Pursued by Shadows (5 page)

He waited, silent, his eyes on the game, until their drinks were in front of them. “How do you feel about sleeping bags?” His voice was still casual, but his eyes strayed more often from the television set.

“I've slept in enough of them. Why? You have a piece of floor you're offering? Seriously?”

“Not my floor. A floor in an empty house—nice and private, all to yourself. All I'm offering is my old sleeping bag. Unless you brought your own.”

“And where will you be?” she snapped back, her eyes challenging.

“Oh, I don't come with the house. Not necessarily anyway.” He grinned, a beautiful, slightly lopsided grin. “Pickings ain't that slim around here,” he said, and laughed.

On Saturday morning, Jane dragged herself up slowly from a dream of confused pursuit and escape into a wash of black despair. Then slowly she felt an arm under her waist pulling her tight against a warm, naked body. She sighed and wiggled closer, comforted again, drifting upward between sleep and consciousness.

Her hiding place was now remarkably complete. The night before sudden panic had hit her, walking into that empty house with Amos after their silent meal together at a local diner; the ground-floor rooms, dark and echoing, with their acres of uncurtained windows, terrified her and she had not been able to keep herself from edging toward the walls for protection. Upstairs, she had staked out as her territory a large, windowless dressing room, smelling comfortingly of new wood, and its connecting bath. Amos had prowled from room to room on the second floor, examining the place as if he'd never seen it before, and then had disappeared out to his truck for the sleeping bag. He had rolled it out, sat down discreetly at one end, and pulled two cans of beer from his pockets. “A gesture of international peace,” he had said and handed her one. And they had sat there and talked companionably, one at each end of the sleeping bag, leaning against the wall. Talked about baseball, and governments, and what was wrong with schools, and the weather in winter, but there seemed to be a silent agreement against anything personal being mentioned. At last he had stood up, smiled a lazy smile, and said that it was time to go. Some taut, trembling wire snapped inside her.

“Not yet,” she had said, scrambling hastily to her feet. The words had jumped out of her mouth with an emphasis she had not intended. His fair skin had reddened and he turned away from her with great deliberation, busying himself with the empty beer cans, but she had begun to drift toward him, like an automaton whose control mechanism lay in someone's else's hands. When her inexorable progression brought her close, she had stopped, hesitating and embarrassed, her hands at her sides, and waited. He had turned toward her, one crooked eyebrow raised, and gathered her tentatively in his arms. Then suddenly, he had kissed her with as much hunger and intensity as if he had been waiting all his life for this moment. It's just a trick, a small part of her brain had screamed at her. Some men have it, you know that. It's just another scam. You're nothing, as far as he's concerned, but an easy lay. She had clicked the voice off and turned over the decision to her trembling knees and torso heavy with desire; unable to stay upright, she had pulled him down with her onto the tiny sleeping bag.

She had awakened in the night to discover him gone, and she had been shaken by a sense of desperate and inexplicable loss. But he had returned, carrying an air mattress, sheets and pillows, and a couple of towels, and swiftly, neatly, built them a nest out of the little room.

And now, dizzy with sleep and satisfied desire, she was in this stranger's arms again, lying with her head on his shoulder, pretending that this encounter signified something more than confusion and loneliness. “I turned on the water heater,” he said prosaically, interrupting her musings. “If you want a shower.”

From somewhere he produced a kettle, coffee, and mugs, and while she showered, he set about making coffee. He seemed to have an endless supply of competence in dealing with the world, and she accepted it with exhausted gratitude.

She put on a long T-shirt and came back into their little bedroom, energetically toweling her hair. “Whose house is this?” she asked.

“It belongs to a couple of guys. It was falling apart—they bought it and they've been fixing it up. I give them a hand when I have time.” He poured her some coffee. “And now that you've asked the first question, I get to ask one. Those are the rules.”

She stiffened. “What do you want to know?” she asked warily.

“What's in the briefcase?”

“You mean this?” she laughed and pointed at the attaché case. “Just a project I'm working on,” she added quickly. “It took me forever to get it to this point and I'm scared I'll lose it. I do keep losing things,” she said, with a scatty, fluffy-headed sort of laugh.

