The sun streaming through the windows awakened her the next morning. She propped herself up on the pillows and admired the Widow Snopes’s bedroom, which was painted a pale blue with chalk white trim and soft iris accents. Its simple cherry furniture and braided rugs gave the room the same homey feel as the nursery.
Jane glanced uneasily toward the door that led to a master bath linking her bedroom with Cal’s. She vaguely remembered hearing a shower running earlier, and she could only hope he’d already left the house. Last night she had placed her own toiletries in a smaller bathroom down the hall.
The Jeep was gone by the time she had finished dressing, gotten unpacked, and made her way to the kitchen. She found a note from Cal on the counter with the number of a grocery store that delivered and instructions to order whatever she wanted. She ate a piece of toast, then phoned in a list of items more suitable to her taste buds than foamfilled chocolate cupcakes.
Not long after the groceries arrived, another deliveryman showed up with her computer equipment. She had him carry it to her bedroom, where she spent the next few hours setting up a workspace for herself on a table she moved in front of the window, so she could gaze at the mountains whenever she remembered to look up from her computer screen. For the rest of the day, she worked, stopping only long enough to take a walk outside.
The grounds around the house nearly made up for the interior. Shadowed by the surrounding mountains, they were a bit overgrown, and it was too early for anything to be in bloom, but she loved their feeling of isolation and slightly abandoned look. She saw a rough path leading up the side of the nearest mountain and began to follow it, but after less than ten minutes, she found herself gasping for breath from the effects of the altitude. As she turned back, she decided she’d make herself go a bit farther each day until she reached the notch at the top.
By the time she went to bed that night, she still hadn’t seen Cal, and he was gone when she awakened the next morning. Late that afternoon, however, he walked into the foyer as she came downstairs.
He gave her that familiar contemptuous look, as if she’d crawled out from under a rock. “The realtor hired a couple of women to keep the house clean while it was on the market. She said they did a good job, so I told them to stay on. They’ll be coming a couple times a week starting tomorrow.”
“All right.”
“They don’t speak much English, but they seemed to know what they’re doing. Stay out of their way.”
She nodded and thought about asking him where he had been until two o’clock in the morning, the time she’d heard the toilet flush in the adjoining bathroom, but he had already turned to leave. As the door shut, she wondered if he was going off to be with another woman.
The thought depressed her. Even though their marriage was a sham, and he didn’t owe her fidelity, she wished he’d give it to her, just for the next three months. A premonition of disaster settled over her, a sense of impending doom that made her so uncomfortable, she hurried back to her computer and buried herself in work.
Her days settled into a routine, but the uneasiness never quite went away. To keep it at bay, she worked most of the time, although she managed a walk each day. She barely saw Cal, something that should have eased her mind, but didn’t, since she realized he had virtually imprisoned her. She had no car, he didn’t offer to lend her his, and the only people she saw were deliverymen and the two Korean cleaning women. Like a feudal lord with a moated castle, he had deliberately cut her off from the town and its people. She wondered what he planned to do when his family returned.
Unlike a medieval noblewoman, she could have put an end to her imprisonment anytime she wanted. A phone call to a taxi company would have done the job, but she didn’t have any real desire to go out. With the exception of the prickly Annie Glide, she knew no one here, and although she would have enjoyed seeing something of the area, she couldn’t resist the luxury of uninterrupted time.
Never in her life had she been able to devote herself so completely to pure science. There were no classes to teach, no faculty meetings to attend, no errands to run, nothing to distract her from her research. With her computer, modem, and telephone, she was linked to everything she needed, from the Los Alamos electronic library to the data coming in from crucial experiments being conducted in the world’s billion-dollar supercolliders. And work kept her uneasy thoughts at bay.
She began to lose track of time as she absorbed herself in the mathematics of duality, applying theoretical physics to unravel mathematical puzzles. Using a free-flowing mathematics of intuition, she pondered convoluted curves and mirror symmetry. She applied quantum field theory to count holes in four-dimensional space, and wherever she went, she left scribbled notes to herself-ideas scratched on the backs of pizza coupons that came in the mail, formulas written with a stubby golf pencil over the margins of the morning newspaper. One afternoon she walked into her bathroom only to see that she’d unthinkingly used her antique rose lipstick to draw a doughnut shape that was remodeling into a sphere on the bathroom mirror. With that, she knew she had to get out.
She grabbed her white Windbreaker, emptied the notes she’d stuffed into the pockets on previous walks, and left through the French doors at the rear of the house. As she made her way across the yard toward the path up the side of the mountain that she’d been climbing a little higher each day, her thoughts returned to the problems of convoluted curves. Would it be possible…
The shrill call of a bird blasted through her conjecture and made her aware of her surroundings. What was she doing pondering quantum geometry in the middle of all this beauty? If she weren’t careful, she’d become so strange that no child would want her as a mother.
As she climbed higher, she forced herself to observe the world around her. She drew in the rich scents of pine and leaf mold and felt the sun shining with new warmth. The trees had a fragile green lacework on them. Spring was arriving, and before long these mountain slopes would be alive with blooms.
But instead of being buoyed by the beauty, her spirits drooped, and the premonition of disaster that had been nagging at the edges of her consciousness for days grew stronger. By immersing herself so completely in her work, she had kept herself from thinking, but with the quiet of the damp woods around her, that was no longer possible.
As her breathing grew labored, she made her way to a rocky area off to the side of the path where she could rest. She was so tired of living with guilt. Cal would never forgive her for what she had done, and she could only pray that he wouldn’t take his hostility out on their child.
She remembered his veiled sexual threat the night they had arrived and realized she had no idea if he’d really try to force himself on her. She shivered and looked down on the valley, where she saw the house with its dark- shingled roof and crescent-shaped motor court. She watched a car turn into the gated lane. Cal’s Jeep. Had he come back to grab a fresh comic book from his collection?
They were scattered all over the house:
But that gratitude didn’t extend to her imprisonment. As much as the isolation helped her work, she realized she was giving him too much power by tolerating it. What would he do, she wondered, if she didn’t return? He knew she went for walks, but how would he react if she didn’t come back? What if she made her way beyond the gates, found a telephone, and took a taxi to the airport?
The idea of upsetting him elevated her spirits a few small notches. Leaning back on her elbows, she tilted her face and enjoyed the sunshine until she felt the chill of the rockyledge through her wool slacks. Then she rose and gazed back down into the valley.
The house and its owner lay beneath her; the mountains rose above. She began to climb.
Chapter Eight
C al stalked into the family room with Jane’s purse clutched in his hand and strode over to the French doors that led to the deck, but he still couldn’t see any sign of her. That meant only one thing. She’d taken off up the mountain.
He knew she walked most days, but when he’d asked her about it, she’d told him she never went far. Well,
