Hobart crept forward until he reached the corner where the other car had turned. He stopped at the stop sign and saw the car going into a driveway beside a house. He waited for fifteen minutes, drove around the block to go past the driveway where the car had gone, and noted the house number. The garage door was closed now. There was a dim light visible on the second floor of the house, but then it went out.
Jerry Hobart made the left turn at the corner, switched on his lights, and drove back out to Vanowen. He was tired, ready to go to his hotel and get into bed, but this had been a good night for him. Emily Kramer must have found the evidence her husband had hidden. Torching her own house and office could only be an attempt to make Hobart believe that the evidence was destroyed. He knew that she was spending time with a man, but he knew exactly where they were living. He could take her anytime he wanted to.
26
Ted Forrest reached Route 3 3 and passed west of Mendota just as the night was showing signs of giving way to the dim gray light before the sunrise. As he drove through the Central Valley, now and then his car would dip into a low, shallow pocket of fog. It was what the old people used to call the bean fog. In the days before heavy, efficient irrigation, the fog was a big source of free water for the vegetable crops.
He knew this highway so well that he descended into the basins of fog without slowing. He believed he would detect any obstacle blocking his lane in plenty of time, and if he couldn’t, he could veer off the road and let the car exhaust its momentum in the level rows of artichokes and radishes he had been passing for the last couple of miles.
When he reached a rise and recognized the long flat road ahead, he took his cell phone out of the glove compartment and turned it on. As it awoke, he heard the familiar musical tone, and then almost instantly, the one that said he had a message. He glanced at the screen: thirteen messages, twenty-one missed calls.
Forrest had already felt tired and anxious from his night’s work, and listening to the messages seemed like an insurmountable task. He decided not to listen to them. He would be home in a little while anyway. Then he changed his mind. He had to know if Kylie had called, and it wasn’t safe to leave her calls in his voice mail. He dialed the message number and the code, then listened.
“Ted.” It was Caroline’s voice, not Kylie’s. “I think you should come home right now. You know that we need to talk, and putting it off isn’t helping.”
He pressed the three key to erase it, and left his finger on the key while he listened to the next message. “It’s now seven o’clock. I’m going out for dinner with some friends. I assume that you heard my earlier message and decided to ignore it. Or maybe you left your phone off all day, which amounts to the same thing. I won’t be home before ten, but you can call my cell number.”
He listened to the next call. At first there was near silence, but he could hear a woman breathing, and sounds that could be traffic. Then she said, “Sorry I missed your call during business hours, Mr. Forrest.” It was Kylie. “I was still at violin practice and then I went to work, and didn’t get a chance to check messages. I’ll be available and waiting for your call from now until tomorrow.” She didn’t seem to know how to end her message. “This is Kylie Miller. My number is-” He hit the three and erased it.
Next there were eight more calls from Caroline, each one just a second or two. “Call me,” or “It’s Caroline,” “Me again,” and once, “Shit!” Her final call was at three in the morning-he looked at his watch-about fortyfive minutes ago. That was good. She had probably given up and gone to sleep. He could go in, take another of the spare bedrooms, and get some sleep, too.
He remembered that when he had left he had resolved to check Kylie’s voice mail to be sure she had erased his call from yesterday. He took his eyes off the road long enough to dial her mailbox number, then her phone number. On the first call, a young girl’s voice said, “Hey, Kyl. This is Tina. Get back to me on the party tonight.” The time on the call was six fifteen. Why had Kylie’s phone not been on at six fifteen? Oh, yes. He remembered. Violin lesson. His own message had been left in the morning, so if she had neglected to erase it, he would already have heard it.
He still didn’t hang up.
The next message was the same voice: “Kylie? Do you still want a ride tonight? Call me.” Ted Forrest felt his breathing become shallow, and noticed a hollow feeling in his stomach. He told himself it was all right. He had called her early and left his message that he would be gone. She had erased it, tried to call him back, and then decided to go to a party with her girlfriend Tina. He had heard of Tina, he thought. Kylie talked constantly, but it was like a cat purring, just a steady sound that come out because she was comfortable and contented. He had not listened to her anecdotes closely enough to know all the names with confidence.
He knew that he should be delighted. It wasn’t good for a young girl to be isolated from friends her own age. It might even make her feel restless and tired of him, her young mind reacting to get what it needed, the way a growing body did when it was missing some nutrient. Going to a party was good in a dozen ways. Kylie was gregarious and had lots of friends. If a few of them started to notice that she was hardly ever available in the evening, they might begin to talk. That was probably the danger he had to worry about most because it was out of his control. If they talked, the gossip would eventually reach one of her friends’ mothers.
But he couldn’t keep from feeling a blind, galloping sort of jealousy. He knew that there was no realistic hope of keeping Kylie away from boys her age, and absolutely no chance that any of them wouldn’t be interested in her.
He kept listening. “Kylie, this is Mark. I was wondering if you were doing anything on Friday. My number is-” Forrest erased the call.
Forrest erased two more calls from boys, and one from a girl who sounded too giggly to be a safe, sensible companion, and who invited Kylie to “hang out” because Hunter and Shane were going to be there.
When he had heard all of the messages he put his phone in his pocket and began to feel a manic energy. He knew it was only the shallow, nervous agitation that came from too many hours at the wheel. He had driven all the way to Los Angeles, spent a night awake there, and driven all the way back, all in changing states of worry or fear or excitement.
But he had done it. He had managed to burn both the Kramer house and the office in one night. He had destroyed the evidence that Phil Kramer had wanted to use to blackmail him, and probably any secret copies that Kramer had never intended to hand over. If Philip Kramer had been devious enough to hide the evidence in a third place, then Kramer had defeated himself. If it hadn’t turned up by now, then he had not left word where it was hidden. It would stay hidden forever.
This was a masterstroke, the sort of big thinking and bold, decisive action that won wars. The realization that he actually had accomplished the coup and made it home without discovery began to make him giddy. He was free, he was safe, he was invulnerable. He still had Jerry Hobart out preparing to kill Emily Kramer, and that was good, but now that he had burned the evidence, it wasn’t essential. As soon as he paid Hobart, he would forget all of this unpleasantness.
As he drove along the ever-more-familiar stretch of highway toward his house, he knew he was going to beat the sun by a long mar gin. As soon as it was light enough to work, there were always workers in the fields who might see a car out at dawn and maybe remember it. But by then Forrest would be asleep. In a few more minutes, Forrest saw his home ahead, standing on its rise at the end of its long drive.
The gate was closed. He reached for the remote control in the door’s well, pressed the first button, and watched the gate slide aside to admit him, then pressed the button again to close it behind him. It felt good to be inside that iron gate again.
Forrest kept his car slow all the way up the long driveway and around the big house to the old carriage-house garage. He felt a moment of suspense as he reached for the remote control again to open the garage door. What if the garage was empty except for the pickup truck and the riding lawn mower the gardeners used? What if Caroline had gotten into her Jaguar and simply driven off toward whatever vision of a future her self-absorbed mind had been constructing since he had left? The fact that his thought had come from nowhere seemed to give it divine provenance and make it prophetic. The current of the universe had been running his way for the past twentyfour hours. Would there be a last gift?
He pressed the second button.
As soon as the door began to rise, he recognized the tires of the Jaguar in its parking space, then the
