“It is. From Romeo and Juliet, I think.”
“Romeo and Juliet. Oh, fine.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“Something about the package … did Amy and I like our presents.”
“Bastard. You did remember to switch tapes?”
“Tapes? What tapes?”
“In your answering machine. To preserve what he said.”
“It wasn't a message. I talked to him.”
“Talked to— I thought we agreed to let all calls go on tape. Why did you pick up?”
“I don't know. I was standing right there when the phone rang and I … habit, impulse, I don't know.”
“You didn't provoke him, argue with him?”
“No. I didn't say anything, I just listened.”
“You did record it?”
“I didn't have time. The cassette recorder was in my purse in the other room—”
“Cecca, what he said was the kind of evidence we need—”
“What good would it have done us? Don't you understand? He's planning to murder Amy and me. Unless we find out who he is, he'll kill us the way he killed Katy—”
“Keep your voice down, for God's sake. You're jumping to conclusions again.”
“I'm not. Not this time. And you know it.”
No answer.
“Dix, you know it. Stop pretending our lives aren't in danger!”
He ran a hand roughly over his face, pulled it down, and looked at it as if he expected to find it stained. “All right,” he said.
“We've got to do something.”
“What? What can we do?”
“Confront Louise Kanvitz, that's what.”
“Beg her to tell the truth about Katy?”
“Pay her. She'd take money.”
“Suppose she won't?”
“Force it out of her then.”
“Threaten her? Beat her up?”
“If that's what it takes, yes!”
“We're not thugs, Cecca. Besides, she could have us arrested, put in jail—”
“I don't care about that. At least we'd have his name.”
“If she really does know it.”
“She knows. I tell you, she knows—”
“Who knows what?”
Owen's voice, startling them both. Owen had come around the corner and was standing there, head cocked quizzically, half smiling at them. Damn you, Owen! she thought fiercely. Are you the one? Is that why you won't leave me alone?
“Did I interrupt something?” he asked.
Dix said, “No, we were just chatting.”
“Sounded pretty intense to me.”
“It wasn't intense,” Cecca said, “it was just a conversation. Can't I talk to somebody without you butting in?”
The words stunned him. She saw the hurt reshape his expression and didn't care; for all she knew he was the one. “Hey, I wasn't butting in,” he said. His voice had stiffened a little. “I came looking for you because Beth asked me to. She wants some help in the kitchen.”
“Tell her I'll be right there.”
Owen glanced at Dix, gave Cecca a longer, hurt look, and went away without saying anything else.
Dix said slowly, “Maybe we'd better not stay for dinner. This isn't the place for either of us tonight.”
“We can't leave now. How would it look to the rest of them?”
“You go, then. I'll make excuses—”
“No. We'll both stay. We'll get through this and then we'll go somewhere and talk, make a decision.”
He nodded. “You'll be okay?”
“I won't lose it and start hurling accusations, if that's what you mean. You go ahead. I'll be along in a minute.”
Alone on the path, she stood composing herself. She was on a ragged edge and it wasn't like her. She didn't fall apart in a crisis. Chet … yes, okay, she'd gone through a crumbly period when he walked out, but she'd still held herself and her life together, and come out of the divorce more or less whole. It was that this thing, this madness, was so foreign to anything in her experience. You couldn't adjust to it because it kept changing, shifting, so you couldn't get a grasp on any of it. The not knowing why, the gathering certainty that he was probably a man you knew well and liked and trusted … those were the things that made it so unbalancing.
But I can handle it, she thought. I am going to handle it. So is Dix. So is Amy. We'll be all right. We will.
It won't be us who ends up getting burned.
For a while Dix felt oddly detached, an almost schizoid detachment, as if only part of him were still there in Jerry's backyard. The other part … running around in a cage somewhere, rattling the bars, looking for a way out. Bits and pieces of conversation bounced off his mind without quite registering: food, baseball, taxes, local politics, jokes, old movies versus new movies, a kind of gibberish labeled the power of positive dreaming. He had no appetite, had to force down his first few bites of steak, but when dinner was over he saw with surprise that his plate was empty except for the steakbone and a few bites of pasta salad, as if somebody else had cleaned it for him when he wasn't looking. When Jerry asked him what he thought of the alder and mesquite combination, he said, “Wonderful, just wonderful,” without realizing until minutes later what the question related to.
Cecca, he noticed, ate almost nothing. Otherwise she seemed to be holding up better than he was, making more of an effort to join in. Trying too hard, but nobody noticed because they were also trying too hard—to recapture the old, easy, relaxed camaraderie of good friends enjoying each other's company. It was not he who was preventing it from happening; it was the specter of Katy. The sudden death of one of the flock was a reminder, consciously or subconsciously, of their own mortality. For all but one of them, maybe.
They stayed outside after they finished eating and the remains were cleared away. They had more drinks, they talked, they watched the sun sink lower in the west and turn the sky a streaky gold, then a darkening pink. And a slow change came over Dix. The feelings of detachment and fragmentation went away; he grew sharply aware of what was being said and done around him, of what was in his own mind. Tension seemed to seep out of him, leaving a kind of shaky peace—the kind that follows a crisis point reached and overcome. Mr. Mediocrity was no longer looking for a way out.
The breeze had picked up, turned the coming night as chilly as he had anticipated earlier; they all put on sweaters and jackets. The last of the sunset colors disappeared into smoky gray, and when dusk became dark, the wind sharpened again. Somebody said, “Brr, it's cold out here.” Jerry suggested they go inside, have some coffee, maybe a little dessert. Owen, still nursing his bruised feelings, said he'd pass, he had some film to develop and he'd better get on home. It was like a door being suddenly opened to reveal an escape route: The others made their own excuses as they trooped inside. Within ten minutes, despite Jerry's mild protests, the party was over—hours earlier than it would have been in the old days.
Dix's car was parked just ahead of Cecca's, so it was natural enough for him to walk her to the door of her station wagon. They were alone there, out of the earshot of any of the others. As she groped in her purse for her keys, he whispered, “You were right. We're not going to sit around and wait for something else to happen. We're going to put an end to it.”
She looked up at him, her face silver and shadow in the early moonlight.
“Tomorrow morning we'll go see Louise Kanvitz and find out what she knows. One way or another.”
THIRTEEN
It was going to be another beautiful night.
Eileen went out for her evening walk earlier than usual, right after they got back from Lakeport, leaving Ted and the boys to play Monopoly. This was their last night at the cabin—the end of another vacation, home tomorrow afternoon, school and dental office and hospital and the rest of the familiar grind on Tuesday—and she wanted to savor the sunset, the lake view, the coolness, the solitude.