“The waiting room,” Claire said.
10
Following Sandra out the front door of Wayward Inn, Parker said quietly, “Let her go first.”
“All right.”
They said good night, said they’d see one another tomorrow, and got into the cars. It took Claire a while to decide the best place to put her handbag, and by then Sandra had backed out, spun around, and headed for the exit.
As they followed, Parker said, “Hang back. She won’t let you disappear out of her mirrors, but she’ll let you hang back.”
“You aren’t going to do anything to her, are you?”
“I can’t. When she and her partner Keenan were first looking for Harbin, they made dossiers of what they could find out about the people at that meeting where he disappeared. Nelson’s bar, Nick phoning you. If something happens to Sandra, her friend on Cape Cod gives that stuff to the law.”
“They already know my phone number.”
“Getting it again, from a second direction, means they’ll take a closer look. You don’t want that.”
Claire shook her head, eyes on the taillights out in front of her. “If I have to give up my house, I will,” she said. “Be Claire somebody else, I will. But I won’t want to.”
“We’re trying to make it not happen,” Parker said. “Right now, Sandra’s on guard, something could kick her off. Her friend I don’t know anything about. But so far, we can deal with it. The worst would be if McWhitney found out she was here.”
“Why?”
“He’d kill her, right away, first, worry about dossiers later. Then everybody has to move.”
Claire brooded about that. “Do you think he’ll come up?”
“Not now, not over the weekend, he’s still got that bar to run. Early next week, he might. Up ahead there, at the intersection, you’re gonna turn left. There’s a deli on the right, parking lot beyond it. Make the turn, go in there, shut everything down.”
Claire nodded and said, “I thought maybe we weren’t going straight back.”
The intersection ahead was topped by a yellow blinker signal. Sandra’s Honda drove under it and through. Claire, without a signal, made the left, made a right U-turn into the deli’s parking lot, tucked the Toyota in next to a Dumpster back there, and switched everything off. They waited, and then a black car went by out there, from left to right, accelerating.
Parker said, “Give her a minute, then go back out and go straight through the intersection.”
“All right,” she said. “Where are we going?”
“To visit the money,” Parker said. “Start now,” and she did. As they jounced out onto the road, he said, “We don’t wanna do all this dance and the money’s long gone.”
“Stop at the road up there on the right. Then just drive around a while. Give me half an hour.”
“All right,” she said, and when she stopped at the corner, the two visible houses both dark for the night, she said, “Will you bring some out?”
“No,” he said. “We don’t want samples. We just want to know it’s there. And alone.”
He got out of the Toyota and walked down the dark side road. There was partial cloud cover above, but some starlight got through, enough to see the difference between the blacktop and the shoulder.
It was not quite midnight now, a Thursday in October, nothing happening on this secondary road at all, no lights in the occasional dwelling he walked past. Soon, ahead of him on the right, he could make out the white hulk of the church. It was a small white clapboard structure with a wooden steeple. Across the road, difficult to see at night, was a narrow two-story white clapboard house that must have been connected to the church. Both buildings had been empty a long time.
Parker started with the house first. If there were a law presence here, watching the place, this would be the most comfortable spot to wait in.
But the house was empty, and when he crossed the road, so was the church. There was no sign that anybody had been in it since he and Dalesia and McWhitney had quit it a week ago.
Finally, he went up to the choir loft to check on the money. The bank had been transporting its cash in standard white rectangular packing boxes, and the church had stored its missals and hymnals up in the choir loft in the same way; not identical boxes, but similar. Parker and McWhitney and Dalesia had mixed the bank’s boxes in with the church’s boxes and left them there, arranging them so that, if anybody came upstairs and started looking in these boxes, the first three would contain books.
They still did. And the ones behind and beneath them still contained the close-packed stacks of green. Nothing had changed. The money still waited for them.
When they got back to Bosky Rounds, someone was seated in the dark on the porch, in a rocking chair. Rocking forward into the light, Sandra said, “Visiting our money?”
“Your part is still there,” Parker told her.
11
Breakfast at Bosky Rounds was in a room smaller than the communal parlor, an oblong crammed with square tables for two, at the right front corner of the building, with a view mostly of the road out front. Friday morning, Parker and Claire ate a late breakfast, each with a different part of the New York Times, Parker facing the doorway through which the entrance foyer and Mrs. Bartlett’s desk could be seen.
The small bell over the entrance tinkled and a woman appeared, stopping in front of Mrs. Bartlett’s desk, her profile to Parker. She was a good-looking blonde in her twenties, tall, slim in a tan deerskin coat over chocolate-colored slacks and black boots, with a heavy black shoulder bag hanging to her left hip. Parker knew her, and she would know him, too. Her name was Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa.
Quietly, Parker said, “Lift your paper. Read it that way.”
She did so, her expressionless face and the room behind her disappearing behind the newsprint. Out there, Mrs. Bartlett and Detective Reversa talked, pals, greeting one another, discussing something. Parker couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, and then the bell tinkled again, and when he said, “All right,” and Claire lowered the paper, only Mrs. Bartlett was there.
Claire said, “Can I look?”
“She’s gone.”
Claire looked anyway, then said, “She’s a cop.”
“State, plainclothes. You could hear what they were saying.”
Claire shrugged. “She was just checking in. Wanted to know if Mrs. Bartlett had seen anything interesting since last time they talked.” Without irony she said, “The answer was no.”
“Good.”
“But she’d recognize you?”
“She made a traffic stop on me, before the job. She’s the reason you had to report the Lexus stolen and get this rental.”
“I liked the Lexus,” Claire said.
“You wouldn’t have.”
“Oh, I know.” Claire looked around again at the space where the detective had been. “But she was here.”
“She’s part of the search,” Parker said. “She was on that heist from the beginning. She and a bunch more are still around because they know Nick’s got to be somewhere around here and the money’s got to be somewhere around here.”