Richard had a whole list of objections to this line of reasoning, starting with the fact that Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh had never been married, but Mathilda Frazier was already convinced that he was after her ass. He didn’t want to give the woman any more cause for conceit than she already thought she had. Instead, he got up from his chair again.
“If I don’t get some sleep, I’m going to collapse,” he told them.
They looked at him as if he had just pitched a fit in the middle of the table.
“I don’t even read murder mysteries,” he said querulously. “You people may be fascinated by all this stuff, but I’m not.”
“So go to sleep,” Mathilda Frazier said.
They had resumed their conversation as soon as he left the dining room. Richard could tell by the excited tones in their voices, and the way a giggle seemed to run just under the surface, without ever breaking into light. He looked at the stairs where Tasheba Kent’s body had lain. He found a couple of flecks of blood on the runner carpet. Nothing much.
Richard went around to the back of the staircase and past the elevators. He stuck his head into a back hall before finding the television room. The television room wasn’t much, just a small square place that might have started life as a walk-in closet, with a couch and two chairs and a Magnavox twenty-seven inch in it. There was a VCR and a couple of tapes, too, but the tapes were nothing shocking. Blade Runner. The Hunt for Red October. Like every other man on earth, Cavender Marsh liked action-adventure and good guys versus bad guys.
Richard shut the door to the television room. He pulled back the white sheet and looked into Tasheba Kent’s face. What he really looked into was Tasheba Kent’s makeup. In spite of what they had all thought last night, she was wearing quite a bit of it—just not as much of it as she had been wearing at dinner. Richard put his finger on the cold wet skin of the bridge of her nose and traced the line of the nosebone to the cartilage tip. He moved his finger to the left eyebrow and traced the line of it there. It was hopeless. Her eyebrows had been plucked. Her eyes, although free of false eyelashes now, were puffy with age and the abuse of too much paint. Her lips looked stung.
Richard got his handkerchief out of his pocket and tried to wipe some of the paint off, but it wouldn’t come. He went over to the one small window and undid the latch. With his luck, this window would be painted shut, or it would be one of those windows that was never meant to be opened. To his surprise, it opened easily. Richard stuck his handkerchief into the rain and waited until it was soaked. Then he wrung it out a little and brought it back inside.
This time, getting the makeup off was much easier. It smeared under the rainwater, but it came. Richard rubbed at the eyes until they were clear of everything but a thin black line of mascara on each eyelid. Then he went back to the window, washed the handkerchief out, and came back to do the sides of her face. The lips were hardest. Lipstick streaked and stuck and got stubborn. Richard had to go back to the window three times before he was finished with that. He got it all, though, and then he sat back to look at what he had left.
The problem, Richard thought a few minutes later, was that it was so hard to know what age could or couldn’t do to a human face. This was not the Tasheba Kent he dreamed about, the one whose great dark eyes stared down at him from his bedroom ceiling—but that Tasheba Kent was twenty-two years old. This one would have been one hundred if she had lived. Time and gravity had taken their toll. So had six decades of Cavender Marsh. Having met Cavender, Richard thought he would take a toll on anyone, even Gandhi or Jesus. Tasheba’s eyes looked smaller, but the size of them in the picture he had might have been a trick of the camera. The hands looked bigger, but Richard had never really paid attention to her hands. He had been lying when he had told Gregor Demarkian that he would never touch a corpse, and especially this one. Precisely what he wanted to do now was to touch this corpse. He wanted to put his hands on her face and feel the smoothness of her skin. He wanted to put his hands on her arms and feel them tighten into life against him. Sometimes he thought his touch was magic. If he could only lay hands on her in exactly the right way, she would not only rise from the dead but reconstitute herself. The evil witch’s enchantment would be broken. Tasheba Kent would be young again.
I am losing my mind, Richard thought in a sudden panic, backing away from the corpse. Now he hurried over to close the window, unhappy to see that a thick patch of damp had formed on the carpet. He went back to the couch and stared at the ancient face again, the wrinkles and folds and ugly slackness. Everybody always said that age brought individuality, but it wasn’t true. Tasheba Kent at twenty-two had had individuality. This woman was simply Old, made up of the bits and pieces of generic age, no different from dozens of other old people from one end of the country to the other. There was nothing here to prove that she had once been the most desirable woman alive.