Runner (35 page)

She was confident that Claudia and Sybil would never offer to take Robert in to the nurse or to watch over him while he slept. But she was not so sure they wouldn't move close enough to see what she was carrying. She had to dawdle just enough to let them notice that she was taking the baby into the house.

In the reflection in the glass wall she caught the glance that Sybil gave her, saw her say something to Claudia, and then the two got up off the lawn and began to move toward the house behind her. She resisted the temptation to hurry in order to stay far enough ahead of them. They were predatory creatures, unconsciously cruel like a pair of wide-eyed feral cats, and any tiny sign of fear or nervousness would be like the shriek of a wounded bird. They would be on her in a second.

Christine went inside and left the sliding door open, hoping it looked as though she simply didn't care enough to shut it. She forced
herself to walk slowly down the hallway with the doll wrapped in the blanket, swaying gently from side to side to rock the lifeless piece of rubber to keep it asleep.

As she reached the open door of her bedroom, she turned back and let herself see first Sybil, then Claudia step in through the sliding door and then move beyond her sight into the great room. She slipped into the bedroom and quickly arranged the doll in Robert's crib. She placed it on its side and pushed a small, firm pillow behind its back to keep it on its side, facing away from the doorway, then covered it with another receiving blanket.

Every second that passed, Christine was listening for the sound of Robert's little voice to rise from outside the window a few feet away. She already knew him so well that she could hear in her imagination the first, tentative cooing sound that he would make if he woke up on the ground behind the shrubbery along the house. Then there would be an inquiring noise, a sound that was intended to call her. If he didn't see, hear, or feel her after that, there would be a loud cry. Someone would hear it, and they would know.

She felt afraid to delay by even a second, and afraid to go on with this. She wished she had done more to prepare, wished she had tried instead to find the Beales' bedroom in this huge place and sneak into it alone. There might be an actual telephone plugged in, and not just empty jacks as there were in the rest of the house. But Christine dismissed those thoughts. She was already moving, and she had to think about what she needed to do.

Christine snatched up the magazine she had been reading the night before. The impression she wanted to make was that she had put Robert to sleep under the eye of the baby nurse, and was now taking a break by herself. She sauntered back down the hall, fixing a tired, bored expression on her face.

Where the hallway opened onto the great room, she walked
along, aware of Sybil and Claudia. Each of them had arranged herself on one of the big white couches in feline repose. They paid little attention to Christine, but she knew they saw her, and had appraised how she walked and held herself, what she was carrying, how her face looked. If there was a tremor in her hand or a stiffness to her gait that she hadn't suppressed, she knew they had already detected it. She held her mind empty for a few seconds, waiting for one of them to spring up or yell or even shoot her. Nothing happened, so she walked on.

Christine wouldn't do anything but step outside through the same door they had just come in. It was the simplest, most direct route to the safe places, the ones where she was allowed to be. She went out and sat in one of the Adirondack chairs where they could see her without moving from their couches, and began to leaf through the makeup advertising at the front of her magazine.

All of her senses were raw, as though the skin had been peeled back and the nerves were exposed to the air, throbbing and waiting to be irritated. Robert wasn't making noises yet, and the women were lying still. Two cars went past on the road beyond the hedge, and Christine felt worried at first that they would pull into the driveway, and then devastated because they might have been the last cars to go by for an hour. She had missed them, and maybe they had been the ones that had been meant to find her and Robert by the roadside and save them.

Time was short and diminishing now, a lit fuse. She looked up, shaded her eyes from the sun petulantly, got up and moved to another chair, closer to Robert's place under the barred window, and invisible from the couches inside. She needed one of the two women to see her, so she waited. She counted to twenty, then counted fifty more, pretending to read her magazine but unable to concentrate on the sentences, which seemed to be lists of disconnected words.

She caught a movement in the corner of her eye, so she lazily lifted her gaze toward the grove of trees at the end of the yard like a person lost in thought, then half-turned her head and saw Claudia. She was standing on the inner side of the glass door, craning her neck slightly to look along the side of the house at Christine.

Christine sighed and half-turned her body to face away from Claudia, and turned more pages. She counted to seventy again, then glanced back at the door. Claudia was gone. Christine stood quickly, hurried around the Adirondack chairs to the shrubs under her window, and gently lifted Robert. He was still asleep, still peaceful and unharmed.

She followed the steps that she had been imagining in fragmentary form since she had been caught and brought here. She walked briskly along the edge of the vast green lawn toward the back. She had always known this would be part of her route, because she could see the grove of trees, the deep, cool shadows from her room. She had known she could make it all the way—or nearly all the way—to the grove before the angle of the path made her visible to the people behind the glass in the great room. But walking it in real life was an ordeal. It was much farther than she had imagined it to be, and the need to walk fast was a terrible temptation, because walking fast might wake Robert. She held him like a shallow bowl of water, keeping him level and never allowing him to tip or feel a bump. When at last she reached the shade of the trees, she was already breathing hard and sweating. She kept going farther from the house for another hundred feet, so the number of tree trunks between her and the house would make her harder to see.

Christine turned right when she got to the big brick wall at the back of the property. She could tell that she wasn't as hard to see from the house as she had hoped. If they missed her and began to look around, they would certainly be able to spot her within a
minute or two. But she was far from the house now, and that would help. The grove was wide—at least as far as a football field—and she had to cross it quickly. The piled-up leaves were slippery and noisy, and once her toe hit a raised tree root, and she jolted Robert so hard that he gave a startle reflex. She hummed to him to make him aware she was there, and corrected the way she cradled him to make him more comfortable, and he sank back into sleep.

