Ordinarily the judge would've smiled in admiration at the attorney's cold-blooded ambush, but Arthur Battenkill wasn't enjoying the moment even slightly. He was climbing the stairs, taking three at time, anticipating what he'd find when he reached the bedroom; preparing himself for the catastrophic fact that Katie wasn't at the grocery or the salon. She was gone.
Her drawers in the bureau were empty; her side of the bathroom vanity was cleaned out. A suitcase was also missing, the big brown one with foldaway casters. A lavender note in Katie's frilly handwriting was Scotch-taped to the headboard of their bed, and for several moments it paralyzed the judge:
Honesty, Arthur. Remember?
Which meant, of course, that his wife, Katherine Battenkill, had been to the police.
The judge began packing like the frantic fugitive he was about to become. Tomorrow's front-page newspaper headline would exhume Tom Krome but, more important, rekindle the mystery of the corpse found in the burned house. Detectives who might otherwise have dismissed Katie's yarn as spousal bile (and done so without a nudge, being longtime courthouse acquaintances of Arthur Battenkill) would be impelled in the scorching glare of the media to take her seriously.
Which meant a full-blown search would begin for Champ Powell, the absent law clerk.
I could be fucked, thought Arthur Battenkill. Seriously fucked.
He filled their second-string suitcase, a gunmetal Samsonite, with underwear, toiletries, every short-sleeved shirt he owned, jeans and khakis, a windbreaker, PABA-free sunscreen, swim trunks, a stack of traveler's checks (which he'd purchased that morning at the bank) and a few items of sentimental value (engraved cufflinks, an ivory gavel and two boxes of personalized Titleists). He concealed five thousand in cash (withdrawn during the same sortie to the bank) inside random pairs of nylon socks. He packed a single blue suit (though not the vest) and one of his judge's robes, in case he needed to make an impression on some recalcitrant Bahamian immigration man.
One thing Arthur Battenkill found missing from the marital bureau was his passport, which Katie undoubtedly had swiped to thwart his escape.
Clever girl, the judge said to himself.
What his wife did not know (and Arthur Battenkill did, from his illicit travels with Willow and Dana) was that U.S. citizens didn't need a passport for entry into the Commonwealth of the Bahamas. A birth certificate sufficed, and the judge had one in his billfold.
He latched the suitcase and dragged it to the living room, where he got on the phone to a small air-charter service in Satellite Beach. The owners owed him a favor, as he'd once saved them a bundle by overruling a catastrophic jury verdict. The case involved a 323-pound passenger who'd been injured by a sliding crate of roosters on a flight to Andros. Jurors blamed the air-charter service for the mishap and awarded the passenger $100,000 for each of her fractured toes, which numbered exactly four. However, it was Arthur Battenkill's view, based on the expert testimony, that the woman herself shared much of the blame since it was her jumbo presence in the rear of the aircraft that had caused the cargo to shift so precipitously upon takeoff. The judge sliced the jury award by seventy-five percent, a decision upheld on appeal and received buoyantly by the air-charter firm.
Whose owners now assured Arthur Battenkill Jr. that it would be no trouble flying him to Marsh Harbour, none whatsoever.
As the judge showered and shaved for the last time as an American resident, he imagined how it would be, his new life in the islands. It would have been better with Katie, for a single middle-aged man surely would attract more notice and even suspicion. Still, he could easily picture himself as the newly arrived gentleman divorce – no, a widower. Polite, educated, respectful of native ways. He'd have a small place on the water and live modestly off investments. Discreetly he would let it drop that he'd held a position of prominence in the States. Perhaps eventually he would take on some piecework, advising local attorneys who had business with the Florida courts. He also would learn how to snorkel, and would order some books to help him identify the reef fish. He would go barefoot and get a nut-brown tan. There would be time for painting, too (which he hadn't done since his undergraduate days) – watercolors of passing sailboats and swaying palms, bright tropical scenes that would sell big with the tourists in Nassau or Freeport.
Leaning his forehead against the tiles in the steamy shower, the Honorable Arthur Battenkill Jr. could see it all. What he couldn't see was the plain blue sedan pulling into his driveway. Inside were three men: an FBI agent and two county detectives. They'd come to ask the judge about his law clerk, whose name had been helpfully provided by the judge's wife and secretaries, and whose toasted remains had been (less than one hour ago) positively identified by a series of DNA tests. If, as Mrs. Battenkill stated, the judge had assigned the late Champ Powell to the arson in which he'd perished, then the judge himself would stand trial for felony murder.
It was a topic that would arise soon enough, after Arthur Battenkill toweled off, got dressed, picked up his suitcase and – gaily humming the tune of "Yellow Bird" – walked out his front door, where the men stood in wait.
"What'll happen to your husband?"
Katie Battenkill said, "Prison, I guess."
"God." Mary Andrea Finley Krome, thinking: This one's tougher than she looks.
"There's a Denny's off the next exit. Are you hungry?"
Mary Andrea said, "Tell me again where we're going. The name of the place."
"Grange."
"And you're sure Tom's there?"
"I think so. I'm pretty sure," Katie replied.
"And how exactly do you know him? Or did you already say?"
Mary Andrea wasn't in the habit of road-tripping with total strangers, but the woman had seemed trustworthy and Mary Andrea had been frantic – spooked by Tom's divorce lawyer and rudely shouted at by the reporters. She would never forget the heat of the TV lights on her neck as she fled, nor the dread as she fought for a path through the crowd in the newspaper lobby. She'd even considered feigning another medical collapse but decided against it; the choreography would've been dicey amid the tumult.
All of a sudden a hand had gripped her elbow, and she'd spun to see this woman – a pretty strawberry blonde, who'd led her out the door and said: "Let's get you away from all this nonsense."
And Mary Andrea, stunned with defeat and weakened from humiliation, had accompanied the consoling stranger because it was the next best thing to running, which was what Mary Andrea felt most like doing. The woman introduced herself as Katie something-or-other and briskly took Mary Andrea to a car.
"I tried to get there sooner," she'd said. "I wanted to tell you your husband was still alive – you deserved to know. But then I got tied up at the sheriffs office."
Initially Mary Andrea had let pass the last part of the woman's remark, but she brought it up later, as an icebreaker, when they were on the highway. Katie candidly stated that her husband was a local judge who'd committed a terrible crime, and that her conscience and religious beliefs required her to rat him out to the police. The story piqued Mary Andrea's curiosity but she was eager to steer the conversation back to the topic of her scheming bastard husband. How else to describe a man so merciless that he'd burn down his own house to set up his own wife – even an estranged one – for publicly televised ridicule!
"You're mistaken. It wasn't like that," said Katie Battenkill.
"You don't know Tom."
"Actually, I do. See, I was his lover." Katie was adhering to her new-found doctrine of total honesty. "For about two weeks. Look in my purse, there's a list of all the times we made love. It's on lavender notepaper, folded in half."
Mary Andrea said, "You're serious, aren't you?"
"Go ahead and look."
"No, thanks."
"Truth matters more than anything in the world. I'll tell you whatever you want to know."