Skull Session Read Online Free PDF Page B

groceries, which Paul took from her. "Wow," she said. "What a day. Ugh. I am very glad to be home." She kissed Paul fiercely.
    "A hard day?"
    "No more than usual—typical departmental squabbles, scheduling conflicts, conferences. I'm beat. I'm very, very glad to see you." She threw her books on the kitchen table and embraced him fully, her head fitting under his chin, the outdoors smell in her hair. Paul rubbed her back and felt the compressed strength of her.
    "I've got pasta water on. And I got an interesting call today."
    "Well, you'll have to tell me over dinner. I'm going to take a nap," she said decisively. "Half an hour."
    "Fine." Paul smiled, went back to working on the garlic.
    "You were running in the fields," she said from the doorway, startling him. "And you didn't wear orange. Paul, it's hunting season!"
    "Yeah. It was great. How did you know?"
    "Burrs in my skirt." She lifted the fabric to show him a cluster of small triangular tags. "J wasn't out in the autumn fields wearing this skirt—they must have stuck to me when I hugged you just now. And the orange windbreaker is still hanging by the collar loop, the way I hang it. You'd have hung it by the hood." She pointed to the row of hooks near the door.
    "How would anyone guess you're a police detective's daughter?"
    "I wish you wouldn't do it."
    "Hey, I thought you were the big apostle of controlled risk."
    This didn't strike her as amusing. "That's not risky, it's just stupid."
    He laughed. "I brought my saxophone. Nobody was going to shoot me, unless they thought I was a moose."
    "If that's what moose sound like." Lia put her hand to his cheek. "You are hopeless, you know that?" She looked up at him, a heart-shaped face framed in tangled red-blond hair, cheeks banded with fatigue. Paul saw suddenly that she loved and in some way trusted the quirky, sentimentalizing muddle he lived in as much as he loved and trusted her clarity, focus, decisiveness.
    Then she was heading toward the stairs again, picking at the burrs, her skirt lifted to reveal her strong calves. / am absolutely a goner, Paul told himself joyfully. I am gonzo about this woman.
    Over dinner, Paul told her about the call from Kay, filling in some background. "Highwood is the house of my aunt Vivien, down in Westchester County, fifty or sixty miles from Manhattan. When I was a kid we used to spend a lot of time up there. On top of a hill, wild old woods all around—a beautiful spot. Back then, Vivien lived there with her ancient mother, Freda, and her son, Royce, who's a few years older than me."
    "I don't think you've ever mentioned Vivien." Lia wrapped her spaghetti expertly on her fork and when it slipped sucked her noodles anyway. "Your mother's sister?"
    "Half sister. They weren't really in touch with each other until later in their lives. My mother's what, seventy, so Vivien would be in her early sixties. Their father divorced my mother's mother soon after her birth, and married Vivien's mother, so they grew up in separate households. More than separate—estranged. When my grandmother remarried, she didn't want to have anything to do with her ex's new family."
    *' Understandable.''
    "But then Vivien and her husband, Erik, moved to the Lewisboro area when my parents were there, bought Highwood, and they all got pretty close." He explained: Highwood had been built as a hunting lodge by some wealthy nineteenth-century industrialist, and stood alone on the top of a ridge in heavy forest. Inside, much of the decor was left over from the original owners—boar, bear, and elk heads on the walls, antique guns and decorative swords, Hudson River School paintings that portrayed mist-obscured, dense woods like those around High-wood. Vivien's own tastes were no less exotic. She had traveled all over the world with her husband, bringing back chairs made of antelope horns, antique chests from Milan, paint-daubed shields and spears from some African tribe. Some of her things had come from no farther away