CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“It’s just about us now,” she says.
Hunter isn’t sure that’s ever going to be true, but he happily follows her out across the crabgrass. He’s not sure life ever just lets people be alone. It’s always on your case. Life is a dog that needs human attention at any cost and will worry at you until you give it some.
After a moment he notices that what they’re walking on isn’t grass after all, though, which surprises him— he’s pretty sure he sat here in his car only yesterday and saw how much this place of theirs had been changed. Tonight this couple acres of the key seems to have reverted to scrub, however; tilting palm trees, straggly grass over sandy paths, a little swampy in parts.
A few minutes gets them down onto the beach. It’s sunny there, so bright that it threatens to burn out into white. Sometimes evenings are like that, he supposes.
He holds her hand, and they walk along the waterline, watching their own bare feet. She asks him about where he has been and what he has done. He doesn’t want to talk about it. That period was only ever a time of waiting, and it’s finished now, and of no account.
He doesn’t want to hurry, either, but he knows they have to keep moving. He knows there is someone on this beach with them.
When he eventually glances back, he sees her.
She is a long way behind, struggling a little in the sand. She is alone. She has had nowhere else to go in all these long years, and so she’s waited for him.
There’s nothing Hunter can do about her. She will always be there, some way back along his beach, forever following him. But she is fat, and old, and he and Katy are young. They can outwalk her, probably.
He thinks so, anyway.
They can try.
He thinks he hears a voice, then, though it could just be the rustle of the waves. The Breakers was always a dumb name for a place on this side of the peninsula. You don’t get the big waves here. You just get these little guys, coming in and out like breaths.
He hears the voice again, louder, more urgent.
For a moment he wonders if the white surrounding them might not be the sun after all, and if the shadows over the beach are not merely from the wisps of insubstantial clouds up above but rather those of people leaning over a hospital bed.
It doesn’t seem likely.
He rejects the thought, hooks his arm around Katy’s shoulders, and kisses her neck.
“Let’s see how far we can get,” he says.
She smiles, and nods.
And they walk.
“Yeah, he’s dead,” the voice says. “Mark the time and tell the cops.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
It took fifteen endless minutes to get back to the turn off the highway, during which Steph took some convincing that this was a good idea. I wasn’t sure myself. My gut instinct was screaming loud, telling me to get the hell out of town, now now NOW, but I knew that if Karren was suddenly finding herself part of the cleanup, then I couldn’t just drive away. We’d never been close, but if you get to the point where you’ll let others be hurt through inaction, then darkness has fallen in your life.
I got Steph to try calling Karren back, but there was no answer. There was nothing I could do before I got there, so I just drove, fast, and on the way learned from Stephanie that Nick had started being attentive almost from the day he joined the magazine, that she’d politely resisted all this time, and it was only the pictures she thought I’d taken of Karren—and a lot of wine—that had broken her resolve yesterday afternoon. Nothing had actually happened, nothing would have happened, she said. I believed her, at least ninety-nine percent. I was certainly prepared to believe by now that all it took was a couple of tiny modifications, for someone to move the walls just a little, for a life previously solid to look like it had been made of cardboard all along.
Karren’s apartment was in a development a couple of streets back from the bay, half a mile north of downtown, an area favored by young professionals with money to spend and no kids to get to school. It was a three-story block, the building surrounded by small but well-tended gardens and angled so the upper stories got half-decent views of the bay. Karren had got into the development early. A smart buy. She was a smart woman. I knew the place a little, having once sold property in it.
As I parked in the lot, however, I realized I didn’t know the number of Karren’s apartment.
“Come into the driver’s seat and lock the doors,” I said. I reached into the footwell on her side and picked up the gun. Steph stared at it.
“How have you got a gun, Bill?”
“Long story.” I got out. “You see anybody approaching, anyone
Steph didn’t move. I stuffed the gun down the back of my jeans, the way I’d seen Emily do it. Thus ended my entire knowledge of firearms. “Honey, are you hearing me?”
She jerked back to life.
“Yes,” she said. She was lost in a combination of fear and dopiness that was hard to know how to deal with. “But I’ll move over slowly, okay? I really ache. All over.” She sounded about eight years old.
“Sure, honey. Of course. I’ll be back soon. I’m going to shut this door now. Lock up after me, okay?”
She nodded. I shut the door. She locked it. We gave each other a thumbs-up.
I trotted across the lot, glancing back when I got to the entrance to the building. Steph was laboriously hoisting herself into the other seat. I felt a twist of love for her that was so deep and sharp it hurt, and I wondered if I shouldn’t leave Karren to sink or swim. She was just background, after all. Part of the filler God provides so you’re not so aware of the joins and silences. But I thought back to the younger man I’d been—or hoped I’d been— and knew I couldn’t leave without at least checking whether she was okay.
At the entrance to the building I realized there was another method of finding which was her apartment. I didn’t know the number—but I could work it out. I changed course and went around the side of the block instead. When I got there I walked quickly backward into the grassy area, looking up at the windows.
I’d seen pictures of this structure recently, of course. The earliest photos in the sequence planted on my laptop had been designed to establish the environment, to make it look like the work of a voyeur homing in on his prey. The rear face sloped back, floor by floor. The window shown in the pictures had been on the extreme right middle floor. Now that it was in front of me, I recalled Karren extolling the virtues of a corner balcony, of having bought that apartment off-plan.
And there it was. There was a light on, but it was dim. I watched the windows as I tried calling her number again. She still wasn’t picking up.
I ran back around to the front of the building. I didn’t know what else to do but start pressing buttons on the entry phone. The first one with a 2 at the front was 201. A man’s voice answered, and was quick to tell me he wasn’t Karren. So then I tried the last number that started with a 2—204, which I hoped would be at the other end of the floor, thus at the other corner.
It rang, but nobody answered.
So maybe that was hers. But now what? I glanced back at my car and saw Steph in the driver’s seat. Her head was bent forward, and I thought once more—
Would that do?
Could I just leave it at that and live with myself?
I was on the verge of deciding I could when a pair of car headlamps swept into the lot from the main road. I
