“Oh?”
“Yes.” He’d nodded emphatically. “Just trust me on this.”
“Certainly.”
“The first thing you’d have to do if you were running from the law or people who were trying to kill you is ditch the cell phone, obviously,” he went on. “They can always track those. But it’s easy to get a burner phone — if you have cash. Credit cards are no good, right? And how many people have enough cash to go on the run? How much cash do you have in your wallet right now?”
Abby had four bills crumpled in her purse — and she was pleasantly surprised to discover one of them was a ten. She’d thought they were all singles.
“So there you go, thirteen dollars,” Luke said. “I couldn’t get far on that. They’d find me before I hit the state line. I’d run out of gas—”
“Is this in the car you hot-wired with a screwdriver?” Abby asked, and he grinned. For all of his physical beauty — and he was stunning, no question about that — he had a kid’s smile, awkward and shy, and his off-the-set laugh was the same, a little too big, too high, far too likely to end with a helpless snort. Abby loved that about him. All the surprising touches that turned the movie star into a human being were reassuring. The more human he became, the more she loved him. That first day, when he’d joked to her about the grief his friends were giving him for having a woman perform his stunt driving, she’d thought he was exactly what she’d expected: good-looking and charming and arrogant and false. The first date, she’d asked herself why she was wasting her time. But soon she realized that her initial wariness about him was understandable, but it was not the truth. The truth was complicated, as it usually is, and the truth of Luke London made him easier to love than Abby wanted. Her truth was that she wanted to stay far away from actors. Her truth was that she was breaking rules for him.
“Sure it’s the car I hot-wired,” he said of his escape vehicle. “Because I’d have found an old car, right? As we discussed.”
“Ah, of course.”
“But then I run out of gas, and I’ve got no cash. What then? Pretend to be a homeless person?”
“It doesn’t sound like it would be pretending by then.”
Her pointed at her, sculpted triceps flexing under his T-shirt. “Good point! It would be method acting at its finest.”
“And you suck at that.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Indeed. I’d stand out, and they’d find me.”
“Who?”
“The people who are trying to kill me! So what do I do?”
“You steal,” she said.
“I’d get caught. I guarantee it. I have a naturally guilty disposition when it comes to crime. One try at shoplifting, and I’m getting caught and going to jail. Which means, obviously, another inmate will be paid to kill me. Or maybe a guard. But going to jail is not hiding.”
“You steal carefully, then,” Abby had said. “Maybe break into a house. Just a matter of finding the right place.”
Now, two years after that conversation and months after they’d taken Luke off life support, Abby drove along the turnpike and wondered where the right place was.
She had some cash — a hundred and thirty bucks, enough for a hotel room somewhere, but hotels were dangerous. Her face was going to be on the news, and this was off-season in Maine, which meant that the employees of hotels that took cash were going to have time to pay attention to their guests, learn their faces.
That was when she got it.
Off-season. The right places, she realized, were plentiful. They didn’t call the state Vacationland for nothing — most people who owned property in Maine didn’t stay there year-round. There were thousands of vacant houses, cabins, and cottages out there for her, and plenty of them were isolated.
She left the interstate in Augusta and moved on to the back roads. She realized only after taking the exit that the other cars hadn’t made her uneasy, nor had the speed. Her mind was too busy with a real crisis to let the imaginary threats creep in. When you were fleeing a murder scene and a murderer, a traffic accident suddenly didn’t seem too bad.
As she followed one of the winding country roads east toward the coast, it began to rain again. That felt good, like protective cover. She was driving east because most of the summer people clung to the coast. There were exceptions at every lake and pond, of course, but nowhere was the population of seasonal houses higher than the Midcoast. When the patio furniture was moved into storage and the lobster shacks folded up their bright umbrellas, the population of those towns fell by at least half.
How to pick the right house, though? Driving around some little coastal village and staring at houses would allow her to identify a few vacant ones, but it would also get her noticed by a year-round resident.
She stopped at a gas station with a lunch counter, a place busy enough for her to feel like she wouldn’t stand out and big enough for her to suspect they’d have what she needed. Her clothes had dried but were still covered with mud, and she didn’t want many people to get a look at her. She waited until an older couple got out of their car and headed toward the door, and then she got out of the Tahoe, crossed the parking lot swiftly, and walked in on their heels. They turned toward the deli counter, and Abby stepped behind one of the merchandise racks and pretended to be looking at candy while she looked around the store. Just beside the door, she saw what she wanted — a rack of real estate guides, free of charge.
She grabbed one, exited, and tried to keep her pace slow while her heart thundered and her every impulse screamed at her to run.
Nobody gave her so much as a passing glance.
She drove to Rockland and pulled off the road at a busy Dunkin’ Donuts where the Tahoe wasn’t likely to stand out. She’d have to change plates if she intended to keep the car, but right now her priority was finding a place where she could buy some time.
The real estate guide offered plenty of them. Abby knew what she was looking for; the keywords were seasonal, which meant they’d likely be empty now, and motivated, which meant they’d been on the market for a long time, and the neighbors were used to seeing strange cars pull in for a look.
She found both of those packaged with an even more golden word: isolated.
There was a seasonal property in St. George, a rural stretch of peninsula about twenty minutes from Rockland, that boasted a reduced price, motivated seller, and fifteen isolated acres.
A private oasis, perfect for artists, nature lovers, or anyone seeking beauty and seclusion!
The Realtor didn’t spell it out, but the place certainly appealed to fugitives too.
Abby drove south on Route 1, then turned in South Thomaston and followed 131 through winding curves that led out of the hills and down the peninsula, the sea on one side and the St. George River on the other. Past an old dairy truck that stood on the top of a hill like it was waiting to be used for a calendar photograph, past a few houses with tall stacks of lobster traps in the yard, and then through the little fishing and tourist town of Tenants Harbor. More fishing town than tourist spot now; this was far enough out of the woods to be unappealing to the leaf peepers, so it probably ran on a short season, Memorial Day to Labor Day, for most everyone but the locals. Just before Port Clyde, the road to the private oasis appeared. She followed it into an expanse of ever-thickening pines and then spotted a FOR SALE sign beside a stone post onto which the house number had been carved: 117.
She followed a dirt driveway up a slope and around a curve and then the house came into view, a tall structure of shake shingles and glass that made her think of a lighthouse, everything designed vertically, with each floor a little smaller than the one below it, so it looked as if the levels had been stacked on one another. On one side of the home was a garage and on the other a small outbuilding that had probably been a studio.