Body Language. James Hall

it. He better be packed. You’re going to have to decide, Alex, who you want to live with, your husband or that half-wit.’

       4

      After Stan left, Alex got Lawton into a pair of khakis and a short-sleeved plaid shirt, then settled him in front of a morning news show.

      In the bedroom while she straightened the quilt and fluffed the pillows, she listened to the television in the next room, a reporter detailing the background of the latest victim of the Bloody Rapist. A paralegal with a prestigious downtown firm. Recently divorced, the woman had moved to Miami only the month before. Her family back in Baltimore had warned her that Miami was too dangerous, but she’d come anyway. ‘She believed the travel posters,’ her brother snarled.

      When the TV cut to a commercial, Alex went to her closet, took her fanny pack down, and strapped it on. Stepping into a slash of sunlight, she withdrew the photographs and held them up to the light, four twisted hieroglyphs. Gasper, Hear No Evil, the Swatter, Floater. Studying them carefully one by one, as if in that harsh morning sun she might glimpse the crucial detail she had overlooked before.

      It was a violation of department rules, bringing home evidentiary material. But she couldn’t help herself. Dan Romano was right, of course: This case was troubling her, disturbing her already-restless sleep. Time after time, she would jerk awake, the answer in her mind, but as she fetched for it, the image faded, staying just beyond her reach, some insistent warning signal that continued to elude her.

      Over the last few weeks, she had slipped the photographs one by one into her pouch and now carried them with her everywhere, sneaking them out when she was alone, staring at them, focusing, trying to identify that intangible detail that was prickling silently on the edge of her awareness. The answer was in the photographs – she was certain of it – somewhere in the austere, brightly lit images. Some key, some revelation. At times, she had begun to feel like there was even something larger at stake than solving this particular case, that if only she could see the detail she’d been missing, she would have, as well, the solution to her own unending grief.

      These women were not swingers or risk takers. They’d wanted no more or less than anyone else, but in their understandable hunger for love, each of them had opened their doors and admitted the same man into their homes, a man whose savagery must have come clear to them only in the last seconds of their lives.

      It was herself Alexandra saw in those photographs. Her naked form repositioned with such hideous care. Eighteen years had passed since she had risen out of her body and hovered high overhead, a loose cloud of energized gas, escaping from the physical self. And even though over those long years she had gradually reoccupied her body, it was never the same again. The fit was wrong. Some inexpressible unease plagued her still. Even the years of martial-arts training – the stretching, the conditioning the deep awareness of her own body’s strengths and limitations – had not enabled her to achieve the wholeness that had once been so natural. She had been driven out of her own body and had never fully returned, and that part of her that still drifted free seemed at times to take up temporary residence in the very victims she photographed.

      Staring at their images, Alex could become those women on the unyielding floors of their apartments. As cold and lifeless, as vacant and remote. Those women who had departed now, leaving behind only their latent images, silver-halide crystals in a chemical emulsion adhering to a flat white page.

      ‘Want to look at the book?’ Lawton stood stiffly in the doorway.

      Alex fumbled the photos back into her fanny pouch, zipped it shut.

      Lawton was holding the coffee-table book in his right hand.

      ‘We’ve got to get you to Harbor House, Dad.’

      ‘Hell, if I’m late, what’re they going to do, send me to the principal?’

      She followed him into the living room and sat beside him on the dark blue velvet couch near the east window, the best natural light in the house.

      He opened the heavy book and let it rest half on his lap, half on hers.

      Big glossy shots of Seaside, Florida, that carefully arranged clutter of pastel wood houses with tin roofs that had been built along the dunes a half mile from Seagrove, where Alexandra had spent that glorious August. Princess of the Sugary Sands. The Gulf of Mexico spread blue and empty beyond the narrow strip of highway. The same tranquil water stretching away and merging with the sky.

      Seaside was only ten years old, but in that decade it had become a famous town. Famous among architects and city planners, who hailed it as a model for the new Florida, a town with the grace and civility of a bygone era. A laboratory for a simpler, more humane community structure, Main Street USA. Famous with travel writers who wanted to take their readers on a one-of-a-kind journey into a colorful fantasy land of the past. The town was a gorgeous blend of modern whimsy and old-fashioned architectural models. Part Charleston, part Key West, part Cape Cod, part sentimental daydream. Narrow redbrick streets, picket fences around every house. Scrub oak and wildflowers and pine-needle mulch for yards. No sod, no lawn mowers.

      Brick streets, a town square, fanciful beach pavilions, and all those gorgeous homes, soft purples and sunny yellows with lots of gingerbread and widow’s walks and shiny tin roofs. No two architectural plans were permitted to duplicate each other, but all sprung from the same nostalgic vision, a hundred different renderings of the ideal beach cottage. None of the scruffiness, none of the sagging floors and rusty tin that Alex remembered from her time there. As if all those bright young architects had pooled their imaginations to create a past that had never existed. A place more perfect than the perfect place she remembered.

      On the couch, her father paged aimlessly through the slick color photographs, mumbling to himself. Weeks ago, he had spotted the book while they were browsing in a bookstore, and he’d refused to leave the store without it. Now he called for it whenever he was anxious or confused. And just a few minutes of looking at those simple wooden houses seemed to tranquilize him.

      ‘Know why I like this book so much?’

      ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Because it’s such a pretty place. So serene.’

      ‘No,’ her father said. He pulled the book from her hands and clapped it shut. He frowned at her, his eyes full of reproach, then shifted a few inches away on the couch.

      ‘Well, what is it, Dad? Why do you like the book?’

      ‘Because it reminds me,’ he said. ‘It stirs my memory.’

      ‘Reminds you of what?’

      He turned his face away.

      ‘Never mind. You wouldn’t understand. You think I’ve forgotten everything. You think I’m an idiot child. You’d just mock me.’

      ‘I don’t mock you, Dad. I never mock you.’

      ‘Never mind. I’m sorry I brought it up. Let’s go. I’m going to be late for work.’

      ‘Okay.’

      ‘It’s not work. It’s that place I go now. What’s it called?’

      ‘Harbor House.’

      ‘I know that. You think I don’t know what the place is called, the place I go every damn day? You think I could forget its name?’

      He set the book on the coffee table and stood up.

      ‘What does the book remind you of Dad? You can tell me.’

      He looked down at her, rolled his lips inward, and bit down on them, sealing his mouth like a wayward boy refusing to admit his guilt.

      ‘All right, then, don’t tell me.’

      ‘It reminds me,’ he said, taking a long breath, ‘of the last place I was completely happy. Right there, on that beach.’

      

      It