessing her. Once again, Zach thought he should leave. And he didn't.

“Of course it wasn't meaningless!” Margo said ferociously now. “Of course it wasn't nothing! It was you finally being you, Zach. Admit it. It was the real stuff of your life. It was you in your true nature—not in the guise of some upright western lawman from a TV show, and certainly not as some complacent
paterfamilias
enduring dinner with your squealing kids and your simpering wife—or in that godawful church with its stuffy gray-haired zombies passing around coffee cake and chitchat. God, how can you even stand to pretend that's what you're like? How can you
stand
to go back to all that after what we had?”

“What we had?” In his pent-up frustration with her, the words burst from Zach before he could stop them. “What we
had
, Margo? Christ, I banged you against a wall for five minutes!”

She swept up one of the candlesticks and casually hurled it at him. “They were the only honest five minutes of your life!”

The moment of violence was so natural, so much a part of the flow of her argument, that Zach hardly realized it was happening and had no time to duck. The candlestick thumped painfully against his collarbone and dropped to the rug with a thud. Stunned, he watched it roll under an armchair, out of sight.

“You didn't throw away what you love for something meaningless,” Margo snarled at him. “You threw away something meaningless for what you really love.”

He raised his eyes to her with wonder. “You?” he said, in genuine amazement.

“Me. Yes, of course, me.”

“Do you really believe that?”

“It makes no sense otherwise.”

“But don't you see how crazy that is?”

She picked up the other candlestick. This time, he was ready and raised his arm in self-defense. She brandished the crystal cylinder a moment. It sparkled in the light. Then her eyes blurred with tears and she slowly lowered the stick back to the table with a trembling hand.

“You say you threw away what you love in exchange for five minutes of meaningless pleasure. I say you cast off a lifetime of hypocrisy for five minutes of real life as you truly are. Which version makes more sense to you?” she said.

She straightened. She put her hands together before her skirt as she had outside the church that morning. She composed herself. And when he didn't answer her, she went on with restored dignity, “Well, then, have it your way. But no, do not think for a minute I'm going to allow you to keep all this theoretical. To be noble in theory. To do the right thing in theory. No. If you're going to throw away a woman as valuable as myself, if you're going to throw me over for Saturday cartoons and coffee cake, then, so help me, I'm going to make you live out the logic of your lies. I'm going to make every kind of trouble for you, Zach. With your wife. With your children. With your employers. With the news media who made you a hero. Go ahead. Tell them I seduced you. I'll tell them you took me. I'll tell them you wanted me so much, you wouldn't listen when I said no. I'll set my lies against yours, and see which ones make sense to the rest of the world. I have money and powerful friends, and I promise you I will lay waste to your
kabuki
marriage and all the rest of it. I'm doing you a favor, Zach. Really. I care about you too much to let you throw your only life away on all that . . . fraudulent sanctity.”

When she finished speaking, the room was silent, except for a clock ticking somewhere. Neither of them moved, but instead they stood regarding each other steadily, she with haughty defiance, he with his broken heart showing in the slump of his shoulders and his weary frown. He didn't know how much trouble she could really make for him, but he didn't kid himself: it would be enough. If she only told Grace—if only the children found out—it would be enough.

He drew breath, and his forlorn gaze shifted to the windows. Dusk had shaded to the edge of night outside. The trees beyond the garden were turning black against the dark blue sky. A dazzling burst of silver was just now appearing on the horizon. It caught Zach's eye and he gazed at it, thinking:
She saw me coming from a mile away. She saw that picture in the paper and she wrote this script and played it out. She saw something she couldn't have and she set out to ruin it—and I let her do it.

He went on gazing past her out the window. The silver dazzle behind the trees resolved itself into a silver arc. The silver arc bloomed into a magnificent circle of white and silver light. The silver circle rose like the music of an overture into the twilight sky.

Musing distantly, Zach realized that, with all the troubles on his mind, he had forgotten Imogen Storm's warning that this would be the first night of the full moon.

PART III

A STRUGGLE WITH TRUTH AND LIES

18

MONSTER

H
e woke up half naked and covered in blood. He didn't know where he was. He couldn't imagine what had happened. The transition was so sudden that, for a moment, he thought he must be in his bed at home. For one blessed moment of sweet relief, he thought his confrontation with Margo must have been a dream.

Then the smells of the woods overwhelmed him. The smells of the dead leaves and the dirt, of the spoor and tree-life and water and fish and scrabbling frightened fur-creatures in the underbrush—their various odors swept into his nostrils on an inhalation and overpowered his senses like sunlight blinds the eyes. He felt twigs and stones pressing into his flesh. He sat up fast. He found that he had been stretched out on the forest floor.

Shocked, he looked around him. He was at the bottom of a gorge, on the narrow muddy strand of a lake, forest rising around him on three sides, the expanse of water at his back. The full moon had breached the meridian and was now shining over the water. It cast a splash of light into the middle of it, threw a sparkling line across the surface ripples and laid a soft blue-gray glow down over everything.

He gaped at the scene. Then he looked down at his nakedness, his clothes hanging off him in tatters, his stained hands. He understood the smell before he saw it clearly: blood!

He scrambled to his feet, breathing hard. He didn't dare to think, but his mind was black with foreboding.

“Oh, God.” His first words. His voice hoarse and guttural. It made him aware of the noise all around, the steady cricket call and the frogs like ancient car horns and the whispering undulations of the lake water and small paw-steps skittering over the leaves.