We finally made the inlet. As soon as we rounded the tip of the peninsula, we escaped the waves and the worst of the wind. We found ourselves in a narrow passage twenty yards wide and four times as long. The shoreline was all rock, but as I looked over my shoulder I could see dark pilings and a platform at the far end of the inlet.
“There’s a dock,” I said.
“I see it,” Schanno said.
“How’re you doing, Henry?” I asked.
He looked at me over his shoulder and smiled enormously. “Corcoran O’Connor,” he replied, “I have never been better.”
Unlike the more public landing on the other side of the island, the dock in the inlet had no security kiosk and no lighting. We tied up and climbed out of the dinghy. The lake water had been freezing cold, but the rain and the summer air felt warm against my skin. There was a trail of crushed rock leading into the trees. We could see the lights of the great house glimmering through the sway of branches.
“Lead on, Macduff,” Schanno said.
Deep in the cover of the pine trees, everything was dark enough that a flashlight would have helped, but it would also have given us away. We walked carefully, and as we approached the clearing, we slowed to a creep. We stopped before we broke from the woods. I took the binoculars from my knapsack.
The mansion stood at the center of the clearing. Lights were on inside, on both the first and second floors, but in different wings. Curtains blocked any view of the interior. On the far side of the clearing was what looked like a guesthouse. Lights were on there, too, but the shades were up and the curtains open. Through the windows of the guesthouse, I saw movement, shapes crossing through the light inside. I could see framed pictures on a wall and the polished edge of a baby grand piano. To someone it was home. I studied the big windows of the mansion. They gave away nothing. As I watched, the light went out in one of the second-floor rooms and, a few moments later, the curtain of another flared as the light behind it came on. It didn’t stay on long. A minute later, a light flipped on in another room farther down the hall. Upstairs in the great house, someone was pacing restlessly.
“The police were wrong,” I said. “He’s home.”
“What now?” Schanno asked.
I lowered the binoculars. “You hear any dogs?”
“Just the wind.”
“I want to get around to the other side, see who’s in the guesthouse. You stay here with Henry, okay?”
“What if they spot you?”
“I’ll do what I can to distract and delay them while you see if you can get Henry into Wellington’s house.”
Schanno shook his head. “Better if I do the reconnaissance and you stay with Henry.”
“Why?”
“You’ve been inside Wellington’s place. If you have to move quickly, you have a better idea of the layout. And if I get caught by these guys, what are they going to do? Call the cops? Big deal. You, they could pull that brand-new license of yours.”
What could I say? He made sense.
“I’ll work around the perimeter, keeping to the trees in case they’ve got cameras,” he said. “Be patient. This could take a while.”
I handed him the binoculars. “Morrissey was a killer. I don’t know about these guys, but you be careful, understand?”
“If it’s Benning and Dougherty, Pollard claims they’re a nice couple. They catch me, we’ll talk drapes.”
“I mean it.”
“I know you do.”
He hung the binoculars around his neck and turned to start away.
“Thanks, Wally.”
He grinned at me. “You kidding? I’m having the time of my life.”
Henry and I stood in the steady rain watching Schanno vanish among the shifting pines. Water dripped from my eyebrows and the end of my nose. My clothes were soaked. The trees blunted the wind, which was helpful. If the night hadn’t been so warm, we’d have been in trouble.
“You okay, Henry?”
“I have been wet before, Corcoran O’Connor.”
His eyes were on the house. Only fifty yards and the stone wall of the mansion separated him from his son. I wondered how he felt watching the lights go on and off, knowing his son was walking those empty corridors alone. I tried to imagine Wellington, the kind of loneliness that went along with the kind of life he’d made for himself. It left me feeling suffocated.
Schanno returned in less than fifteen minutes.
“Two men,” he said. “One tall, thin, blond. The other stocky, dark. Both midthirties.”
“Benning and Dougherty,” I said. “What were they doing?”
“Watching television, eating popcorn. Very domestic.”
“See any surveillance monitors?”
“Nothing.”
I wiped rainwater from my eyes. “For a man fanatical about his privacy, Wellington’s awfully slack with security.”
“He’s been hiding out here for six years,” Schanno said. “Maybe at some point, rigorous security no longer became necessary. He’s established a reputation. Substitutes virtual dogs for real dogs. Pares down his security force to a gay couple who don’t mind the isolation. Saves a lot of money that way.”
“And with a greeting committee like Morrissey, not many people want to take the chance of coming here unannounced. It fits, but…” I shook my head.
“You don’t like the feel of it?”
“Do you?”
“Why don’t we get inside and ask the man himself. Got a plan for how to do that?”
As a matter fact, I did.
FORTY
Several red maples had been planted in the clearing long ago, probably to provide shade for the mansion. They were magnificent things that in the fall would be on fire. Now they were thick with dark green summer leaves, and their wet branches flailed in the wind.
Schanno and Meloux followed me to the nearest tree.
“I need to cut a limb,” I said, pointing up at the wealth of branches above us. “Give me a boost, Wally.”
“Give you a boost?”
“You know.” I intertwined my fingers and made a stirrup.
“How about you do the boosting for me?” he suggested.
Meloux said, “You could both lift me. A sparrow weighs more.”
“You sure you’d be okay climbing this tree, Henry?”
He looked at me as if I was a hopeless idiot. “I am old, not feeble. You treat me like thin ice that will break. I will not break, Corcoran O’Connor.”
“All right, Henry.”
I took the sheathed knife from the knapsack and handed it to him.
“We need a branch strong enough to break a window. And it can’t look as if it’s been cut from the tree. It needs to look like the wind tore it loose.”
“I understand,” the old man said.
We stirruped our hands, Schanno and I, and lifted Meloux so that he could grasp the lower branches and pull himself into the maple. He spent a few minutes lost in the foliage, then a good stout branch, thick as my wrist, dropped to the ground.
“Will that do?” he called.
“Great, Henry. Come on down.”
We helped him from the tree. He handed me the knife. I put it in the knapsack and gave the little pack to Schanno.
“You two get back to the cover of the pines,” I told them. “I’ll join you in a minute.”
They slipped out of the clearing and I turned to the house. I knew the window I wanted: ground floor, above the patio in back, out of sight of the guesthouse. It was odd that the security on the estate was so lax, but I couldn’t believe that there wouldn’t be some sort of security system for the house itself. We’d see.
The patio was large and edged with a knee-high stone wall. There were stone benches and a couple of flower beds of irregular shape. The beds had been long in need of tending. I stepped over the wall and came at the window quickly with the “broken” end of the branch aimed at the center of the frame. The glass shattered and an alarm sounded inside. I left the branch stuck in the window among the shards of glass that jutted out from the frame and I leaped over the wall. As I hightailed it toward the pines, floodlights kicked on, illuminating the outside of the house in a blaze of white. Inside the mansion, all the lights seemed to come on, too, as if the whole household had been roused by the intrusion. From the direction of the guesthouse came the vicious barking of a pack of dogs.