But he couldn’t keep from feeling a blind, galloping sort of jealousy. He knew that there was no realistic hope of keeping Kylie away from boys her age, and absolutely no chance that any of them wouldn’t be interested in her.
He kept listening. “Kylie, this is Mark. I was wondering if you were doing anything on Friday. My number is-” Forrest erased the call.
Forrest erased two more calls from boys, and one from a girl who sounded too giggly to be a safe, sensible companion, and who invited Kylie to “hang out” because Hunter and Shane were going to be there.
When he had heard all of the messages he put his phone in his pocket and began to feel a manic energy. He knew it was only the shallow, nervous agitation that came from too many hours at the wheel. He had driven all the way to Los Angeles, spent a night awake there, and driven all the way back, all in changing states of worry or fear or excitement.
But he had done it. He had managed to burn both the Kramer house and the office in one night. He had destroyed the evidence that Phil Kramer had wanted to use to blackmail him, and probably any secret copies that Kramer had never intended to hand over. If Philip Kramer had been devious enough to hide the evidence in a third place, then Kramer had defeated himself. If it hadn’t turned up by now, then he had not left word where it was hidden. It would stay hidden forever.
This was a masterstroke, the sort of big thinking and bold, decisive action that won wars. The realization that he actually had accomplished the coup and made it home without discovery began to make him giddy. He was free, he was safe, he was invulnerable. He still had Jerry Hobart out preparing to kill Emily Kramer, and that was good, but now that he had burned the evidence, it wasn’t essential. As soon as he paid Hobart, he would forget all of this unpleasantness.
As he drove along the ever-more-familiar stretch of highway toward his house, he knew he was going to beat the sun by a long mar gin. As soon as it was light enough to work, there were always workers in the fields who might see a car out at dawn and maybe remember it. But by then Forrest would be asleep. In a few more minutes, Forrest saw his home ahead, standing on its rise at the end of its long drive.
The gate was closed. He reached for the remote control in the door’s well, pressed the first button, and watched the gate slide aside to admit him, then pressed the button again to close it behind him. It felt good to be inside that iron gate again.
Forrest kept his car slow all the way up the long driveway and around the big house to the old carriage-house garage. He felt a moment of suspense as he reached for the remote control again to open the garage door. What if the garage was empty except for the pickup truck and the riding lawn mower the gardeners used? What if Caroline had gotten into her Jaguar and simply driven off toward whatever vision of a future her self-absorbed mind had been constructing since he had left? The fact that his thought had come from nowhere seemed to give it divine provenance and make it prophetic. The current of the universe had been running his way for the past twentyfour hours. Would there be a last gift?
He pressed the second button.
As soon as the door began to rise, he recognized the tires of the Jaguar in its parking space, then the gleaming metal. His premonition was only a fantasy. He moved his car into its space beside the Jaguar, pressed the second button on the remote control again to close the door, then turned off the car’s engine.
He sat still for a moment, staring at the back wall of the garage. There was the door to the old tack room, and it reminded him of the things he had taken when he had left. He pushed the button to pop his trunk, then got out, picked up his small suitcase, and looked into the space behind it. His car was clean. He closed the trunk, then walked out the side door of the garage onto the stone walkway to the house. It was still dark, but he could hear a few chirps from birds beginning to move around in anticipation of the sun.
He was careful to grip his keys in his palm so they wouldn’t jingle when he unlocked the front door. He prepared to punch in the code to turn off the alarm before it sounded, then pushed the door inward. The alarm was off, and he let out a breath in relief. Caroline had undoubtedly decided she didn’t want to be awakened.
He stepped into the broad foyer of his house and felt the hard, slippery surface of the marble tiles, the black-and-white pattern just visible in the dim star-glow from the skylight. The substantial, weighty presence of the architecture made him feel even more protected and invulnerable than before. The house was not just big interior spaces and thick walls. Hardinfield was several generations of importance and unassailable position. He was aware that there were mobs of people living on the coast to the south and the north of him-movie-studio people and computer billionaires-who each had the money to build several houses like his. But it would not have been appropriate, and even they seemed to sense it. When they opened their windows they didn’t see vistas of open land running all the way to barely visible foothills. They saw the houses of the rest of the rich rabble, all shouldered up to each other along streets in Beverly Hills or San Francisco, and actually touching each other in Malibu.
“I see you’re back.”
His head spun toward Caroline’s voice. A love seat that belonged beyond the vaulted arch in the living room had been pushed across the marble floor into the foyer. As his eyes adjusted to the deeper shadows along the far wall, he could see that she was wearing a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and there was a quilt pushed into a lump beside her. “What are you doing here? Did you sleep here?”
“I didn’t want to miss you.”
“Very interesting. You can tell me about it another time. I’m going up to bed.” He started toward the staircase.
“I want to talk now, Ted. There are no servants in the house. I told Maria to give them the rest of the week off, so we can settle this. We’re going to start right now.”
He had almost made it to the stairway, but he heard something in her voice that made him stop. “Oh? Something’s urgent?”
“You bet. It’s very urgent. I would like you to put your suitcase down and come with me to the library where we can see each other and talk.”
“And what will happen if we wait until I’ve had some sleep and a shower and maybe even some breakfast?”
“Are you trying to goad me into saying something that will give you an excuse to stomp off? I don’t want to threaten you.”
“That’s good. I don’t think there’s much you could threaten me with at this point, is there? That there will be less than no sex? That you’ll be more extravagant and demanding? When would you find time?”
“You just wanted to hurt me, and it always works, I guess, because your wanting to do it is what hurts. In spite of that, in spite of everything that’s gone on in the past few years, I find that you’re still more important to me than anyone else. Whenever I do something, or even think something, part of me is already looking around for you, to be sure you noticed. I know it’s just a reflex now because you haven’t been there watching or listening in years. What hurts most is the unfairness.”
“What’s unfair?”
“We don’t have a better relationship because you haven’t wanted one. When I went off to find ways of keeping busy, I wasn’t choosing them instead of you. I was filling a vacancy.” She looked down and shook her head, as though to push away a distraction. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to fight, I want to save you.”
His jaw was tight, but he spoke quietly. “What the hell are you talking about?”