Or sniffing exhaust from a ‘39 Continental, Eve had thought, and looked up at the portrait of Olivia Tilden.
“I just can’t hack it,” Sam had said.
The very words her father must’ve said to her mother with the 1962 equivalent of hack.
She had not argued or pleaded or told him about the baby to keep him; she’d said she understood, and the terrible thing was, she did. She’d walk out on it too, if she could.
Now it was almost midnight. They’d planned for him to leave late at night so there’d be no questions, no black looks from Larry, tears from Mrs. Knapp, or that awful, ultra-bland look Frances got when something made her desperately unhappy.
In the morning, Eve would tell them he was gone, then she’d get out of the house and stay out until everyone had gotten a little used to the idea that the three-day reconciliation was over.
She closed the suitcase, started to drag it off the bed, and he took it from her.
“I’m sorry, Eve.”
“Don’t say that again,” she snapped, suppressing an urge to slap him.
He was sorry... she was sorry, everybody was sorry. Some crazed gene had gotten stuck in an old family of superrich fools who’d somehow pissed off the gods, and everybody was sooooo sorry. Distant sorrow, such as you’d feel for the starving children of Somalia unless they happened to do their dying on your front lawn. Very distant to everyone but her, and her poor, poor mother and grandmother... and the great-great-great-grandmother in the hoop skirt who’d stood under an old elm and mouthed, “Watch out.”
Oh, 1II watch out, Granny, she thought as she followed Sam out of the room. She caught sight of the new TV she’d gotten for his return and almost sobbed out loud, but choked it down and thought, If only I knew what to watch out for.
They made their way down the stairs, only turning on lights they needed and turning them right off again, in case Frances was alone tonight, wandering her sitting room with a spell of insomnia, and happened to see the light under her door.
They got down to the entry hall and Eve pushed the switch for the chandelier. It was on a dimmer; she kept it low so they had just enough light to see by.
He put the suitcase down and they faced each other. She’d been twenty-four when she’d met him, twenty-five when they married, and for five years it’d been fine. Better than fine until her mother died and left Eve the Dodd-Tilden legacy, like a monster flea jumping off a dead dog onto a live one, she thought. Sam was the only man she’d ever “known,” or maybe ever would.
The feeling of loss was almost unendurable, but her genes for hiding it were as strong as the genes for “the thing,” and she looked steadily up at her about-to-be-ex-husband. He made a move to hug her, but she knew he didn’t really want to because she might see something, and she stepped back. He picked up the suitcase and said, “The alarm?”
“Yes.”
“Eve...”
“Just go, Sam. No blame.”
She tried to believe that, to not hate the unknown Tilden forebear who’d done something heinous enough to bring this curse on them.
She opened the door for him and he said, “I love you, Eve. Always will.” He choked on will, then rushed across the front terrace and down to the car he’d brought around earlier so he wouldn’t have to get it out of the garage.
She closed the door, leaned her head against it, and whispered, “I’m going to have a baby.” She wanted to throw it open and yell it, then he’d come back... do the right thing... the way her father must have. And a year or so down the road, he’d walk out like her father had, or eat rat poison or blow his head off.
She heard the car start, then hurried to the alarm panel in the dining room. She pressed pause control, then the gate control pad, and a line of yellow, high-tech-looking lights blinked across the chrome panel. He had seven minutes to get down the drive and out on the road; then, if the gates weren’t closed the lights would turn red and the alarm would go off. The gates would slam shut, the private alarm company would send about forty men, not to mention the local cops, who’d be alerted automatically. It’d gone off on its own a few times before they’d gotten the kinks out of the system and it had been like the final alert for World War Three.
She watched the panel carefully; the lights blinked a few minutes later to show Sam breaking the beam as he went through the gate, then they went back to steady cat’s-eye yellow and she closed the gate. The lights went out and she countermanded the pause.
He was gone.
She went into the kitchen, poured a glass of milk and took a couple of the pecan cookies that Mrs. Knapp had made especially for Sam. She’d see some were gone, demand to know who’d eaten them because they were for Mr. Klein. Eve would tell her he was gone and Mrs. Knapp would cry, Larry would brood, and Frances would be totally, ostentatiously nonreactive, like some rare, inert element.
And Eve would get out of the house and stay out for the rest of the day.
She forced the milk and cookies down, standing at the marble-topped counter Mrs. Knapp kneaded bread on, then she rinsed the glass and her mouth, spitting nut fragments into the sink.
Mrs. Knapp would have a seizure if she saw them and Eve cleaned the sink with detergent, then wiped it so it shone the way it had before.
She turned off the kitchen lights and went back through the butler’s pantry, past the door to the breakfast room and into the huge, formal dining room they almost never used.
She was abreast of the head of the table when something made her stop and face the windows. They were long and narrow, draped in pale gray damask with inside sheers. Slowly, not knowing why, she went to them and pulled the sheers back to look out. Moonlight turned the driveway silver; the lawn was a blackish green ground-sheet ending in the black, spiky, impenetrable-looking woods.
A shiver racked her and she thought, Something’s out there.
Sam hadn’t gone through the gate after all. He’d changed his mind, was willing to give it another go, and she didn’t know if she was elated or sorry... only the alarm was armed. It could not be Sam.
Her hands were still warm from washing out the sink; she slid them up her chilled, goosepimpled arms inside her robe sleeves and thought, Scars.
Adam had done it; he’d found the road, the house, and her. He’d also found gates fifteen feet high, with wrought-iron spikes on top that would probably impale him if he tried to get over them.
Walls along the road, even higher than the gates, enclosed the land. They were well mortared, with no toeholds for climbing that he could see in this light.
Rich, Riley had screamed at the end. “She’s rich... no one gets to people that rich!”
Rich she was. Tilden House was a walled estate, with pillars with a red light on one of them that must be the alarm. Even if Adam got past the alarm, over the walls, and across God knew how many acres of land, he’d find a thirty-room house crawling with servants.
All he got for all his trouble...
“Can that,” he snapped to himself.
This wasn’t a magic tower, she wasn’t locked up in it like a fairy princess. Sooner or later, she’d come through those gates and when she did, he’d be waiting. He’d follow her to town, to the parking lot of a shopping center, the house of a friend, and maybe the friend lived in a place as isolated as this.