Forrest got up from the kitchen table, opened the door to the basement stairs, and listened. He thought he should be hearing something-pounding or shouting-but he wasn’t sure whether he did. He descended the stairs cautiously and walked quietly through the tasting room. He put his ear to the wine-cellar door and listened.
“I hear you, Ted,” she called. “I know you think this is funny and you’re really being clever, but you’re not. Eventually you’re going to have to face up to the way you’ve treated that girl. It’s illegal.”
He said nothing.
“I know you’re there.”
“Of course I’m here, Caroline.”
“Don’t you have anything to say?”
“I’m not arguing with you. I know it’s illegal. Well, sit tight.”
“Very funny!” she shouted. “You’re just pissing me off and making it harder on yourself. If you’ll let me out now, I may not show the cops the bruises you put on me last night.”
He made a lot of noise walking up the steps, but stopped near the top, sat on a step and closed the door, and then listened. There were no scraping sounds, and there was no hammering. Maybe she had already given up on getting out by herself. He stood, opened the door, and went up into the hallway by the pantry.
Hobart had said he would be here this evening, so there was plenty of time for preparations. Forrest went about them thoughtfully. Since Hobart had to drive here, he would drive through the open gate, up the driveway, and park on the circle in front of the house. He would come to the front door.
Forrest went to the front door and studied it, and then went to the other door at the rear of the house that opened by the pantry. That door was the one where deliveries were made, the one a stranger would see first. He began to work on the door. He got a large jackknife he had kept in the back of a desk drawer for years, went outside, and worked on the pantry door. He scraped away some paint and then dug more deeply into the woodwork beside the doorknob. He kept at it until he could slide the blade into the wood behind the metal plate and push the latch aside to open the door.
Forrest stepped back. He wasn’t sure whether he had done a good job or a bad one, but it looked the way the latch on the door of Kramer Investigations looked the night he had burned the place, so he was sure it would do. He had no reason to believe that Hobart was a locksmith or a safecracker, so he was confident it would look to the police as though this was the way he had come in. Hobart would never see this door.
Forrest stopped and looked around the kitchen for a moment, and tried to evaluate his plan. Did he really need to do this to Caroline? Yes, he did. She knew about Kylie, and she intended to use the girl to force him into giving her control over his fortune and his freedom. When he had gone into a rage and grabbed her, he’d had no intention of killing her. He had simply been the victim of an immediate need to make her shut up. He had needed to be by himself and think. But having thought, he could not see any way of getting through this with Caroline alive. She really was ready to call the police. Right now she would probably be down there doing things to herself so she would have enough marks on her body to impress the authorities and make him look like an abuser.
He could hear the prosecutor now: “Surely she didn’t make marks like these on herself. So who did?”
Nobody knew Caroline the way he did. They would never imagine that she was so opportunistic and calculating. At worst they would think she was a vengeful wife who was being replaced by a much younger woman. And the law’s crude view of human life demanded that there be a victim and a criminal. Caroline was an expert at roles, and she would be all the victim that the law required. He was sure that if he opened the door right now, he would find her covered with bruises.
That was fine. His breakin story would account gracefully and smoothly for the bruises, too. They would all be fresh enough. He was sure doctors could tell how recent a bruise was, and she had never had any before. Those marks could have been caused only by the intruder. The more ways that Forrest found to think about his situation, the more certain he was that the intruder story was the best way to handle it.
There were several things he would have to prepare before Hobart got here. Forrest needed to put together the money to show Hobart. That would be what Hobart demanded to see first. But Forrest had been assembling and keeping large sums of money in the house for weeks, ever since Philip Kramer had contacted him. He hurried upstairs and opened the safe, got the banded stacks of hundreds, and laid them out on the bed to count them. He put two hundred thousand in a large bag he used to take to the gym. That was the payment for taking care of the Emily Kramer problem. Then he counted out enough stacks of money to make the same payment for Caroline. He could probably fit those into the same bag, but he decided it was better to have two. That way, at some point Hobart’s hands would both be encumbered.
Forrest found a bag of Caroline’s in the closet. It was a piece of luggage-an overnight bag, really-but it was about the right size, and seemed to him to be a nice touch. If it got bloody or something, he could even leave the money in it and place it with the bodies, as though Hobart had forced her to open the safe before he killed her. If Forrest’s fingerprints were on it, that didn’t matter. After all, the money was his.
Everything fit together perfectly. It left nothing dangerous, nothing ugly, nothing messy or inconvenient. Thinking about his plan gave Ted Forrest a sample of the happiness that he was going to feel.
He needed a gun, of course. There were two in the house. One he retrieved from his nightstand, an M9 9mm Beretta. There was also another gun somewhere in the master suite. He had bought it for Caroline years ago, when things were still cordial between them. It might fit the story he was concocting if that turned up somewhere, too, but he didn’t like the unnecessary complexity. He tested the story. Caroline hears noises downstairs, gets up to investigate, and brings her gun with her. She gets ambushed from behind, or shot-no, ambushed and beaten if there really are bruises on her-by the intruder. She’s killed. Ted hears the shots or something, goes downstairs and shoots the killer. No, too many guns. He decided to forget hers.
He looked around to be sure there was nothing out of place. The bed had not been slept in last night. It was still made, the covers tight and the decorative pillows arranged at the head of the duvet as the chambermaid had left them. He moved the pillows to the couch where Caroline usually put them, and then pulled back the covers and punched the goosedown pillows to indent them as though someone had slept here. He turned off the light and hurried downstairs. This had taken too long. He should have been where he could watch the front of the house and listen for sounds from the wine cellar.
He stood with his ear to the door of the basement, heard nothing, and then opened the door. He went down the stairs into the tasting room, but still didn’t hear her. He put his ear to the door of the wine cellar.
It occurred to him that he might have forgotten another problem. There was no real ventilation down here. The wine cellar wasn’t a place where anyone had ever spent much time before. The new cooling unit worked by pumping water through a closed system, not blowing air. She could be suffocating. He reached for the door, then stopped. What if she were suffocating? His story would accommodate that comfortably. But if he opened the door, air would rush in again and revive her. She would be active and difficult.
He turned and walked toward the steps, and climbed. As he reached the third step from the top, his cell phone rang. It startled him because he had forgotten he had it, and then realized he had been below ground. It might have been ringing for a minute or more. He answered it quickly. “Hello?” he said. “Hello?”