the mirror again as we turn sharply through a switchback, but the lights are gone.
Henderson asks me if I had a good visit… and, all at once, I know where I have heard his velvety voice before. I could kick myself for not realizing the truth earlier. Mr. Henderson spoke to me on the telephone at two- fifty-one in the morning, sitting up after my beating, as he assured me with quiet confidence that my family and I would not be bothered again. Because his job is protecting Uncle Jack, he most likely called me from Aspen. But Elm Harbor is only a plane ride away, and the tools needed to cut off two men’s fingers are surely available at any hardware store.
CHAPTER 45
Through the living-room window of John and Janice Brown’s small time-share, I watch the Range Rover glide deftly out of the parking lot. I walk around the place, turning on plenty of lights, and remembering the last time I was here, all those years ago, when my marriage was reasonably happy. I wonder whether there is any hope it can be happy again; if, for example, the man who telephoned that drizzly morning to call my wife baby is going to ruin our lives, or whether he is simply going to disappear, as, in the past, Kimmer’s men have always done.
Or whether, this time, she will make me disappear instead.
The condo is two floors, the first a narrow living-dining room with attached kitchen, the second two bedrooms, each with its own bath. I rummage in the refrigerator and find nothing but bottled water, and I decide that whoever left it will not mind if I treat myself to some. I have not eaten, and there is no food, so I check the telephone book and call a pizza delivery service and discover, on this exciting Aspen winter night, that the wait is ninety minutes or more.
I tell them ninety minutes will be just fine.
I return to the front window, wondering, as I did on the drive down the mountain, whether the breath I sensed on the back of my neck was imagination or a shadow, somebody tailing me. On Red Mountain, with only a couple of roads, it is not easy to tell. Another car can follow you all the way up or all the way down, and there is no real way to sort the sinister driver who means you ill from the resident of the place who is simply heading in the same direction that you are.
I console myself that Henderson seemed unworried.
I prod the lacy curtain to one side and peer out into the lot. A few drunken revelers stumble about, an occasional car swishes in or out, but I have no idea whether I am being watched-or, if I am, who is doing the watching. A defiant, tangled part of my imagination hopes that Maxine will stride boldly up to the door, but the more rational part of my mind proposes it is far more likely to be an agent of the FBI, even a fake one, like Foreman, who is, as Maxine reminded me on the Vineyard, very much alive.
As there is no way to tell, I determine not to worry.
Instead, I return to the kitchen and call home to tell Kimmer I am safe.
I reach only the answering machine.
There could be a thousand reasons for her absence, I warn myself. It is just past six here, so it is just past eight there, and my wife could be out shopping, Bentley of course with her. Naturally. Shopping, running some other errand: it has never been in Kimmer’s nature to share the details of her schedule with me.
So I plug in my laptop and play online chess for half an hour or so, then check my e-mail, but find, as usual, nothing of consequence. My office voice mail reveals that Visa, too, is now interested in when precisely the next payment will be received, and I wonder how long I will be able to balance all these trips on a budget stretched thin to keep us in a house we cannot really afford.
Seven o’clock, nine in the East. I unplug the laptop and call home again, and once more am treated to the answering machine. Odd, because it is Bentley’s bedtime. Maybe he is in the bath, I tell myself, and Kimmer cannot hear the phone ring or does not want to leave him. Except that she always takes the portable into the bathroom.
The errand ran late, I decide.
When, half an hour later, there is still no answer, I can no longer hold back the more ominous musings that have been clamoring for attention.
For example, the fact that Colin Scott may be dead but Foreman is still alive.
My family is in no danger, Uncle Jack just assured me again, and I believe that he believes it, but I am not supposed to be in any danger either, and somebody assaulted me in the middle of the campus. True, somebody who sounded just like Henderson called later to apologize, but he called later.
Eight o’clock, ten in the East. I try Kimmer’s cell phone. I try her office. Then I try my home number again. When there is still no answer, I do something I almost never do, which is to call Dear Dana Worth at her house, two blocks from mine on Hobby Road. I suppose I do not call because Alison makes me uneasy, or maybe I am the one who makes her uneasy. Either way, we do not get along. So it is Alison, of course, who answers the phone.
When I apologize for calling so late, Alison trots out the tired old joke, that she had to get up anyway because the phone was ringing. Her tone tells me that she is half serious, that she is annoyed that I called, so perhaps it is an awkward moment, a proposition on which I would as soon not speculate.
When I ask for Dana, Alison asks why.
“Because I need to talk to her.”
“About what?”
“It’s… it’s private.”
A brief, furious silence over the line. “Well, she’s not here right now.”
“Do you expect her soon?”
“I have no idea,” Alison grumbles, and the anger in her tone tells me that the two of them have been fighting again, as they often do.
I can hardly ask Alison, who has no reason to like me, to do what I had planned to ask of Dana-to go by the house and see if Kimmer and Bentley are home and safe-so I make my excuses and hang up.
Another call home. Still the answering machine.
I cross to the living-room window again. There is little furniture in the place: a glass-topped dinette with six imitation leather chairs, an ugly green sofa and matching loveseat, two beanbag chairs on which, in a pinch, someone could sleep. The sofa, I suppose, also folds out into a bed. I push the curtain aside once more. Dark in Aspen. Dark on Hobby Road. More worried than ever, I return to the kitchen and try Don and Nina Felsenfeld, next door.
No answer. No machine. I remember that they have gone to visit a daughter down in North Carolina for a few days. And it is ticking fast toward ten-thirty back East.
I am beginning to tremble.
Who else can I call in the neighborhood? Peter Van Dyke, who lives right across the street, scarcely knows I am alive. Tish Kirschbaum, my next-nearest neighbor from the law school, has a house right around the corner, but we are not close. Theo Mountain, who resides one street over, is surely asleep. Within a couple of blocks are Ethan Brinkley and Arnie Rosen and a few other colleagues, but on all of Hobby Hill, there is nobody, with the exception of Dear Dana, fellow outcast, I can imagine waking to help me scare away the bogeyman. If there is a bogeyman.
Nothing is wrong, I keep telling myself. Everything is fine. Kimmer is asleep, I try. But the answering machine is right next to the bed. So she fell asleep downstairs, maybe in the family room, watching television and drinking wine. Except that Kimmer never drinks herself to sleep: it was the Judge who used to do that. She is at the office, then, finishing some urgent project, Bentley sleeping on the floor as she works, but the notion is insane, and, besides, I tried there already. So she is stuck in a traffic jam. Dead in a traffic accident. Maybe I should try the university hospital? She is out in the yard, being tortured by Foreman.
