Shadowfires

Rachael. She had her answering machine on, and she did not pick up
the receiver when he identified himself.
    At the traffic light at the corner of Seventeenth Street and
Newport Avenue, he hesitated, then turned left instead of continuing
on to his own house in Orange Park Acres. Rachael might not be home
right now, but she would get there eventually, and she might need
support. He headed for her place in Placentia.
    The June sun dappled the Thunderbird's windshield and made bright rippling patterns when he passed through the inconstant shadows of overhanging trees. He switched off the news and put on a Glenn Miller tape. Speeding through the California sun, with “String of Pearls” filling the car, he found it hard to believe that anyone could die on such a golden day.
By his own system of personality
classification, Benjamin Lee Shadway was primarily a past-focused
man. He liked old movies better than new ones. De Niro, Streep, Gere,
Field, Travolta, and Penn were of less interest to him than Bogart,
Bacall, Gable, Lombard, Tracy, Hepburn, Cary Grant, William Powell,
Myrna Loy. His favorite books were from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s,
hard-boiled stuff by Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain, and the
early Nero Wolfe novels. His music of choice was from the swing era,
Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Harry James, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller,
the incomparable Benny Goodman.
    For relaxation, he built working models of locomotives from kits,
and he collected all kinds of railroad memorabilia. There are no
hobbies so reeking with nostalgia or more suited to a past-focused
person than those dealing with trains.
    He was not focused entirely on the past. At twenty-four, he
had obtained a real-estate license, and by the time he was thirty-
one, he had established his own brokerage. Now, at thirty-seven, he
had six offices with thirty agents working under him. Part of the
reason for his success was that he treated his employees and
customers with a concern and courtesy that were old-fashioned and
enormously appealing in the fast-paced, brusque, and plastic world of
the present.
    Lately, in addition to his work, there was one other thing that
could distract Ben from railroads, old movies, swing music, and his
general preoccupation with the past, Rachael Leben. Titian-haired,
green-eyed, long-limbed, full-bodied Rachael Leben.
    She was somehow both the girl next door and one of those elegant
beauties to be found in any 1930s movie about high society, a cross
between Grace Kelly and Carole Lombard. She was sweet-tempered. She
was amusing. She was smart. She was everything Ben Shadway had ever
dreamed about, and what he wanted to do was get in a time machine
with her, travel back to 1940, take a private compartment on the
Superchief, and cross the country by rail, making love for three
thousand miles in time with the gently rocking rhythm of the
train.
    She'd come to his real-estate agency for help in finding a house, but the house had not been the end of it. They had been seeing each other frequently for five months. At first he had been fascinated by her in the same way any man might be fascinated by any exceptionally attractive woman, intrigued by the thought of what her lips would taste like and of how her body would fit against his, thrilled by the texture of her skin, the sleekness of her legs, the curve of hip and breast. However, soon after he got to know her, he found her sharp mind and generous heart as appealing as her appearance. Her intensely sensuous appreciation for the world around her was wondrous to behold, she could find as much pleasure in a red sunset or in a graceful configuration of shadows as in a hundred-dollar, seven-course dinner at the county's
finest restaurant. Ben's lust had quickly turned to infatuation. And sometime within the past two months-he could not pinpoint the date-infatuation had turned to love.
    Ben was relatively confident that Rachael loved him, too. They had
not yet quite reached the stage where they could forthrightly and
comfortably declare the true depth of their feelings for each other.
But he felt love in the tenderness of her touch and in the weight of
her gaze when he caught her looking secretly at him.
    In love, they had not yet made love. Although she was a
present-focused woman with the enviable ability to wring every last
drop of pleasure from the moment, that did not mean she was
promiscuous. She didn't speak bluntly of her feelings,