Sweet Dreams, Irene by Jan Burke Page A

carried on the night air. My muscles ached with tension.
    “Irene?”
    I turned back, thinking maybe he wanted to talk after all. There was a long silence.
    “What, Frank?”
    Still more silence. I was about to give up when he said, “I think we should take a few days off from each other.”
    I didn’t answer because I couldn’t answer. My throat was constricted and I could feel tears welling up. I rolled away on the off chance he would turn and look at me. I lay there for a long time before I was able to breathe normally.
    Before we started sleeping together in that bed, I had spent a number of years living alone. My friends and family always worried that I was lonely then. But in all those years, I was never as lonely as I was that night, lying less than three feet away from Frank Harriman.

7
    B ETWEEN MY EMOTIONAL STATE and the noise next door, I didn’t sleep at all that night. The two triple-sized scotches had apparently done the trick for the bastard next to me, although I noticed he was extremely restless even as he snored away.
    I went from feeling extremely sorry for myself to being extremely angry with Frank. I was pissed at myself as well, for not having a car to make an escape in. I considered calling a cab. Maybe because it was a Holy Day of Obligation, I prayed for strength.
    At dawn, watching Frank and wondering if I would ever watch him sleep again, something like sympathy found its way past my anger. I remembered how upset he had been earlier, how close he had been to Mrs. Fremont. I thought of the helplessness he must have felt when Carlson took him off the case. I didn’t like the idea that withdrawing from me might be his way of dealing with his own emotions, but I concluded that like it or not, I was going to have to give him the time alone he wanted. I reminded myself that he had said “a few days,” not “I never want to see you again.”
    I’d been around too long to feel much comfort in this last thought. I hated being in the position of waiting to see if he still wanted me.
    I decided the answer to my problems was to busy myself with the election and to do what I could to find out about occult groups in Las Piernas. If the paper raised a stink about it, I figured I could argue reasonably that I wasn’t working on a crime story—after all, I had already been contacted by someone who had indicated a connection would be made between Satanism and the D.A.’s race. Besides, who knew how much longer I’d be bedding a cop? It might only be a few more minutes.
    Sometimes my own sense of humor backfires on me.
    I decided that the odds of Frank waking up and taking me into his arms and murmuring, “Darling, how could I have been so wrong! I can’t live without you …” were slim to none. So I carefully slid out of bed and went down the hall to the bathroom and took a shower. Okay, so what if we usually took one together? That was just water conservation, right?
    I was in a really foul mood by the time I dried off. Frank wasn’t awake yet. I carried my clothes into the bathroom and got dressed there. I was too restless to stay in the house, so I went out onto the patio. That wasn’t such a great idea. It made me think of standing in the backyard of Casa de Esperanza, hearing Mrs. Fremont tell me Frank was a keeper. Well, I apparently hadn’t set the hook properly—he was wriggling away.
    I heard him moving around inside the house; heard the shower and later, kitchen noises. My own appetite was running around somewhere with my ability to sleep. I couldn’t take looking at the garden anymore, caught between the loss of Mrs. Fremont and the distance from Frank, so I left the yard through the gate. I walked past Mrs. Fremont’s house without more than a glance at the yellow police barricade tape that sealed it, and headed for the beach. It was only a short walk from the house.
    I stood at the edge of a walkway that led down to the beach. The Pacific stretched out in dark gray, the autumn