"I'm not pretending anything."
She nodded, but I had the feeling it wasn't because she agreed with me. "I think you did it for the same reason you didn't tell me about it or tell me who the client is."
"What reason is that?"
Her eyes confronted mine. Her look was hard under the soft lamplight, but there was more than anger in it.
"Caring about you," she said, "is a big problem for me."
I reached onto the side table for a cigarette. "I'm not sure what that means, and I don't know how to answer it."
"Before," she said, "when we just worked together, just sometimes, that was easy. Now, if we're supposed to be partners and .. . and maybe whatever, then I can't do it unless you really mean it too."
"You think this has to do with that?"
"I know it does. You're used to working alone. You took a case up here and didn't tell me about it because you're not so sure being partners is a good idea. Maybe it's not, but if it isn't, then I can tell you right now that all that other stuff you've been saying you wanted all these years is a worse one."
I put my coffee mug down on the side table without looking at it. I didn't have to look; years of sitting in this chair, reading, smoking, listening to music, had given me the measure of that table, of this room and everything in it.
"I don't know," I told Lydia. "If that's what I did I didn't mean to do it."
"You didn't mean to, or you meant to but you just didn't know you did?"
Briefly, I met her eyes, then looked beyond them to the shadows gathering on the porch I'd built, the dusk starting its business of disputing the daylight's confident disposition of the facts of time, depth, distance.
"I don't know," I said again.
"Well," she said, "you'd better figure it out. Because I'm not going down this road if this is what's there. I can still help it. So think about it."
We sat in silence for a while, no sound but the crackle of logs in the stove, the hiss of a match as I lit another cigarette when the first was gone. I was beginning to think bourbon would have been a better idea than coffee when Lydia spoke again.
"Okay." She surprised me with a grin. "Anyway, you have this case and I'm here. So tell me about it."
I told her. I went through everything that had happened since Monday, everything I thought had happened before. I told her what I was sure of and what I wasn't, what I was worried might be coming next. We talked the way we always talked, going back, forward, back again. I gave her everything, even things I didn't understand.
She sipped her tea, listened, asked a few careful questions. When I had said all I had to say she was quiet; then she asked, "These people are very important to you, aren't they?"
"Tony and Jimmy ..." I began. Then I didn't know anything else to say besides "Yes."
"And Eve Colgate, too."
"Eve, too."
"And this place." Her eyes moved over the room, stared into the woods, dark now beyond the windowpanes, then came back to me. "Bill, can he really do that? Have your land condemned?"
I looked into the murky depths of my coffee, answered, "I'm sure he can."
"Is it worth it?"
I looked up, met her eyes. "Jimmy didn't kill Wally Gould."
"If you did what Sanderson wants," she said, "Jimmy would get arrested, but your land would be safe, and if he's innocent—"
"It wouldn't matter. Between Brinkman and Grice, Jimmy'd be sent up for life, if he lived long enough."
"So it's worth it?"
"It's got to be."
In the silence I could hear the wind moving in the trees around the cabin, the whispering, the rustling and creaking as familiar to me as my own breathing, my own bones.
Lydia stood, crossed the room. She sat on the arm of my chair, kissed my bruised cheek very gently. Freesia and citrus mingled in the cool air.
"Okay," she said. "Just making sure." Her face grew serious. "I just hope you're not—missing something," she said. "Because of how you want things to come out."
"That's one of the reasons I asked you to come. I wanted someone I could trust, someone who's detached."
"Well," she said doubtfully, "detached hasn't ever been my best thing."
"You'll be fine. And besides being detached," I said, "you have that beautiful, anonymous, rented car. I have plans for that."
"My car," she said, standing. She clipped her gun to her belt. "I drive."
"Always. Besides," I added casually, "it's probably not a stick shift. I bet it wouldn't be any fun anyway."
"Forget it. I drive."
So she drove, up my driveway and on to 30, north under the bare winter trees spread against the dark sky.
Our first stop was the 7-Eleven, where we picked up cigarettes, beer, and a chicken parmesan hero. The clerk stared at Lydia as though she were a black-petalled orchid that had sprung up in the daisy patch. Back in the car, Lydia grinned, said, "Not many Asians up here, huh?"
"Especially in black leather."
"You think I'm too downtown?"
"I think you're adorable."
"Seriously, Bill. Will it be a problem? That I can't blend?"
I shook my head. "Outsiders don't blend here, no matter what they look like. I've been coming here for eighteen years; once I lived here through the fall and winter into the spring. I'm still a weekender. Brinkman calls me city boy.'"
"When did you do that?"
"What?"
"Live here."
I lit a cigarette, found the ashtray in the unfamiliar dash. "Seven years ago."
Lydia said, "Mmm." I didn't say anything.
She rolled down her window. The wind blew her silky hair across her forehead. She combed it back with her fingers.
When the first cigarette was gone I pulled out another.
"If it makes you that crazy," Lydia said, "you can drive."
"Do all Chinese read minds?" I pushed the cigarette back in the pack.
"Only me and my mother."
"I love your driving. Hear that, Mrs. Chin? I love your daughter's driving. Turn here."
We had reached the steep hardscrabble road. We bounced up it, emerged from the trees onto the flat, rock- strewn plain.
"We're here," I said.
Tonight there was a moon. The ridge was clearly visible, towering on the other side of the great pit, in whose glassy surface stars glittered.
"God," Lydia said, staring. "Where are we, Mars?"
"It's an abandoned quarry pit. The one I told you about, where Jimmy dropped the cars."
A truck went by on the ridge road, its headlights passing behind trees a hundred yards above where we sat.
"That's weird," she said.
"There's a road up there, but you can't get here from it, except on foot. Stay in the car a minute."
I got out, moved away from the car. The shack was dark and silent. "Jimmy!" I shouted, "It's Bill. I have a friend with me. I need to talk to you."
A short silence. Then from behind me, some distance away, Jimmy's voice, hoarse and loud: "Who's with you?"
I turned. There was a great mound of jagged rock, with smaller mounds piled at its feet like the ritual remnants of some brutal civilization. Nothing moved. I called, "No one you know. Another PI." I motioned Lydia out of the car. She stepped out cautiously, her jacket unzipped but her hands empty.
Scraping sounds came from the mound. The moon covered everything with a silver light that had no dimension. The scraping stopped, and Jimmy, rifle in one hand, jumped from a rock that jutted sharply from the mound's face.
"Man, where've you been?" he demanded. His face was haggard, sleepless. His jumpy eyes flashed from Lydia to me. "Where's your car?"
"My car's too obvious. I wanted to come up here in something Brinkman wasn't looking for."
He eyed Lydia again.
"This is Lydia Chin," I told him. "We work together sometimes, in the city. She's okay."
"Thanks," said Lydia dryly.
We followed Jimmy into the shack. He lit the wobbly kerosene lamp. His clothes stank of sweat and smoke; there was a pile of cigarette butts on the table.
Jimmy shifted uneasily.
"You scared the shit out of me."