He walked up the stairs and had his finger out to push the doorbell when the door opened.
“I saw you coming up the drive,” Martha Peebles said. “I wasn’t sure that you would come.”
“Good evening,” David Pekach said, unable to choose between “Miss Peebles” and “Martha” and deciding quickly on neither one.
“Please come in,” she said.
She was wearing a dressing robe.
Nothing sexy or suggestive or anything like that; it goes from her neck to her ankles. Just what a lady like herself would wear when she was about to go to bed.
“I said I would stop by and check on you,” David Pekach said.
“I know,” she said.
She started to walk to the stairway, stopped and looked over her shoulder to see if he was following her.
Where the hell is she going?
“And I’ve ordered cars to check on you regularly,” he said.
“I’ve seen them,” she said. “That’s why I thought you might not be coming. That you had sent the other cars in your stead.”
“If I say I’ll do something, I do it,” David Pekach said.
“I was almost sure of that, and now that you’re here, I’m convinced that you are a man of your word,” Martha Peebles said.
They were at the landing before the stained glass window of Saint Whatsisname the Dragon Slayer by then.
“I made a little midnight snack,” Martha Peebles said.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I wanted to,” she said, and took his arm.
“And there’s a plainclothes officer in an unmarked car parked just up the block,” David said.
Or I think there is. I didn’t see anybody in the goddamned car, now that I think about it.
“I saw him, too,” she said. “He’s been up the drive four times, waving his flashlight around.”
“We’re doing our very best to take care of you.”
“I wasn’t sure if you—if you came, that is—if you could drink on duty, so I made coffee. But there’s wine. Or whiskey, too, if you’d rather.”
They were on the second floor now, moving down the corridor, away from the gun room.
“Oh, I don’t think law and order would come crashing down if I had a glass of wine,” David said.
“I’m glad. I put out a port, a rather robust port, that Father always enjoyed.”
A door was open. Inside, David saw a small round table with a tablecloth that reached to the floor. There was a tray of sandwiches on it, with the crusts cut off, and a silver coffee set, and beside it was a wine cooler with the neck of a bottle of wine sticking out of it.
Jesus!
And when he stepped inside, he saw that there was an enormous, heavily carved headboard over a bed on which the sheets had been turned down.
Jesus!