"Let's take one of the cars, then," he said.
And Diane quickly said, "Let's make it mine."
They walked through the main part of the yard, Pete leaving the Coke machine keys with one of the Wilson boys and looking in to say a quick goodbye to Ted and to Frank Lowry on the way out. But Lowry had already gone home and Ted was on the phone in his office, having trouble getting himself out of a none-too-fascinating business conversation with somebody called Ellis. With the phone still to his ear Ted leaned out to look past Pete and then, having seen Diane just outside the doorway, he caught Pete's eye again and pointed to an envelope that was just out of reach in his OUT tray. Pete saw that it had Diane's name on it, and he took it outside to her.
She opened it as they walked toward the Toyota. It contained the key to the boat house, and nothing else.
"I didn't know what to say about this," she said, looking at it bleakly.
"It's only a key," Pete said.
Diane looked at it a moment longer.
"Is it?" she said, and then she slipped it, envelope and all, into one of the pockets of her jacket.
"You can get right in, the car isn't locked," she said.
Ross Aldridge was going to be home late again.
He could avoid it by leaving this conversation with Tom Amis for another day, and he was tempted to do exactly that… but the professional side of his nature told him that he ought to know better and, besides, for some time now Loren had been in the kind of mood where nothing seemed to suit her no matter what he did. Whether he came home early, or came home late; whether they went out, or stayed in and sat around. The company of a total stranger would have been better than this; a stranger would feel an obligation to be civil, at least. Loren was rarely straight out rude, but she no longer seemed to be able to answer a simple question without throwing in a dash of attitude. He didn't know what he could do about it. He wasn't a saint, he couldn't go on like this forever; for the first two years after the stillbirth he'd felt as if he was carrying her across a tightrope while she bit and clawed at him every step of the way. They'd come through that, but not to return to the relationship they'd once had. Everything was different. She was different. Sometimes he felt as if she didn't want a husband anymore, just a guilty witness to the hard time that she was having.
The sun was getting low in the sky as he turned his Metro toward the old sawmill track that would lead to the ski centre. The owners had been upgrading the road but it was only half finished, a bed of crushed stone that had already fallen into ruts from forestry traffic. As the car laboured upward he passed the raw fresh scars of trees recently tended, and great white splashes of sawdust on the forest floor. At a place where another track crossed, several large stumps had been wrapped in chains and were now waiting to be hooked onto tractors and dragged elsewhere. The car bounced hard a couple of times, jarring all the equipment in the back; he knew that he wasn't concentrating as much as he should, and he tried to focus himself on the job in hand.
They never talked about the child they'd never had. Not even to give her a name; beforehand they'd bought one of those books of names and their meanings and they'd each made their own lists, but it had all come to nothing.
So Aldridge had given her a name of his own, although he'd never said as much out loud.
The lodge announced itself with a blinding reflection from the main windows, flooding his car with the sun's late rays and forcing him to slow down and shade his eyes until he'd driven around into the shadow side of the reception block. The ride suddenly turned smooth on him. The tarmac here looked pretty new, when his eyes got over the dazzle enough for him to make it out. He stopped and sat for a minute or more, waiting for the fireworks to subside before he got out.
And what exactly was he expecting to find, here?
Nothing, he hoped.
Which was exactly what he found.
There were signs of Amis everywhere, but no Amis. There was a varnishing job in the foyer that was only half done, the brushes wrapped in polythene bags to keep them soft while the varnish itself had set hard. His old Bedford van stood out around the back, bonnet half open, keys in, battery dead. Aldridge stood in the carpenter's makeshift bedroom, looking down at the man's neat stack of second-hand paperbacks and wondering where he could be. He'd already checked on the generator in its open cage in the utility shed; switched on but stalled, the generator had been cold.
He found the bathroom that Amis had been using, a small private suite next to what would eventually be the manager's office. It had a toilet, a shower stall, a mirror, and a washbasin. On a glass shelf above the basin were a battered leather travelling case with shaving kit laid out alongside it.
This bothered him. He stood looking at the setup for a while, half aware of his own reflection in the mirror. Damn it, he ought to be able to concentrate better than this. He kept thinking of the two of them, himself and Loren, as if they were chained together and drowning. She'd tried, he couldn't pretend that she hadn't. For a few months in the winter she'd joined a housewives' guitar group, where they all wore long dresses and sang John Denver songs to deaf old people. It hadn't lasted.
There was a vehicle approaching, somewhere outside. He turned and walked through the manager's office and out into the foyer, and there he stopped. The Venetz sisters' Renault van was turning onto the forecourt, its windscreen flaring in a momentary double reflection from the window behind which he now stood. He knew the van, he'd walked past it barely half an hour before; it had the name of the business and their telephone number on its panelled sides. What did the sisters want here? Were they looking for him?
But no, neither of the sisters was driving. It was one of the waitresses, the one that always seemed to fade into the background whenever he called by. What was her name, again?
He couldn't remember. He'd heard it somewhere, perhaps that evening at the Hall; he was sure that it would come back to him. She'd stopped now, and began to reverse the van toward the cafeteria block. She seemed to be in a hurry.
Perhaps she'd overheard him. It wouldn't have been impossible.
Aldridge was now having no problems with his concentration at all.
He saw her get out of the Renault. She was small and graceful, and she was moving with purpose; no looking around to see who might be there, no calling out, no waiting to see if anyone emerged to meet her. She took a couple of grey plastic trash bags out of the Renault, and went straight in through the unsecured doors of the cafeteria block. As they swung shut behind her, the last fierce rays of the sunset began to die in the distant mountains.
Aldridge moved across the foyer. The cafeteria block was the one part of the site that he hadn't yet checked. His own car was around the side and out of sight, so the waitress wouldn't yet know that he was here; and for the next few minutes, at least, that was how he wanted it to stay.
This entire situation was probably innocent.
But he was going to make sure of it, his own way.
Here's a dream that Pete McCarthy's been having, on and off, for the past five or six weeks:
Alina is leading him through the lobby of an expensive-looking hotel. He's acutely aware of the fact that he looks out of place in his work clothes, but the people who pass them on either side don't seem to notice; they're programmed, unseeing, mere walk ons in the dreamscape.
Alina looks back over her shoulder at him.
You'll have to see this in the end, she tells him. So, let's get it over with now.