It was almost five o’clock when he reached the front gate and was admitted to the ranch complex. He drove to the garage barns, left the Cadillac there, and without conscious choice found himself walking straight across toward the main house. I don’t want to see her, he thought-and came around a curve in one of the south-garden paths and saw her.
He stopped instantly. Unaware of him, she was bending over a bed of flowers, clipping a bouquet of yellow-andpurple lilies with a pair of shears. She wore a blue bandanna around her hair, and gardening clothes, and there was a smudge of dirt on one cheek. Beautiful, Harper thought. His hands were moist. She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.
“Mrs. Augustine,” he said. “Claire.”
She came erect in a jerky motion, shaded her eyes against the sunglare. “What is it, Maxwell?” Cold voice, distant, always so distant and unknowable.
“Where is the President?” he asked.
“Resting.”
“Yes, of course. After what he did this morning he needs all the rest he can get.”
She moistened her lips: little pink tongue glistening, flicking sensually at soft pink lips. “He did what had to be done,” she said.
“Did he?”
“You know he did.”
“I don’t know anything,” Harper said. “But I can see how delighted you are. If it had been up to you, you’d have had him resign, wouldn’t you.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Why? What motivates you?”
“Nicholas motivates me.”
“That’s all? Just Nicholas?”
Uneasiness had crept into her eyes. “Why are you talking to me like this, Maxwell? What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing is the matter with me,” he said, and thought: Why am I talking like this? I don’t have any right to say these things. Control, control-but that was gone too and he did not seem to care. And the words kept coming out of him, out of the gray void. “I just want to know you, Claire. I want to know what you’re really like inside that beautiful head of yours.”
“I think I’d better go-”
“No,” he said. “Not just yet. Why won’t you open yourself up to me? Why are you afraid of me? Is it because you find me hateful and repulsive?”
She shook her head, shook it again, and began to back away from him.
“Or is it because I’m an intellectual and you think I’m incapable of understanding, that I’m just a political machine with no human feelings?”
“I never thought of you as a machine-”
“I think you did,” Harper said. “I think that’s exactly how you and Nicholas and everyone else have always felt about me. But you’re wrong, all of you. I have deeper feelings than any of you ever imagined.”
She kept backing away, seemed about to turn and flee-and compulsively he moved toward her, caught her wrists in his hands. The touch of her skin, the silky warmth of it, made him catch his breath, sent little tremors through him. He had not touched her in a long time, had never touched her except for impersonal handclasps; he had never been this close to her, had never had the scent of her heady in his nostrils, had never looked into the depths of her eyes.
“Please,” she said, and ducked her face away from him.
“Please, Maxwell, let me go.”
“I don’t want to let you go,” he said. Words still coming out of the void, and he could not stop them, did not want to stop them. “I’ve always wanted to touch you, Claire.”
Her eyes on him again, flashing messages that he could not read. “Don’t. Don’t-”
“I’m a person after all, you see that now, don’t you? I’m capable of normal desires, I’m capable of love.”
“Please,” she said again.
And he heard himself say, “I’ve been in love with you for a long time, Claire.”
She made a sound in her throat, wrenched out of his grasp, and ran through the garden to the house.
Harper just stood there. Feeling empty, feeling awed at himself and what had been hidden away inside him all these years. Thinking: I shouldn’t have done it, I shouldn’t have done it-but Nicholas shouldn’t have done it either.
Thirteen
At nightfall, beneath another full moon and a sky heavy with stars, Justice prowled here and there, back and forth-and a voice in his mind kept repeating: If it’s going to happen it will happen tonight; the killer will go after his third victim in the next few hours.
He could not get rid of the feeling. Every nerve in his body was sensitive with it. But where would it happen? Who was the intended target this time? Could it actually be the President, for some reason connected to his stunningly tragic withdrawal statement this morning? Justice had no intuitive answers; there was no way he could begin to fathom the workings of a deranged mind. He felt only that someone else was scheduled to die. Tonight.
Tonight.
And he could not be everywhere at once. He was only one man, one man alone. He wanted desperately to spend the night inside the manor house, at the President’s side; to talk to him again, try to make him accept the danger. But when he had gone there just before dusk, the housekeeper, Mrs. Peterson, had told him the President was not seeing anyone and had adamantly refused to carry a message to him. On impulse Justice had asked for an audience with the First Lady, and had been told that she was not seeing anyone either.
There had been nothing for him to do then except either to barge into the house-which might have angered and upset the President enough to make him not only refuse to listen but to have Justice confined to quarters-or to go on patrol. So he had gone on patrol, concentrating his vigil on the manor house, the guest cottages, the security and staff quarters. Whenever he encountered another agent on duty, or any of The Hollows’ private security police, he stopped and suggested carefully that they be extra watchful tonight; the President’s bombshell at the press conference might bring out part of the lunatic fringe, he said, you never knew how people would react to news like that. That was as far as he could go, and it did nothing at all to ease the fear and tension inside him.
He moved now through the gardens behind the manor house. The lights in the President’s study were on, he saw, and the idea came to him to hail Augustine from outside, get in to talk to him that way. Justice crossed to the window, stood close to it and then called out, “Mr. President? It’s Christopher Justice, sir. I’d like to speak with you.”
No response.
“Mr. President?”
No response.
Justice listened. There was a faint electric whirring from within: Augustine’s toy train outfit. So the President was inside; at least he knew that much. Amusing himself with his toy trains and not responding even out of curiosity to summonses from outside.
Just stay there, sir, Justice thought. Don’t leave the house or respond to any other summonses.
Grimly, he turned away.
Fourteen
Inside the study Augustine sat in front of the train board and stared at a 1927 Ives locomotive dragging a string of tankers and coal gondolas around the tracks. I should have gone into railroading instead of politics, he thought. I should have become a highballing engineer on the last of the steam locomotives on the Southern Pacific or the AT amp;SF. The smell of cinders and burning coal and hot cylinder oil; the pound of the 2-10-4s and the 4-6-2s and 2-8-0s; the roundhouses and the freight yards, the high mountain runs and the desert crossings, the close-knit fraternity of railroaders. To hell with trying to shape the destiny of the world. To hell with the thankless futile eviscerating world of politics. Give me anonymity and freedom and dignity. Give me a little joy.