Dexter in the Dark | Page 4

great
laboratory skill. But alas for poor Rita—b attered by a terribly unfortunate and
violent first marriage—she can’t seem to tell the margarine from t\
he butter.
All well and good. For two years Dexter and Rita cut a brilliant swathe across
the Miami social scene, noticed and admi red everywhere. But then, through a
series of events that might well leave an enlightened observer somewhat
skeptical, Dexter and Rita had become accidentally engaged. And the more I
pondered on how to extricate myself from this ridiculous fate, the more I
realized that it was a logical next step in the evolution of my disguise. A
married Dexter—a Dexter with two ready-made children!—is surely a \
great deal
further from seeming to be anything at a ll like what he really is. A quantum
leap forward, onto a new level of human camouflage.
And then there are the two children.
It may seem strange that someone whose only passion is for human vivisection
should actually enjoy Rita’s children, but he does. I do. Mind you, I don’t get
all weepy-eyed at the thought of a lost tooth, since that would require the
ability to feel emotion, and I am quite happily without any such mutation. But
on the whole, I find children a great deal more interesting than their elders,
and I get particularly irritable with those who cause them harm. In fact, I
occasionally search them out. And when I track these predators down, and when I
am very sure that they have actually done what they have been doing, I make sure
they are quite unable to do it ever again—and with a very happy hand, unspoiled
by conscience.
So the fact that Rita had two children from her disastrous first marriag\
e was
far from repellent, particularly when it became apparent that they needed
Dexter’s special parenting touch to keep their own fledgling Dark Passengers
strapped into a safe, snug Dark Car Seat until they could learn how to drive for
themselves. For presumably as a result of the emotional and even physical damage
inflicted on Cody and Astor by their drug-addled biological father, they too had
turned to the Dark Side, just like me. And now they were to be my children,
legally as well as spiritually. It was almost enough to make me feel that there
was some guiding purpose to life after all.
And so there were several very good reasons for Dexter to go through wit\
h
this—but Paris? I don’t know where it came from, this idea that Paris is
romantic. Aside from the French, has anyone but Lawrence Welk ever thought an
accordion was sexy? And wasn’t it by now clear that they don’t like us there?

And they insist on speaking French, of all things?
Perhaps Rita had been brainwashed by an old movie, something with a perky-plucky
blonde and a romantic dark-haired man, mo dernist music playing as they pursue
each other around the Eiffel Tower and laugh at the quaint hostility of the
dirty, Gauloise-smoking man in the beret. Or maybe she had heard a Jacques Brel
record once and decided it spoke to her soul. Who can say? But somehow R\
ita had
the notion firmly welded into her steel-trap brain that Paris was the capital of
sophisticated romance, and the idea would not come out without major surgery.
So on top of the endless debates about chicken versus fish and wine versus cash
bar, a series of monomaniacal rambling monologues about Paris began to emerge.
Surely we could afford a whole week, that wo uld give us time to see the Jardin
des Tuileries and the Louvre—and maybe something by Molière at the
Comédie-Française. I had to applaud the depth of her research. For my part, my\

interest in Paris had faded away completely long ago when I learned that it was
in France.
Luckily for us, I was saved from the necessity of finding a politic way of
telling her all this when Cody and Astor ma de their subtle entrance. They don’t
barrel into a room with guns blazing as most children of seven and ten do. As I
have said, they were somewhat damaged by their dear old biological dad, and one
consequence is that you never see them come and go: they enter the room by
osmosis. One moment they are nowhere to be seen and the next they are standing
quietly beside you, waiting to be noticed.
“We