The next night, Jane stepped to the newsstand on State Street, opened the
She sat behind the steering wheel and opened it again, feeling her heartbeat at the sides of her head. Her eyes swooped to the article, clutching phrases because she was too impatient to follow sentences: “taken into custody,” “questioned by the F.B.I.,” “could be charged.” She read that twice. If he could be charged, then he had not been charged. That gave her the momentum to relinquish the first page and move to the second. Charged with what? “Accessory to murder.” Her mind protested: Not a chance … not yet, anyway. But she saw it was just the culmination of a list. “Aiding and abetting an escaping felon, obstruction of justice, making false statements in a police report.”
Jane closed the newspaper, tossed it to the floor in front of the passenger seat, and started the engine. There was no more time for waiting and watching and looking into the past, trying to gather a pile of evidence that Richard Dahlman was innocent. She was going to have to take a chance on Brian Vaughn.
38
Charles Langer went out to breakfast, as he often did. When he had still been Brian Vaughn he would not have dared show his face in a spot like the Santa Barbara Biltmore. Now Brian Vaughn’s face didn’t exist, and there was no disadvantage to showing Charles Langer’s. Since he had been in Santa Barbara he had seen four people who had known him when he was Brian Vaughn, and two of them had been at the Biltmore.
The first time, he had been eating lunch at an outdoor table on the patio. He had been staring past the tall cedar tree on the broad front lawn, beyond the shoreward rolling of blue, sluggish Pacific swells, at a squadron of tiny white sails just poised on the horizon so their hulls were invisible and their forward progress was almost impossible to detect. A shadow had unexpectedly fallen across the white linen in front of him, he had looked up, and standing over him was David Rollins.
Langer had become flustered. He had been warned that moments like this might happen someday, but someday had always seemed far away. But Rollins had not said “Brian!” or even “Don’t I know you?” He had said, “Excuse me, but is anyone using these chairs?”
Charles Langer had not dared use his voice. He had smiled and shaken his head. Rollins had taken two of the extra chairs to his table, said, “Thanks,” sat on one of the chairs, and picked up his menu. The other chair had been for Rona Pellham, apparently Mrs. Rollins now. Langer was sure that she would not fail to recognize him. As soon as she looked in his direction, he was going to have to say something false about not being who she thought he was, and bail out of Santa Barbara. But Rona had not appeared to even glance at him. It was a miracle. He had known her very well—actually made a serious attempt to Do the Deed with her once, with enough acquiescence so that he could knowledgeably judge the terrible things that time and gravity had done to the poor woman since then.
Nobody had recognized Brian Vaughn looking at them from behind Charles Langer’s face, and the chance meeting had been wonderful for Charles Langer. He was liberated, giddy with power and license. He reminded himself of Claude Rains in
He had stuck to all of the precautions they had taught him during the long period since he had needed to leave Massachusetts. But after seeing Rollins, these safeguards had come to seem like the old civil defense drills of his childhood, when he had dutifully crouched under his desk to escape bombs that never fell. He was now convinced that the only necessary precaution had been taken for all time. He was a brand-new man with nothing much to worry him.
Langer finished his breakfast and walked on the beach for an hour. He liked walking away from Santa Barbara, below the big homes above the cliffs, toward the Montecito side. If he walked in the morning like this, he could often go for long stretches without seeing another human being.
He came back up the beach just ahead of the incoming tide, got into his Miata, and drove toward his house. He would spend a little time cleaning the place and then go to the library before he went off for his golf game. That way he would have something fresh to read this evening.
Many of the things he liked least about being the Invisible Man had gradually been mitigated. At first he had found it frustrating to live in a place where he could have golfed on almost any day of the year, except that he wasn’t able to join a club or even scare up a foursome. Now he simply went to the public course and told the starter he would fill in on any threesome who showed up. Most days it meant he would not have to wait as long as he would have with three partners. When Langer wanted to swim, he would pay for a day’s admission to the Coral Casino across the street from the Biltmore and share the best pool in town with a sparse gathering of ephemeral strangers who sat in cabanas, ordered a few drinks, and then moved on.
His search for something to fill the time after sunset had not been as satisfactory, but it was not painful. He now kept his days busy and active, lingered late over dinner at a pleasant restaurant, then spent the latter part of the evening reading the books he had borrowed from the public library.
Langer had spent only a few months in this place, and already the social prospects were showing small signs of improvement. Several times at the golf course he had run into men he had played with before, and when they had seen him alone as usual, they hadn’t waited for the starter to form the foursome but had invited him themselves. There were also two young female librarians who made it a practice to smile and joke with him when he came in, and he had actually had a real conversation with the prettier of the two a week ago. At first he had been a little wistful and regretful when she had seemed to like him, but then he had remembered that he wasn’t fifty-five anymore. To her he looked about her own age. Maybe next time he would find out more about her so he could concoct exactly the right invitation to make her go out with him.
As he drove up his street, he studied all of the cars parked at the curb, glanced at the windows of the houses nearby, and then stopped without taking the keys out of the ignition and looked again. The precautions they had taught him were all habits now, and each time he performed them he actually felt better. After all this time he would have noticed anything that was out of place.
He got out of his Miata, walked up the sidewalk, unlocked his door, and slipped inside, then stepped directly to the corner window to ascertain that his arrival had not triggered any movement outside.
He counted to ten, then stepped back, turned, and gasped. He felt the hair on his scalp bristle. A woman was sitting motionless on the couch, and at first his mind didn’t know what to do with her: ghost-burglar-accuser? Was his eye assembling shadows into a human shape?
“I’m sorry to startle you,” she said.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, then realized he had said it wrong. He sounded scared and ridiculous. He had not missed the soft, melodious sound of her voice, and there was a little catch in it that was mildly erotic and appealing. He couldn’t see her very well because his glasses hadn’t adjusted to the dim light on that side of the room. The outline of her was long, lean, and feminine like a cat. There was nothing to be afraid of.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I had just sat down to rest. They called me in the middle of the night, so I had to take a redeye flight to get here.”
“Why?”
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry again.” She stood up and took a couple of steps where the light from the window reached her. He appraised the long black hair and the grace of her movements. “It seems that Santa Barbara is
