Chapter 1

I received a letter from Jane, asking that I meet her at a coffee shop in the city, to "discuss whether or not our involvement in the research project would be appropriate". She didn't say who the 'we', in 'our involvement', was. It was on expensive stationary, and was hand written in flowing beautiful script. Hardly anyone writes longhand any more, and her letters were both legible and feminine. I was interested immediately. I was drawn in even more when she set a time and date and then described how she would be dressed.

No phone number.

No last name.

She just signed it, "Jane".

It all seemed very mysterious, and of course, I went.

"Bodiglio's", where the letter had said she would be waiting, was a high-end kind of place, where a cup of coffee costs as much as a meal at the Sirloin Stockade or some other buffet type place. It wasn't the kind of place I hung out in, or even entered, for that matter. I was immediately cognizant of my longish and ragged hair, and my beard, which I hadn't trimmed in a month or so.

Actually, the last time either my hair or beard had been trimmed was at Kent and Lisa's house. You'll remember them from narrative number three in this series - the nudist couple. Their daughter, Nikki had taken it upon herself to "clean me up". She cut my hair and trimmed my beard... while sitting on my lap. Remember... they're nudists...

Let me tell you something. Letting a naked girl straddle your naked lap while she's cutting your hair is NOT the wisest thing in the world to do. I hadn't wanted to go out in public for a week or two after that. But hair grows back eventually, and maybe it was worth it in the end.

Anyway, that's what I was thinking about when I walked in to Bodiglio's and looked around for a woman wearing "a fawn colored frock" and pearl necklace with matching earrings.

It took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the discrete darkness inside the establishment, which could have been any of a number of high class bars. The smells in the air, though, were all coffee, with a hint of something else delicious wafting past my nose. I surveyed the place and, in a back booth, saw her.

It wasn't her 'frock' or jewelry that tipped me. It was that she wasn't very good at making, or should I say keeping, clandestine assignations. She was sitting up, ramrod straight, with an anxious look on her face, staring right at me. Then she slumped back and her eyes went to a napkin on the table in front of her, beside a steaming cup of coffee. I saw the pearls then, and a dress that looked almost like some kind of high-fashion camouflage, all browns and tans and greens. It really DID look like what I'd expect a fawn to look like.

It was obvious, though, that I wasn't the one she was looking for. That dejected slump of hers told me that much. Maybe she was expecting a man in a coat and tie, or a cardigan or something, with argyle socks and loafers and a pipe clamped between his teeth. A lot of people think that's what an academic dresses like. Some do. If you ever have one of those for a professor, by the way, drop the class.

There wasn't anything to be done about it though. I walked over and stood by the table.

"Jane?"

She looked up, startled. By some trick of the light, there was a beam of light on her face that lit up her eyes. Either she was wearing colored contacts, or she had wolf's eyes. They were those blue-with-silver-in-them eyes that looked feral... dangerous. The rest of her looked harmless though. She jerked, obviously uncomfortable, and pushed back into the soft seat like she was trying to get away from me.

"I'm Bob, " I said. "You wrote to me?"

"Oh my! You're Bob? Oh!" Her eyes might have said 'wolf', but the rest of her was saying 'scared puppy'. She looked down again.

"Is everything OK?" I asked. I was almost afraid she'd bolt screaming for the door.

Then the most amazing thing happened. Her shoulders gave a little shake and she straightened up. Her head came back up and those eyes said the wolf was back, and that the wolf wasn't afraid of anything.

"Please," she said, lifting a hand that flashed in the light. It had a huge diamond on it. "Forgive me. I think I already owe you an apology."

I sat.

It was a horseshoe shaped booth, with a round table. She was sitting in the heel of the shoe, and I sat to her left. Her body moved, almost like she thought of scooting over, but then stilled. If she was as nervous as I thought she was, she had iron control over it.

"You don't owe me anything," I said. "Except maybe a cup of coffee. This isn't the kind of place I usually drink coffee in."

