"Did she pay for his defense lawyer?"
"No. What she did was hire a lawyer to separate her assets from his, and she did that right away, so it would be a done deal before he was charged. That way, his creditors could come after her all they wanted, but get zero. This, you see, is a neat trick, because she'd never had a job. Her assets were all money he had earned, and probably even some of the money he stole. From her, Dad couldn't even get bail money."
"I'm sorry."
"The reason she could even hold on to the money was that he went along with all of it. He never contested anything. He signed every piece of paper her lawyer sent him, including things that were outright lies—that she had brought money with her when they were married. Actually, when she moved into our house, I remember she had one small suitcase, and what was in it was an outfit to wear to go on her first shopping trip."
"He probably thought if she had some money she'd take care of you and your brother and sister while he was away."
"I suppose. What actually happened was that the minute we got home from seeing him off to Lompoc, Delia sat me down at the kitchen table and had a long talk with me. Or, at least she wanted it to be long. Have you ever noticed that the worst people in the world always want you to feel sorry for them?"
"Yes," said Jane, "I have."
"Well, that was Delia. While she was working up to throwing me out of the house, she was telling me how much she'd been suffering with my dad, and how hard it was on her. She even wanted me to feel sorry for her for the pain it gave her to refuse to give him the money to save himself. It had ruined her forever, she said. Her health was shot, and she was too old now to get a good enough job to support us all. She was crying, so I could barely understand her half the time. But what she was expecting was that I would throw my arms around her and tell her I was sorry for living, and would make it up to her by leaving."
"You didn't?"
"No, so she gave me a month to get out. And that was why I ended up getting a full-time job and an apartment and lying to say I was eighteen when I was sixteen."
"Didn't you need papers to get the job?"
"I used Delia's computer at home. An eight with a little white on the upper right side turns into a six. I did that to my birth certificate and made a copy of it on the printer. A Social Security card doesn't carry a birth date, but I made a copy of that, too. In California a sixteen-year-old's driver's license has a birth date and a red stripe and a blue stripe saying when you'll turn eighteen and when you'll turn twenty-one. I scanned mine and Photoshopped it to change the years to make me eighteen. The day I started work I brought in the copies. There was no secretary—that was the job I was taking—so I put the copies in the file I made for myself. If my boss ever noticed anything odd, he must have realized I had given him proof that he wasn't the one at fault."
"Pretty effective. You'll do well to get some sleep while you can. We'll have to make a stop in a couple of hours, and I'll wake you up then."
"Okay." Christine's voice sounded small and distant now, and she fell asleep within a few minutes.
As Jane drove on along the rural road, she thought about what she had heard. What Christine had said about Sharon was true. The voice on the recorded telephone message had been Sharon's. And Christine seemed to be telling the truth about the way she'd changed dates on papers. She might have been exaggerating the story about her childhood, but probably not much if she had been on her own young enough to have to obliterate dates. There still seemed to be no lies, but there was much more she was leaving out.
4
Jane drove into the small town of Blackwater as the summer night took on its deepest silence. She slowed to twenty at the town limit, opened her window, and drove even more slowly, listening. Above the steady, gentle sound of the air going past, there was nothing. It was after two, and the town was asleep. She reached the center of town where the streets were lined with old houses that had been renovated by the latest generation of a long succession of owners. The house on her right looked about the way it must have in 1880, except that the white paint on the ornate cookie-cutter trim had been brushed on this spring. The house across from it still had the original brown sandstone foundation, but it looked to Jane as though it had just been professionally cleaned.
She decided that this set of owners must be rich, probably a wave of lawyers and brokers and executives who had retired early from jobs in New York City and come here to reproduce a vision of village life they imagined existed a hundred years ago. On Jane's previous visits, there had been an impression of gray peeled paint, overgrowth of vines, and patches of weeds. Now everything was neat and fresh and orderly. The lawns were rolled and cut, and recent plantings of bleeding hearts and currant bushes had appeared near the houses. Separate beds of heirloom roses had been cut into the side yards.
The biggest houses were all ranged around the small park in the center of town, each facing an ancient bandstand. As the road led off toward either edge of town, the houses got smaller, until they were simple, neat cottages that had been converted to stores, small restaurants, the offices of doctors, opticians, and realtors. Jane turned beyond the park, and kept going until she reached the barn-sized building that used to be the town's feed and hardware store. She pulled off the road to the gravel parking lot, and backed her car up to the rear of the building. As she got out of the car, Jane saw Christine open her eyes, blink, and focus on her. Jane whispered, "It's okay. Go back to sleep."
Jane walked across the dark, quiet street, and listened. She headed back to the center of town to the park and into the shadows of the two-hundred-year-old maples and oaks. In small upstate New York towns like Blackwater, people often left their dogs out in their yards on summer nights, and Jane knew if she came too close to the houses, she would set off a proprietary bark or two, so she stayed on the path to the bandstand. When she came under the tallest of the trees she saw the broad wings of a gliding owl carry it to a high limb and flap soundlessly once to pause in midair while the talons took hold, but then she lost sight of the owl in the foliage.
She passed the bandstand and crossed the street on the other side. She walked straight to the front of the big Civil War-era redbrick house, climbed the steps, and watched the door open in front of her. The person standing inside the dim doorway was shorter than Jane and slender, but Jane could see that there was a handgun in the right hand.
"Put it away," said a voice from somewhere deeper inside the house. "I know her. Evening, Jane."
"Hello, Stewart," said Jane. Now she could just make out the distinctive shape of Stewart Shattuck, short and wide-shouldered, standing by the staircase.
"Come on to the office."
In the dim light that leaked from beneath a closed door at the end of the hallway she followed him to the door to the left of the staircase. The office was a room that must have been, at some early date, some kind of interior storage space. It was in the center of the first floor of the house, opposite the stairwell, and it had no windows. Shattuck was nocturnal, and during his business hours no ray of light escaped his workroom to raise suspicion outside.
When he had closed the door behind them, he moved the switch on a rheostat to bring up the lights. He said, "Will you sit down, please?" He settled himself on a straight-backed chair beside the eight-foot table he used as a desk, and made a few tiny marks on a piece of paper in front of him, bending so his face was within six inches of it.