Kiss the Girls

terrifying house where he kept the other women. She was trying to understand him better. We both were.
    “He’s refusing to be civilized, or repressed,” I said. “He does whatever he wants. He’s the ultimate pleasure seeker, I suppose. A hedonist for the times.”
    “I wish you could hear him talk. He’s very bright, Alex.”
    “So are we,” I reminded her. “He’ll make a mistake, I promise.”
    I was getting to know Kate very well by now. She was getting to know me. We had talked about my wife, Maria, who was killed in a senseless drive-by shooting in Washington, D.C. I told her about my kids, Jannie and Damon. She was a good listener; she had excellent bedside-manner potential. Dr. Kate was going to be a special kind of doctor.
    By three that afternoon, we must have walked four or five miles. I felt grungy and a little achy. Kate didn’t complain, but she must have been hurting. Thank God the karate kept her in great shape. We hadn’t found any sign of where she had run during her escape. None of the landmarks we passed looked familiar to her. There was no disappearing house. No Casanova. No outstanding clues in the deep, dark woods. Nothing to go on.
    “How the hell did he get so good at this?” I muttered as we tramped back to the car.
    “Practice,” Kate said with a grimace. “Practice, practice, practice.”

Chapter 57

    T HE TWO of us stopped to eat at Spanky’s on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. We were bushed, famished, and most of all thirsty. Everybody knew Kate at the popular bar and restaurant, and they made a nice fuss over her when we walked in. A muscular, blond-haired bartender named Hack started a big round of applause.
    A waitress and friend of Kate’s gave us a table of honor at a front window on Franklin Street. The woman was a doctoral candidate in philosophy, Kate told me. Verda, the waitress-philosopher of Chapel Hill.
    “How do you like being a celebrity?” I kidded Kate once we were seated.
    “Hate it.
Hate it,
” She said with her teeth clenched tightly. “Listen, Alex, can we get blotto drunk tonight?” Kate suddenly asked. “I’d like a tequila, a mug of beer, and some brandy,” she told Verda. The waitress-philosopher grimaced and wrinked her nose at the order.
    “I’ll have the same,” I said. “When in collegeville.”
    “This definitely
isn’t
therapy,” Kate said to me as soon as Verda departed. “We’re just going to bullshit some tonight.”
    “That sounds like therapy,” I said to her.
    “If it is, then we’re
both
on the couch.”
    We talked about a lot of unrelated things for the first hour or so: cars, rural versus big-city hospitals, slavery, childrearing, doctors’ salaries and the health-care crisis, rock ‘n’ roll lyrics versus blues lyrics, a book we’d both enjoyed called
The English Patient.
We had been able to talk to each other right from the beginning. Almost from that first moment at University Hospital, there had been some kind of bright sparks between us.
    After the first blitzkrieg round of drinks, we settled into slow-sipping—beer in my case, the house wine in Kate’s. We got a little buzzed, but nothing too disastrous. Kate was right about one thing. We definitely needed some kind of release from the stress of the Casanova case.
    Around our third hour in the bar, Kate told a true story about herself that was almost as shocking to me as her abduction. Her brown eyes were wide as she spun her tale. Her eyes sparkled in the bar’s low light. “Let me tell you this one time now. Southerners love to tell a story, Alex. We’re the last safekeepers of America’s sacred oral history.”
    “Tell me the story, Kate. I love to listen to stories. So much so that I made it my job.”
    Kate put her hand on top of mine. She took a deep breath. Her voice got soft, very quiet. “Once upon a time, there was the McTiernan family of Birch. This was a happy group of campers, Alex. Tight-knit, especially the girls: Susanne, Marjorie, Kristin, Carole Anne, and Kate. Kristin and I were the youngest
goils
—twins. Then there was Mary, our mother, and Martin, our father. I’m not going to say too much about Martin. My mother made him leave when I was four. He was very domineering and could be as mean as a stepped-on copperhead sometimes. To hell with him. I’m way past my father by now.”
    Kate went on for a bit, but then she stopped and looked deeply into my eyes. “Did anybody ever tell you what a