of breaking glass. To her greater surprise, the man wasn’t crouching on the other side of it.
The voice came from the living room. 'Do you have the gun?' He must have come down from upstairs.
She couldn’t think of a reason to deny it. 'Yes,' she said.
'I left it there.'
'I know that.'
'I mean, I did this so you wouldn’t be afraid.'
A part of her mind wanted to call out, 'It didn’t work,' but she controlled it and said, 'What do you want here?'
This time his voice was nearly at the kitchen door. 'I need your help.' Why had she assumed there was only one? Maybe he had let Jake see him just to give that impression. He was coming closer. This was her last chance to look behind her, so she took it. She swirled her head, her eyes searching hungrily for the shape of a man, but there was none.
'Can I come in?' he asked quietly.
She hesitated, slipped to the side of the door by the tilted refrigerator as quietly as she could, and turned her head to the side to let her voice come to him from the center of the room. She cocked the hammer and said, 'Come in.'
4
Jake Reinert applied the paint in long, even brush-strokes. He was not the sort of man who put too much paint on a brush and hoped that would keep him from having to do a second coat. Foolproof nondrip paint was still in the realm of the perpetual-motion machine and the philosopher’s stone. In fact, paint was one of many things that had actually gotten perceptibly worse in his lifetime. They had taken the lead out so the whole country didn’t get retarded at once, but whatever they had put in there to replace it was as good as money, because it meant you had to buy paint twice as often, and sometimes it seemed as though the whole world had gotten mentally damaged anyway. The only thing to be said for painting was that it helped a man keep his mind off things that worried him and that were none of his business. If Jane Whitefield wanted to tell him something, she knew where to find him.
Jane Whitefield had taken up a lot of watching time, because he had begun early and kept up with it. He had started worrying about her before she was born. He had felt a little trepidation about it. The old folks had been pretty reasonable about Henry Whitefield’s marrying an American woman, as near as Jake could tell. But he had seen situations before where everybody pretty much minded their own business until the babies started coming. Then there would be a lot of arguments that were deep and nasty about whether the kid was going to be Protestant or Catholic, who it looked like, who it would be named after, and all that. But with the Whitefields it hadn’t been like that. They didn’t seem to notice.
Her hair was as black and shiny as the lapel of a tuxedo, and it hung so straight it sometimes looked as though it were made of something heavier than hair. But Jake had seen at about six months that the eyes weren’t turning brown, not even darkening a little, and he had mentioned it to Henry.
Henry had laughed about it. He said the Seneca had captured so many white women over the years that the blue eyes might have come from him. Then he reminded Jake of something he hadn’t thought about since high school: that the last great Iroquois chiefs, Joseph Brant and Complanter, both had had white fathers. He said he had read somewhere that the more mongrelized a person was, the better the chance that he would be healthy and intelligent. Mongrels wasn’t a word Jake would have used, and it had shocked him, but he guessed Henry had a better opinion of dogs than he did.
Henry lived long enough to see that Jane had turned out all right: nice-looking, smart in school, fine athlete. Jake’s own girls, Amanda and Mary Ellen, who were a few years older, had doted on Jane until they had gone away to college. He had assumed that these were going to be lifelong friendships, but history had fooled him and made lifelong friendships obsolete. By the time all those kids had come back from school, there wasn’t really a whole lot that the town could offer them to do for a living. His had moved on; Jane had stayed.
There was a natural question in Jake’s mind as to how she was accomplishing that. Her mail was always full of stuff from stock brokers and banks and mutual funds, so she must have a little money from her folks. But that couldn’t be what she lived on. Henry had been shrewd, but he had never concentrated on getting rich. He had worked construction jobs for thirty years. A few years ago, when Jake had pried out of Jane what she was doing, it had sounded like a puff of air in his face. She had a research and consulting business. What the hell was that?
She went off a lot on sudden trips, sometimes for a day or two, sometimes for sixty days. And now and then there would be strange people coming to her door. He had seen how she had looked when he had told her about the man. She didn’t even know who he was, but it didn’t strike her as a pleasant surprise. Jake didn’t know everything, but in his experience, people who had nothing to hide didn’t cringe when they heard somebody had come to see them.
His stomach felt hollow and queasy when he looked at the pure arithmetic of the situation. You had a very attractive young woman who spent a lot of money. When you asked her where it came from, she named a profession that didn’t involve making, buying, or selling anything and didn’t require her to leave the house on a regular basis. He had never met anybody who could be described as a call girl, so he didn’t really know how that business worked from the inside, but he suspected that from the outside it would look quiet and respectable and too good to be true, a lot like the way Jane Whitefield lived.
As he scrutinized his work and set aside his brushes, Jake felt a little sad. His generation—his wife, Margaret, his closest friends—were all gone. Amanda and Mary Ellen were grown-up and raising their own kids a thousand miles away. Here he was spending his time worrying about Jane Whitefield’s personal life. In his younger days Jake Reinert would have disdained the idea of being the next-to-last live person in a dying place. He would rather have put a gun to his head. But life had a way of presenting you with a dogshit sandwich and tailoring events perfectly so that you just had to hang around and eat it.
5
Jane Whitefield aimed the gun at the doorway and quietly stepped to the other end of the kitchen. She held the big pistol in both hands to ride out the recoil without allowing it to kick upward and deprive her of the second round. She aimed ten inches to the left of the doorjamb and three feet above the ground. If he was honest, he would walk in slowly and upright. The gun would look to him as though it weren’t being poked into his face. If he was dishonest, he would charge in low and the muzzle would be at the level of his chest. She would spend the evening cleaning the floor and spackling the hole in the wall.
He walked into the kitchen with his hands held out wide and the fingers spread, as though he were offering to hug somebody. His voice had sounded as though it was coming from above her, so she wasn’t surprised that he was tall. He was slim but muscular, and that wasn’t a good sign. He had short, dark-brown hair and brown eyes, so he was probably the one Jake had seen. His face looked as though he was in his late thirties or early forties, too old to be a sneak-thief. He had about three days’ worth of dark beard on his face, and he looked tired. That part was good.
'My name is John Felker, and—'
'How did you get in here?' she asked.
'You weren’t home, and I couldn’t find a safe place. The motels ...' He seemed to see that he wasn’t answering the question. 'You mean the alarm system?'
'You know I do,' she said evenly. 'How?'
He gave a small, apologetic shrug. 'They always wire the windows and doors and things. You can’t get past them. But on the attic of every house there’s a vent at the peak, just under the roof. If you take off the grille, a man can sometimes fit.'
'If he happens to be up there.'
