Grofield grinned, shaking his head. 'The smaller the community, the tougher it is to have any privacy. It was Dan Leach, the fellow that won the money when I was in Las Vegas. I told you about that, remember?'
'Did he have a job for you?' She looked eager; she knew their financial condition.
'Not exactly.' He told her about the afternoon and Myers, and the three old prisoners with their tunnel and their hundred thousand dollars.
'It doesn't seem right to take their money,' Mary said. 'I'm glad you said no.'
'I know what you mean, but that wasn't why I said no.'
She went on, following her own line of thought, saying, 'What you do is best. Taking from banks and armored cars and places like that. That's not really
Grofield grinned at her. 'You'll make a great defense witness.'
She made a face. 'Don't joke about that.'
After dinner they did the dishes together, and then Grofield turned on the radio. It was tuned permanently to a background music station that played lots of Mantovani and nothing recorded later than 1955, and it was hooked in to the theater's speaker system. With the volume fairly low, the theater was filled with lush music, which seemed to drift gently down from the raftered cathedral-type ceiling like spring rain.
They sat together on the sofa, facing the empty seats out there in the darkness, and talked, mostly about the plays they might do this coming season. Later on, they made love on the sofa, and fell asleep there, wrapped around each other.
5
He heard a sound.
Grofield opened his eyes, seeing nothing but Mary's rumpled black hair, and for a second or two he couldn't figure out where he was – face down, entangled, warm all over except for his backside.
He lifted his head, and Mary made a small grumbling noise in her throat and moved her head slightly from left to right. He looked down at her sleeping face, listening. He looked up, looked around the dim-lit stage, the dark body of the theater.
There was someone there. He couldn't see anybody, he couldn't really even hear anything, he didn't know precisely where the someone was, but he knew he and Mary were no longer alone.
A small shiver started in the base of his spine, where his bare skin was cold anyway, and ran lightly up his backbone like mercury through a thermometer. He and Mary were in the light, however dim, both of them half naked. The intruder was in darkness.
Mary was frowning in her sleep. She moved her head again, disturbed by the tension in Grofield's body. Resting his weight on his right elbow, jammed down between her shoulder and the sofa back, he slowly moved up his left hand and cupped it over her mouth.
Her eyes opened, startled. He felt her mouth strain against his palm, wanting to yell. He stared tensely down at her, and slowly shook his head back and forth. The fright faded from her eyes, and she nodded. He released her mouth leaned on both elbows, and lowered his head beside hers to whisper in her ear, 'There's someone in the theater. Out in the seats someplace.'
She whispered, 'What are you going to do?'
'I'm heading for the lightboard. You stay here. Don't move unless I yell at you to.'
'All right. Do you think it's that man Myers?'
That hadn't occurred to Grofield. He'd thought of it as a peeping tom, maybe some local high school boy. But if Dan had taken Grofield's advice and released Myers, and if he'd done it too close to here, it was just possible that Myers would show up. Myers was very unprofessional, which meant unpredictable, there was no telling what his response might be to anything.
'Let's hope it isn't,' Grofield said. 'I'm going now.'
'All right.'
Grofield tensed himself, bringing his knees up slightly underneath him to get more leverage, then abruptly pushed himself upward with hands and knees and rolled violently to the right, over the top of the sofa and onto the dusty thin carpet behind it. He landed heavily on his left side, having turned almost completely around, rolled onto his stomach, got his feet under him, and made a fast weaving dash, bent double, to the wings and the light-board, where he simultaneously pushed the stage lighting master lever all the way down and the house lights lever all the way up.
It was a quick step to the left to look out past the edge of the opened curtain at the house. The stage seemed just as bright as ever, with spill from the house lights, and poor Mary was lying there on the sofa unmoving, in the traditional pose of the naked woman trying to cover herself.
And there was no one to be seen in the house. The seats stretched back, level after level, absolutely empty. The four entrance doors at the rear were all closed.
Had he been wrong? But he had a sense for that kind of thing, he'd come by it naturally and he'd trained it in the service of his other profession. He'd heard some sort of sound, something small but real, which had awakened him and told him there was another presence somewhere nearby. Not a cat, not a squirrel, both of which made occasional visits. Something human.
There was a tool kit up on top of the lightboard. Grofield reached into it, came out with a ballpeen hammer, and turned it so the ball was the business end. He felt stupid, dressed in nothing but a polo shirt, but his trousers and shoes and everything else were over on the floor in front of the sofa. There was neither time nor opportunity to dress.
Grofield ducked out from behind the curtain, made the edge of the stage in two running steps, and jumped down. He trotted up the center aisle, going up a level at every second step, and scanned to left and right as
