“And I’ll show you the house.” She stepped away from him, but kept one of his hands. “What do you think of it, so far?”
He didn’t think about houses, they had as much to do with his life as apple trees. But she needed an answer, so he said, “It looks fine. The outside.”
“There’s all sorts of advantages for us,” she said. “Come on in, I’ll tell you about it.”
Parker had to take his hand back to carry one of the suitcases. She went on ahead to open the door, and he carried the two bags. At the entrance, he nodded to the right and said, “Neighbors are close.” Spring foliage was skimpy on the trees, and a white clapboard house could be seen less than fifty feet away on that side.
“That’s one of the nice things,” she said. “Come on in, I’ll tell you everything.” Holding the door, she said, “You hungry?”
“Later. After I shower.”
It was a large country kitchen he’d entered, with old electrical appliances around the walls, an old porcelain double sink under the windows facing the neighbor’s house, and a red-and-yellow-patterned linoleum on the floor so old the lines of the floorboards underneath could be seen clearly through it. The formica-and-chrome kitchen set in the middle of the room was twenty years newer than everything else, but still thirty years old.
Claire shut the door. “We don’t have any neighbors. Both sides, empty almost all year. Come here, let me show you.”
Parker had put the suitcases down against the wall. Now he followed Claire through a wide doorway at the far left corner of the kitchen and into a large living room. Where the two garages took the front left quarter of the house and the kitchen most of the front right quarter, this living room filled the left rear quarter, behind the garages. In the middle of the wall it shared with the garage space was a stone fireplace. Directly opposite the fireplace was a door, with several small-paned windows stretching away on both sides. Through these windows, and the glass in the door, the lake could be seen, and a small structure of some kind down by the water’s edge.
Claire led the way diagonally across the living room—it was furnished in maple tables and mohair chairs, all old and battered and lodge-looking—and through the door to a screened porch overlooking the lake. The air was cooler on this side of the house. She said, “It’s a lake. Most of the houses are just for the summer. The real estate woman told me there’s only fifteen-percent occupancy around the lake year round, and most of that is across there on the other side, because this side gets the wind in the wintertime. So we can live here all year without any neighbors, and then go somewhere else in the summer. That’s normal, too, a lot of people rent their houses in the summer. We can do the same.”
She was proud of herself, and it sounded in her voice. Parker knew she’d done her house searching with his specific needs at the top of her list, and she’d found a place that was perfect, and she was pleased with herself. He said, “It must have been hard to find a place like this.”
She smiled. “It took a while. But you can relax here, you don’t have to be on guard.”
There was no answer to that. He was on guard everywhere, it was natural to him. He said, “What’s that building down by the water?”
“A boathouse. There’s no boat, though. Want to see it?”
There was a slate walk from the porch steps across to the boathouse. Stumps showed where trees had been sawed away to give a clearer view of the lake from the house, but there were still several trees standing, and underbrush between. Boulders lined the water’s edge, with ropy shrubs growing out over some of them, and a wooden dock ran out over the water along the side of the boathouse.
There were spider webs across the closed boathouse door. Claire brushed them away, saying, “They build these new every day. I wish they’d get discouraged.” She opened the door, pushing it inward, and stepped inside, saying, “The floor’s very narrow here.”
The boathouse was about twelve feet wide and twenty-five feet long, with a concrete floor about eighteen inches wide along three sides. A vertical garage door closed the wide opening in the fourth wall; through its grimy windows the far shore of the lake could be seen. Water lapped at the concrete inside the boathouse about two feet below floor-level.
Claire said, “We can get a boat, if you want.”
Parker never liked to be in a place with only one exit, boat or boathouse included. He said, “Maybe later on. Let me get used to a house first.”
Her smile was a bit crooked. “That will be different, won’t it?”
They went back to the house. Parker had met Claire three years before, in Indianapolis. She was an airline pilot’s widow, and an in-law of her dead husband, a coin dealer named Billy Lebatard, had involved her in a coin convention robbery. Lebatard was an amateur with a rich fantasy life, and at the end the job went very sour, Lebatard was killed, there was bloodshed everywhere, and Parker had dragged Claire out of the way at the last minute. They’d been together since then, but her one experience of his profession had been enough, particularly after the husband she’d lost in an airplane. Now she wanted to know none of the details of the ventures he went on, not even where he was going or how long he expected to be gone. When he was around they lived together—in resort hotels, mostly, up till now—and when he was gone she waited for him.
In the living room again, she said, “I’ve been expecting you to show up at night, so I’ve been making a fire after dinner. I wanted to have a fire going when you came in.”
“We’ll make one a little later.”
“It doesn’t matter what time of day you get here,” she said.
They went back to the kitchen and he put one of the suitcases up on the kitchen table. She sat in one of the chrome tube chairs and watched. The suitcase was closed with two belts and three snaps; Parker opened the belts, used a key to unlock and open the snaps, and then lifted the lid. He took out the two sweaters on top, dropped them on a chair, and the suitcase was full of bills.
Claire grinned at the money. “I must say it looks good.”
“There’s twelve thousand. I took away seventeen, but I stashed five.” He had several caches around the country, for emergencies. Back when the Charles Willis name had been blown, back from before he’d met Claire, all
