An ironic smile in the mirror. "I'd tell you to give them my best but I guess they probably wouldn't want to hear that, would they?"

"No."

Then she pauses and turns around and takes me in her arms. As we're kissing, I smell her clean wet hair and her damp sumptuous flesh and the faint hint of her s.e.x. How I love to worship in that particular grotto.

She hasn't kissed me like this in months and I'm fl.u.s.tered. Can't help it. Have an erection that is driving me absolutely crazy.

"I really want to get f.u.c.ked tonight," she says, in a voice I've never quite heard before.

"That makes two of us."

She pulls me to her once again and slips her hand easily inside my pajama bottoms.

She takes my c.o.c.k out and begins to slip it up between her legs. She is wet down there, too, but it is a more profound and silken wetness than mere water.

Half an hour later, I am sitting in my parents' living room. They are both on the couch, sitting very straight and very close together.

We are all well aware of what day this is.

They are old well beyond their years, my parents. It is not the age of time but the age of sorrow. They will never recover from the murder of my brother. They are both heavily tranquilized most of the time. If they ever desert their medicine, they are given to long periods of frightening depression.

"That G.o.d d.a.m.ned governor better not pardon him," my father says.

"He won't," my mother says. "Don't you worry."

"How are the kids?" my father says.

"Good."

"She ever going to let you bring them over?"

That is how they refer to her. "She." Never by name. They blame her for my brother's death.

Their reasoning goes thusly: if I hadn't gone out with Cindy, I would not have been accused of murder, and if I had not been accused of murder, Josh would not have been on the street corner where Garrett, the real murderer, killed him. Not even when I point out that she testified against Garretta"was an eyewitness to not only Josh's murder but to Mae Swenson'sa"not even then do they care. They just say that she was protecting herself, that's the only reason she cooperated with the County Attorney.

They absolutely refuse to see her.

They would not attend our wedding, the baptism of the girls, or any holidays if "she" was to be present.

I think back to the day, seven years ago, when I told my father that I had been seeing her without them knowing it, and that I had asked her to marry me. He said, "Never bring that c.u.n.t in my house." I had never heard him use that word before. It had a shocking effect on me.

Now, on this day, my mother says, "They should have two gurneys, side by side."

"One for him," my father says, "one for her."

"If she goes into the mental hospital again," my mother says, "you should try to get permanent custody of those kids. We'd be happy to have them stay here."

"As long as she never tries to come over here," he says.

I get up. I can't do this any longer.

My father says, "You don't care that she helped murder your little brother, do you?"

"She didn't help murder him, Dad," I say wearily.

"Far as I'm concerned," my mother says, "she should be right next to him on another gurney."

"She's a f.u.c.king wh.o.r.e," my father says. He's just starting to shout now. The shouting will last for as long as I stay. Once he starts to shout at me, he can't stop.

"She's a f.u.c.king wh.o.r.e, you know that, Spence? Your wife's a f.u.c.king wh.o.r.e!"

CHAPTER NINE.

I am at the Earl May Gardening center, picking up some peat moss. Spring has touched the world again.

I am loading the bags in the trunk of my station wagon when I sense somebody standing next to me.

I look up and see my father.

I have not seen him for three months. In that time he seems to have aged a decade. His eyes look like blind eyes and both his hands twitch as if with palsy.

But the smirk is the most disturbing part.

He pokes at me with a sharp gnarled finger. "You hear what your little wh.o.r.e did last week?"

He is not going to let me speak.

"She went up to the old line shack with the Sievers boy, that big strapping football star who plays at State?"

The smirk becomes almost insane with pleasure.

"She f.u.c.ked him. Right against the well. She probably f.u.c.ked you that way, too, right, standing up against the well?"

"G.o.d, Dad, you got bad information. She isn't like that. She really isn't."

"Uh-huh," he says. "Uh-huh. Well, Doc Parson happened to see 'em with his very own eyes. He was out there with his birds the way he usually is and he saw them plain as day. That little wh.o.r.e of yours and the football boy!"

And then he breaks and begins sobbing and everybody in the sunny parking lot starts looking at us and all I can do is throw my arms around this ancient and aggrieved figurea"but he pushes me away, pushes through a few onlookers, and wobbles away to the front of the store.

CHAPTER TEN.

Six evenings later, Cindy having taken Marisa to the mall, I decide to do it, do what I've been thinking about ever since I saw my father in the parking lot.

I search through her bureau.

And there I find ita"tucked under a stack of family photographsa"a very glossy snapshot of the Sievers boy in his State uniform, holding up a football as if he's about to make a touchdown pa.s.s.

On the back, he's written a note.

"To my all-time favorite teacher."

I do not have to wonder what it is she has taught him.

I do not have to wonder at all.

An Excerpt of Ed Gorman's

DIFFERENT KIND OF DEAD.

