Long Shot (16 page)

“Well, something
like
it, then,” she said, dismissing the thought of eminent domain. “There must be other ponds. All you need's a realtor with a little brains.”

The heads kept turning, wherever they went. As they pushed through the glass doors into the commissary, three big men from the starship crew came out the other way, toothpicks in their teeth. They rolled their eyes at Vivien Cokes, and then they looked at him. He clearly didn't exist, except in terms of her. When they trailed behind the maître d', making their way to a corner table, he saw the room erupt and crane for a glimpse. It made him feel two things at once. On the one hand, quite invisible—no more than a kind of shadow that she cast. But terribly important, too, or else why would she eat with
him?
Altogether, he found himself strangely unthreatened. Ready to go to the ends of the earth.

As they ducked and slid into the booth, he had an awful urge—to come back at the end triumphant, the diamond in his hand and the killer's name on the tip of his tongue. All he had to do was tough it out alone. He bet he knew more about
that
than she did.

“You know,” he said in a worldly way, taking a glance at the prices on the menu, “it's not supposed to
require
a pond. I mean, Walden is really nowhere. It's in your head.”

“Well, it's not in
mine
,” she protested smartly, scanning the list of specials with a rueful eye. “And I'll wager it's not in yours. But like I said, I'm ahead of you. You're only on 106. We'll talk about it later. I wouldn't want to spoil the plot.”

“I'm not much of a reader,” he said. No time for anything now but heroic isolation. “Don't hold your breath.”

“What are you going to have?”

“Soup. Why did you go to Bermuda?”

“No reason. What kind?”

“
I
don't know,” he said irritably, putting the menu aside. “Whatever they've got.”

“You'll be sorry,” she said. “Don't say I didn't warn you.”

“Did you leave him?”

“Jasper? Oh, I suppose. At the time, I was sick of everything.”

“And now?”

“Do you think I killed him?”

“Good God, no!”

“Well,
that's
a load off my mind, right there.”

She snapped her fingers once in the air, as if to spirit them off. And the waiters came running from every side, falling all over each other to get there first.

chapter 4

“SAILING” WAS ONE WAY
of putting it. In fact, it was two hundred feet of oceangoing yacht, formerly in the hands of the Aga Khan. Of eleven staterooms, Vivien would occupy numbers 1 and 2—the latter set aside for her personal luggage, in her case enough to fill the belly of a 707. Erika and Felix, who always cruised in the spring and fall, had moved up the sailing date by a full two weeks, so that Vivien Cokes could flee the tawdry aftermath of Jasper's death. In Erika's set, the feel of unparalleled luxury was the only way they knew to prove that life (though a vale of tears) went stumbling on.

Thus they kept on board such amenities as pastry chef, hairdresser, and Sicilian masseur—the last of whom did a double shift in the nightly round of musical beds. Viven, needless to say, would not be required to do anything, beyond a minimal amount of keeping up appearances. Everything else would be done before she thought to ask. Besides, Erika and Felix were a known quantity. She'd covered the seven seas with them at the helm. The food would be three-star all the way. At the backgammon board, the stakes would be in five figures. This tub was not for nothing called
The Ritz
.

No matter if Erika got capricious, sometimes halving her lithium so as to get a little mad. Or that Felix was so dreadful with the locals—furious if no one spoke English—that he threatened to turn a day in port into an international episode. Vivien let a lot of things go by. Like the other guests, for instance. She had sat in the course of time at the right of every major power—all the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it seemed, and men who were on as many boards as she had pairs of shoes. There was always some fleetingly famous type who'd pitched a winning season. People she couldn't keep straight from year to year.

It meant maybe three or four hours a day of attending to other men's dreams. In Vivien's presence, they seemed to affect a slow and low-voiced version of the boys they must have been in high school. They didn't know what they wanted from her. She made a thousand little murmurs of assent, no matter what they said, and watched for a chance to break away. On balance, she knew that her brief appearances paid her way. She still had a dozen waking hours a day to stare out across the rail.

