“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, “we made a mistake – took a wrong turn. We were just looking for the way off the beach and—”
I broke off as Walt’s wildly sprouting eyebrows did a strange jiggle of surprise. “English, huh?” he said. “I have a daughter went to college over there – Manchester. You know it?” He pronounced the name with all the emphasis on the Man, like it was two words.
“Erm, yeah, I’m from that part of the country. My mother and father still live near Manchester,” I said, grasping at the association. I thought of my parents’ substantial Georgian house in the stockbroker belt of Cheshire and reckoned that my mother would faint at the suggestion that they were anywhere near the outskirts of the city itself, but they weren’t here to contradict me.
Walt beamed. “Well, that’s just great,” he said. “Why don’t you both come inside and you can tell Harriet and me all about Manchester while we have a bite of breakfast.”
“Oh really, sir, we couldn’t put you out like that,” I said quickly, even though my empty stomach was already grumbling at the mention of those blueberry pancakes.
“No, no,” Walt said. “It’s no trouble. Harriet always cooks for a full house. That woman could feed a battleship. There’ll be waffles, bacon, eggs, hash browns . . .”
He let his voice trail off artfully, those canny eyes shifting between the two of us. The expression on Trey’s face was so pained at my continued resistance to food it was almost comical.
I flicked my eyes past him. The two cops were still in sight, stopping someone else further along the beach. I looked back and found Walt had been watching me carefully.
I smiled back at him. “Well, if you’re sure, then that’s very kind of you, sir,” I said. “We’d love to stay for breakfast.”
Nine
Walt led us into the house through the screen door where his wife had been uneasily observing our approach. She stepped back without speaking as we trooped into her kitchen, confining whatever doubts she may have had about Walt’s foolhardy actions to a single hurried look.
“Now, now, Harriet,” Walt said, catching it. He hooked the Panama onto a peg by the door and dumped the bag of shells on a worktop. Then he turned to face her, taking both her small hands gently in his, engulfing them completely. He was a good head taller than she was and he had to drop his chin to meet her eyes. “This young lady here’s from Manchester, where Grace went to school. How could I hear that and not invite them in for some good home cooking?”
She smiled indulgently at him, but didn’t look much reassured.
I moved forwards and put my hand out. “I’m Charlie and this is Trey. It’s very nice to meet you,” I said in my best well brought-up voice. “I’ve never been to America before and I’m overwhelmed by your husband’s generosity in inviting us into your home like this.”
Her shoulders relaxed a little. That was different, I saw. National pride was at stake. She disengaged herself from her husband and took the hand I’d offered. Her grip was firm rather than strong, the skin thin and soft.
“You’re very welcome,” she said. “I’ll get right on it. How d’you take your coffee?”
She poured us both a cup of the real stuff from a pot on the side. I added sugar to mine to try and stop my hands from shaking, aware that I hadn’t managed to keep anything down since that midday snack at the park yesterday. Besides, there’s only so much adrenaline your body can produce without giving it an outlet and mine was threatening to swamp me.
Trey and I hovered and drank our coffee while Harriet cooked and Walt fussed around, setting the table and generally getting in her way. They kept up a friendly banter between the two of them as they worked together. Trey watched, fascinated.
“OK, we’re nearly all set,” Walt announced, putting four glasses and a jug of iced water onto the large oval table near the kitchen window. “Either of you two kids need to use the bathroom before we eat?”
I glanced down at the dirty state of my hands and took him up on the offer. He pointed me in the right direction and left me to it, which was rather more trusting than I would have been, given the circumstances.
The back of the house, the one facing the water, was almost entirely open-plan, with just an island unit between the dining kitchen and the large living room, and a study area at the far side. Two ceiling-mounted fans lazily stirred the air in the living room.
Off that room were two hallways, one of which contained the bathroom and what looked like a couple of spare bedrooms. The bathroom was clean but shabby, the short little shallow bath marked by years of hard water.
As I scrubbed my hands I glanced at my reflection in the mirror above the sink. The side of my face still looked a little bright, but you might simply have taken that for overexposure to the sun. In fact, with my reddish-blonde colouring, if I didn’t take care when we were outside today it really would be sunburn.
I pulled back my perspective a moment and looked at my whole face, realising that the eyes staring steadily back at me showed no signs of guilt for what I’d done. I’d been hoping for some mark of inner torment, something to show that I was normal, that I was just like everyone else.
Not just a cold-blooded killer.
I looked away, turning to dry my hands on the towel hanging from the rail, then walked out of the bathroom taking care not to meet my eyes again.
When I got back to the kitchen I found Harriet serving up the promised blueberry pancakes. They looked more like thick Scotch pancakes than the familiar thin-style crêpes. She handed me a small jug of what appeared to be golden syrup, but turned out to be maple instead.
Walt and Trey were chatting about car stereos by the sound of it. The old man had a way of listening with his head on one side, like what you were saying was the most important thing he’d heard in ages.
It worked really well with Trey, who was sitting taller in his seat, puffed up with pride as he enthused to Walt about the big sound-off competition going on at the Ocean Center. Trey had already cut his pancakes into strips and slathered them with maple syrup. Now he abandoned his knife and started shovelling the sodden bits into his mouth with his fork, not bothering to stop talking while he ate. He shut up abruptly when I sat down.
I smiled at Harriet to cover the awkward silence. “You have a lovely house,” I said. “Have you been here long?”
“Oh, since we got married,” she said, fetching a plate of thin crispy bacon strips and indicating that we should dig in and help ourselves. “Walt and his daddy started building this place in the fall and we moved in in the spring, right after the wedding. Forty-five years ago next month.”
“My family’s been in construction going back three generations,” Walt put in.
“It’s been a good family home,” his wife said, contented.
“It still is, by the looks of it,” I said, finding that bacon went amazingly well with maple syrup. Even if it hadn’t I still would have eaten it. I hadn’t realised just how hungry I really was and it took some effort not to let my table manners slip to Trey’s level. “Do you have a lot of grandchildren?”
Harriet frowned. “No,” she said, “we’ve never been blessed.”
Surprised, I nodded to the toys in the garden and Walt smiled.
“We foster. Y’know – kids from problem homes,” he explained. “Try and set ‘em back on the right path.”
I thought about Sean’s sister and his younger brother, who’d taken his parents’ broken marriage much harder than Sean had done. His kid brother, in particular, had gone off the rails in fairly spectacular fashion the winter before. We’d since managed to retrieve him, more or less, but how either of them were going to react when they found out that the big brother they idolised was dead, I couldn’t begin to guess.