Thunderbird, white with blue interiorand he immediately called Rachael.
She had her answering machine on, and she did not pick up the receiver
when he identified himself.
At the traffic light at the corner of Seventeenth Street and Newport
Avenue, he hesitated, then turned left instead of continuing on to his
own house in Orange Park Acres. Rachael might not be home right now,
but she would get there eventually, and she might need support.
He headed for her place in Placentia.
The June sun dappled the Thunderbird’s windshield and made bright
rippling patterns when he passed through the inconstant shadows of
overhanging trees. He switched off the news and put on a Glenn Miller
tape. Speeding through the California sun, with “String of Pearls”
filling the car, he found it hard to believe that anyone could die on
such a golden day.
By his own system of personality classification, Benjamin Lee Shadway
was primarily a past-focused man.
He liked old movies better than new ones. De Niro, Streep, Gere, Field,
Travolta, and Penn were of less interest to him than Bogart, Bacall,
Gable, Lombard, Tracy, Hepburn, Cary Grant, William Powell, Myrna Loy.
His favorite books were from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, hard-boiled
stuff by Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain, and the early Nero
Wolfe novels.
His music of choice was from the swing era, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey,
Harry James, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, the incomparable Benny
Goodman.
For relaxation, he built working models of locomotives from kits, and he
collected all kinds of railroad memorabilia. There are no hobbies so
reeking with nostalgia or more suited to a past-focused person than
those dealing with trains.
He was not focused entirely on the past. At twenty-four, he had
obtained a real-estate license, and by the time he was thirty-one, he
had established his own brokerage. Now, at thirty-seven, he had six
offices with thirty agents working under him. Part of the reason for
his success was that he treated his employees and customers with a
concern and courtesy that were oldfashioned and enormously appealing in
the fast-paced, brusque, and plastic world of the present.
Lately, in addition to his work, there was one other thing that could
distract Ben from railroads, old movies, swing music, and his general
preoccupation with the past, Rachael Leben. Titian-haired, green-eyed,
longlimbed, full-bodied Rachael Leben.
She was somehow both the girl next door and one of those elegant
beauties to be found in any I 930s movie about high society, a cross
between Grace Kelly and Carole Lombard. She was sweet-tempered. She
was amusing. She was smart. She was everything Ben Shadway had ever
dreamed about, and what he wanted to do was get in a time machine with
her, travel back to 1940, take a private compartment on the Superchief,
and cross the country by rail, making love for three thousand miles in
time with the gently rocking rhythm of the train.
She’d come to his real-estate agency for help in finding a house, but
the house had not been the end of it. They had been seeing each other
frequently for five months. At first he had been fascinated by her in
the same way any man might be fascinated by any exceptionally attractive
woman, intrigued by the thought of what her lips would taste like and of
how her body would fit against his, thrilled by the texture of her skin,
the sleekness of her legs, the curve of hip and breast.
However, soon after he got to know her, he found her sharp mind and
generous heart as appealing as her appearance.
Her intensely sensuous appreciation for the world around her was
wondrous to behold, she could find as much pleasure in a red sunset or
in a graceful configuration of shadows as in a hundred-dollar,
seven-course dinner at the county’s finest restaurant. Ben’s lust had
quickly turned to infatuation. And sometime within the past two
months-he could not pinpoint the date-infatuation had turned to love.
Ben was relatively confident that Rachael loved him, too. They had not
yet quite reached the stage where they could forthrightly and
comfortably declare the true depth of their feelings for each other.