—it was time to call the surveillance off.
I told them I wanted one more day. Spent twelve hours watching that lonely drive and the gate and didn’t see a soul.
“You knew it was a long shot anyhow,” Amy said. “Time to let it pass.”
I agreed with her, told her the whole thing had gone on too long. Then the next morning I got up and took my camera and my binoculars and drove back and watched nothing. I did it the day after that, too, then came home and told Amy I’d spent the day at the gym. The next morning I rose before dawn and returned.
That was the coldest day of the fall so far, and by seven my coffee was gone and the sun wasn’t even up yet and the chill had already filled the cab of the truck and gone to work on my knotted back and shoulder muscles. It was time to quit, I realized. This was lunacy, or close to it.
I was parked just off the road beside a cluster of saplings and brush, squeezed in the back of the extended cab with blackout curtains hung in the windows. I’d now spent about a hundred hours in this position, the most surveillance time I’d logged on a case in years, and I wasn’t making a dime from it.
When the headlights crested the hill and slowed near the drive, I didn’t even lift my camera. I’d seen too many cars pass to get excited about this one. Then it came to a complete stop, and I sat up and pushed the blackout curtain farther aside and watched as the car—a small red sedan—turned into the gravel track and drove right up to the gate. I finally got my shit together then, reached for the camera and got it up and turned on as the driver’s door swung open. My zoom was good, but it wasn’t built for low-light conditions, and all I could see in the predawn gloom was that the driver looked like a woman, and she was walking around the gate and through the trees. She was walking toward the house.
35
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For a moment, I wasn’t sure what to do. I just sat there holding my camera and looking at the dark trees she’d vanished into, wondering if I should wait for her to reemerge and then follow her, or set off now with hopes of catching her at the house. After a brief hesitation, I decided to take action over patience.
I got out of the truck, leaving my camera but wearing my gun, and walked down the road toward the drive. I took my time, knowing that any attempt to follow her quietly through the woods around the creek would be hopeless. It was important to give her a little lead time. When I reached the red sedan, I knelt by the back bumper and took a photograph of the license plate with my cell phone’s built-in camera, a device I’d come to appreciate in moments like this. It was an Ohio plate. Surely, then, this couldn’t be Alexandra. She couldn’t be living so close to home. It would be an aggressive Realtor checking on the house before going to the office, and nothing more. When I walked around to the front of the car I spotted an Avis sticker, though. A rental.
I walked toward the woods bordering the gate. The trees didn’t seem nearly so dark when I was in them as they’d looked through the camera, and I found I was able to walk without much difficulty. It was easier now, in late fall, than it had been in spring, when everything was green and growing and the water in the creek rode high on the banks. Once I was around the gate and away from the creek I slowed again, focusing on a quiet approach now. I made my way back to the rutted drive and followed it along, seeing and hearing nothing of the woman ahead.
When the drive curled around its final bend and came out at the base of the hill that hid the house, I stopped and scanned the trees, searching for her. I gave it a careful study, made absolutely certain she wasn’t in sight, and then continued forward. I’d taken at least five steps toward the hill when I finally realized she was at the door.
I hadn’t seen her at first because the door was beneath that stone arch, covered in shadows, and she was no longer standing. She was kneeling before the door, and as I walked closer, in slow, silent strides, I saw that her head was bowed and her arm extended, her palm resting on the oaken door.
It was her. Other women might make a trip out to this home before the sun rose, but none would drop to their knees and touch its door as if at an altar.
Alexandra had come home.
I stopped walking when I was about thirty feet from her, stood and waited. She held her position for a while, maybe a minute, maybe two. Didn’t move at all, didn’t make a sound, just knelt there with her head bowed and her hand on the door. When she finally moved it was to rub her hand gently across the wood, and then she got to her feet and turned and saw me.
“It’s a beautiful house,” I said. “One of a kind. Do you miss it?”
Her eyes left me and flicked to either side, searching for others.
“I’m alone,” I said, “and I don’t intend to bring you any trouble. I would just like to hear you talk for a while. I’d like you to tell me some things. I need that very much.”
She stepped away from the door, out of the stone arch and into the light, toward me. She was not tall, no more than five foot two or three, with a slender build and graceful movements. When she came closer I saw that much remained from the face that had stared at me in photographs—the fine bones and small nose and mouth, the impossibly dark eyes. Her hair was different, chopped short and close to her skull, but for the most part she looked the same.
“I wear a wig most of the time,” she said, watching me study her. “I have glasses even though I don’t need them. They’re clear, no prescription. I wear makeup now when I never used to, lots of eyeliner and foundation and other junk that I just hate to put on my face.”
She came to within a few feet of me, then tilted her head, frowned at me, and said, “You’re Lincoln.”
I hadn’t been mentioned in any newspaper article; there was no public record of my involvement with any of the cases surrounding this woman.
“How do you know that?”
She ignored me, turned and looked over her shoulder at the door.
“You were right,” she said. “It is a beautiful home, and I do miss it. I miss it terribly, the house and all of the other things I left behind. The life I left behind.”
“Alexandra,” I said, “how do you know my name?”
“From Ken Merriman.”
I stood still and silent and stared at the calm set of her face. Then I said, slowly and carefully, “You don’t mean that you spoke to Ken Merriman.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I hired him.”
36
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The sentence left her lips almost carelessly and struck me like lead.
“You hired Ken Merriman?” I said. “You
She nodded.
“No,” I said. “Joshua’s parents hired him. That was in the papers. He’d been looking for you for twelve years.”
“He looked for me for about nine months,” she said, “and then he found me.”
“Explain it,” I said. It felt hard to get the words out.
“You understand how it began. Joshua’s parents hired him. If there is one thing I felt worst about in all of this, it’s the uncertainty they had to deal with. That was terrible, I’m sure. They were not kind people, and Joshua’s relationship with them had been a painful and difficult one, but that was not enough to justify what I did.”
She fell silent for a few seconds before saying, “There’s probably no way for people to understand the decisions I made. All I can say is that once I was gone, once it was already under way, I wasn’t brave enough to return. There was nothing that could be done to bring Joshua back, not for me or for them.”
“Tell me about Ken,” I said. The sun was beginning to show pink through the trees. I could hear the birds and the wind but nothing of the road. “How did he find you?”
