On the far side was a pretty stand of birches, already stripped of their leaves. An oyster shell driveway led up to a clapboard garage, where a black Jeep Cherokee with rusted rear panels was parked outside. Unless there was something else parked inside, this was the only vehicle, and I presumed it was Kyle Anderson’s.
I found a viewing spot that offered reasonable cover and sat in the crunchy brown grass, scattering a few grasshoppers. I pulled out the binoculars to scan the house. Every curtain was closed. They were the lacy kind, like you saw in Europe. No smoke from the chimney, but who’s to say he’d even have a fire going at this time of day, or at all? A heating-cooling unit to the left of the house hummed into action, throbbing like a refrigerator in an empty kitchen.
It didn’t look at all like the nerve center for the kind of odyssey I’d just been on. Then again, the most effective spies in my favorite books were always ordinary-looking men-Folly with his lumpy suits and split-level home in the Virginia ’burbs, Smiley the Chelsea homebody, wiping smudged glasses with his necktie. In their world, and in Cabot’s, James Bond and Johnny Fedora were aliens from Planet Hollywood.
Such thoughts kept me occupied for maybe an hour before I began to grow restless. I got out the bird book, flipping the pages. The only ones I’d seen since arriving were gulls and sparrows. I was admiring the long red bill of the American Oystercatcher when I was startled by the slam of a storm door.
I looked up and saw the big fellow I remembered from the funeral, Kyle Anderson, stepping off the porch and walking up the drive. I followed with the binoculars, and when he disappeared into the underbrush I stood, ready for pursuit. I was on the verge of leaving when he reappeared with a folded newspaper in hand. There must have been a delivery box at the end of the drive.
He went back inside. A few seconds later I heard faint strains of music. A symphony by Mahler, another Austrian-Bohemian like Litzi. I gazed east toward the sea. In only a few hours it would be nightfall on her side of the Atlantic. Nothing else stirred. I hunched lower into the grass. This was tougher work than I’d expected.
Just after eleven a.m. I took out my lunch, eating the sandwich but saving the apple and the chips. By 2:30 they were also gone, and shortly after four o’clock I swallowed the last of the water. Only four other people had wandered past me on the trails, and fortunately none had seemed overly curious about the middle-aged man with binoculars.
I stifled a yawn and stood to take a leak, scattering more grasshoppers. I had just zipped up when I heard tires popping against the shells on the driveway. I moved back into position and there it was, a white FedEx van with blue and orange trim, rolling to a stop behind the Jeep. Cabot’s handyman in Vienna had worked fast. I raised the binoculars and settled back onto the matted grass.
The deliveryman left the engine idling as he carried a clipboard and a small box across the porch. Anderson answered his knock and signed for the package with the door ajar. The afternoon sunlight caught the gleam of something or someone behind him, and as the deliveryman retreated I saw the spokes of a wheelchair. Adjusting the focus, I made out the outline of a seated figure, mostly in shadow. The only distinguishable feature from this distance was a shock of white hair, which I saw just as Anderson was shutting the door. Cabot had the bait. The only question now was if and when he’d bite.
Nothing more happened until dusk. Lights came on in the kitchen and living room, and I thought I heard a television. Anderson emerged shortly afterward, still alone, and not carrying anything. He wore a light jacket but there were no bulges in the pockets. It was six o’clock.
When he got into the Jeep I headed back toward the bicycle, eager to catch him before he drove out of sight. I made it down to the junction of the paved road just in time to see his taillights receding in the opposite direction, toward an intersection where he turned right, toward town. I would never catch him, but the town was small enough that it would probably be easy to find the Jeep.
Half a mile down the turnoff I saw the Jeep parked in the lot of a natural foods store, well short of town, one of those boutique groceries where everything sells at a premium. Only two other cars were there, so I kept my hat on and my face down and went inside. Anderson was seated toward the back, at a small metalwork table by a coffee counter where a milk frother was hissing.
“Order’s up, Kyle,” a girl called out.