She'd only admitted it once, to Jasper: Travel of any sort made her feel as safe as a child again. She never remotely entertained the thought that anything would crash. She'd spent the summers of her youth rocketing through the landscape. She shuttled back and forth between one parent and the other, developing all the skills of a commuter. Her earliest recollection was a
Queen of Angels
Pullman bound for San Francisco, with Vivien tucked between a governess and a Spanish maid. The first of every October, she crossed on the
Queen Elizabeth
—once in the thrall of a tutor, Miss Wharton, who walked the decks reciting Byron, as if they'd put out to sea in Plato's Academy. Somehow, it always felt good to get moving again.

Though she'd learned in time to be moved by the sight of mountainous harbors, of coral-island chains not big enough for an airport, she never became a creature of destinations. A change of landscape didn't really strike her as much of a change. It was pure and simple journeying she loved. The feel of the open road. As a girl, she liked to imagine herself a wild horse or a migrant bird. It was never quite the same when she grew up, but still she traveled for good luck's sake, the way another woman might touch wood. As if death could not pin down a moving target.

This time, though, it wasn't going to work. She made up the usual lists and went about taking care of details, but with only half a heart. From Monday night till Wednesday afternoon, she oversaw the packing—tucking things one in the other, and minimizing wrinkles. From Carl she borrowed a smart-ass secretary, to help her clear the desk of the heaviest of the condolences. She knew all along it was mere diversionary tactics. She filled up a string of trunks, but like somebody throwing off excess baggage. As if she planned to put her past in the attic.

She betrayed nothing of this to Erika, though. As the day approached to cast away, Erika called her woman to woman, practically on the hour, to talk out matters of policy as to hemlines and porcelain nails. Vivien swore she couldn't wait to be out of sight of land. She affected to find it thrilling that Felix had signed up a psychic to come along for the ride. As always, she called and arranged for two cases of Dom Perignon to be delivered right to the dock. She ordered pots of orchids placed in every stateroom. She even remembered to have made up a refill of her Lomotil. She found the acts of preparation bracing, in spite of the fact that she wasn't about to get stuck in a boat off Baja.

Not that she had any alternate plan. All she knew was this: She had to go off by herself, because everyone else was still tied up disposing of what was left of Jasper. She wouldn't have minded joining Greg for a couple of days in Bermuda, but that was out of the question now. She'd badly misread him. Somehow, she thought he'd had a thing with Harry Dawes that lasted years and years. That hangdog look, last Thursday at the grave—it seemed so unmistakably tied to the loss of one's other half.

Poor Greg. She could see that he needed some time in a place like the house on Harrington Sound. A walk on the cliffs would clear his head. What's more, he needed to have it all to himself. Before they talked on the mission set, she had more or less hoped they could have their
Walden
seminar moved to the limestone house in the cedar grove. She saw them sitting in lilies up to their ears, tossing off quotes and living, however briefly, off the land. But that was a lot of wishful thinking. For some reason, he couldn't bear Thoreau. Not even for Harry Dawes could he get past 106. He'd decided it was bullshit, though he wouldn't tell her why.

So who exactly was he, if he wasn't who she thought?

It would have to wait till they both got back. She packed and packed and got used to the fact that she had to travel solo. She'd done it enough before. It was what she was really good at. Thus, late Wednesday, after she heard what she happened to hear, she was just as glad she'd put it all off, deciding where to go. It was only then that she understood how far away it would have to be. Somewhere she'd never been to. Somewhere she wouldn't be seen. So far away, she might not even know it till she'd passed the last frontier.

Lucky for her, she had everything ready.

It was just after six, on Wednesday evening. She was propped up in bed, reading over the end of Chapter 10. “Earth's eye,” Thoreau had just called the pond. Vivien gripped a spotty Bic and underlined five lines at a stretch. She'd grown so used to the prose, she no longer got tangled among the burrs. She read it straight through and saw what he meant:

Men come tamely home at night from the next field or street, where their household echoes haunt, and their life pines because it breathes its own breath over again; their shadows, morning and evening, reach farther than their daily steps. We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character.

