to stumble all over myself until the truth came out. In the morning, the hotel maids will open the room to clean, see she’s gone, and the manager will call the cops. They’ll find what we found. They’ll see the watch and say, ‘Aha! This isn’t Mrs. Bourgosian.’ They’ll figure out E.S.S. is Ellen Sue Snyder. They’ll find that somebody used the telephone book as a scratch pad, and they’ll call Zurich. In a day or so, they’ll admit they lost her. She slipped out of their cunning clutches. They’ll assure the nearest reporter that they’re turning Europe upside down to extradite her and bring her to justice.”
“You mean they’ll be lying?”
Stillman shrugged. “They may try to do it. If people start thinking they can escape a crime just by going to Europe, it’ll be impossible to get a seat on a trans-Atlantic flight. They’ll all be booked until doomsday by fleeing felons.”
“I take it what you’re saying is that Ellen didn’t go to Zurich.”
“Somebody using her name made a reservation from a hotel room in Chicago to take a flight out of New York. But I didn’t see any note about a reservation on a flight to New York. Did you?”
“Maybe she didn’t write it down. Besides, there must be a flight from O’Hare to Kennedy about twice an hour. She could show up and get one.”
“True. Is that the way you would do it?”
“Probably not,” admitted Walker. “Maybe she drove to New York.”
“She would have to drive about a hundred and twenty to get there in time.” He sighed. “Here’s the way it looks to me. You have this young woman who pulls a very odd little crime that requires lots of elaborate moves: washing her cut of the money, using fake names and IDs and so on. Then she’s in a hotel in Chicago. She’s alert enough to know that we haven’t lost her. She leaves without checking out of the hotel so anybody following her will think she’s still there. This is not hard for a woman to do, because the clerks and cashiers always assume she’s with some man who just paid, or will be along in a minute. Fine so far?”
“Fine,” said Walker.
“She leaves in such a hurry that she forgets her watch, which is exactly what a person in a hurry would miss first. When you’re trying to catch a plane, you look at your watch every minute or two. As it happens, this watch is not ordinary. It has her initials and a date engraved on it. The date is October second, which is Ellen Snyder’s birthday.”
“You know that for sure?”
“I haven’t had time to check, but it will be.”
“It is,” Walker admitted. “But it could have been the anniversary of something: maybe the day she got her braces taken off, or the day her grandmother swam the Hellespont.”
Stillman nodded. “Maybe. But look at it backwards. Suppose you wanted not only to be sure somebody knew you were in a particular place at a particular time, but to be sure that they didn’t make a mistake and think you were somebody else. How would you do it?”
“I’d leave a signed note.”
“How about renting a hotel room, which narrows the time down to twenty-four hours? Then leave something there that’s yours. A watch with initials and a birthday isn’t a bad choice. The only thing missing is her social security number. That watch is better than a birth certificate. A gold watch is too valuable to look like you left it on purpose, and this one looks like it has sentimental value. And, unlike a birth certificate, it doesn’t even have to be genuine to fool an expert. You could go into a jewelry store and buy a watch and have anything you want engraved on it.”
Walker said, “So you think it’s another trick. Ellen is trying to throw us all off and make us think she’s in Europe.”
“I think somebody is,” said Stillman. “The watch was left on purpose, and nobody who’s running uses a phone book as a scratch pad to write down her next flight.” He paused. “She wouldn’t have had to do any of that herself.”
He drove along the lake, then turned west, staring ahead at the dark road, then at the map he held on the steering wheel. Then he turned north onto a smaller road and set the map aside. From time to time he would slow markedly and look out the window at landmarks in the dim landscape: a construction site, a stand of trees that had at first looked like a woods but turned out to be only the narrow green windbreak beside a large condominium complex. He seemed to be evaluating places and rejecting them.
“What are you doing?” asked Walker.
“This is the road that was marked on the map they took with them.”
“I thought you said everything we found was faked.”
“I don’t think leaving an impression on the page beneath the map was something they did to mislead us,” said Stillman. “If it was, they would have left it in her room. Nobody was supposed to know the people in the next room had anything to do with Ellen Snyder. And it wouldn’t be contradictory. You don’t leave false trails leading in two different directions. You pick one and leave signs to it. I think they picked Zurich. So I’m trying to drive this route and look at the things I see from a different point of view.” He sighed. “Now I’ve got to ask you to be quiet for a while and let me think.”
Walker sat in silence while Stillman continued northward. Now and then he would slow the car down, look at a particular configuration of buildings or fields, then seem to reject it and speed up again.
After another fifteen minutes, he pulled the car onto the shoulder of the road beside a large field that had once been a farm but had no buildings left except a single bare-board barn with a caved-in roof. Through the empty front doorway, Walker could see stripes where the moonlight streamed in through gaps in the back wall.
Stillman flipped on his bright headlights and Walker could see the green reflective surface of a road sign at the edge of a narrow perpendicular line of pavement. It said LOCKSLEY RD. Stillman turned the lights off and cut the engine. Walker realized with growing uneasiness that this was the first place they had come to that was completely quiet and deserted, the first place where he could see no electric lights in any direction.
When Walker turned his head to look at Stillman, he could see the sober expression and the sad, watchful eyes. “I’m not asking you to do it,” Stillman said. “If you want to wait here, you can.”
Walker shook his head, not so much to deny the thought as to dispel the cold, prickly sensation that had settled on the back of his neck. “It doesn’t have to be. It could be nothing. Somebody else could have marked that map and ripped it out of the magazine two weeks ago.”
Stillman turned and stared out the window into the dark field. “It’ll go faster with the two of us.”
14
Stillman opened his suitcase and took out a small Maglite, then handed an identical one to Walker. “Save your batteries until we get out there.” They closed the trunk of the car and stepped to the edge of the field. Stillman said, “We’ve got maybe six hours before farmers and commuters start coming up that road in force. You start down on that end, and I’ll start up here. Walk the field in rows, as if you were plowing it.”
Walker asked, “What will it look like?”
“I think if they were here at all, it was probably sometime today. The weeds will have been trampled down, and they won’t have had time to stand back up.”
Walker made his way up into the edge of the field, thinking about Ellen Snyder. Whenever he approached a spot that looked like a gap in the weeds, his breathing became shallow and his arms began to feel weak. He was expecting to see the white face appear in an open-eyed stare between two clumps of alfalfa. But as he walked to the end of the field and came back beside his own tracks, his thoughts became calmer.
Two years ago, if she could have imagined this night, what would she have felt? The one searching for you should be some close relative, not an old boyfriend you had left, expecting never to see him again. There was something intrusive about this. He turned again and came up the next row.
As he walked, he began to believe that what he was doing was spending the night tromping around in an empty field, getting burrs and seeds stuck to a pair of pants that had cost about two days’ pay, and scuffing a pair of shoes that cost more. Stillman had paid for them, he thought. He can decide how they get wrecked. Walker glanced to his right to watch Stillman’s light sweeping back and forth ahead of him as he trudged on.
There was a quiet rhythm to the night sounds. Walker could hear unseen crickets chirping, the distant call of
