curiosity at the light and shadows as the wind made the trees sway back and forth near the buildings.
The two women were more comfortable now that Christine was away from the forbidden places—the gap in the hedge, which Christine could now see was an open wrought-iron gate, and the pathway around the garage to the cars. As long as the pair were between her and those places, they felt comfortable enough to sit talking. When Robert cried for milk they looked up for a second, saw Christine lifting her shirt to nurse him, and looked away again.
After Robert was fed, Christine began to walk again, holding him upright to burp him with his face resting on a cloth diaper on her shoulder. This time she walked along the side of the house. Robert was happy and full, and after a few minutes he fell asleep. Christine continued walking along in the shade of the house looking in the windows at the deserted rooms, and then came to the barred window of her own room. She used the diaper from her shoulder to wipe a little milk off Robert's lip, but then dropped the diaper. She knelt down, and checked to be sure she was behind the Adirondack chairs and out of sight of the women.
Christine's heart began to speed up as she lay her beautiful, perfect son in his blue blanket on the bed of cedar chips under her window, picked up the diaper and the baby doll wrapped in the same kind of blue blanket, cradled it in her arms just the way she had cradled Robert, and walked along the side of the house in the direction of the sliding door.
She was confident that Claudia and Sybil would never offer to take Robert in to the nurse or to watch over him while he slept. But she was not so sure they wouldn't move close enough to see what she was carrying. She had to dawdle just enough to let them notice that she was taking the baby into the house.
In the reflection in the glass wall she caught the glance that Sybil gave her, saw her say something to Claudia, and then the two got up off the lawn and began to move toward the house behind her. She resisted the temptation to hurry in order to stay far enough ahead of them. They were predatory creatures, unconsciously cruel like a pair of wide-eyed feral cats, and any tiny sign of fear or nervousness would be like the shriek of a wounded bird. They would be on her in a second.
Christine went inside and left the sliding door open, hoping it looked as though she simply didn't care enough to shut it. She forced herself to walk slowly down the hallway with the doll wrapped in the blanket, swaying gently from side to side to rock the lifeless piece of rubber to keep it asleep.
As she reached the open door of her bedroom, she turned back and let herself see first Sybil, then Claudia step in through the sliding door and then move beyond her sight into the great room. She slipped into the bedroom and quickly arranged the doll in Robert's crib. She placed it on its side and pushed a small, firm pillow behind its back to keep it on its side, facing away from the doorway, then covered it with another receiving blanket.
Every second that passed, Christine was listening for the sound of Robert's little voice to rise from outside the window a few feet away. She already knew him so well that she could hear in her imagination the first, tentative cooing sound that he would make if he woke up on the ground behind the shrubbery along the house. Then there would be an inquiring noise, a sound that was intended to call her. If he didn't see, hear, or feel her after that, there would be a loud cry. Someone would hear it, and they would know.
She felt afraid to delay by even a second, and afraid to go on with this. She wished she had done more to prepare, wished she had tried instead to find the Beales' bedroom in this huge place and sneak into it alone. There might be an actual telephone plugged in, and not just empty jacks as there were in the rest of the house. But Christine dismissed those thoughts. She was already moving, and she had to think about what she needed to do.
Christine snatched up the magazine she had been reading the night before. The impression she wanted to make was that she had put Robert to sleep under the eye of the baby nurse, and was now taking a break by herself. She sauntered back down the hall, fixing a tired, bored expression on her face.
Where the hallway opened onto the great room, she walked along, aware of Sybil and Claudia. Each of them had arranged herself on one of the big white couches in feline repose. They paid little attention to Christine, but she knew they saw her, and had appraised how she walked and held herself, what she was carrying, how her face looked. If there was a tremor in her hand or a stiffness to her gait that she hadn't suppressed, she knew they had already detected it. She held her mind empty for a few seconds, waiting for one of them to spring up or yell or even shoot her. Nothing happened, so she walked on.
Christine wouldn't do anything but step outside through the same door they had just come in. It was the simplest, most direct route to the safe places, the ones where she was allowed to be. She went out and sat in one of the Adirondack chairs where they could see her without moving from their couches, and began to leaf through the makeup advertising at the front of her magazine.
All of her senses were raw, as though the skin had been peeled back and the nerves were exposed to the air, throbbing and waiting to be irritated. Robert wasn't making noises yet, and the women were lying still. Two cars went past on the road beyond the hedge, and Christine felt worried at first that they would pull into the driveway, and then devastated because they might have been the last cars to go by for an hour. She had missed them, and maybe they had been the ones that had been meant to find her and Robert by the roadside and save them.
Time was short and diminishing now, a lit fuse. She looked up, shaded her eyes from the sun petulantly, got up and moved to another chair, closer to Robert's place under the barred window, and invisible from the couches inside. She needed one of the two women to see her, so she waited. She counted to twenty, then counted fifty more, pretending to read her magazine but unable to concentrate on the sentences, which seemed to be lists of disconnected words.
She caught a movement in the corner of her eye, so she lazily lifted her gaze toward the grove of trees at the end of the yard like a person lost in thought, then half-turned her head and saw Claudia. She was standing on the inner side of the glass door, craning her neck slightly to look along the side of the house at Christine.
Christine sighed and half-turned her body to face away from Claudia, and turned more pages. She counted to seventy again, then glanced back at the door. Claudia was gone. Christine stood quickly, hurried around the Adirondack chairs to the shrubs under her window, and gently lifted Robert. He was still asleep, still peaceful and unharmed.
She followed the steps that she had been imagining in fragmentary form since she had been caught and brought here. She walked briskly along the edge of the vast green lawn toward the back. She had always known this would be part of her route, because she could see the grove of trees, the deep, cool shadows from her room. She had known she could make it all the way—or nearly all the way—to the grove before the angle of the path made her visible to the people behind the glass in the great room. But walking it in real life was an ordeal. It was much farther than she had imagined it to be, and the need to walk fast was a terrible temptation, because walking fast might wake Robert. She held him like a shallow bowl of water, keeping him level and never allowing him to tip or feel a bump. When at last she reached the shade of the trees, she was already breathing hard and sweating. She kept going farther from the house for another hundred feet, so the number of tree trunks between her and the house would make her harder to see.
Christine turned right when she got to the big brick wall at the back of the property. She could tell that she wasn't as hard to see from the house as she had hoped. If they missed her and began to look around, they would certainly be able to spot her within a minute or two. But she was far from the house now, and that would help. The grove was wide—at least as far as a football field—and she had to cross it quickly. The piled-up leaves were slippery and noisy, and once her toe hit a raised tree root, and she jolted Robert so hard that he gave a startle reflex. She hummed to him to make him aware she was there, and corrected the way she cradled him to make him more comfortable, and he sank back into sleep.
The sweat was pouring from Christine's scalp down her forehead now, and her breaths came in little huffs, as though she had been jogging. She could see the back of the long garage ahead through the trees. She kept moving as quickly as she could, corrected her course to go along the outer wall so close that she sometimes brushed it. And then she was there. She walked to the corner of the garage, slipped silently along the narrow passageway between the back wall of the property and the side wall of the garage toward the open brick pavement in front.
She approached the end of the passageway, and she knew there would be open garages and probably cars parked in the open. She stopped, leaned forward slowly and carefully, and looked. There was Richard's car. Her chest seemed to tighten and her eyes watered for joy. She knew the car, knew Richard's unbreakable habit of leaving a magnetic case with an extra key in it in the compartment that held the gas cap. She looked out farther, saw that the six garage doors were all open, and saw the front ends of cars, but saw no people. She stepped
