She even composed a note and typed it on a typewriter on display at an office equipment store. It said, “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Stewart, I’m afraid I’ve been called away urgently. My mother back in Florida has had a stroke, and I need to be there to care for her immediately. Thank you so much for your kindness. I’m enclosing next month’s rent to cover the inconvenience while you find a new tenant. Regretfully, Tamara Davis.” She had put the paper into the typewriter and taken it out with a tissue in her hand, then slid it into an envelope the same way so it would carry no prints.
With that, she decided she was ready. In the Old Time, a lone Seneca might have come to this very place to watch the lake. In the wars of the forests, all attacks were surprise attacks, and the best strategy was to become indistinguishable from the forest, to wait and listen and watch. Enemies needed to be studied until their strengths and vulnerabilities were known and the time was perfect. Relations with distant tribes of the west were fluid and shifting, so they were studied for signs of impending trouble.
Each night she sat at her window gazing at the familiar picture she could see through her night-vision scope. By now the bright green image had become flat like a painting—an unchanging arrangement of shapes that her mind simply verified each time she leaned to the eyepiece.
But the green painting had small living elements. Owls nested high in the canopy of leaves at the top of the stand of old maples across the lake to her left, where there were no houses. Every few nights she would see one glide out of the high place, suddenly swoop into the brush, and rise clutching a small shape that must have been a mouse, then flap its wings to return to the confusion of dark leaves. The ducks that swam on the surface of the lake in daylight were gone by the time she took her post each night, but she had studied the tapes to see them return to their nesting places in the reeds to the right of the owl trees. To the far right, near the road that ringed the lake, she had found squirrels. To amuse herself she had switched on the infrared scope to pick up their body heat as they slept in their ramshackle piles of dead leaves in the high overarching limbs of the sycamores.
The only human shapes that moved across the green painting regularly were two people she called Woman with Dog and the Sad Man. Woman with Dog seemed to work late five nights a week. Jane saw her car appear on the hill at around midnight and pull into the driveway of a big house up one of the side streets across the lake. The light would go on only in an upper window, so Jane was sure the woman lived in a converted upstairs apartment like hers. Then the woman would reappear in a sweat suit with a retriever on a leash, and go for a long walk in the park. The Sad Man usually appeared some time later. He seemed to come from a distance. He walked steadily, but not quickly. He slouched forward and looked down at the ground, as though he were wondering whether this was the night to burrow into it.
The other visitors were ephemeral. One night, after Jane had watched a middle-aged man selling crystal methamphetamine to a college-age boy, a man and a woman pulled to the curb near the spot where Jane’s directional microphone was trained. Jane’s spine straightened, she turned on her cameras, and recorded the sounds her microphone picked up. The scene began as she expected. The man was alert and watchful, looking around him for other people, then moved the car with its lights out so that it was precisely in the ideal parking spot, shielded by bushes, barely visible from any side but Jane’s.
Jane put on the earphones, and the man said, “This isn’t a good idea. I don’t want to do this. Please.” That didn’t sound right. The woman’s voice said, “What are you afraid of?” Then she suggested, “The police?” and the man said, “Well, that’s not unreasonable, is it?” Jane increased the magnification of the zoom lens of the video camera aimed at the car, turned up the volume of the microphone, and began to prepare. She had her suitcase closed, her keys and purse on the bed, and was on her way to the window with the big empty suitcase to begin collecting her electronic equipment, when the sounds began to change. She stopped and listened. They were having sex.
Jane had started to turn off her electronic equipment, then stopped. It wasn’t out of the question for one of them to be a face-changer and have that kind of relationship with a runner. This wasn’t the time for it, but since it wasn’t beyond the realm of human behavior, she couldn’t dismiss these two people just yet. She waited, keys in hand.
Finally, the man said, “Next Friday?” and the woman answered, “I’m sorry, but it’s my anniversary, and it’s very important to me. How about Saturday?”
Jane thought about that a few times afterward, but never was confident that she understood. Each of the false alarms during those few weeks made her faster and more efficient, but each one made her more impatient. She seemed to have done to herself what she had done to Carey. She had left him in a kind of paralysis, where he could do nothing but stay where he was and allow every tiny movement he made to be watched. Now she was trapped too, sitting in a room watching a static landscape, waiting to detect some minuscule change.
One night another man and woman arrived and stopped in the same parking place. They behaved so much like the other couple that she was almost sure it was just more sex. The woman said, “Are you sure no one will see?” and the man was the one who said, “Don’t worry.” But then he said, “Just walk straight ahead along that ridge. Then go up to the big brown house, stand on the porch, and knock. By the time you get there they’ll be waiting.”
24
Jane watched the woman walk along the dark path toward Sid Freeman’s house. She was about twenty-five years old with a good figure and a face that might be pretty under white light. But in the dim green glow through the eyepiece of the nightscope, the skin looked ghostly and the hollows of the eyes were deep gashes of darkness. Her hair seemed to be dark, cut above the shoulder, then curled and puffed to stand out a little. She wore a dark sweater and a pair of jeans, but Jane did not consider drawing any conclusion about her from the way she dressed tonight.
She carried a big shoulder bag, and Jane watched the way she handled it. At first it hung on her left shoulder with her hand resting on it. Jane watched her head moving in little jerks from side to side, looking for human shapes and listening for footsteps, and wondered if the woman was carrying a gun in the purse. Then the woman stopped, frozen for a moment, and listened. After a few seconds, she recognized that the sound she had heard was a car going by on the street, and she went on, looking anxious. She slipped the strap over her head and across her chest and clutched the bag with her left hand, but never touched the metal latch. She didn’t have a gun in there. She had money for Sid Freeman, and she was protecting it as though all she had to worry about were purse snatchers.
Jane turned the nightscope away from her and watched the man. She wrote down the license number of his car, then reached to turn up the volume on her directional microphone, but found she already had it all the way up.
He was in the shadow created by the roof of the car, and there were no streetlights nearby, so he was a shadow in a shadow. Jane picked up a small ticking sound, then recognized it as the sound car engines sometimes made when they were hot. The man’s hand came up to his mouth, then went down again. The other hand came up and there was a bright flash, then a blinding glare. Jane blinked, then instantly understood he was lighting a cigarette, but the nightscope made it look as though a flare had exploded in his face. She turned to the eyepiece of the video camera in time to see the next two seconds. The automatic light meter on the video camera let in more light than a human eye would, so she saw his face clearly until the cigarette caught and he closed the lighter. He was the man she had seen outside the hospital in Buffalo—the blond one who had turned into the wind to light a cigarette.
Jane listened to the recorder as she hurriedly prepared. She wiped off the door knobs, tore the sheets off the bed and threw them into the suitcase with her clothes, then began to dismantle her equipment. The cameras, recorder, and scopes went into the second suitcase. She turned off the light in the room before she took her empty air conditioner out of the window and reinstalled the original. She carried her first suitcase and the empty air conditioner down to the car, then returned. Finally, with a little trepidation, she yanked the wire at the side window and coiled it as the directional microphone slid down the roof. It stopped at the gutter and she tugged it over, then barely kept it from swinging against the side of the house as it fell. She pulled it in the window, put it in the big suitcase with the rest of her equipment, and took a last look around before she locked the door. On her way to the car she left her good-bye letter in the landlords’ mailbox.
