Read Online Swindlers by D.W. Buffa - Free Book Online Page B

young man and his young wife through the
French doors onto the stone patio where, under the shade of a
eucalyptus tree, long strips of tan bark peeling from the trunk,
she made them feel what it would be like to live here in the quiet
dry heat of a long summer’s day.
    “They’ll be back,” she said
with an air of satisfaction after she waved goodbye from the front
door. “They want it. I could see it in their eyes. They’ll go
someplace, a restaurant, sit across a table and talk it over. They
can’t afford it, but they’re young, and they come from money. Did
you see what they’re driving? The market is down. This house would
have gone for twenty, thirty percent higher a year or so ago. It’s
a good time to buy. That’s what they’ll tell themselves.” A shrewd,
knowing grin cut across her mouth. “He’s still in love with her;
he’ll take it as a challenge. Sweet, really; men always love women
more than they are loved back – while it lasts, that is,” she
whispered as she went to greet another, older, couple at the
door.
    Another car stopped outside, and another one
after that. She met each new arrival before they could take a step
inside, saying their names out loud to make sure she remembered
them. Soon there seemed to be people in every room, poking their
heads in closets, trying door knobs, looking all around. A man in
his sixties wanted to know about the security system and whether
the gate at the bottom of the drive could be closed electronically
from inside the house. Whatever the question, she not only had an
answer but gave it as if she had been waiting all day for someone
smart enough to ask something as sensible as that.
    Afraid of getting in the way, I went outside
and walked around the pool. Standing in the shade of the eucalyptus
tree, the same spot where Carol had invited the young couple to
imagine the life they could have, I began to wonder about the same
thing myself. It was easy to imagine the blissful quiet and the
clean, sun-drenched air, away from the city and all the crowded
noise. Maybe it was too late to think of doing something else,
something other than what had become the settled routine of my
solitary life, but for a brief moment I remembered how I felt, with
Danielle in my arms, that night on Blue Zephyr, and thought how
good it would be if I could live in a place like this and come home
every night to someone like her.
    “It’s like a zoo in there,” said Carol
Llewelyn, smiling at my distraction. “The owner will be happy.” She
looked back across the pool to the rambling stucco house and the
muted conversations going on inside. “I didn’t mean to abandon
you.” She peered down at the lawn, cut as close as a putting green.
“What’s he like, the man she’s married to, Nelson St. James? I’ve
read some things in the papers, but….”
    It seemed incredible, but she insisted that
she did not know him, that they had never met.
    “I wasn’t invited to their wedding. I don’t
know what she told him about me; nothing, I imagine. I never heard
from her after she left for New York.”
    “Never heard from her?” I asked, stunned by
what she was telling me. “Why would she have done that? Did
something happen?”
    “You mean, did we have a fight, did I throw
her out – something like that? – No, nothing like that at all. I
told you she always knew her own mind; that doesn’t mean that she
ever told me what she was thinking, or anyone else that I know of.
Maybe it was because she didn’t have a father; maybe it was because
I wouldn’t tell her who he was. She resented me for that; and of
course there was the way we lived, always just barely getting by.
She was smart, a straight A student. Everything came easy to her.
She could have gone anywhere to school – Stanford, Cal, one of
those schools back east – but she was not interested. The only
place she wanted to go was New York. She knew she had the kind of
face they were looking for, knew she could become a