Dead in the Water

conversation, and Stone asked a question. “Allison, what are you going to do with yourself when this is all over?” He regretted it immediately, but to his surprise, she answered him as if she would not be on trial for her life in a short time.
    “Gosh, I really haven’t looked all that far ahead,” she said. “I’ve sold the house—it’s under contract now—so I guess the first thing I’ll do is go back to Greenwich and start getting ready to move out.”
    “Where do you think you’ll go?”
    “Oh,” she murmured, “I was thinking maybe New York. Would you be glad to see me there, conveniently located, as it were?”
    He felt a little stab in the chest; after all, Arrington would soon be back from California. “Of course I’d be glad to see you,” he said, after perhaps too long a pause.
    “Oh, yes, there is the other woman, isn’t there? What are your intentions, sir, if I may ask?”
    “I don’t honestly know,” he replied, and it was the truth.
    Allison leaned forward on her elbows. “Do you think she’s fucking Vance Calder?”
    Stone shrugged. “She’s had the opportunity before, and she says she never did, never thought of him as anything but a friend.”
    “I would be,” Allison said.
    “Would be what?”
    “Fucking Vance Calder.”
    “Oh. Well, if she is, then that would make life easier for me, in a way.”
    “Oh, Stone, you’re the perfect old-fashioned man.”
    “How’s that?”
    “You’d leave Arrington for fucking Vance Calder, but you wouldn’t want her to leave you for fucking me.”
    “What I meant was, if she left me for Vance, I wouldn’t have to make a decision, she’d have made it for me. Also, I’d have some things to tell her.”
    “You mean about me?”
    Stone nodded. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about it until now, but he knew he would tell her.
    “For God’s sake, why?”
    “I guess I’m not as old-fashioned as you think—not your idea of old-fashioned, anyway.”
    “Why, Stone, I believe you’re an honorable man.”
    He felt his ears turning red, and he wondered why he was embarrassed. “If I were as honorable as you think, why would I be fucking you at all?”
    She smiled. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I simply made myself irresistible.”
    “That you did.”
    “Women can do that, you know—make themselves utterly irresistible.”
    “Some women.”
    “Thank you, kind sir. Do you know when I decided to seduce you? I mean, the very moment?”
    “When?”
    “When I was on the stand at the inquest.”
    “Nonsense.”
    She shook her head. “No, really. I was sitting there, and Sir Winston was making me absolutely furious, and I caught a glimpse of you sitting there.”
    “You never looked at me.”
    “I did. You were looking at Sir Winston. You see, after Paul’s death, I was alone for another two weeks, and I had a lot of time to get used to being a widow. I had a friend once who lost her husband; she was in her forties at the time. It took her months just to accept the idea that he was actually dead. She’d walk into his study, expecting to find him sitting there reading the newspaper. It wasn’t like that with me. I wasn’t distracted by a funeral, or by friends and relatives coming to call or by all the details of settling the estate. I was all alone, right there, in the place where he had been for solong, and he was dead. I think that after the first week I had accepted that completely. Then I started to get horny.”
    Stone smiled. “I was angry with Arrington for not being here.”
    “And that gave you an excuse to crawl into the sack with me.”
    He nodded. “I guess it did.”
    “You are the best lover I’ve ever had,” she said. “Not that I’ve had all that many, but I had the years between puberty and the time I met Paul, and I enjoyed myself. But you are the very best.”
    “That’s high praise,” he said, satisfyingly flattered.
    “Do you know why?”
    He shrugged.
    “It’s not because you’re a beautiful man, though you are, and it’s not because you’re experienced and inventive, though God knows you are: it’s because you’re so considerate. I know when we’re fucking that you really care that I’m enjoying it as much as you. It makes me want to please you even more.”
    “And you do, believe me.”
    “I know I do; I can tell. I think you like me best when I’m wanton, when I do the things a proper Greenwich, Connecticut matron isn’t supposed to enjoy, and when I