How true, she thought contentedly. And she plopped an exclamation point in the margin just beside it.

She closed her eyes to let it sink in, more than glad to take it along on a nap. The farther she read, the odder it seemed that Thoreau had developed an audience. Surely, at any given time, there were only a few who felt this way. She could hardly believe they numbered enough to keep the book in print. As to why the colleges pushed it so, she couldn't really say. She assumed they all read it the way she had, in the crudest kind of outline. In any event, Thoreau wasn't like a college kid at all. He didn't want to be popular, for one thing. He didn't hate the little town he grew up in. And he wasn't after a girl.

She started up and turned her head, as if she'd heard a gun go off. In fact, it was quite the opposite. For the first time since returning here to Steepside, she missed the sound of water. She got up and opened the sliding door, but she wasn't thinking clearly. The angles of the house were such that she couldn't see west from this end. Could it be the water had not been on all week? She tried to recall, but she drew a blank. She'd been hearing it all her life. It was just as much a given as the view. The loss of it was something like the windows going dark.

She turned and hurried along the tunnel. She loped across the canyon room, then onto the deck on the steepest side. There didn't appear to be anyone anywhere, neither in nor out, and she wondered again if the emptiness was all they'd ever bought for living here. Somebody watching her make her way around the western end—one hand gliding along the railing, the other still holding her place in the book—would have thought she'd had a sudden need to ponder the dome of space that ranged about her house. Only those few who knew Steepside top to bottom could have second-guessed her destination. For this was the only route to Jasper's place.

At the farthest reach of the deck, she climbed a flight of white stone steps that angled up to the roof. At the top, the whole expanse was planted in ivy, so as to cool the house beneath—or at least Wright's half of it was. From the head of the stairs, a pebble path wound its circuitous way across the ivy field to the roof's far edge, where a kind of square stone shrine was perched above the canyon. This was where Jasper had lived. It used to be Jacob Willis's office—before that, Abner's—but Vivien always felt, as she walked the lush and well-kept ground that hovered above the surrounding hills like a flying carpet, that Wright had wanted a temple.

To a person approaching it up the path, it looked like a solid block of stone—a cube maybe fifteen feet on a side. The figures carved on the outer walls depicted, in the Mayan style, a flight of water birds on a pattern of scalloped waves. It looked like the winter view down the canyon, when flocks of northern birds were blanketed all across the water. Some few were frozen in stone up here, like fossils. As she came up close, she put out a finger and touched the outstretched wing of a crane. She hadn't been here in a long long time. It grew to be out of bounds between them, very early on. But the stonework friezed on the walls was in her blood. The Mayan birds still peopled the dreams she sometimes had, of places so wild they couldn't be owned.

She came around the corner, closer to the door. It wasn't going to be easy. She tried to focus on nothing but this, that the water had to be started up for Jasper's sake. There was sure to be death still hanging about inside—in his clothes, in his drawers, in the odds and ends of his everyday life. It was one thing, she knew, to look down on the redwood tub from the balcony off her room, for there it was just the dying that mocked and rang in the empty yard. Up here it was everything Jasper ever kept, and one of his quirks was souvenirs.

As she reached for the handle, she put her mind on the water's course and blocked the treehouse clutter that lay all about the room. The water was piped from deep in the house. It bubbled up into a shallow, half-moon pool in the room beyond. The farthest point of the moon cantilevered out through a plate-glass window. From there, it spilled a stream that fell and splashed in a second pool—down below in the garden, just outside the dining room. It flowed and played like mountain water. It pulsed all through, like the house's blood.

So do it
, she thought.
Go in
.

“No!” bellowed Artie, fierce and grim from the other side of the door. She froze with the handle turned a quarter turn. “If you touch that stuff, I swear I'll kill you.”