False Memory

not going to take off her clothes, he untied her laces and removed her shoes. Her socks. Skinned off her jeans. She didn’t resist, but she didn’t cooperate, either.
    Getting Martie out of her blouse was too difficult, especially as she lay on her side, knees drawn up, arms crossed on her breasts. Leaving her partially dressed, Dusty pulled the covers over her shoulders, smoothed her hair back from her face, kissed her brow.
    Her eyelids drooped, but in her eyes was something more stark and sharp-edged than weariness.
    “Don’t leave me,” she said thickly.
    “I won’t.”
    “Don’t trust me.”
    “But I do.”
    "Don't sleep.”
    "Martie—"
    “Promise me. Don’t sleep.”
    “All right.”
    “Promise.”
    I promise.
    “Because I might kill you in your sleep,” she said, and closed her eyes, which seemed to change from cornflower-blue to cyanine and then to purple madder just as her eyelids slipped shut.
    He stood watching her, frightened not by her warning, not for himself, but for her.
    She mumbled, “Susan.”
    “What about her?”
    “Just remembered. Didn’t tell you about Susan. Strange stuff. Supposed to call her.”
    “You can call her in the morning.”
    “What sort of friend am I?” she muttered.
    “She’ll understand. Just rest now. Just rest.”
    In seconds, Martie appeared to be asleep, lips parted, breathing through her mouth. The pinched lines of anxiety were gone from the corners of her eyes.
    Twenty minutes later, Dusty was sitting up in bed, combing back through the tangled story that Martie had told him, trying to pull the burs out and smooth it into a fully intelligible narrative, when the telephone rang. In the interest of uninterrupted sleep, they kept the ringer switched off in the bedroom, and what he heard now was the phone in Martie’s office down the hall; the answering machine picked up after the second ring.
    He assumed Susan was calling, though it might have been Skeet or one of the staff at New Life. Ordinarily, he would have gone to Martie’s office to monitor the incoming message, but he didn’t want her to wake up while he was out of the room and discover that he had broken his promise to remain with her. Skeet was safe in good hands, and whatever “strange stuff” was going on with Susan, it couldn’t be any stranger or more important than what had transpired right here this evening. It could wait until morning.
    Dusty turned his attention once more to what Martie had told him of her day. As he worried at each bizarre event and quirky detail, he was overcome by the peculiar conviction that what had happened to his wife was somehow associated with what happened to his brother. He sensed parallel oddities in both events, though the precise nature of the connections eluded him. Undeniably, this was the strangest day of his life, and instinct told him that Skeet and Martie had not unraveled simultaneously by mere coincidence.
    In one corner of the room, Valet was curled on his bed, a large sheepskin-covered pillow, but he remained awake. He lay with his chin propped on one paw, intently watching his mistress sleeping in the golden lamplight.

     
     
    Because Martie had never failed to keep a commitment and thus had banked a lot of moral capital, Susan didn’t feel aggrieved when the promised phone call failed to come in by eleven o’clock; however, she was uneasy. She placed her own call, got an answering machine, and grew worried.
    No doubt Martie had been rocked and mystified by Susan’s claim of a phantom rapist to whom locked doors were no impediment. She’d asked to be given some time to think. But Martie wasn’t prone either to waffle or to be unnecessarily diplomatic. By now she would have arrived at some considered advice—or would have called to say she needed more convincing if she were to believe this tall, tall story.
    “It’s me,” Susan told the answering machine. “What’s wrong? You okay? You think I’m nuts? It’s all right if you do. Call me.”
    She waited a few seconds, then hung up.
    Most likely, Martie would not have suggested a course of action with more potential for success than the camcorder sting, so Susan went forward with her preparations.
    She placed a half-full glass of wine on the nightstand, not to be drunk, but as a prop.
    She settled into bed with a book, sitting up against a pile of pillows. She was too nervous to read.
    For a while she watched an old movie on TV, Dark Passage, but she couldn’t concentrate on the story. Her mind wandered down darker and more