Around eight that night, snow started drifting on the narrow Nebraska highway Ralph Sheridan was traveling. Already he could feel the rear end of the new Buick begin sliding around on the freezing surface of the asphalt, and could see that he would soon have to pull over and sc.r.a.pe the windshield. Snow was forming into gnarly b.u.mps on the safety gla.s.s.

The small-town radio station he was listening to confirmed his worst suspicions: the weather bureau was predicting a genuine March blizzard, with eight to ten inches of snow and drifts up to several feet.

Sheridan sighed. A thirty-seven-year-old bachelor who made his living as a traveling computer salesmana"he worked especially hard at getting farmers to buy his waresa"he spent most of the year on the road, putting up in the small, shabby plains motels that from a distance always reminded him of doghouses. A brother in Cleveland was all the family he had left; everybody else was dead. The only other people he stayed in touch with were the men he'd been in Vietnam with. There had been women, of course, but somehow it never worked outa"this one wasn't his type, that one laughed too loudly, this one didn't have the same interests as he. And while his friends bloomed with mates and children, there was for Sheridan just the road, beers in bars with other salesmen, and nights alone in motel rooms with paper strips across the toilet seats.

The Buick pitched suddenly toward the ditch. An experienced driver and a calm man, Sheridan avoided the common mistake of slamming on the brakes. Instead, he took the steering wheel in both hands and guided the hurtling car along the edge of the ditch. While he had only a foot of earth keeping him from plunging into the gully on his right, he let the car find its own traction. Soon enough, the car was gently heading back onto the asphalt.

It was there, just when the headlights focused on the highway again, that he saw the woman.

At first, he tried sensibly enough to deny she was even there. His first impression was that she was an illusion, a mirage of some sort created by the whirling, whipping snow and the vast, black night.

But no, there really was a beautiful red-haired woman standing in the center of the highway. She wore a trench coat and black high-heeled shoes. She might have been one of the women on the covers of the private-eye paperbacks he'd read back in the sixties.

This time, he did slam on the brakes; otherwise, he would have run over her. He came to a skidding stop less than three feet from her.

His first reaction was grat.i.tude. He dropped his head to the wheel and let out a long sigh. His whole body trembled. She could easily have been dead by now.

He was just raising his head when harsh wind and snow and cold blew into the car. The door on the pa.s.senger side had opened.

She got inside, saying nothing, closing the door when she was seated comfortably.

Sheridan looked over at her. Close up, she was even more beautiful. In the yellow glow of the dashboard, her features were so exquisite they had the refined loveliness of sculpture. Her tumbling, radiant hair only enhanced her face.

She turned to him finally and said, in a low, somewhat breathy voice, "You'd better not sit here in the middle of the highway long. It won't be safe."

He drove again. On either side of the highway he could make out little squares of lighta"the yellow windows of farmhouses lost in the furious gloom of the blizzard. The car heater warmed them nicely. The radio played some s.e.xy jazz that somehow made the prairie and the snow and the weather alert go away.

All he could think of was those private-eye novels he'd read as a teenager. This was what always happened to the Hammer himself, ending up with a woman like this.

"Do you mind?" she asked.

Before he had time to answer, she already had the long, white cigarette between her full, red lips and was lighting it. Then she tossed her head back and French inhaled. He hadn't seen anybody do that in years.

"Your car get ditched somewhere?" he asked finally, realizing that these were his first words to her.

"Yes," she said, "somewhere."

"So you were walking to the nearest town?"

"Something like that."

"You were walking in the wrong direction." He paused. "And you're traveling alone?"

She glanced over at him again with her dark, lovely gaze. "Yes. Alone." Her voice was as smoky as her cigarette.

He drove some more, careful to keep both hands on the wheel, slowing down whenever the rear of the car started to slide.

He wasn't paying much attention to the music at this pointa"they were going up a particularly slick and dangerous hilla"but then the announcer's voice came on and said, "Looks like the police have really got their hands full tonight. Not only with the blizzard, but now with a murder. Local banker John T. Sloane was found murdered in his downtown apartment twenty minutes ago. Police report an eyewitness says he heard two gunshots and then saw a beautiful woman leaving Sloane's apartment. The eyewitness reportedly said that the woman strongly resembled Sloane's wife, Carlotta. But police note that that's impossible, given the fact that Carlotta died mysteriously last year in a boating accident. The eyewitness insists that the resemblance between the redheaded woman leaving Sloane's apartment tonight and the late Mrs. Sloane is uncanny. Now back to our musical program for the evening."

A bossa nova came on.

Beautiful. Redheaded. Stranded alone. Looking furtive. He started glancing at her, and she said, "I'll spare you the trouble. It's me. Carlotta Sloane."

"You? But the announcer saida""

She turned to him and smiled. "That I'm dead? Well, so I am."

Not until then did Sheridan realize how far out in the boonies he was. Or how lacerating the storm had become. Or how helpless he felt inside a car with a woman who claimed to be dead.

"Why don't you just relax?"

"Please don't patronize me, Mr. Sheridan."

"I'm not patroniza" Say, how did you know my name?"