Kiss the Girls

summer.”
    Nana Mama swatted me with her spatula. Swatted me again for good measure. “Don’t get smart with me,” she said.
    She
always
had the last word.
    The phone call came around one o’clock one morning in late July. Nana and the kids had gone up for the night. I was playing some jazz piano, amusing myself, keeping a few junkies out on Fifth Street up with the music of Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck.
    Kyle Craig was on the phone line. I groaned when I heard Kyle’s calm subaltern voice.
    I expected bad news, of course, but not the particular news that I got late that night.
    “What the hell is it, Kyle?” I asked him right off, tying to make his unexpected call into a joke. “I told you not ever to call me again.”
    “I had to call on this, Alex. You had to know,” he hissed over the long-distance lines. “Now listen to me closely.”
    Kyle talked to me for almost half an hour, and it wasn’t what I had expected. It was much, much worse.
    After I got off the phone with Kyle, I went back to the sun porch. I sat there for a long time, thinking about what I should do now. There was nothing I could do, not a thing. “It doesn’t stop,” I whispered to the four walls, “does it?”
    I went and got my pistol. I hated carrying it inside the house. I checked all the doors and windows in our house. Finally, I went to bed.
    I heard Kyle’s fateful words again as I lay in my darkened bedroom. I heard Kyle tell me his shocker. I saw a face I never wanted to see again. I remembered
everything.
    “Gary Soneji escaped from prison, Alex. He left a note. The note said he’d stop by and see you sometime soon.”
    It doesn’t stop.
    I lay in bed and thought about the fact that Gary Soneji still wanted to kill me. He’d told me so himself. He’d had time in prison to obsess about how, when, and where he was going to do it.
    I finally went off to sleep. It was almost morning. Another day was starting.
It really doesn’t stop.

Chapter 120

    T HERE WERE still two mysteries that had to be solved, or at least dealt with in a better way. There was the mystery of Casanova, and who he was. And there was the one featuring Kate and myself.
    Kate and I visited the Outer Banks in North Carolina for six days at the end of August. We stayed near a picturesque resort town called Nags Head.
    Kate’s clumsy metal walker was gone, though she did carry around a knobby, old-fashioned hickory cane at times. Mostly she practiced karate exercises with the hardwood cane. She used it as a karate stick on the beach, twirling the cane around her body and head with great dexterity and skill.
    Watching Kate, I thought that she looked almost luminescent. She was back in good form. Her face was close to the way it had been, except for the dent. “It’s my stubborn streak,” she told me, “and it’s permanent until the day I die.”
    It was an idyllic time in many ways. Everything seemed just right for us. Kate and I felt that we both deserved a holiday, and much more.
    We ate breakfast together every morning on a porch made from long gray planks, which overlooked the shimmering Atlantic. (I made breakfast on my mornings to cook; Kate went to the Nags Head market and brought home sticky buns and Bavarian cream doughnuts on her days.) We went for long, long walks along the shoreline. We surf-cast for blues, and cooked the fresh fish right there on the beach. Sometimes, we just watched the shiny boats patrolling the water. We took a day trip to watch the crazy-ass hang gliders off the high dunes in Jockey’s Ridge State Park.
    We waited on Casanova. We were daring him to come after us. So far he wasn’t interested, at least he didn’t seem to be.
    I thought of the book and movie
The Prince of Tides.
Kate and I were a little bit like Tom Wingo and Susan Lowenstein, only mixed together in a different, though equally complex, way. Lowenstein had brought out Tom Wingo’s need to feel and
give
love, I remembered. Kate and I were learning everything about each other, the important things—and we were both quick learners.
    Early one August morning, we waded into the clear, deep blue water in front of the house. Most of the beach community wasn’t up yet. A lone brown pelican was skimming the water.
    We held hands above the low waves. Everything was picture-postcard perfect. So why was I feeling as if there was a gaping hole where my heart ought to be? Why was I still obsessed with Casanova?
    “You’re thinking bad thoughts, aren’t