Perhaps the same thought crossed Lindsey's mind, for she nodded and said, “Okay. I'm sorry. You're right.”
He leaned back into the garage and turned off the lights. He closed the door, engaged the deadbolt — and felt no safer, really.
She had started toward the dining room again. She glanced back as he followed her, indicating the pistol in his hand. “Going to bring that to the table?”
Deciding he had come down a little heavy on her, he shook his head and bugged his eyes out, trying to make a Christopher Lloyd face and lighten the moment: “I think some of my rigatoni are still alive. I don't like to eat them till they're dead.”
“Well, you've got the shotgun behind the Coromandel screen for that,” she reminded him.
“You're right!” He put the pistol on top of the refrigerator again. “And if that doesn't work, I can always take them out in the driveway and run them over with the car!”
She pushed open the swinging door, and Hatch followed her into the dining room.
Regina looked up and said, “Your food's getting cold.”
Still making like Christopher Lloyd, Hatch said, “Then we'll get some sweaters and mittens for them!”
Regina giggled. Hatch adored the way she giggled.
After the dinner dishes were done, Regina went to her room to study. “Big history test tomorrow,” she said.
Lindsey returned to her studio to try to get some work done. When she sat down at her drawing board, she saw the second Browning 9mm. It was still atop the low art-supply cabinet, where Hatch had put it earlier in the day.
She scowled at it. She didn't necessarily disapprove of guns themselves, but this one was more than merely a handgun. It was a symbol of their powerlessness in the face of the amorphous threat that hung over them. Keeping a gun ever within reach seemed an admission that they were desperate and couldn't control their own destiny. The sight of a snake coiled on the cabinet could not have carved a deeper scowl on her face.
She didn't want Regina walking in and seeing it.
She pulled open the first drawer of the cabinet and shoved aside some gum erasers and pencils to make room for the weapon. The Browning barely fit in that shallow space. Closing the drawer, she felt better.
During the long morning and afternoon, she had accomplished nothing. She had made lots of false starts with sketches that went nowhere. She was not even close to being ready to prepare a canvas.
Masonite, actually. She worked on Masonite, as did most artists these days, but she still thought of each rectangle as a canvas, as though she were the reincarnation of an artist from another age and could not shake her old way of thinking. Also, she painted in acrylics rather than oils. Masonite did not deteriorate over time the way canvas did, and acrylics retained their true colors far better than oil-based paints.
Of course if she didn't do something soon, it wouldn't matter if she used acrylics or cat's piss. She couldn't call herself an artist in the first place if she couldn't come up with an idea that excited her and a composition that did the idea justice. Picking up a thick charcoal pencil, she leaned over the sketch pad that was open on the drawing board in front of her. She tried to knock inspiration off its perch and get its lazy butt flying again.
After no more than a minute, her gaze floated off the page, up and up, until she was staring at the window. No interesting sight waited to distract her tonight, no treetops gracefully swaying in a breeze or even a patch of cerulean sky. The night beyond the pane was featureless.
The black backdrop transformed the window glass into a mirror in which she saw herself looking over the top of the drawing board. Because it was not a true mirror, her reflection was transparent, ghostly, as if she had died and come back to haunt the last place she had ever known on earth.
That was an unsettling thought, so she returned her attention to the blank page of the drawing tablet in front of her.
After Lindsey and Regina went upstairs, Hatch walked from room to room on the ground floor, checking windows and doors to be sure they were secured. He had inspected the locks before. Doing it again was pointless. He did it anyway.
When he reached the pair of sliding glass doors in the family room, he switched on the outdoor patio lights to augment the low landscape lighting. The backyard was now bright enough for him to see most of it — although someone could have been crouched among the shrubs along the rear fence. He stood at the doors, waiting for one of the shadows along the perimeter of the property to shift.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe the guy would never come after them. In which case, in a month or two or three, Hatch would most likely be certifiably mad from the tension of waiting. He almost thought it would be better if the creep came now and got it over with.
He moved on to the breakfast nook and examined those windows. They were still locked.
Regina returned to her bedroom and prepared her corner desk for homework. She put her books to one side of the blotter, pens and felt-tip Hi-Liter to the other side, and her notebook in the middle, everything squared-up and neat.
As she got her desk set up, she worried about the Harrisons. Something was wrong with them.
Well, not wrong in the sense that they were thieves or enemy spies or counterfeiters or murderers or child-eating cannibals. For a while she'd had an idea for a novel in which this absolute screwup girl is adopted by a couple who are child-eating cannibals, and she finds a pile of child bones in the basement, and a recipe file in the kitchen with cards that say things like LITTLE GIRL KABOB and GIRL SOUP, with instructions like “INGREDIENTS: one tender young girl, unsalted; one onion, chopped; one pound carrots, diced.…” In the story the girl goes to the authorities, but they will not believe her because she's widely known as a screwup and a teller of tall tales. Well, that was fiction, and this was real life, and the Harrisons seemed perfectly happy eating pizza and pasta and hamburgers.
She clicked on the fluorescent desk lamp.
Though there was nothing wrong with the Harrisons themselves, they definitely had problems, because they were tense and trying hard to hide it. Maybe they weren't able to make their mortgage payments, and the bank was going to take the house, and all three of them would have to move back into her old room at the orphanage. Maybe they had discovered that Mrs. Harrison had a sister she'd never heard about before, an evil twin like all those people on television shows were always discovering they had. Or maybe they owed money to the Mafia and couldn't pay it and were going to get their legs broken.
Regina withdrew a dictionary from the bookshelves and put it on the desk.
If they had a bad problem, Regina hoped it was the Mafia thing, because she could handle that pretty well. The Harrisons' legs would get better eventually, and they'd learn an important lesson about not borrowing money from loansharks. Meanwhile, she could take care of them, make sure they got their medicine, check their temperatures now and then, bring them dishes of ice cream with a little animal cookie stuck in the top of each one, and even empty their bedpans (Gross!) if it came to that. She knew a lot about nursing, having been on the receiving end of so much of it at various times over the years. (Dear God, if their big problem is me, could I have a miracle here and get the problem changed to the Mafia, so they'll keep me and we'll be happy? In exchange for the miracle, I'd even be willing to have my legs broken, too. At least talk it over with the guys at the Mafia and see what they say.)