"No, it wasn't," she said. "Good for us."
He sat up, looked at the clock, and then stood and put his arms around her. "I'd better brush my teeth before I kiss you." He went into the bathroom, and as she straightened the bed she heard the hum of his electric toothbrush, then the buzz of his razor.
As she had each morning since her return, she looked out the upstairs window at the road outside, trying to detect any change since the night before. Then she went downstairs and walked out toward the end of the driveway to pick up the morning newspaper. She could hear faraway sounds—robins on the lawns today and crows in the big trees of the McKinnon yard, and others calling to one another along the road. Jane pretended to look at nothing, but she used the walk down the long driveway to scan the neighborhood for unfamiliar vehicles and people who were out of place. There was nothing to disturb her. She stepped back in through the kitchen entrance and locked the door.
Carey was standing beside the kitchen table, and she could see the papers in his hand were the airline tickets she had printed. He looked troubled, but when he saw her he erased the expression and turned to hand them to her. "You're leaving today?"
"I was going to talk to you about it after you were awake, but you were a lot faster coming down than I thought you'd be. What I have to do will take one day, but it'll take me a day to fly there and at least two to make it back home. I'll be back here on Saturday, probably."
"Why do you have to go at all?"
"I don't want to. It's just something I have to do."
"You won't tell me more than that?"
"It wouldn't make anybody safer—you, me, the girl."
"Look, I don't want to start a fight with you, especially just before you go away. But maybe you ought to spend some time asking yourself why you don't trust me."
She put her arms around him and kept them there, rocking slightly. "You know I trust you. We went through this years ago, and I thought you understood. I've made promises. One was that I wouldn't tell anyone where this person is or what I'm doing for her. Not that I'd only tell my husband."
"Getting married is a promise, too," he said. "There's not supposed to be anybody who knows more than you tell me."
"There isn't," she said. "I'm sorry, Carey. Right now just isn't a good time for this conversation. When this trip is over, we can talk. Please, just don't make this harder."
Carey studied her for a second, then relented. "Just make it back here safe, and get this whole thing finished."
"I will." She released him, then stepped back to look at him. "What do you want for breakfast?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"I'm not hungry right now. I'll get something at the hospital later."
"I love you," she said, and kissed him on the cheek, then picked up the carton of eggs and put it back in the refrigerator. "I love you" had always struck her as a foolish, inadequate thing to say, but it was exactly what she meant in exactly the way she had said it. She remembered times, years ago, when she had called him from various places around the country, only daring to talk on a pay phone for a minute or two. In her memory it was always night, and always raining. She wouldn't be able to tell him where she was because she was afraid his phone would be tapped or he would forget and mention the name of the place to someone else. He would be impatient for her to come home, and she would say, "I love you," and what it meant was "I'm sorry." And then when it was time to hang up she would say "I love you" again, and wait, holding her breath and listening, because it meant "Do you still love me?" In the past five years, since she had quit going away, the meaning had always been happy and sure. Maybe five years of that was as good as a life. It was more of a life than many people had, and she felt lucky to have had it. By this time tomorrow she could be dead.
15
After Carey had left for work she completed the rest of her preparations for her flight. Seeing Ketter in Kennedy Airport had reminded Jane that for her, airports were dangerous places. All she could do was alter her appearance enough so that if she was not face-to-face with an enemy, he might not recognize her immediately. This time she wore tinted glasses to hide her eyes, a cashmere sweater that softened and rounded the thin, sinewy quality of her arms and shoulders, an understated pendant with a single diamond, and a skirt. As soon as she had gone through security in the Buffalo airport and shown her driver's license for the last time, she hid her black hair under a blond wig. She flew to the US Airways hub in Pittsburgh and then boarded her plane to Santa Barbara without ever taking her eyes off the people around her.
Her plane turned and lowered above the ocean off Santa Barbara while the sun still hung well above the blue horizon line. The plane hit the runway and rolled to the terminal, and the sky had a late-afternoon golden glow. Jane stepped off the plane quickly with her sunglasses on and her carry-on bag over her shoulder, scanning the faces of the people in the airport, then went to the car rental to claim the car she had reserved.
She had asked for a luxury car, and when she got to the rental area she found a Cadillac waiting for her. She had decided she wanted something big and overpowered for the drive up the coast. Lompoc was about an hour north of Santa Barbara, and if something went wrong she didn't want to be easy to outrun or bump off the road. She got into the car and drove out Sandspit Road to Ward Memorial Boulevard, a straight strip of concrete over the protected wetland at Goleta Beach, then turned onto Interstate 101 heading north away from Santa Barbara. After a few minutes, when the traffic thinned and cars were far apart, she pulled off the blond wig and shook out her hair.
She looked in the rearview mirror at the mountains that rose abruptly like a wall above Santa Barbara. She had always liked Santa Barbara in the old days because it was beautiful and warm, a city of white buildings with red tile roofs built between a mountain range and a white sand beach. Now it had become a city of ghosts.
Jane could remember the night when she had broken into the apartment on Ocean View Avenue where Harry Kemple had been living for years as Harry Shaw, the name she had given him. Before she got there, the police had already spent hours in Harry's place, and they had left greasy black fingerprint dust all over the windows, the doorknobs, the smooth surface of the table in the kitchen. Harry's body had been taken away, but there was a huge reddish brown stain in the dirty shag carpet where Harry had bled out after his throat was cut. His heart must have taken a long time to stop, to pump out that much blood.
Harry was the only runner Jane had ever had who had been caught, and he had died because of her. His killer had fooled her into believing he was a friend of Harry's who needed help, so she had brought him to Vancouver to the shop of Lewis Feng, the man who had made Harry's identification papers. Days later, when Jane had learned Lewis Feng was dead, she had rushed to reach Harry, but she arrived too late. Since then, Harry Kemple had sometimes visited Jane in her dreams.
Santa Barbara wasn't the best place for Jane to stay the night, anyway. It was too close to Los Angeles, and it had become crowded over the past few years. There were too many people from other places on the street, and any of them might be one of the people who hated her, and might see her face before she saw theirs. The best place to stop would be one of the smaller towns to the north—Buellton, or Solvang, or even Lompoc—but when Jane reached them she kept driving.
She chose Santa Maria. Since she had last been there Santa Maria had begun to evolve from a largely blue-collar ranch area to an overflow community for Santa Barbara. The open spaces looked like vanity ranches where rich people rode expensive horses. She selected a motel off the interstate and checked in for the night. The room was small and thin-walled, and there was a sliding pocket door to the bathroom that kept going off its track, but it was adequate and she was tired.