He thanked her and grabbed his mug, then sat back down to browse through the store’s copy of the New York Times while he sipped foamed milk from the top of his cup. Anderson hadn’t struck me as a latte guy, but I guess you never know. I picked up an apple and a bottle of fruit juice, then eased toward the meat counter, pretending to look at the Delmonicos marked at $17.95 a pound.
“Help you, sir?”
“Just looking.”
After a few minutes more I began to feel conspicuous, so I paid for my items, then sat on the small front porch, gazing off into the gathering darkness. I checked my watch. 6:20. Ten minutes later I heard a chair scrape followed by the beeping of the register. I averted my face as Anderson emerged with a six-pack of beer and a grocery bag-probably the makings of tonight’s dinner-then hopped into the Jeep. If he’d noticed me on the porch, he hadn’t reacted, but I still felt uncomfortable.
By the time he got back to the house the whole interlude would have lasted nearly forty minutes. It had the feel of a daily ritual, and I filed it away as a possible window for action. God knows he must get stir-crazy, cooped up all day with Cabot, especially with winter coming.
By the time I got back into position it was nearly too dark to see where I was going on the path. The whine of a stove fan filtered up from the house, and before long I smelled meat frying and heard the first notes of an old Van Morrison album.
I gave it another two hours. By then it was so chilly I could barely keep my teeth from chattering. At nine a light went on upstairs, and the ones downstairs switched off. Bedtime for Cabot. I packed up, groped my way to the bicycle, and pedaled to the hotel, oddly drained by the long and mostly uneventful day. I walked into town for a later dinner, but hardly had an appetite until the waitress brought a steaming bowl of chowder and a tall glass of beer, which got the juices flowing enough for a cheeseburger and fries.
“Here for the fishing?” she asked.
“Bird-watching,” I said, sticking stubbornly to cover.
I was in bed by ten-thirty. If Cabot bit, he would do it soon, so I set the alarm for ninety minutes before the dawn ferry, then fell asleep to the muffled sound of voices from the TV in the next room.
The sun was a sliver of orange peel peeking above the gray rim of the Atlantic when Anderson propped open the storm door and pushed Cabot’s wheelchair onto the porch. I raised the binoculars, fingers freezing, and saw a frowning old man draped in an Army blanket. Two clawlike hands poked from the opening, clutching the FedEx box in his lap. He had swallowed the bait. Now he was about to run with it. I stood, ready to move.
Anderson pushed the chair down a ramp to the ground. Then Cabot waved him off. His right hand let go of the box and punched at a set of controls, guiding the chair forward under its own power. Anderson followed him around the left side of the house toward an oyster shell path that led across the back lawn and disappeared into the underbrush. I’d brought the bike up the trail with me today to be better prepared for a quick getaway, and I pedaled hard toward the dirt road, quickly reaching the pavement and turning toward Cabot’s place. Then I turned up his driveway. If they’d changed course in the meantime and were now coming out in the Jeep, then I’d meet them head-on, busted for sure.
But as the house came into view I saw the Jeep still parked at the garage. I hid the bike in the underbrush and ran toward the house, using it to shield me from the trail in the back. I went the same way they’d gone, to the left, then peered around the corner toward the back. They were still somewhere off in the brush. I sprinted across the back lawn to follow them.
Twenty yards into the brush the path became a plank walkway that curved left through marshland, with high grasses and reeds to either side. I slowed down, not wanting to make a clatter on the boards or come upon them without warning. I heard voices and stopped. Just around the bend I could see that the walkway led to a small dock on a salt pond. They were out on the end of it, and Anderson was lifting Cabot out of the wheelchair into an aluminum skiff with an outboard motor. I kept out of sight, following their progress by sound-a few grunts of effort, sloshing water from the rocking skiff, the pull of a starter rope, then the sputtering roar of the motor. I smelled the oily smoke and heard Anderson rev away from the dock. When I peeped around the corner, the skiff was heading toward the center of the pond, and their wake was coming ashore through the reeds. Anderson was at the stern, steering with the motor. Cabot sat up front, propped on boat cushions, his white hair stiff in the breeze. He stared straight ahead, as rigid as a carved bowsprit.