“The hell you do,” he answered. “You want sugar? I would say that you haven't lost anything for a long, long time. Not since your ma first sewed strings on your mittens.” He sounded bitter, as if in the short time they had known each other, she had already betrayed him. “You'd give things away, maybe, and you might even sell them, but I wouldn't think you'd lose much.”

“Thanks,” she said, unpleasantly, turning scarlet. The pink cloud she had wrapped herself in was dispersing rapidly.

“Take it as a compliment,” he said, with a mercurial switch in mood, pushing a mug of coffee in her direction. “I don't like vague, stupid women who are always losing things. I brought us some muffins for breakfast,” he added, walking across the room, unself-conscious in his nakedness. His body, broad-shouldered, lean, and muscular, lived up to its early promise. As he passed the open door, a stray beam of sun made his hair flame and turned his skin into gold. For an instant, as he turned, she caught a glimpse of a thick, jagged, white mark on his thigh in that revealing beam of sunlight and wondered, for an equally brief instant, what it was. Before she could ask, he reached his jacket, hanging on a hook by the door, and pulled a bag from one of its pockets. “So—let's assume I'm right. What was last night? That's what I'm curious about. This morning I understand. That was a sort of emotional hangover, you might say. A hair of the dog.”

“What do you mean?”

“Was last night a gift to a poor small-town boy or was it a business transaction? And if it was, what exactly do you want in return? Besides a piece of floor to sleep on. You're a pretty classy woman to be trading sex for a place to sleep and a couple of muffins.”

Jane stared back speechless. She felt as if a huge wave of bitterly cold reality had just knocked her off her feet and dragged her down the beach before dropping her, flayed raw and breathless, on the wet sand. Amos was scrutinizing her, unembarrassed. Then it occurred to her that he had said that deliberately. He knows exactly how much it ought to hurt, and now he's waiting to see how I'll react. She closed her mouth on her scathing reply, blinked, and then, with a great effort of will, smiled and took a muffin out of the bag. “That's not much of a choice,” she replied at last. “Between being a whore and a—I don't know what to call it. But it's something even worse.” She could feel tears begin to sting her eyes and she turned her face aside.

“I agree. It isn't,” he answered, regarding her steadily. “Which is unfortunate. Because you're great in bed, but I don't like being used. For whatever reason.”

She nibbled on her blueberry muffin to cover her confusion. For all she was noticing, it might as well have been hay. “Can't you accept it as something that just happened? Without either one of us having ulterior motives? You were the one who offered the sleeping bag.”

“Find me a person without ulterior motives—they come with the basic equipment. Like breathing. But I'll consider it a possibility,” he said judiciously. “Have another muffin. They're small. And if I were you, I'd shove that briefcase in a closet. The one over there has a lock. Keep the key in the pocket of your jeans. The way you're hanging on to it, everyone around here is going to think it's full of money. That's the kind of people we are.”

Amos worked around the house most of the day, whistling softly to himself and, by and large, staying out of Jane's sight. But she was acutely conscious of the noises of his presence, the sawing and sandpapering, and the smell of fresh wood, which surrounded her like a wall. She spent most of the morning staring out a second-floor window into the tangle of shrubs and trees in the back garden, wavering between fear, gloom, and suspicion, and a sense of transitory euphoria. At last, she took a book and some paper out of her suitcase, and tried to settle down to some useful occupation. Around noon, she snapped her book shut and said that she was going out for some exercise. “Good idea,” said Amos. “I'd take the side door if I were you. There are a lot of nice tall shrubs to walk behind until you get to the road,” he added casually. “It's shadier.”

She didn't try to pretend that she didn't understand him. Her desire to avoid notice was so strong by now that she had great difficulty forcing herself to walk by a first-floor window. He must think I'm a murderer, she thought, trying to escape capture. She smiled to hide her embarrassment and gave him a light valedictory kiss. He patted her on the bottom with that curiously detached, lopsided grin and pointed her in the direction of the side exit.

He watched from an upstairs window until she was out of sight, pulled some keys out of his pocket, opened the closet, and took down her briefcase. After a cursory inspection, he took a short metal probe out of his tool kit, inserted it in the keyhole, and delicately sprang the lock. He opened the only thing she kept in there—a brown manila envelope—and pulled a document out. He unfolded it, looked at it at some length, shook his head, and restored it to its place. With a thoughtful frown, he closed the briefcase again, shoved it back on the shelf, and relocked the closet door.

