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again if necessary, or else to use to frame someone else. She lay in bed staring at the ceiling that was
marginally paler than the walls.
Then she thought of Lieutenant Fernandez, and thinking of him, she found herself restless again. She had
not had sexual arousal like that for many years; she and Blaine had settled into a relationship in which
sexuality had been important, but not blatant, not forcing itself at unexpected times, unexpected places.
Their rhythms had corresponded closely enough so that neither of them had ever felt denied, or rushed.
Dependable, reliable, safe.
She mocked herself. Safe sex, Judge, is that what's on your mind these days? And she shook her head
at the ceiling. Just sex, she thought clearly. With that one man, that policeman, Lieutenant Fernandez,
whose first name she had not been able to recall since the day she met him; and now it would be
embarrassing to ask. She remembered watching his lean hands, and thinking of them on her body, in her
body; she began to shake, and after another minute, she left the bed, and paced some more.
ALL MORNING SARAH wandered from room to room, picking up a book, putting it down, picking
up the latest horticulture magazine, putting it down, arranging, rearranging water lilies in a crystal bowl,
pacing out to the veranda, back inside. At ten Rosa came to tell her, "It's done. They're gone now."
Sarah sat down heavily and nodded. And soon they would know, she thought, but that wasn't right; she
and Fernandez already knew. Soon they would have something to show the world, to let the world
know.
Winnie came to the living-room door, looking haunted, the way she did these days.
"I'm going to take the color film to the drugstore," Winnie said.
"Rusty Curlow flies into Reno this evening. I want to get the color shots in to the processor."
Sarah jumped up. "I'll come with you. Walking?"
"Yes. It isn't very hot out yet. I need to walk every day, they tell me." "So do we all," Sarah said. Walk,
run, move, do something.
As long as they walked in the shade, the air was pleasantly cool, but the sun was brutal already, and they
passed in and out of shade, in and out. They would both burn, Sarah thought, and tried to banish the
worry about diminished ozone layers, about the hole in the atmosphere growing larger day by day, about
ultraviolet rays cooking her eyes, her brain cells, her skin. She could almost feel the freckles popping;
sometimes she thought she could hear them as if they were popcorn exploding.
"I thought you had a darkroom in the upstairs bathroom," she said as they walked.
"That's just for black and white stuff. All the shots I took out at Ghost Lake, things like that. The garden
shots are color for the catalog, and that gets into lab work." She went on moodily, "I don't know what to
do about Maria and Virgil, how I'll finish the cassette for the franchise idea."
She walked briskly, faster than Sarah would have chosen, but Winnie was the one who felt the need for
x hours of exercise daily, Sarah conceded, and kept u PI getting hotter and hotter.
"I'll wrap it up this weekend," Winnie was going on, muttering to herself more than to her mother. "And
later I'll try some fancy editing, move the image of Maria from here to there a few times. What a mess!"
"You can do that? I know you can with film, but I didn't realize you could with videos."
Winnie began to describe some of the equipment she and her partner Andi already had, and what they
intended to buy in the coming years, all high tech and complicated-sounding-remote-control devices,
programmable timers, editing machines. Most of it sounded like equipment for a space launch, as if it
had nothing to do with art.
Then Sarah was thinking that there had been timers around for half a century or even more, of one sort
or another. It wasn't that the ideas were new, it was the equipment that had become more powerful,
more accessible. Suddenly she thought she knew how Ghost Lake had been haunted.
"Mother?"
"Hmm? Sorry, honey. What?"
"Nothing. You do that a lot, you know? We're here, and I asked if you want something cold to drink."
It was not that she had been unaware of her surroundings; she knew perfectly well that they had passed
the few blocks that were not "downtown" and had arrived at the two-square-blocks hub of East Shasta.
The hardware store was here, and the grocery, the tiny K-Mart discount store, and before them the
drugstore and department store combination.
They had passed the Baptist Church, and the Church of Jesus Christ; they had stopped for the red light
at the traffic signal, and today there had even been two cars at the intersection.
Sarah grinned at her daughter. "Sorry. Thinking, and about the drink, you bet. I wonder if Milton Flink is
here."
They went inside the small building painted blue that housed the drugstore as well as a general [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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