But the sound was Kate’s car. She leaped up to peer over, watched the SUV pull into the drive. Yes, Kate’s Lexus, curved bars on top where the Greenlaws’ luggage was tied. Kit fled down the oak tree, dropped the last six feet as Lucinda opened the passenger door. She flew into Lucinda’s arms. Lucinda’s wrinkled cheeks were sunburned; she was dressed in safari pants and a khaki jacket. Pedric stepped out from the backseat dressed in khakis, too. They held her between them, hugging and loving her so hard they nearly squeezed her breath out. Lucinda was crying. Pedric’s wrinkled cheeks were wet—but then they were all laughing and Kit thought she’d burst with happiness and they couldn’t talk here in the front yard for fear of the neighbors, though they saw no one about. They hurried in the house, leaving the luggage on the car. Inside there was more hugging and Kit scrambled from one to the other and all of them talking at once. They were home, her dear family was home, they were safe, they were all together and safe.
In the living room Kate turned on the gas logs, made sure the tired couple was settled comfortably in their own soft chairs—as if Lucinda and Pedric were guests in their own house—then, in the kitchen, she put the kettle on for tea. As bright flames danced on the hearth, Kate went to bring in the luggage. The Greenlaws had traveled light, just their three canvas duffels. Why had they been tied on top when there was plenty of room in the big Lexus? But then Kit caught a whiff of salmon as Pedric went to help Kate carryin an oversize Styrofoam cooler; she sniffed a stronger scent as they headed for the laundry where the big freezer stood.
In the living room again, Kate told Kit, “At the last minute they changed their flights, decided to all come home together. I dropped Mike and Lindsey off first, so they could get their own salmon in the freezer.
“Lovely salmon,” Lucinda said, leaning back in her soft chair. “A lovely trip,” she said as Kit leaped into her lap. “But a tiring flight home, we didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“Tired and hungry,” Pedric said. The couple stayed awake long enough to enjoy the hot tea and the quick lunch Kate had put together. Gathered before the fire, they shared a favorite, grilled cream cheese and salami sandwiches on rye; then Lucinda and Pedric headed for the bedroom, yawning. They didn’t unpack, but pulled on nightclothes and crawled into bed, where Kit snuggled between them purring a sleepy song. She could hear Kate in the kitchen rinsing the dishes; soon she heard Kate leave, locking the front door behind her, heard her car back out. And Kit snuggled deeper, safe between Lucinda and Pedric—an unaccustomed midday nap for her two humans. Contentedly Kit dozed, drifting on a cloud of happiness that only a little loved cat could truly know.
It was nearly a week before Lucinda and Pedric felt up to a party for their homecoming, a simple gathering of friends to celebrate their safe return. It would be two weeks more before MPPD would celebrate the end of another journey: the end of the Bleaks’ cross-country escape, the moment when neither of the Bleaks could any longer dodge the law. Much would happen, between.
While Lucinda and Pedric rested at home with Kit, exchanging tales of their adventures, while Dulcie languished in her own house feeling heavy and nervous, Joe Grey prowled the offices of MPPD scanning computers, listening to phone calls, waiting, as Max and the detectives waited, for a positive response to the BOL. A few calls came in where a citizen thought he’d spotted the car speeding by, tried to follow it, lost it, and didn’t get the license number. It was raining across several states, and the Bleaks, taking advantage of stormy night travel, managed to slip through. Meanwhile MPPD was busy with the usual shoplifting, car break-ins, and domestic violence cases that, these days, plagued even the tamest of small towns. There were, as well, daily inquiries from concerned citizens asking if there was any line yet on the attacker. The next report on a brown SUV, again with only a partial license number, put the couple somewhere in Alabama, still heading east. Alabama HP put patrols out, but in the heavy storm that had hit the state, the Bleaks had the advantage.
Sam could drive only short distances because of his left leg. In Molena Point, he hadn’t driven the van at all. Best to let people think he was more crippled than he was, to garner sympathy, make folks feel sorry for him. Now, moving across the country, he did drive, though it made his leg hurt. His increasing crankiness continued to irritate Tekla.
They didn’t stop in Atlanta; she wanted to move on through, head north into Georgia’s less populated backcountry. Freeway drivers were fast and brutal, so even she got nervous. They gassed up outside Canton, moved away on a narrower road into low hills, thick pine woods, and tacky mom-and-pop farms. “Home places,” the gas attendant called them when they asked for directions, home places, with an accent that made Arnold smirk. The rain had stopped, the weather hot and humid, further souring Sam’s mood.
With a local map they checked out a couple of shabby motels back in the hills at the edge of small manmade lakes. The only motels available in that backcountry, where people went to fish. Following the crooked roads they passed truck gardens and commercial chicken farms, long rows of rusted metal buildings that stunk of burned feathers and burned, dead chickens.
They holed up in a sleazy motel north of Jasper, the hick town where juror Meredith Wilson had moved to take care of her aging father. The weather had turned even more muggy, sticky and overcast with dark clouds hanging low. Sam said it was tornado weather. He was always imagining something, some disaster that never happened. Coming across country he’d grown more and more bad tempered, critical of her and of this whole plan, whining that they were going to get caught.
Well, they hadn’t even been stopped. Couple of glances from GHP black-and-whites on the highway, but with Arnold ducked down out of sight, and with her long blond hair, they sailed right on through.
Getting caught hadn’t been Sam’s complaint earlier, right after the trial. Those first two “accidents,” he’d been pretty high, seeing Herbert vindicated. “One more payback,” he’d say. Then when she’d pulled off the first Molena Point assaults without a hitch, and then Arnold did one while she watched from the shadows, then Sam had been really excited. He’d even got a kick out of the fake attacks. “They probably deserved it, anyway,” he’d said. And all along, he hadn’t had to do one damn bit of the legwork.
But now suddenly, running from the cops, he’d decided, this late in the game, that he didn’t like the program.
It was half his idea in the first place. More than half. It had been his rage as well as her own, at the twisted law, at the self-righteous courts. It was Sam’s anger, at that lawyer and the jurors, that’s what started them planning. He said, when Herbert was committed to die, “Those twelve lackeys just signed their death sentences. No one,” Sam said, “has the right to take Herbert’s life. Every one of them will pay, and pay hard.”
It was later that he started to get shaky. Though not until they were through Texas did he really get cold feet, when that trucker slowed and ran alongside them for half a mile, looking. But by that time they’d changed license plates, and she and Arnold sat in the back, both with long blond wigs; she thought that was funny. Arnold didn’t. But it was then that Sam, glancing up at the trucker, began to really whine.
Well, to hell with him. Now they were in Georgia she wasn’t stopping, not this late in the game. Now they had a motel just where she wanted it, a place to hole up near to Meredith Wilson, and now it was her turn to pay.
A thin, nervous creature, the Wilson woman, fidgeting in the jury box looking upset every time the coroner up there on the witness stand mentioned some gory aspect of his supposedly unbiased examination—the bastard putting Herbert in the worst light. Deliberately making the weaker jurors, like Wilson, squirm with unease.