“Yes, I got your message,” said John, as he followed Harriet up the stairs on Monday evening. She was wearing a floor-length, long-sleeved silk garment that fastened up to the neck, and he regarded it with suspicion. Its jewel green turned her eyes the shifting colour of the sea over sand and gave her whole body a luminescence he found difficult to ignore. He had a feeling that he was about to be manipulated. “And I spent a hell of a long time trying not to explain it to the entire floor,” he said, lightly. “I wish if you're going to leave funny messages you'd leave them with Ed. He's a bit more discreet than the others.”

“He wasn't there,” said Harriet. “Or I would have. Didn't it ever occur to you that when you're not there, Ed isn't, either? Most of the time? It's because you're partners,” she explained with mock sententiousness, “if you hadn't figured it out.” She turned toward the kitchen. “How about a beer? I've been doing a lot of thinking since we had lunch and you're going to get thirsty before I finish. How's the case coming along? I assume that since you're here, it's not too sticky.”

“Sure,” he said. “The case? It's over. We picked up this guy wandering down an alley with a knife in his hand, so polluted he's falling over, and a few yards away is his drinking buddy with a dozen knife wounds in him. A certain amount of legwork, but all of it's finished. Including court this morning. I would have come over anyway,” he added, with hesitation. “I wanted to make sure that you were okay after the weekend—”

“Don't be an idiot,” said Harriet, closing the subject with a sweeping gesture of dismissal. “Or I'll get irritated and change my mind about pouring out my troubles at you.” She handed him a beer. “First of all, before you say it, I really am going to have the locks changed, and I have double-locked the doors and put the chain on every minute I've been home.”

“Right. And if—”

“Wait. There have been some more strange things. One is that I have this paranoid feeling that someone has been going through the apartment while I wasn't here—you know what I mean? Everything seems to be just slightly out of place.”

“Who?” asked John, his voice sharp with worry. “Guy?”

“I don't know,” said Harriet, looking very embarrassed. “Probably no one. Guy messed things up on Thursday and I could have put things away in strange places. I was upset and not thinking very clearly. Nothing has disappeared, as far as I know. That's one,” she went on, counting on her fingers. “Number two is much more substantial. I got another letter from Jane. A weird letter, let me warn you.”

Sanders gave her a wary look. “Let's hear it,” he said, against his better judgment.

“Well, first of all, it's from Skaneateles, New York.”

“From where?”

“Skaneateles. It's near Syracuse. On one of the Finger Lakes. Very pretty.”

“Why?”

“Why not? That's where she seems to be. Anyway, stop interrupting me and listen:

‘Dear Harriet,' it says, ‘I'm sorry to bother you again. I couldn't call you in Toronto because I was being followed, I think. Guy must have been on the next flight after mine. Could I ask you for an even bigger favour? Could you possibly come down here? I am desperate. I daren't go home in case something happens to Agnes. I am so tired of running, and I have no one at all to turn to. At the moment life doesn't seem worth living.

‘I am renting a lovely house here (an early nineteenth-century restoration, well done) at 96 Lake Street; there is plenty of room for you. Bring a sleeping bag. I know you like the town or I wouldn't have had the nerve to ask for your help like this.

‘Bring cameras—there's so much to do here. And do you think you could bring a macro while you're at it? It's important. I'll explain when you get here.'

And then she signs it,” added Harriet.

“What in hell's a macro?” asked John.

“It's a lens,” said Harriet. “For copying flat things, like pictures, small objects, you know. In close-up shots.”

“Why does she think something is going to happen to the baby?”

“Maybe she's afraid that Guy will follow her home and take Agnes away from her.”

“If he knows where her parents live he doesn't have to bother following her.” Sanders shook his head. “I'll tell you what's weird about this letter. It's the unbelievable amounts of nerve that your friends have. Breaking into your house to see you in the middle of the night; asking you to drop everything and drive out to the back of beyond—”

“That is not what's weird about it,” said Harriet impatiently. “They've always been like that. Here, you look at it.” And she handed the sheet of paper over to him.