“Well, only a few words at the very end,” I admitted, “but that was after they’d come back into the house.”
I’m not sure how long they’d talked together before my father suddenly nodded sharply, as if in conclusion, then began walking back toward the house. Laura walked beside him, her hand holding to his arm. When they had made it almost halfway across the yard, my father stopped, looked down at my sister for a moment, then lifted his right hand and very gently stroked her hair. It was a gesture that seemed to melt her, so that she leaned toward him and buried her face in his shoulder. My father looked away from her, as if unable to bear what he’d seen in her eyes. Then, in a slow, surprisingly dramatic movement, he lifted his face toward the bright, overhanging moon. They stood in just this position for a long time, she in her pale gown, he in his stone-gray work clothes, the light washing over them, so that they looked vaguely like marble figures, motionless and cold.
Then they separated and walked, without touching, back toward the kitchen door. Seconds later, I heard them pad up the short flight of stairs toward their separate rooms.
I ran to the door of my room and opened it slightly. Through the small slit, I could see my father and Laura as they mounted the stairs, moving slowly, until they came to a stop at the top of the landing. For a brief, suspended instant, they stood, facing each other silently.
Then my father said, “Are you all right?”
And my sister said, “Yes, I’m fine.”
With that, they headed up the corridor, moving directly toward my room. I shrank away from them, not wanting to be seen, and eased my door back so that it was almost closed when they passed. Because of that, I could see only the broad outlines of their two bodies as they swept by my door, featureless and without detail, little more than gliding shapes.
“I heard my father say, Tomorrow.”
And my sister said, “So soon?”
My father did not answer her. Or, if he did, it was later, in some place beyond my hearing. For after that, I heard nothing but the sound of his feet as they moved on down the carpeted hallway, then the sound of his bedroom door as it opened and closed.
Minutes later, I heard Laura open the door to her own room, so I know that for a short time she stood alone in the unlighted corridor. I don’t know why she waited for those few extra minutes, or what thoughts played through her mind as she stood in the darkness outside her room, as if afraid to go in alone.
“And that’s all you heard them say?” Rebecca asked.
“Yes.”
She glanced down at her notes, quietly, thoughtfully, as if she were processing and rearranging information that she alone possessed. Watching her, I felt as if she’d rowed out onto a dark lake, leaving me on shore.
“The ‘tomorrow’ your father talked about,” she said finally, “that would have been the first Tuesday in September?”
“I suppose.”
“The first day of school,” she added, almost to herself. Then she came back to me suddenly, her dark eyes darting over to mine. “Did anything unusual happen that next day?” she asked. “Did you notice any change in anything?”
“No,” I said.
Again, Rebecca appeared to draw into herself, her mind deep in thought, as if she were unable to accept what appeared to be the routine notion that “tomorrow” had been nothing more than my father’s idle reference to the beginning of school, and Laura’s whispered reply just a schoolchild’s regret.
I leaned forward slightly. “Should I have seen something different that day?” I asked. “Was something going on?”
She didn’t answer, but only flipped back a few pages in her notebook, scanning the lines she’d written until she found the right one.
“You said before that when Laura and your father were down by the fence, that they hadn’t been concerned that anyone in the house might be watching them,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“You said that it was as if they thought the people in the house were already dead.”
I knew then what she was getting at. “How long had he been planning it, Rebecca?”
“Maybe longer than you think, Steve.” She waited, trying to gauge how the latest information might affect me. “At least three or four months,” she said finally.
“How do you know that?”
“Because of something Swenson found,” she told me. “Travel brochures. A lot of them.”
Occasionally, I’d seen my father reading an adventure novel, always slowly, taking weeks to slog through each one. I’d also seen him idly turning the pages of the local newspaper. But I’d never seen him browsing through anything that resembled a travel brochure.
“He found quite a few of them in that little office your father had at the rear of the store,” Rebecca added, without emphasis.
It was little more than a stockroom, as I recalled then, small and cramped, but more secure, with many locks. It was the place he’d kept the unassembled Rodger and Windsor bicycles before bringing them home. Once or twice I’d seen him there with Nellie Grimes, the bookkeeper he’d hired some years before, but on all other occasions, he’d been in the room alone. Because of that, it was easy for me to think of it as the place of his solitude, the cluttered little room which he’d set aside for his plotting, the careful working out both of his crime and his escape.
“These brochures,” I said. “Where did they come from?”
