Pursued by Shadows (18 page)

“Yeah, I know. May—June. Exams, all that stuff. I can sympathize,” he said, his exam-taking days still vivid in his mind.

Jane nodded agreeably, even though Lesley's exams had been in April, and had caused her little distress. “When it hits her, she thinks she's being followed. She hears footsteps, and catches glimpses of some man—always the same one—lurking around corners. Of course, this time—”

“They were real. She was attacked. Well, it'll take a while to get over, I'm afraid, but she's probably better off at home with her own doctor. The nurse tells me that you're willing to take charge of her. That's wonderful. Now—how are you feeling?” he asked, turning to his patient for the first time.

“I'm fine,” said Lesley, clinging fiercely to her sister. “And I'd like to go home.”

“That's all it took,” he said with satisfaction. “A familiar face she could trust. What happened was a terrific shock for her. It is for anyone, in fact. Being mugged. We see a lot of it. But the physical injuries are healing rapidly and she'll get over it, I'm sure. Lots of luck, Lesley Sinclair. You're going to be fine. I'll do the paperwork from my end while you visit the business office,” he said cheerfully.

Jane poured herself a cup of coffee and leaned against the counter, staring out the window at the variegated blues, browns, and greens of the absolutely calm water. Her ear caught the rhythm of Amos's footfalls on the stairs, and it occurred to her that he was limping slightly. She frowned. It also occurred to her that this was probably not the first time since she'd met him that his leg had been bothering him. When, after all, had she last noticed anyone else's pain? Except Lesley's, of course. But that was different. He had laughed about her self-centeredness, transmuting it graciously into a welcome tendency not to pry, but still . . . She hadn't even taken the scar seriously when she had first seen it. Treated it as a small oddity, or passing phenomenon, in fact, not to be discussed in the same breath with her own, more interesting problems. “Jane,” she said to herself as she turned the bacon, “you are a bitch. A selfish bitch. And that is the absolute, bloody truth.” She walked over to the door very quietly to avoid waking her sleeping sister, opened it, and stepped onto the landing.

His hair was wet and plastered over his forehead; she looked down at him standing on the steps, half-naked and shivering in the cool of the morning, and smothered a burst of laughter with great difficulty. She raised a finger to her lips and pointed through the door. He nodded and moved swiftly up the last three steps, before wrapping himself around her in an icy embrace. “Couldn't stay away, could you?” he whispered, and kissed her. “My God, that smells good. You know, having you around might get addictive.”

“You're wet,” she said, as she broke away.

“And cold and starving. I went for a swim. I thought the shower might be a bit crowded with all three of us in it. Come on,” he said, opening the door very quietly. “Let's have breakfast.”

With great tact, he had made himself very scarce the night before, disappearing in the truck in search of groceries and busying himself with work downstairs while Jane settled her exhausted sister into the big double bed. Finally, he had made himself a bed down in his workroom, and left Jane and Lesley to share the loft. It was not a satisfactory arrangement. Jane had tried to creep silently down to join him as soon as her sister was asleep, but Lesley had awakened and cried out, clinging to her like a frightened child. And now there was Amos, leaning against the kitchen counter, a cup of coffee in his hand, dressed only in a pair of shorts, looking damp-haired and infinitely appealing.

“Your leg hurts,” said Jane. “I should have noticed that before.”

“A little. It does sometimes,” he admitted. “The weather's changing.”

She looked out the huge window at the intensely blue sky and shook her head. “You're kidding,” she said, pointing at the serene heavens. “Feeble excuses. Old wives' tales.”

“Just you wait and see.” He moved over and kissed the back of her neck. “I missed you last night,” he murmured. “I'm not very good at abstinence. Especially when I know you're only a few yards away. I had an almost irresistible urge to go out and howl at the moon to pass the time. We'll have to work this out, somehow.”

Amos left early, still insisting, although humorously, that the weather was about to change. But when he stopped to say goodbye at the workroom door, the playfulness drained from his face. “I'll be back as soon as I can,” he said quietly. “Are you going to be all right? With the two of you here it might be a good idea to stay out of sight as much as you can. Take care of yourself.”

