Valentine had already walked out the door, was halfway to the car on this crisp and sunny November afternoon, before he heard the sound of gunshots finishing the job. These would attract no more attention than a faint, faraway cry. They were sporting men. They loved and appreciated fine weaponry. They shot targets and test-fired guns here all the time.
"So how much you got riding on the Bruins tonight?" he asked Teddy a few minutes later.
"Double or nothing on what I was down last week." He hunched his big sloping shoulders.
Valentine conked him on the side of the skull. "Happy just to call it even, after all that? Ought to have your head examined."
They rolled away with Teddy behind the wheel of his car for the drive back down to Boston, and Valentine resumed shuffling through his stack of mail. People went to an awful lot of trouble to send an awful lot of nothing. Except for one, which he tore into as soon as he noticed the return address.
He hurriedly read the hand-scribbled cover letter, devoured the attached pages. Scanned photocopies of information that had been sent by fax. Lovingly crushed them like roses to his chest as he stared out the window at a passing countryside that seemed very far removed.
"They found another," he said, in reverence, in awe, in gratitude. "Clay Palmer, his name. Hmm. If I have to, I'll play this one as carefully as a prize marlin."
"And land him by when?" Teddy asked.
"Valentine's Day, when else? This time it'll work out. I can feel it. I'll have my legacy."
Patrick Valentine leaned back against the seat, and the look that settled over his face — those wary eyes, those contoured cheekbones and jawline that seemed to sweep around to either side of his streamlined skull — was a look very close to serenity.
Twelve
They left Tempe at the end of the week, the first weekend in November, Adrienne's car packed modestly considering her plans for an indefinite stay, ample room up front for herself and Clay. He had passed Friday night at her house without incident, so they could get started all the earlier, before dawn.
Northeast into the sunrise, the road soon blazed with desert fire, while at its other end beckoned mountains that would outlast them and their every hope and dream and granule of dust in death — gods of rock, the face of nature's indifference.
"As long as you can avoid it," Clay said, "could you not take the interstate? I hate the interstate."
"I'll try," she said. An atlas lay curled and wedged in the gap between their seats. Eight hundred miles. She had sworn to herself that she would do her best to avoid any conversation that resembled session work. In the car, it could be too much confined to too small an area, too pressurized.
Still, this seemed benign enough.
"What's wrong with the interstate?"
"I didn't touch an interstate after I left Denver." He stared ahead toward the corona of the rising sun. "I came on secondary roads. They're more interesting. Something about them seems true. If you keep off the interstates, you tend to see the people who travel for its own sake."
Gently, slowly, Clay was squeezing a rubber ball, therapy for muscles long unused. In the hospital he had seemed to relax after she'd told him that no one would challenge his discharge. She had been able to talk him into waiting a couple of days so he could leave with hands unburdened.
Just to see his hands at all seemed foreign, as if he should have remained in those twin casts forever. Both hands and lower arms had that unnaturally pale, pasty quality that skin sometimes takes on beneath a cast. His hands themselves, now emerged like chrysalids, shone with the angry red of new scars from the compound fractures.
Hands were so very vital, so telling of a person and the life led. And here now were Clay's, new to her, some facet of him once concealed, now revealed. She could glance at them — squeezing the ball, thumbing through the atlas, at rest — and wonder things she'd not considered before: They had known brutality, but had they ever known tenderness? He claimed to dislike being touched, but did he use them to caress, or stroke, or bring pleasure to someone else? Were they ever held, fondled, kissed? Such simple acts, but those who were denied them must be terribly lonely.
So much ground they had yet to cover.
"You never told me you were a lesbian," he said, miles later.
Adrienne had been waiting for that, in one form or another. "I never saw it as being relevant." She did not bother correcting him: You're half-right, at least, just caught me on that side of the pendulum's arc. If it served to discourage any transference of misdirected sexuality, all the better. "That's not suddenly going to be a problem, is it?"
"No. It was just a surprise. You know the way we fill in the blanks for people we don't know much about, and imagine things." He tired of squeezing the ball and took to tossing it, catching it, one-handed, over and over. "I noticed you never wore a ring, but I pictured you … I don't know … trading off sleepovers with some businessman, somebody like that. Not another doctor. I don't think you could stand another doctor."
Patients. Sometimes they could pick up the damnedest things.
"But it was good to be surprised," he went on, still tossing, catching. "Things like that remind me not to take anything for granted. Is this bugging you?" Holding up the ball, suddenly.
"A little."
Clay went back to squeezing. "It's easy to see why you were attracted to Sarah. It's like big parts of each of you are things the other isn't."
She weighed this a moment. Last night Clay had spent little time in actual conversation with them, quiet and withdrawn mostly, spending at least an hour sitting in the gathering darkness on the patio, alone, watching night seize the backyard. Still, it would have taken little observation, she supposed, to decide who was the extrovert and who the introvert, who made sure the bills were paid on time and who planned the parties.
They might have been friends, Clay and Sarah, under other circumstances, or at least as close to friends as he thought he could be. Adrienne knew it, just knew they shared elements of a common core, had at one point watched them briefly converse and resonate like both prongs of a tuning fork. He had already spent a couple of minutes enchanted by the rainstick, then set it aside while wandering over to a bookcase filled predominantly with Sarah's titles, mostly anthropology texts and compendiums of multicultural mythic beliefs and the like. He scanned the spines, finally removing one from her small collection of art books.
"Salvador Dali, you like him?" he asked.
"Oh, are you kidding?" Sarah said. "He's only about my favorite twentieth-century artist. Adrienne and I were in Florida last year, and for two days I was inconsolable until we got over to St. Petersburg to the Dali Museum."
Watching from the kitchen, Adrienne caught the brief and uneasy hesitation with which Clay opened the book, flipped through pages. Close as Sarah was, it could never have escaped her.
"What, you don't like him?" she asked, looking that way she sometimes did, as if she'd be crushed if the answer was no.
"That's not it." Replacing the book, bruised brow furrowing beneath its bandage. "He hits too close to the bone sometimes. I … there are nights I have dreams like this. A lot, really. Some of those pieces, they're like home movies."
Sarah looked enthralled, respectful. "Some people take drugs to see that clearly and make those leaps of connection, and don't even get close."
Clay nodded, then looked at Adrienne in the kitchen doorway. "And some people prescribe drugs to make it stop."
Sarah looked at Adrienne, too, and burst into laughter, clapping a companionable hand against Clay's upper arm — he didn't flinch, Adrienne noticed — Sarah's unexpected and sincere delight even bringing a smile from him. The two of them, just standing there sharing what felt even worse than a private joke. Am I reading this right? she'd thought. They just met and they're ganging up on me? Turning away, finally, momentarily petulant and grumbling something about Dali being the Liberace of modern art.