Sandy is beside him, saying nothing.
"I've told you," Wayne says. "We can't come home. We're with her, now."
FORTY
It was getting late into the evening. Pete and Diane went to the restaurant, to see if Alina would be there. She wasn't, but Angelica explained how she'd borrowed the van and gone home. Diane glanced at Pete, and Pete said nothing. He hadn't seen Alina looking ill or unhealthy for some time, now; not since the evening of the big party. Then, she'd seemed to be struggling to hold herself together. After that night, it had never been an issue again.
And then, pressing them to complete secrecy — as she'd already pressed five other people so far in the evening — Angelica told them about Ross Aldridge's sensational new theory about the serial killer who had set up covert operations in the valley. Set up around the same time that Tom Amis had put in an appearance, she hinted heavily, and added that Aldridge had gone to interview him.
Again, Diane glanced at Pete.
Again, Pete said nothing.
Their next stop was at the yard for Pete to pick up his car; at this hour there shouldn't have been much of anything going on, just boat owners drifting in and out along the lakeside boardwalk or maybe using the laundromat or the vending machines. But the workshop lights were on, and Frank Lowry's car was still outside; for Lowry to stick around so late was pretty well unprecedented, and so Pete asked Diane to wait for a couple of minutes while he looked in to see if there was any problem.
"Ted's over at the marina," Lowry told him. "But don't expect him to make a lot of sense."
"What do you mean?"
"Don't ask me. I've given up trying to make him out. You're his friend, you take over. Something's wrong with him, and I'm sick of asking him what."
Pete went out between the workshop and the showroom, through an enclosed space that was crowded with big cruisers being stored out of the water. They'd been raised up on Valvoline drums and made secure with planks and wedges. They were crammed close together with a dozen well-used car batteries in the shelter under each of them, and the big hulls dwarfed anybody who walked through. He couldn't help feeling a little spooked. In daylight, he'd never given it a second thought.
Or in darkness, before tonight.
He could see Ted's lights out on the rough ground behind the house. They were the old incandescent gas-powered lamps with big reflectors that were hardly ever used, except in the winter time when they were handy for heating up the workshop. This part of the yard had always been something of a dumping ground for the relics of the trade — spare hulls and old skiffs, stacks of timber, cracked and useless celluloid windscreens, duckboarding… even an entire wooden building complete with windows, dismantled into sections and stacked for so long that they'd gone mossy and rotten. The lights were almost at the end of the property, where a row of fence posts and wire marched out into deep water to mark the boundary between the yard and the adjacent woodland.
The old dry dock, Pete realised as he drew nearer. The reflectors on the lights were angled into it.
All that Pete could see was the top of a ladder as he picked his way over the uncertain ground, but when he called Ted's name he saw the ladder move after a moment's delay. Ted appeared a few seconds later, clambering out of the dock as Pete approached. He stood looking flushed, slightly breathless, and — was Pete imagining this? — just a little wild.
"Ted," he said. "You've got Frank so worried, he won't go home. What's going on?"
"Nothing. I've told him as much."
Pete was going to take a look over into the dock, but Ted was somehow blocking his way. It didn't look deliberate.
Pete said, "So, what are you doing?"
"Cleaning it out, trying to free up the gear. There's thirty years of seepage and slime in there, but it's basically sound."
"Yeah, but at this hour…"
"When else?" Ted said. "What am I going to do, sit in the house and think? No thanks. It's difficult enough. Tell Frank to stop being such an old woman and get himself home. And you do the same."
"Are you sure you're all right?"
"I'm all right. So get on with your life. Go."
So Pete went. He glanced back once, in time to see Ted disappearing down the ladder into his pit. Ted didn't wave, or even look at Pete.
Back in the workshop, he reported the drift of the brief conversation to Frank Lowry. "He looks a bit tired," Pete said. "But nothing weird."
"He was down in that old dock, right?"
"Yeah."
"Except that he isn't working on it. He's taken an old chair down and set it on a flat piece of board to stop the legs sinking in. He just sits there, like he's waiting for something to happen."
"Like what?"
"Try asking him," Lowry said darkly, "and see what you get."
There seemed to be nothing more that he could do at the yard. So Pete drove home in his own car, and Diane followed in the pickup. He could see in the mirror that it was a bumpy climb for her. The Zodiac had put down ruts over the months, and the Toyota didn't fit them. They both had to brake hard when a rabbit dashed out into the lights and froze, something that Pete had found to be a regular hazard when night-driving along this stretch. He felt as if his life had begun to spin so fast that it was in danger of tearing itself apart. He felt as if he'd become accountable for responsibilities that he wasn't even aware of. He felt as if he was beginning a long slide into one of his own nightmares
And when they finally reached the old wooden cottage, they found it closed-down and dark.
"She's not home," Pete said.
"She could be sleeping."
"I don't think so. The van would be here. We'll have to wait for her. Can you do that with me?"
"Of course," Diane said.
They got out of the pickup. The porch steps creaked as they climbed them.
She said, "Let's be careful anyway."
"She once said that she wouldn't ever want to hurt me. This could be her chance to prove it."
He went inside, and switched on the hall light. Within moments there were a couple of craneflies and a moth dancing around the shade, lured in from the darkness outside. Pete led the way down to Alina's room. Her door was slightly ajar, no light inside. He gave the door a push, so that it swung inward.
A single, metallic click.
"If you were shorter and better looking," a man's voice said, "I'd have blown your head off."
FORTY-ONE
Alina's bedside reading lamp came on, revealing Ross Aldridge in the act of reaching across for the switch. He was in a chair that had been positioned so that it faced the door square-on, and the lamp was beside him. His free hand held a rock steady shotgun that was pointing directly at Pete.
Pete said, "Is this how the police say welcome home?"
Aldridge didn't smile. He didn't show any inclination to lower the shotgun, either; it was as if he considered himself to be in a strange land where there are no certain allies.
He said, "Where is she?"
"Gone, by the look of it."
"Until when?"
A good question, and one that Pete wouldn't have minded the answer to; but then he found it in a single glance around.
"Quite possibly for good." He pointed toward the empty dressing-table. Aldridge didn't even move his eyes to follow. "Her scrapbook of home, it isn't there. It's the dearest thing she owns. It's just about the only thing she owns. She wouldn't be without it."
Diane moved into the room behind him now, as Aldridge said, "So the next question is, why?"
"I think the next question ought to be what do you think you're doing, sitting here in my house with a loaded gun ready to blast anyone who walks in. Or is that the latest trend in rural policing?"