Read Belinda for Free Online Page A

slapped her.
    And when her eyes began to water, I was stunned. I felt this stab inside as I watched her.
    "Thank you for everything," she said. She was gathering up her bag. "You've been very nice." She laid the napkin down beside the plate, and she stood up and went out into the hallway.
    "Belinda, wait," I said. I caught up with her at the front door.
    "I have to go, Mr. Walker," she said. She had her hand on the knob. About to burst into tears.
    "Come on, honey," I said. I took her by the shoulders. No matter what else I felt, what else I wanted, it was unthinkable that she walk out the door at this hour, alone. That simply wasn't going to happen.
    "Then don't mention all that again," she said, her voice thickening. "I mean it. Kick me our if you want, and I'll go downtown and drop a hundred bucks for a room or something. I've got money. I never said I didn't. But don't mention parents and all that again to me."
    "All right," I said. "All right. Belinda has no parents. Nobody's looking for Belinda." I clasped her neck gently in both hands, tilted her face up. She was almost crying.
    But she let me kiss her, and she was pure warmth and melting sweetness again. The same yielding and the same heat. "Christ, have mercy." I whispered. "Where's the nightgown?" she asked.
    IN the morning, as soon as I opened my eyes, I knew she was gone.
    The phone was ringing, and I managed to mumble something into it as I saw the nightgown, hanging neatly on the hook on the closet door.
    It was Jody, telling that they wanted me on a talk show in Los Angeles.
    It was national coverage. They'd put me up at the Beverly Hills of course. "I don't have to, do I?"
    "Of course not, Jeremy, but look, they want you everywhere. The sales reps say they want you for signings in Chicago and Boston. Why don't you think it over, call me back?"
    "Not now, Jody. All wrong for me."
    "Limos and suites all the way, Jeremy. First-class air."
    "I know, Jody. I know. I want to cooperate, but it's just not the time, Jody-"
    EVEN the collar of the nightgown had been buttoned. Perfume. Clinging to it was one golden hair.
    Downstairs I found the ashtray and the dishes washed, everything stacked on the drainboard. Very neat.
    And she had found the article on me in the Bay Bulletin, and that was spread out on the kitchen table, with me smiling in the big photograph they'd taken on the public library steps.
    WITH FIFTEENTH BOOK WALKER CONTINUES TO WEAVE MAGIC SPELL
    Forty-four, six-foot-one blond-haired Jeremy Walker is a gentle giant among his small fans crowded into the Children's Reading Room of the San Francisco main library, a gray-eyed teddy bear of a man to the eager little girls who besiege him with questions as to his favorite color, favorite food, or favorite movie. The personification of wholesomeness, he has never given these young readers anything but old-fashioned and traditional images, just as if the garish world of "Battlestar Galactica" and "Dungeons and Dragons" did not exist—
    How she must have laughed at that. I threw it in the trash.
    There was nothing else of her left in the house. No note, no scribbled address or phone number. I checked and double-checked.
    But what about the rolls of black and white pictures we'd taken, still in the camera? Old-fashioned and traditional images. I made a phone call to break a dinner date for that night, and went to work in the basement darkroom right away.
    I had good prints by the afternoon. And I put the best of them along the walls of the attic and hung my favorites from the wire in front of my easel. They were a satisfying, tantalizing lot.
    But she had been right when she had said she was not one of my little girls. She wasn't. Her face did not have the unstamped coin look of my models. Yet her features were so conventionally cure, so babyish.
    Like a ghost she looked, actually. Positively eerie. I mean, she suggested somebody who was apart from things around her, somebody who had seen things and done things