Jane mounted the stairs again. Lesley was still sleeping soundly. Sunshine bounced off the water and into the west window, lighting up the dirty dishes from breakfast and a few stray curls of dust. Restless, made irritable by the necessity for quiet, Jane gathered up the dishes, put them gently into hot water, and then set about sweeping, dusting, tidying, polishing as though some prize for perfection in housework were to be awarded at the end of the day. Lesley slept on. Jane contemplated the chesterfield, lined up against the wall with the bed, the desk and the small table, and decided that it made the place look like a dentist's waiting room. She pulled it out into the middle of the room, facing the window. With a certain wry amusement, she realized that in doing so, she had divided the space, created a separate room for the bed, and isolated her sister behind the couch; in short, she had exacted a symbolic—and futile—revenge for the night before's enforced separation from Amos.

Through the cleaning of the bathroom, through the rearranging of the furniture, through the clattering of dishes being put away, Lesley still slept. When she found herself staring speculatively at the huge window, polishing cloth clutched tightly in her hand, Jane shook her head and went downstairs. There she defiantly raised up the great wide door that gave onto the lake. The reflection of the morning sun on the water lit Amos's table in an otherworldly glow. Too otherworldly, Jane decided. Exaggerate your effects, and you cheapen and lose them. She ran lightly up the stairs, pulled out her suitcase from under the bed, and extracted from it the small camera and couple of lenses that she had hidden away in it. Before she went down again, she detoured to grab a white sheet from a pile in the bathroom.

Humming to herself, she pulled a stool over to serve as a makeshift tripod, and began to experiment with her lenses. By the time Lesley wandered down the stairs, a cup of coffee in her hand, Jane was on the stepladder, fastening the white sheet to the wall with tacks, and draping it over the tool bench.

“What are you doing?” asked Lesley. Her voice was dull and slurred, her face pale and heavy with sleep, but she was up and on her feet and dressed. She was wearing neatly pressed, sand-coloured shorts, conservatively mid-thigh in length, and a matching shirt with its long sleeves rolled up to the elbows. She moved stiffly, like someone the day after a particularly hard workout, but other than that, only the flesh-coloured bandage on her left forearm testified to her ordeal.

“Playing around with the light and stuff,” said Jane. “I'm a little short of equipment, but I wanted to try to get this table before he ships it off to the guy who ordered it.”

Lesley could feel no interest in modern furniture, but she walked cautiously up to the open door, looked up and down the lake for a long time, and then settled down like a cat in a patch of sun on the edge of the dock, her legs stretched out in the sun and her head in the shade. Their separate occupations lasted for the better part of an hour. When Jane had finished shooting her last roll of film and had packed up and put away everything she had disturbed, she turned back to her sister. Lesley had taken off her shirt, and was lying on her stomach on the dock, apparently sleeping again.

“How about some lunch?” Jane asked brightly. “I'm starving. And I'll bet you didn't have any breakfast. Come on, let's see what there is in the refrigerator.” She almost bit her tongue in irritation as the words rolled around in her head. No matter how hard she tried to be normal, she knew that she was behaving like a nurse humoring a fractious patient. She wondered if Lesley, wherever she was, noticed what Jane had just said. Because her sister had abandoned—at least temporarily—this neat, polite shell. And it was difficult to find the exact level at which to speak to the zombie she had left behind.

“He's still following me, you know,” replied Lesley, opening one eye and looking at her. “I saw him. He has a pair of binoculars and he's watching us from miles and miles away, across the lake, but I can still see him if I turn my head. It's all right, though,” she added reassuringly. “He doesn't scare me anymore.”

“Come on, sweetheart,” said Jane. “Nobody knows we're here. And nobody's following us. Let's get some lunch.”

Lunch had been a horror. Jane had thrown together a Basque omelet and a green salad. The effect was light, colourful, and spicy—a textbook perfect meal, she had thought, looking down at the table, for the recovering invalid. Lesley had thanked her politely and then played with her food like a bored two-year-old, stirring it about, pretending to eat, and refusing to talk, before wandering off to stare out the window at the manicured lawns and cedar hedges of the main house. Jane took a deep breath and decided to counter her irritation by turning some of Amos's resupply effort of the evening before into a large-scale Bolognese sauce. That would keep them going for a while, and Lesley had always liked pasta. She should have remembered that her little sister had never had much use for food, except as a means of staving off the discomfort of hunger pains. There was no point in going all out to create little delicacies for her and expecting her to enjoy them. By the time Jane had chopped a sufficient quantity of onions and garlic, carrots and celery, and reduced a pile of chicken livers to a fine mince, she had restored herself to good humor. She washed and put away her knives, and began patiently browning the ground meat for the sauce.

