“Thus the scandal,” she said, sipping. Though it was cool in the room, Callie could feel the heat from the alcohol.
Paul shrugged. “The Whitings and the Hathornes don’t mix well. Too much history.”
They sat for a long time. She asked about his studies in Matera, and just about everything he said intrigued her. He told her the history of the area, and of the Sassi district, where he’d been living. And she found herself watching him speak as much as she was listening to him. When he went behind the counter to get some water, she watched him cross the room. His jeans were worn but tight; she noticed his thigh muscles flexing as he moved. Whether it was the port working its magic or Paul, she couldn’t look away.
He poured them each another glass, and then a third. She declined the last one, but he insisted, holding up the decanter. “I can’t exactly put it back in the barrel.”
Finally, the decanter was empty. He took it along with the glasses and walked behind the bar, turning on the water and waiting until it ran hot. She watched his hands as he cleaned the glasses, placing them carefully back on the shelf.
He held the door for her, turning off the lights as she moved past him into the corridor. She waited while he locked up and replaced the key. Then he led her back down the corridor toward the spa, where the creaky elevator waited. “Can’t we go up this way?” Callie asked, pointing to the winding walkway they’d just taken.
“The passageways don’t go all the way to the top,” Paul said.
“What about that tunnel the speakeasy customers used?”
“Well, that exit supposedly leads down to the ocean, but I’ve never been able to find it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. So the only way back is the elevator. It’s really very safe,” he said, taking her arm as if to reassure her.
They rode the elevator in silence, listening to its moans and rattles. The space was tight, forcing them close together, and she was aware of his breath and body. She hadn’t minded on the way down, but she felt self-conscious now.
They stood on the landing at the bottom of the stairs.
“Good night. Thank you for the port.”
She started for the steps, but Paul made no move toward the front door. She turned back. They stood facing each other for a long moment, and then he took her left hand. He held it for a minute, turned it over, and gazed at her palm. She had told him about her scar, but she hadn’t shown it to him the way she had to Rafferty.
“It’s amazing,” he said, as if surprised. “Almost perfectly symmetrical. Do you know what it symbolizes?”
“I’ve been told it’s the five wounds of Christ.”
“Before that.”
“I don’t.”
“Rosa rugosa, the five-petaled rose. It’s Roman and was used by navigators to chart their way. It’s sometimes called the Rose of Venus because its shape traces the planet’s pentagramlike path in the sky. It first represented the goddess of love and later the Virgin.” He looked at it for a long time, then looked up at her. “It’s beautiful.”
She scowled. “Not to me.”
He was still holding her hand, running his index finger over her scar as if reading braille. “It’s bewitching,” he murmured.
“Stop,” she said, trying to pull her hand back.
Paul didn’t let it go. “Look at it, Callie,” he said. “It’s a work of art.”
Then, keeping his eyes on hers, he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed the scar.
That night her dream images were of Paul. Paul kissing the scar and kissing other places, too—her neck, her arms, her breasts, and torso—moving slowly and deliberately downward. Paul looking up at her with the blazing eyes from her vision. Her desire turning to anger and then to fear, seeing Paul on the bed and blood running down the walls behind him, pooling and deepening and finally threatening to drown them both. His eyes piercing and hypnotic. “Dad,” her mother called, and then Leah called, too. And finally, she saw Paul, wide eyed and dead on the cold stone floor, blood trickling from the corners of his open mouth.
By 3:00 A.M., she was agitated. By five, she was up and showering.
It was a cold morning. The fire she’d lit in her fireplace had died to embers, and the large ocean-facing room was drafty. She turned the shower to its hottest setting, fogging the tiles and mirrors. When she opened the door to the bedroom, a cloud of mist swept her into the suite, growing thicker in the colder air outside the bathroom. She dressed hastily and started her morning meditation, but she couldn’t rid her body of the electric pulse that had begun the moment Paul kissed her scar.
Dad. She heard Leah’s voice again.
Please.
She squinted to focus her eyes, erasing the dream image. Lacy frost etched the window. Beyond the glass, she could see only milky whiteness, growing brighter as the sun lifted itself above the horizon, creating a shapeless luminosity. It was as if a blanket of nothingness had descended on the house, made even lonelier by the moans of distant foghorns. She needed to get outside to clear her head. Putting on her coat, Callie descended the stairs slowly, letting herself out through the pantry door.
The mist was so thick outside it was difficult to tell which way to walk. She couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her. The blank whiteness stretched in every direction now, and, for a moment, she panicked, afraid of stepping over the edge of the cliff and falling into the ocean below. But then she heard the horns again, and the faint sound of waves, and so she turned and headed the opposite way. Pulling her coat tighter around her, she took baby steps until she felt the crunch of stones, then followed the driveway toward the barn, where her car was parked.
By the time she reached the road, the fog had lifted enough to see a few car lengths in front of her. Callie pulled onto the shore road as if in a trance, and instead of turning left toward Salem, she turned right toward Gloucester.
Route 127 wound in and out through misty woods and oceanfront, crossing and recrossing the tracks of the commuter rail, thumping her tires once, then twice, each time she went over them. She drove as if summoned, as if a magnetic pull was taking her north and east toward Cape Ann. The rhythm of driving had a sedative effect; she wasn’t sure where she was going, and she didn’t care.
She felt the vibration of the train before she saw the red crossing lights and heard the clang of warning bells. Her brakes shrieked as she slammed her foot down, the front bumper pushing against the crossing gate, bending it forward to the point where she feared it might snap. The nose of her car was so close to the passing train that she could see the horrified expression on a woman’s face looking down from her window seat.