were being held overnight. A coin dealer named Billy Lebatard, distantly related by marriage to Claire’s dead husband, Had conceived the robbery, hoping the money from it would win him Claire. It wouldn’t, but she’d let him believe it might; this was shortly after Ed had been killed in the plane crash, and shortly after she’d learned just how little he had left her to go on with.
It had still been a game, then. Everything in her life up to that point had been a game, one way or another. The teasing boy-girl game that had seemed glamorous and fun in her teens, the exciting-life game in being the woman of an exciting man—Andy, the stock-car racer; Ed; the others in between—and after the death of Ed, a new game, charming con-woman, with Billy Lebatard as her first fun victim.
And in the middle of it all, in the middle of the robbery that she had instigated, suddenly the game had stopped and humorless deadly people who weren’t playing at anything had taken over, and Lempke had come through the hole in the wall with blood all over his face.
Parker could have left her there, then. She had screamed, and then she had become helpless, unable to think or to move or to do anything to save herself. He had gotten her out, she still didn’t know how, and when she had gotten control of her mind again, she’d felt nothing but terror and guilt. Lempke was dead. Billy Lebatard was dead. The game had crashed, and she had no idea what to do next, where to go, how to breathe. She’d said to Parker, “Will you take me with you?” and he’d said, “For how long?” and she’d known enough to say, “Until one of us gets bored, I suppose.” Later she’d said to him, “I know sometimes you’ll have to go away and do these things, but those times you can’t talk about. Not tell me anything, not before, not after.” He’d said, “That’s how I’d be. Whether you wanted it or not.”
Four years now. Living in hotels, mostly, Parker away occasionally, with her most of the time. But even when he was with her, he was in some manner away from her; he was the most locked-in man she’d ever met. And even when he was away, he was in some manner with her, because his existence was letting her go on playing the exciting-life game after all, with added safety rules. It was exciting to eat in a restaurant with him and know she was the only one aware of who and what he was, and by some strange extension it became exciting to eat in a restaurant alone and know none of the people around her could guess what kind of man she was waiting for.
But even with the added safety rules, there had been an undercurrent of nervousness in her life that had refused to go away. She’d expected it to go with time, the occasional dreams about Lempke’s face, the hollow feeling of darkness in the middle of sunny days, but it had neither lessened nor increased in the four years, remaining an ever-present knot of tension in the back of her mind.
She hadn’t told Parker about it, partly because she wasn’t sure what his reaction would be and partly because in putting the nervousness and fear into words she was afraid she would make them stronger. But she’d tried to find something to ease the pressure, and when the thought of a house had come to her, a base of operations, a solid real dependable home which would be hers, she had known at once it was the answer.
There had been a secret pleasure in the conversations with real estate agents, listening to their talk of taxes and schools, knowing they would never guess the real priorities inside her head. Living her true life below the placid surface of an assumed life; that was her joy.
And now she had it. The house, the nest, forming the frame of her existence, and outside it the man who gave that existence its texture. Every task, no matter how ordinary, became charged with another level of meaning when she was doing it while waiting for Parker.
Waiting for Parker. The thought of that made her remember the other thing he’d told her she was waiting for; whoever had wanted to know where Parker could be found would probably be coming here. If Parker didn’t get to them first.
He would, wouldn’t he? She frowned, looking out at the lake, considering the possibilities for the first time. There was a wind across the lake, the water was choppy; it looked cold.
Would some stranger be coming here? She hadn’t wanted to think about that, not with Parker telling her to leave her house and go back to a hotel, but now that he was gone and the pressure on her to leave had gone with him, it was possible to think, to consider the likelihood that someone from Parker’s unknowable and menacing world might be coming here for reasons she knew nothing about.
The afternoon was edging by, the quality of the light was changing on the lake. She felt she should make some movement, some preparation, do something to guard herself and her house from intruders.
The last mouthful of tea in the cup was cold. She made a face, got to her feet, carried the empty cup to the kitchen. There was still more in the pot, but it was only lukewarm. She didn’t want it, anyway. She put on a jacket, walked around the house locking windows and doors, and then went out to the garage and opened the doors and backed the blue Buick out. And then discovered there was no way to lock the garage doors. There was a hasp lock but no padlock to secure it. Irritated, blaming the real estate man in some obscure fashion, she got into the Buick and drove away.
There was a town three miles away, but it was very 102 small, too small for what she wanted. The nearest town of any size was twelve miles farther on.
Her first stop was a hardware store, where she bought two padlocks, one for each set of garage doors. She also looked in their phone book, and found a nearby sporting-goods store.
At first she wasn’t sure she’d come to the right place. Fishing equipment was everywhere, from racks of rods to nets hanging on the walls to display cases full of lures to creels hanging from the ceiling. The short round man who came swimming through all this toward her looked like the fish it was all designed for, with his round bald head and light-reflecting glasses. “Yes, miss.” He had a habit of rubbing his hands together, which gave the impression he planned to cheat somehow.
She said, “My husband wants me to go hunting with him, so I have to have my own rifle. You do sell rifles?”
“Certainly, certainly. This way, please.”
A doorway in the back of the store, hemmed in with fishing net, led to an entirely different world. Rifles and pistols were everywhere, intermixed with red or red-and-black hunter’s clothing. There were large pictures of animals on the walls: elk, deer, moose.
“Mr. Amberville? Mr. Amberville, this young lady would like to buy a rifle. Mr. Amberville will take care of you, miss.”
The fish-man went back to his own department, and Mr. Amberville came smiling over. A younger man, very thin, he had the bony features of an Austrian ski instructor. He seemed pleasant, but remote; he said, “A rifle? A present?”
“No, for myself. My husband wants me to go hunt-103 ing with him, so I have to have a rifle of my own.”