I was trying to set her at ease, but she tensed up again. All I had done was draw more attention to the difference in our stations in life. This woman ran with the big dogs - anybody could see that - and I was a scruffy mutt that did its best not to get in the way when the big dogs were out and about.

She had control though, and she asserted it. She raised that flashing hand and a young man was beside our table instantly. His "How may I be of assistance?" sounded suspiciously like he wasn't asking what kind of coffee might be needed. She heard it too and waved her hand again, negligently.

"Please bring... whatever he wants... and some pastries too."

He relaxed. I did too, surprised that my 'fight or flight' instinct had kicked in.

"What may I get you... sir?" he asked.

You notice I didn't capitalize the 'sir'. He didn't either.

"Coffee," I said as smoothly as I could.

What else might he bring me in a coffee bar?

"Coffee," he repeated. He had that knack of obnoxious waiters, that allows them to communicate just how out of place you are in their little establishment.

Jane spoke again. "Flavia sidomo gold," she said, looking at me calculatingly with those wolf eyes. "Bring organic cream and raw sugar too."

He actually bowed. "Very good Madam, right away." He knew who he had to be polite to... who had the money. She did too. It was obvious there was pretty big money behind this girl.

Well, not girl, per se. She looked to be in her mid thirties, in that late twenties kind of way that money will buy you. It wasn't that she had plastic surgery scars or anything gauche like that. She was just pampered and it kept her skin young and tight. The rest of her looked pretty young and tight too, what I could see. That fawn colored dress fit her like a glove, with puffy fly-away sleeves that balanced it, making it a dress rather than an 'outfit'. It showed just enough cleavage for those pearls to lie on the swells of her inner breasts, but not enough to cause a man's gaze to linger there. It made it obvious that she had a fully feminine set of breasts, but didn't put them on display. I couldn't see her feet, but I would have bet the price of the coffee I was going to drink that she had on three or four inch heels with panty hose that were almost invisible. There was something about her eyes that made me think she could also be wearing a garter belt with thigh-highs, and whatever undergarments she had on were probably lacy in the extreme and another impossibly-named color.

Her makeup was flawless, the kind that takes hours to put on if someone else doesn't do it for you. She could have 'personal assistants', though. It wouldn't surprise me if she had a dozen servants. There was a shopping bag on the seat between us, from one of the stores downtown that I also never went into. When the cheapest thing in the store is a twenty-five dollar handkerchief, I don't shop there. Her hair was also flawless, a wreath of honey-blond hair that floated around her head like a force field, with intricate whorls and what appeared to be streaks of subtly different colors in it, a little darker than the rest, with a hint of red, like a pale red ale with the sun shining through it.

A plate of something golden brown with frosting on it appeared at my elbow, along with a cup of coffee that steamed and almost assaulted my nasal cavities. I decided I'd rather look at Jane than Bruno, or whatever he called himself.

"Thank you Jacques," said Jane, looking up, like any normal person would do. She used the French pronunciation, ending with a hard 'K'.

I found myself looking at the ring on her left finger. It was the size of a marble.

"Would you please pass the tea cakes?" she asked.

I came alive and grabbed the plate, sliding it across the table towards her. The pastries on the plate looked like a cross between a cookie and a brownie, round, but thick, with streaks of chocolate in them, and both white and chocolate icing drizzled across them in little lines. She picked one up, holding her pinky finger out, and took a nibble. Her lips made me think of strawberries. She put the cookie down on the napkin.

"So, you're doing research on marriage," she said.

I came alive again and blushed. I wasn't used to being in such rarified air and I was a bit breathless. My canned speech came to mind, which was good, because without it I have no idea what I'd have babbled about. It wasn't that she was a raving beauty, though she was quite beautiful in a girl-next-door-raised-to-the-nth-level kind of way. I think rather it was that I felt completely and totally outclassed by her, like I was with someone who spoke a foreign language that I didn't know how to communicate in. That was a singularly odd feeling. I speak four languages fluently.

