Chaos. Patricia Cornwell

of the most accomplished people in the world.

      I pause in the entryway, in front of an antique oval mirror, running my fingers through my limp blond hair. I stare into the pitted glass at the tall handsome man behind me in pale gray, hovering over me like a breathtaking apparition.

      “Do I know you?” I ask Benton without turning around.

      “I don’t think so. Are you waiting for someone?”

      “Yes.”

      “What a coincidence. I am too. I’ve always been waiting for someone.”

      “So have I.”

      “Well not just someone. The right person.” His reflection looks at me.

      “Do you think there’s only one right person for each of us?” I ask the mirror on the wall.

      “I can only speak for myself.”

      We don’t have a name for our little game, and nobody is wise to our delightful choreography of meeting as if we’re strangers. It’s refreshing, sobering but also good psychology if one can handle the truth. What would happen if we really were meeting for the first time right now in the entryway of the Harvard Faculty Club?

      Would we notice each other? Would he still find me as attractive as he did the first time we met? It’s not always the same for men when their wives get older, and some mates may say they’re just as in love when they’re not. It’s brave to ask such questions and face the truth unflinchingly. What might we feel were we to meet now instead of decades ago when Benton was married and I was divorced and we worked our first case together?

      There’s no scientific method for answering such a question, and I don’t need one. I have no doubt we’d fall in love with each other all over again. I’m certain I would have an affair with him that would result in my being called a home wrecker. And I wouldn’t care because it’s worth it.

      Benton places his warm graceful hands on my shoulders, and rests his chin on top of my head. I smell his earthy cologne as we look at our reflections in the convex mirror, our faces Picasso-like abstractions where the silvered glass is eroded.

      “How about some dinner?” he says into my hair.

      “Will you excuse me for a moment?”

      I check my shopping bag in the coat closet, and step inside the ladies’ room with its formal wallpaper and vintage Victorian theater posters. I set my leather messenger-bag briefcase on the black granite countertop and dig out a cosmetic kit. I face the mirror over the sink, and the woman in khaki staring back at me is slightly shopworn and disheveled.

      Actually there’s nothing slight about it, I decide. I look like hell, and I take off my damp suit jacket and drape it over a chair. My bra has soaked through my white blouse, and I turn on the hand dryer and blast hot air inside my collar, doing what I can so I don’t sit around in wet underwear. Then I dig out powder, lipstick, a toothbrush. I contemplate my appearance and what else I intend to do about it. Not much.

      I can’t reverse the effects of lousy sleep, of running myself ragged and walking in the extreme heat. I feel a touch light-headed, and I’m weary and hopelessly clammy. I need food and drink badly. I need a shower most of all, and I take off my ruined panty hose and toss them in the trash. I douse a hand towel with cold water, cleaning up, but there’s no quick remedy for rumpled sweatiness.

      It’s as if I were soaked and agitated in a washing machine, and I notice I’ve gotten a bit thinner in recent weeks. That usually happens when I neglect to exercise, and I haven’t been jogging for a while, certainly not during the heat wave. I haven’t touched my TRX bands, and Lucy’s been after me to go with her to the gym.

      I powder my face, and shadows in the low light of a crystal chandelier accentuate my prominent cheekbones and nose, and the angle of my strong jaw. I’m reminded of what journalists say, almost none of it relevant or kind. I’m masculine and off-putting. Or my favorite unflattering line that’s been recycled excessively in stories: Dr. Kay Scarpetta is compelling in appearance with an inaccessible, secretive and domineering face.

      I wet my fingers and muss my hair. I give it a once-over with a volumizing spray. I brush my teeth, and dust my forehead and cheeks with a mineral powder that blocks ultraviolet light and doesn’t cause cancer. I don’t care that it’s about to be pitch dark out. I do it anyway. Then I dab on an olive oil lip balm and find the Visine and a small tube of shea butter.

      I feel much improved but as I survey my wilted suit and blouse, I can hear Dorothy’s voice in my head as clearly as if she’s inside the ladies’ room with me. She’d say the same thing she’ll probably say when Benton and I pick her up in a few hours. I have a terrible sense of style. I’m boring and sloppy. I get dirty and dress in stuffy suits like a frump or a man. She can’t understand why I don’t wear stilt-like heels, heavy makeup or acrylic nails and gaudy polish.

      It’s lost on her why I wouldn’t emphasize my body parts, as she puts it, “especially since both of us were endowed with big knockers,” she likes to boast about what’s most important. I don’t dress or conduct myself anything like my sister. I never have and couldn’t possibly.

      Ever since I can remember I’ve been incompatible with fragile female accoutrements and empty-headed attitudes. We simply don’t get along.

      Benton is waiting for me, chatting with the hostess Mrs. P at her station.

      He grips his black leather briefcase with one hand, and in the other he holds his phone, typing on it with his thumb. He slips it back in a pocket as he notices my return from the ladies’ room, and I understand what’s meant by one’s heart leaping. Mine is happily jolted by the sight of him. It always is.

      “A big improvement? Hmm?” He takes his glasses off, making a big production of appraising me, his eyes glinting with a playful light. “Do you agree, Mrs. P?” he asks her as he winks at me.

      In her early eighties, she has a nimbus of wispy grayish-white hair, and round wire-rim glasses like a caricature of a prim and proper New England matron. Her face is doughy and wrinkled like dehydrated fruit, and her dress and matching jacquard jacket are a rose-trellis design in greens and reds that reminds me of a William Morris pattern.

      Mrs. P tends to eye me curiously even when I don’t look overcooked and disheveled, as if there’s much she wonders about but isn’t going to verbalize. Several times now her eyes have dropped down to my bare legs, and then she looks up quickly as if she’s seen something she shouldn’t.

      “What do you think?” Benton asks her.

      “Well I’m not sure.” Her glasses wink as she turns her head back and forth like a tennis match, from him to me, looking at one, then the other, and the two of them have their shtick. “You know not to put me on the spot that way,” she affectionately reprimands him.

      Mrs. P’s surname is Peabody, pronounced with an emphasis on the first syllable, a drawn-out PEE-b’dy, like the city near Salem. I’ve never addressed her by her first name, Maureen, and have no clue if those close to her call her that or Mo or something else. In the years we’ve been coming here she’s simply been Mrs. P, and Benton is Mr. Wesley. If she refers to me by name it’s Mrs. Wesley, although she’s well aware of my other life where most everyone else calls me Dr. Scarpetta or Chief.

      It’s a sad secret that Mrs. P knows what I do and who I am even as she politely pretends otherwise. Not long after Benton and I moved to Cambridge, her husband was killed in a car accident literally in front of their house, and I took care of him. Now it’s as if that never happened, and what I remember most about her husband’s case is his widow Mrs. P’s refusal to talk to me. She insisted on going over her late husband’s autopsy report with one of my assistant chiefs, a man.

      But then Mrs. P started at the Faculty Club in a day when things were very different for women. You could be on the faculty here and find yourself relegated to the ladies’ dining room or discover there’s no place in the dorm and you’re not welcome in the same libraries