I can't stay here, to wait for him. I can't kill this woman, so I can't permit her to know I'm here.
She uses the patio door, or she has in the past, the same door I just came in by. When she enters, which way will she go?
Either the kitchen, I think, or the downstairs bathroom, which means through the dining room and the smaller sitting room and the hall, not through the large living room facing the front of the house. So I move into the living room, and crouch behind the sofa that stands in the middle of that large space. It looks toward the stone fireplace, with its back to the large bow window showing front lawn and the driveway that recedes downward toward the invisible main road. Crouched here, behind the sofa, eight feet from that window, I'm fully exposed to anyone out front, but why would anyone be out front?
I hear her enter, as the door glides open, and then shut. I hear the final click as she puts the shillelagh down, its tip striking the polished wood floor.
I crouch behind the sofa. My right hand grasps the Luger in my raincoat pocket. I try to remember to keep my finger away from the trigger, afraid I'll spastically shoot when I don't want to, probably wounding myself, certainly alerting her, surely destroying everything I've done so far.
I hear the duller tocks of her shoes as she crosses the dining room. This way, or the other?
The other. Across the smaller sitting room, into the hall, and into the bathroom. Yes, a brisk walk in the woods does exercise the bladder, doesn't it, and that's why the walk was cut short. And she shuts the bathroom door, even though she's alone in the house, as her mother taught her.
I rise up, behind the sofa, and take my right hand out of my pocket, away from the Luger. My fingers are stiff, like arthritis. Briskly, I cross the living room and the dining room. As silently as possible, I slide open the door, exit, slide it shut. I trot across the lawn, wanting to be well off her property before she's done in the bathroom, because next she'll surely go on to the kitchen, and from the kitchen windows over the sink she'll have a full view of this entire lawn.
The gate. I unhook it, step through, hook it. Without a backward glance, I stride up the path, almost as purposeful as she is.
On the walk back, I eat both apples.
28
About three miles before the turnoff to Scantic River Road, still inside Connecticut, there's a gas station with an outside pay phone on a stick. That's where I stop to make my call, glad to see this phone has the same exchange as GRB's. Local calls disappear more readily.
I'm phoning GRB's house because I had a sudden revelation last night. So many marriages fall into trouble among the downsized; not just mine and Marjorie's. What if GRB and his wife have split up? What if he's living somewhere else, all the time I'm crouched in the woods behind his house, waiting for him?
Or, another possibility. What if he's taken one of those time-serving jobs, say, assistant manager at the local supermarket, then he'll never be home during the day. For whatever reason, and there must be one, he hasn't been home the two days I've watched the place. So it's time to find out what the situation is.
Nine-forty. She won't have left for her walk yet. I dial the number from GRB's resume, and she answers on the second ring: "Blackstone residence." She sounds efficient but impersonal, as though she's chief of staff there, not the lady of the house.
I say, "Garrett Blackstone, please."
"He's not in at the moment, may I say who's calling?"
"It's an old friend from the papermill days," I say. "Is there any way I can get in touch with him?"
"Well, he's at work right now," she says. She sounds a bit doubtful.
I say, "Could I call him there?" I need to know where the man is, dammit.
"I'm not sure," she says, not wanting to offend an old friend of her husband's, but troubled by something. "He's just started there," she explains, "and he might not want outside calls right now."
"Oh, it's a job he likes?"
"It's a wonderful job," she says, and all at once the restraint gives way, and she bubbles over, saying, "It's just the job he wanted!"
Arcadia! The son of a bitch got my job, I'll kill him today, I'll kill him in an hour! Gripping the phone so tight my hand is cramping, but unable to relax, I say, "Oh? Back at a paper mill?"
"Yes! Willis and Kendall, do you know them?"
Five hundred pounds drops away from my body. I could dance. I say, "The tin can labels!"
"That's right! That's just the job, do you work there, too?"
"Oh, that's great," I say, and I truly mean it. "That's wonderful. Mrs. — Mrs. Blackstone, please give your husband my, my strongest congratulations. Tell him I'm delighted for him. Oh, tell him I'm delighted."
"Who should I say—"
I hang up, and float back to the Voyager. I couldn't be happier if I had a job myself. It's true; well, almost true. But he's at work, he's in a position, he's where he wants to be!
By God, I don't have to kill him.
Oh, that's great, that's great. Starting the Voyager, making the U-turn, I'm grinning from ear to ear.
As the miles go by, as I drive closer and closer to home, the weight slowly settles down on top of me. Two to go.
29
Saturday morning. I'm in my office, and I've just taken out of the file drawer the last resume, I'm just reaching for the road atlas, when Marjorie knocks on the door. I place the road atlas on top of the resume, and say, "Yes?"
She opens the door. She looks worried, and a bit confused. She says, "Burke, there's a policeman here. He wants to talk to you. A detective."
Terror closes my esophagus. I'm caught, I know it, and everything was in vain. And I was so close. Standing, trying to find a reaction I can share with Marjorie, I say, "Billy? Is it something about Billy?"
"I don't think so," she says. "I don't know what it is, Burke. He's in the living room."
"All right."
I step into the hall. The Voyager is closer the other way than the living room is this way. But there's no point in that. I walk down the hall, while Marjorie goes back to whatever she was doing.
He's in the living room, a slender young guy in a gray suit, on his feet, facing the sofa as he smiles at the framed print that hangs above it. It's a Winslow Homer seascape, very turbulent, and I don't know why we have it. Marjorie saw it for sale years ago, at a frame shop, and bought it, with some embarrassment. "I just love it," she told me. "I don't really like prints, but we'll never have a real Winslow Homer. Is it all right, Burke?"
Of course I told her it was all right, and I drove the nail into the wall and hung the framed print, and it reminds me that other people are mysterious, no matter how much we get to know them. I will never understand why that picture spoke to Marjorie, that picture more than any other, but it's all right; that's the lesson. The surface of the print is flat, it can't hide what it is, a print and not a painting, but the subject is this roiling sea, over vast unknowable depths. That's what we all are for one another, flat surfaces on which some turbulence can be seen, but unknowable depths. It doesn't matter that I'll never know Marjorie very deeply; I know her enough to know I love her, and that's enough.
And would I like her to know my depths?