But I tumbled into my canned speech and was doing just fine until I realized that she wasn't really listening to me. I'm sure she caught the gist of it, but it was odd. Remember the Evelyn Wood speed reading course that was so popular back when? It was like she could speed hear, just picking up on the critical words that transferred the meaning. But her mind was somewhere else while she did it.

I suddenly felt impish.

"So I thought that if I could find the transaxle of the average marriage and whelp the relationship, I could find a way to improve the average cross section." It was a version of one of my favorite phrases. I try to throw in 'transaxle', 'whelp', and 'cross section' when I think someone isn't listening. It's more fun if there is somebody else present who IS listening. It gets a cool reaction out of them to hear gibberish and think it is supposed to mean something.

Her eyes swung to mine and locked. Wolf eyes.

"You're playing with me." she said. "Why are you playing with me?"

She was very direct. I felt ashamed. Apparently she could listen closely and think of other things at the same time.

"I'm sorry," I said meekly. "Honest, I just thought you had other things on your mind."

"Honestly," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"No, I mean the proper word is that you 'honestly' thought I wasn't listening... not honest." Her eyes just made chills run down my spine.

"Of course," I mumbled. "Honestly."

"You're uncomfortable, aren't you?" she asked.

"Honestly," I said. Honestly, I didn't mean to. It was just that it was right there in my head.

She smiled.

"I don't bite," she said softly.

"Maybe," I said back, "but if you did I bet it would hurt."

"It's my eyes, isn't it?" she asked. "They make everyone uncomfortable.

"They're beautiful," I said for some stupid reason. "And scary too," I added inanely.

She laughed again.

"Tell me again about your project," she said. "This time I'll listen. I promise."

I had a fleeting sense of curiosity as to why she would promise me anything. I ignored it, and told her my theory.

"So that's why you wanted photographs," she said.

"Uh... yes." I almost said 'honestly' again, but caught myself in time.

She reached into her purse, which was on the side away from me, and pulled out an envelope. She opened the flap and extracted four or five photographs, five by sevens, and handed them to me. I saw her in some of them, and a woman who looked a lot like her in a couple of others. In one of those the woman had a pony tail and was wearing a checkered shirt. I suddenly realized it WAS her, but she wasn't 'fixed up' in those shots.

There was a man in all the photographs with her, appropriately handsome for a woman of her caliber, with wings of gray at his temples in the ones where he looked a few years older. He looked to be in his early forties, and looked vaguely familiar. In two of the pictures there was a boy who looked like he could be anywhere from seven to ten. I glanced up to ask her if it was her son in the picture. She was staring at me intently.

"Your son?" I asked.

Something flickered in her eyes and she nodded. "He's away at school."

'School' in this sense, I knew, meant a military academy, or some fancy boarding school.

I got down to looking at the faces of the man and woman in the photographs. There were similarities. What was odd that, beneath the veneer I had overlaid by my pre-conceptions about what I would see, I saw that he, too, looked like the boy next door who grew up and hit it big. I compared the two with the little boy in them. In one, he appeared younger and the setting was a back yard. There was a grill there, in the background, and a badminton net strung up on the grass behind them. That was the one where she had a pony tail. The other was of her, sitting on a short couch, with her son beside her, and the man standing behind them. It was more of an informal portrait. Everyone had a silly smile on their face, though. Not the restrained and dignified kind of look you'd expect from rich folks.

Her finger pointed to that picture. "That's when we found out my husband had been elected the first time."

I looked up at her.

"My husband is in politics," she said needlessly.

"I see," I said needlessly as well.

"That's why I'm not sure this is a good idea," she explained.

I couldn't tell if she meant meeting me in a dark coffee bar wasn't a good idea, or them participating in the study wasn't a good idea.

"He's very sensitive to... publicity," she added.