hallway on an upper level of the house.
Closed doors lined the hallway. Meecham was making indignant demands to someone downstairs. He flinched as a door came open across from him.
Meecham’s elderly mother appeared, deceptively frail. “So much noise. I can barely hear the television.”
Pittman made a soothing gesture. “Mrs. Meecham, does your bedroom have a lock?”
“Of course it has a lock. Doesn’t every bedroom have a lock? Do you think I want people barging in on me? What are you doing up here?”
“Thanks.” Pittman hurried with Jill, who didn’t understand what Pittman was doing.
“You can’t go in there,” Mrs. Meecham said.
Pittman slammed and locked the door. From a television in the corner of the well-appointed lace-curtained room, complete with a four-poster bed, the opening theme music for a nature program almost obscured Mrs. Meecham’s feeble pounding on the door.
Jill swung toward Pittman. “What are we
A look of sudden understanding crossed her face as Pittman rushed toward a window. It faced the back of the house, above the peaked roof of the garage. Pittman opened it. “Come on.”
Inexplicably Jill seemed frozen.
“What’s wrong?”
Jill stared toward the door. She turned her head and stared at Pittman.
“Come on!” Pittman said.
At once Jill became animated, taking off her pumps. “Of all the times to be wearing a skirt.”
The hem tore as she raised her legs and climbed out the window. The pounding on the bedroom door became louder. Angry male voices were on the other side. The door shuddered as if shoulders were being heaved against it.
Wincing from pain in his injured ribs, Pittman squirmed out the open window after Jill. The garage roof sloped down on each side, and Pittman tried to stay balanced while running along the peak. Behind him, something crashed in the bedroom. Jill reached the end of the roof and jumped down onto something, appearing to run on the shadowy air as she disappeared around the corner of another house.
When Pittman came to the end of the garage, he saw that what Jill had jumped down onto was the foot-wide top of the high wall that enclosed the courtyard. That wall continued to the left, bordering the courtyards of other houses, bisecting the block. Hearing a shout behind him, Pittman climbed down as well and followed her, breathing so deeply and quickly that his lungs felt on fire.
Then he, too, was out of sight from the window. He concentrated not to topple from the wall as he hurried after Jill, who clutched her shoes in one hand, her purse in the other, and scrambled in bare feet across the peak of another carriage house turned into a garage.
A shingle gave way beneath Jill, skittering off the roof, clattering onto cobblestones. She fell on her shoulder, beginning to roll. Pittman grabbed her arm. She dropped her shoes, which hit the cobblestones next to the shingle.
Pittman charged ahead with Jill and halted unexpectedly.
The wall didn’t continue beyond the garage. The courtyard was framed only by buildings. Below them, a red Jaguar was parked outside the garage.
Pittman jumped down onto the car, feeling the roof protest but hold. Jill didn’t need encouragement; she leapt down after him, the metal so smoothly waxed that her bare feet nearly slid out from under her. Pittman clutched her, kept her from falling, held her arms, lowered her toward the cobblestones, then jumped down next to her.
The Jaguar’s owner must have been planning to leave soon. The gate to the street was open. Racing along the driveway, they reached a narrow, quiet, tree-lined, twilit street around the corner from Meecham’s address.
Their gray Duster was parked three spaces to their left.
“Drive.” Jill threw him the keys, then climbed into the backseat, ducking below the windows.
As Pittman sped away from the curb, he heard her rummaging in the back. “What are you doing?”
She was scrunched down out of sight, fumbling with something.
“Jill, what are you-?”
“Getting out of this damned skirt and into my jeans. This skirt is ripped up to my backside. If I’m going to be arrested, there’s no way it’s going to be with my underwear showing.”
Pittman couldn’t help it. He was frightened, and he couldn’t catch his breath, but she sounded so embarrassed, he started laughing.
“I’ve had it with skirts. And those useless pumps,” she said. “I don’t care who I have to make an impression on. All this running. From now on, it’s sneakers, a sweater, and jeans. And how the hell did the police know we were at Meecham’s? Who could have…?”
Pittman stared grimly ahead. “Yes. That’s really been bothering me.” He concentrated. “Who?”
“Wait a minute. I think I-There’s only one person who had that information. The man I phoned.”
“At the alumni association?”
“Yes. This evening, he must have called my father to suck up to him by bragging how he’d done me a favor.”
“That’s got to be it. Your father knows that the police are looking for you. As soon as he heard from the alumni association, he phoned the police and sent them to the address the man gave you.”
“We’ve got to be more careful.”
Pittman steered onto Charles Street, trying to keep his speed down, not to be conspicuous. As other cars switched on their headlights, so did he.
“Exactly,” Pittman said. “More careful. What were you doing back there?”
“I told you, putting on my jeans.”
“No. I mean back at the house. In the bedroom. You looked as if you weren’t going to leave with me.”
Jill didn’t respond.
“Don’t tell me that’s true,” Pittman said. “You actually thought about staying behind?”
“For a second…” Jill hesitated. “I told myself, I can’t keep running forever. The police don’t want
“Yeah, sure. I bet that would have been good for a few laughs at the precinct.” Although Pittman could understand Jill’s motives, the thought that she would have left him caused his stomach to harden. “So what made you keep going? Why didn’t you stay?”
“The story you told me about how you’d been arrested when you were trying to get an interview with Millgate seven years ago.”
“That’s right. Two prisoners, probably working for Millgate, beat me up while I was in a holding cell.”
“The police weren’t quick enough to help you,” Jill said.
“Or maybe the guards were bribed to take a long coffee break.” Pittman continued to feel bitter that she might have left him. “There’s no way the authorities could guarantee your safety. So that’s why you came with me? Your common sense took over? You listened to your survival instincts?”
“No,” Jill said.
“Self-preservation.”
“No. That’s not why I came with you. It had nothing to do with worrying whether the police could protect me.”
“Then…?”
“I was worried about you. I couldn’t imagine what you’d be like on your own.”
“Hey, I could have managed.”
“You don’t realize how vulnerable you are.”
“No kidding, every time somebody shoots at me, I get the idea.”
“
