There’d been a lot of traffic coming the other way, eastbound, weekenders on their way back to the city, and a car was waiting to come out at the second turnoff. Parker steered around it, and met two others coming out while he drove in. He would have preferred a week night, when there’d be a lot less activity around the lake.
He picked a likely-looking house on the lake side of the road, one that showed no lights or any sign of recent activity, but which didn’t have its windows boarded up for the winter. He left the Pontiac in the driveway, looked through one of the windows in the garage door, and saw a fairly large outboard motorboat in there, on a wheeled carrier. So the owner hadn’t started coming up yet this year at all, or the boat would be in the water and room would have been left in the garage for their car.
Parker walked around the side of the house and down the slope of weedy lawn at the back to the water’s edge, and looked out across the lake. There were maybe fifteen houses showing light over there; one of them would be Claire’s. He was too far away now to make out anything but light and darkness.
The house here was built on land that sloped pretty steeply down toward the water, so that what was the first floor on the road side was a good eight feet above the ground back here, held up by a series of metal posts. Part of the underneath section had been closed off to form a sort of workshop, and the rest was left open and used for storage of various things: a lawnmower, jerry cans, an oildrum-and-wood-platform float, and two aluminum rowboats.
Parker wrestled one of the rowboats out of the storage space, turned it right side up, and dragged it down to the water’s edge. Then he went back and found several wooden oars, their green paint flaking off, leaning against the rear of the storage space. He brought them down to the rowboat, fit them into the oarlocks, and pushed the boat into the water.
It was a cloudy night, with occasional spaces of starry sky but no moon. Parker set off in the rowboat, and twenty feet from shore he could no longer clearly make out the house he’d started from.
It was a cool evening, but the rowing was warm work. The boat moved well enough so long as he kept at the oars, but it never built up any momentum; the instant he would stop to rest, the boat would sag to a halt in the water.
Out in the middle, he stopped for a minute to study the far shore, trying to figure out which house was Claire’s. But it still wasn’t possible, the lights were anonymous, not giving a clear enough indication of the shape of any of the buildings, and he was still much too far away to make out the rooms inside any of those lit windows.
He saw that his tendency while rowing was to veer slightly to the left, probably because his right arm was the stronger. When he started again now, he picked one of the lights back on the shore he’d left, and tried to keep that light on a direct line with the rear of the rowboat. When he looked over his shoulder at the shore he was approaching, it seemed to be working; so far as he could tell he was now traveling in a straight line.
Glimpses of the main road could be seen far away to the left, beyond the end of the lake; a steady stream of headlights made a broken white line marking the route. Parker knew approximately how far in from that road (Zaire’s house stood, and there were four or five houses Knowing light in the right area. He was aiming for the one furthest to the left, and when he got close enough to make out details he would turn and parallel the shore until he got to the right house.
The first one wasn’t it. It had no boathouse, and the porch was a different shape.
Sound travels across the water. There were two young boys fishing off a wooden dock at the second house, and though he was well out from shore he could hear every word they said to one another. They were arguing, quietly and dispassionately, about which one of them had lost a missing lure. Parker rowed past, out beyond the reach of the lightspill from the house behind the boys, and at one point the right oarlock made a metallic creaking sound, not very loud. At once the boys stopped talking, and he could see their silhouettes as they gazed out in this direction. He kept rowing, now making no sound other than the dip of oar blades in and out of the water.
One of the boys said, “There’s somebody out there in a rowboat.”
“He’ll hear you.”
“That’s all right. Maybe he’s got that Big Red, since you don’t have it.” And they went back to their reasonable bickering about the lure.
There were five dark houses before the next lit one. Out in the middle of the lake there’d been a little breeze- chop making wavelets that had slowed the boat some, but in closer to shore the water was almost completely flat, with only a slight ripple from the breeze, and the boat cut through it faster and more smoothly.
He recognized the boathouse first, even though this was the only time he’d seen it from this direction. But he knew it was the right house before he could see it clearly, and he rowed more cautiously, shipping the oars at last and letting the boat drift the short distance in to the boathouse.
The living room was lit, the bedroom was dark. He could see no one through the living-room windows. Lightspill on the side of the house told him the kitchen lights were on.
He took out the automatic from under his arm and held it in his right hand while with his left he maneuvered the boat around the front of the boathouse and along the wooden dock on the side. The shore was finished with a concrete patio, so he kept the boat from drifting all the way in; he didn’t want the clatter of aluminum on concrete.
The boat had its own frayed rope, one end tied to a ring at the prow. There were several rings set at intervals along the outer edge of the dock, and Parker put the automatic down on the dock while he made the boat fast. Then he picked up the gun again and stepped up cautiously onto the dock.
Was that movement on the porch? He stood on the dock, against the boathouse’s side wall, and watched and waited. Nothing happened, and then a figure—two figures —moved past the lit windows from left to right. The door between the living room and the porch opened and closed.
Parker waited. Nothing else happened. He had the vague impression of people moving in the living room, but the angle was wrong to make out what they were doing.
He moved out away from the boathouse wall and came cautiously in off the dock, moving at an angle that would take him eventually to the lightless bedroom. The tail skinny trees spaced around the lawn obscured his view of the house slightly without giving him any cover. He moved up through them, eyes scanning the house, automatic ready in his right hand.
The porch lights snapped on, and a second later the night erupted in rifle shots and screaming and the clatter of breaking glass. There was something on the porch in front of the bedroom door, Parker couldn’t see what; he crouched low and ran forward, now aiming more to the right, toward the living room.