As she worked, vast, round, blue-black clouds started to pour through a break in the mountains to the west, piling in over the lake, and obliterating the sun. When the light levels diminished, she had turned on the kitchen light without thinking or remembering to close the curtains, and had continued working happily, humming to herself. Now the noise of the handfuls of meat browning in hot oil was drowned out by a ferocious clap of thunder. “Good lord,” she said, glancing over to her left at the window and catching sight of black lake and menacing sky. “He was right. The weather is changing.” She turned to where Lesley had been curled up in the basket chair. It was empty.

“Lesley?” she called. There was no response. “Lesley, where are you?” Her sister had always been terrified of thunderstorms.

Then she heard a rustle, looked around, and saw a newly formed hump under the duvet on the double bed. There was no point in trying to talk Lesley out from under the covers, but she did make a quick dash to the other end of the room to yank the heavy draperies on the east wall shut and deaden the sound of the storm. That problem dealt with, she turned back to her sauce.

The rain hit a minute later, slashing across the lake, battering the windows, and pounding against the roof. Jane glanced out again. The sky was blue-black now, and the wind, churning up the water of the lake, sent waves crashing into the dock, and flinging themselves against the boathouse door, until the entire building was vibrating with the force. Her body tensed, heavy and ill-at-ease. “Don't be stupid, Jane,” she murmured to herself. “It's just a thunderstorm. You're perfectly safe here.” Perhaps it was Amos who was causing all this visceral anxiety. But surely he wasn't working outside in this storm. He'd have the sense to pack up and come home, she thought uncertainly, and returned to the sizzling meat on the stove.

A rolling clap of thunder drowned the noise of the glass in the east door breaking; the rattle of the rain hitting the boathouse covered the turning of the handle inside. The door refused to open. A gloved hand delicately removed shard after shard of broken glass and then felt cautiously up and down the frame looking for the obstruction. The storm grew in intensity. During the next crash of thunder, the bolt screeched open.

Jane threw the last handful of meat into the oil, wiped her hands on a damp cloth, and picked up her wooden spoon again, singing under her breath as she scraped the browned portions up and over to the side of the pot. Without even thinking about it, she had forgotten to be terrified. She was lost in her world of cooking noises, happy in her conviction that this was one thing in her skewed life that she knew she could get right.

Her first intimation that something was amiss was the gloved hand that grabbed her left arm and wrenched it hard behind her. Her scream disappeared in the rising wind and rolling thunder. The other gloved hand reached around and pressed a knife against her throat.

The meat began to smoke.

“Turn that fucking stuff off,” said the shape behind her.

She stretched out her free right hand and turned off the burner.

“Now, you thieving little bitch, where is it?” There was a long silence. “I know you have it; you were waving it at Southfield when you tried to sell it to him. That was pretty funny, you going down to New York and trying to sell to Southfield and Pitt. We already had a deal with them. One million, cash, American, in hundred-dollar bills. Do you know how much that is? That's one thousand bills, stacked up, and that was
ours
, you fucking cow, it was ours. And you just sailed out of there like nothing had happened. And then you come back here, and flaunt your bare ass out on the fucking dock.”

The body behind her pressed harder; shoving her up against the stove, forcing her head back with the knife at her throat. Even if the sheer surprise of the attack had not rendered her speechless, the accusations would have. She wanted to say in her own defense that she didn't know anyone called Southfield, that she hadn't been out on the dock, but the pressure of the knife on her throat temporarily choked off her ability to talk. And in that heaven-sent pause, the name Southfield and Pitt bounced up from her memory bank. Guy's list of shady dealers. He must have got it from Guy. New York City. Lesley had been there. And she remembered that Lesley had been lying on the dock, half-naked, and it occurred to her, suddenly and belatedly, that he hadn't realized that Lesley was with her in the room. Hadn't, in fact, realized that Lesley existed. And that realization kept her silent.

“And besides that, I've got this hole in my side that hurts like hell every time I move, and you're going to pay for that, too.” He paused, considering. “It will be hours before your new boyfriend gets back from work. I checked. At least three. Uninterrupted. And trust me. By the time those three hours are over, you'll tell me everything you know and then all the stuff you don't even know you know.” His voice rose to a dramatic pitch and then fell again, menacingly. “Just like Beaumont, doll. Just like that rat, Beaumont. But more fun.” And Jane realized, with a jolt of terror, that this man was completely enveloped in some mad barbaric vision of himself, quoting snatches of tough dialogue from old movies and cop shows, miles beyond the reach of a human voice, miles beyond reasoning with.