The sweat was pouring from Christine's scalp down her forehead now, and her breaths came in little huffs, as though she had been jogging. She could see the back of the long garage ahead through the trees. She kept moving as quickly as she could, corrected her course to go along the outer wall so close that she sometimes brushed it. And then she was there. She walked to the corner of the garage, slipped silently along the narrow passageway between the back wall of the property and the side wall of the garage toward the open brick pavement in front.

She approached the end of the passageway, and she knew there would be open garages and probably cars parked in the open. She stopped, leaned forward slowly and carefully, and looked. There was Richard's car. Her chest seemed to tighten and her eyes watered for joy. She knew the car, knew Richard's unbreakable habit of leaving a magnetic case with an extra key in it in the compartment that held the gas cap. She looked out farther, saw that the six garage doors were all open, and saw the front ends of cars, but saw no people. She stepped out.

Sybil Landreau stepped out of the garage beside her. "Where do you think you're going?"

She had failed. All of that effort had failed. Christine gave a wan smile. "For a little walk, that's all."

"Lying bitch."

She noticed for the first time that Sybil had a gun stuck into the waistband of her jeans. Sybil took a couple of strides toward her, and Christine turned and took two steps to get back around the corner of the garage. When Christine looked the way she had come, she could see Claudia standing at the far end of the passageway, walking toward her.

Claudia called, "This time you don't get another chance. Take a last look at him."

Christine's heart froze. They were going to take Robert away from her. She heard Sybil's footsteps, knelt quickly, set him down, and then leaped toward the sound. She threw her fist into Sybil's face, but somehow the face wasn't there when her fist reached it. She felt Sybil's first blow as a revelation. She had never been hit in that way before, a strike so fast and hard that her head snapped to the side and she felt dizzy. The second blow was a quick punch to her chest. She was down on the hard brick pavement, wondering if the paralysis she felt was permanent. She heard a door slam some distance away. She looked up to see Ruby's overweight, middle-aged body coming from the house, a great deal of arm-pumping and bouncing, but steps that were too small to bring her here in time. Christine heard Ruby's voice: "No! Don't!" and suddenly she knew. Claudia hadn't meant that Robert was the one going away.

Christine saw Sybil Landreau tug the pistol out of her waistband, and hold it out toward her with a straight arm. Christine saw the muzzle flash, heard the bang, and felt something like fire spreading over her upper body.

When Carey came home from the hospital at precisely six-fifteen, Jane knew that the traffic had moved at its usual pace, with none of the sudden fits of highway repair that occurred in the Buffalo area during the late summer. Jane stood at the side window in the dining room and watched him drive his BMW up the long, sloping driveway, follow it around the corner of the house to the carriage house his great-grandfather had converted to a garage, and stop. He didn't pull in beside her Volvo, as she had expected. Even though Carey's car wasn't particularly small, when he got out he seemed to be unfolding, his long arms and legs straightening. She could feel the sense of freedom he was feeling to stand at his full height.

She had known him for so long now, listened to him and watched him so many times since she had met him in college, that it often seemed to her that she could feel what his nerves felt, and see what his eyes saw. She turned from the window, then heard him open the kitchen door and then close it.

As Jane walked through the dining room to the kitchen she saw his eyes focus on her and his smile appear, and she felt it again. She
began to see herself in his expression. She touched her hair to sweep it back from her eyes.

"Wow," he said. "As I was driving here, I hoped a stunningly beautiful raven-haired woman would just show up. I need a date for dinner tonight."

"Raven-haired?" She laughed. "Do you actually
think
in words like that?"

"I don't think when I talk to you. I just start talking." He reached out, pulled her to his chest, and kissed her. "So how about that dinner? I made a reservation at Oliver's."

"I'm perfectly happy to cook. It's all easy stuff that could be ready in twenty minutes—a couple of steaks, fresh asparagus, corn on the cob."

"Keep them for another day. Tonight we're going to celebrate, not do dishes."

"What are we celebrating?"

"I guess we're celebrating a great August day."

"I can support that. But you know, I always feel a little sad when it's August. It's sunny and warm and the leaves are all as thick and green as they can get, and everything has grown all summer. It's so perfect, but that means it's going to end."

"Then it's even more crucial. We've got to get this in before the end. Pretty soon fall will descend on us—fall on us, in fact. Besides, maybe I'm just learning to appreciate you because I missed you so much while you were away this summer, and I want to show it."

"That gives me something to celebrate," she said. "But I hadn't been suffering from a lack of appreciation before. When is the reservation you made? I assume you've given me no time to get ready."

"Seven-thirty. You have an hour."

She stood on tiptoes and kissed him. "Then come on. Let's get started. We can share a shower and save water."

He followed her to the staircase. "I love saving water."

"I'll bet." And as she climbed the stairs, she felt the same sensation she had felt earlier—that she could see herself through his eyes, and what he was seeing made him feel not just a sense of warmth and contentment, but actual joy.

At four in the morning Jane was asleep, but she was becoming more and more aware that she was cold. She snuggled closer to Carey's side, trying to get farther under the cover and be in the zone of heat his body radiated.

"Janie, you can't lie around like this."

"Harry?" She sat up. As always in her dreams, Harry wore his moss green sport coat. When he had picked it out, he'd undoubtedly had no idea that he would wear it forever.

He said, "You're cold, aren't you?"

"Yes." She rubbed her bare arms.

"The summer is over. Days are shorter already. Things are in motion."

"What things?"

He shrugged to make the coat sit properly on his narrow, rounded shoulders. "You know."

"She's safe, isn't she?"

His chest rose and fell in the characteristic sigh she remembered from when he was alive.

"What is it?"

"You're suddenly interested again? You take a little vacation and pretend the whole universe has stopped to wait. You took half the summer off, mostly to lie around in bed with your husband."

"That's not fair. I checked on her twice through her doctor. Communicating with a runner makes her weak and homesick, and sometimes it helps her enemies find her."