Prescott went back to the divorce papers and read them once again. The tone of Rowland’s strategy was different, a long series of futile attempts to delay an inevitable outcome. The whole agreement at the end must have seemed to Rowland like onerous terms of surrender. Donna Halsey had, almost incidentally, included a permanent restraining order. As part of the settlement, Rowland was supposed to communicate only by having his attorneys speak with her attorneys. He was to refrain from calling or writing to her or speaking to her. The terms didn’t sound to Prescott like anything Rowland would agree to, but in the end, he had signed the papers.
There was no question what had happened. Rowland had made claims about his financial status that were false, and produced as evidence papers such as tax returns. Donna and her lawyers had found evidence that he was lying, and had blackmailed him into accepting the terms she really wanted. Rowland’s emotions must have been an unsettling combination. He had included in his responses a repeated request for reconciliation, and even in the last filings before the settlement had wanted the judge to delay the final decree for another six months so he could win her back. He had been wooing her through the end of the fight.
Prescott was beginning to feel sure now. He could not have taken a single piece of the information he had found and convinced anyone that Rowland had hired the killer, but Prescott believed he had. Rowland had paid and kept silent, just as he had in his other disputes, waiting for his time to come. All along, he had planned to get even. No, Prescott decided. It might not have been as simple as that. He had not only hated her. He had loved her or, anyway, had wanted to keep her. Maybe the first intermediary he had hired after the lawyers had been a detective, or at least an informant: a person who had not been included in the court’s order to stay clear of her. He’d had her watched, probably since the separation.
When he had learned that she was going to bed with Cushner, he had gone about hiring a different kind of intermediary, one who could carry out his secret desires without ever being seen, whose approach would not be noticed. Rowland had needed one whose feelings about Donna Halsey were not an ambiguous stew of hatred and love and desire and anger and remorse and self-interest. He’d needed somebody with no discernible emotions at all, someone who would simply kill her and go away.
22
Varney awoke and lay still for a moment, staring up at the old, irregular plaster ceiling. It had taken him an hour the first night to determine that the texture of it was intentional, and not just the work of some plasterer in the old days who’d had no idea what he was doing. It was supposed to have all those raised places and lower ones, to show it was handmade. It must have been a style sometime in the 1920s, just like the weird tarnished golden light fixture in the center that held one weak bulb behind a whitish half globe, and the lights on the walls that looked like candles with pointed bulbs.
He sat up in bed and picked up his watch: ten o’clock. He rubbed his hands over his eyes, and felt despair. He was letting go of his discipline, losing his will. For fifteen years he had kept himself under control, fighting to make a tiny bit of progress every day. When he had gone to bed each night, he had closed his eyes knowing that he had done his best to make himself stronger, faster, smarter than he had been in the morning. When he had awoken eight hours later he had not needed to prod himself to get started. He had felt eager to build on the small improvements won the day before.
Every second day he had lifted weights, and every day he had done his stretches and crunches and push-ups and pull-ups, practiced the punches, kicks, feints, and combinations he had been working on that month, then gone out to run. By this time of the morning, he would have had his shower and his breakfast, and been ready to go out again. He would go into the day feeling as though he had his edge, and everything he did after that was extra.
Varney had possessed incredible energy, and taken every opportunity to make the rest of the day as good as the beginning. If he had to go to the library to find everything they had on some topic—say, the habits and attitudes of some business guy he had been hired to take out—he would walk miles to the main branch to increase his stamina. He would stare for a long time at the man’s photographs and memorize all the details he had read, then test himself on the way home. On the street, he would study everything he saw, trying to notice things that would help him in other places and other times: how new buildings were locked and protected, where the surveillance cameras were placed, and how they were disguised. He watched policemen and security guards, searching for routines that had become sloppy and predictable.
This morning Varney slowly pulled himself out of bed and walked to the window, trying to avoid the mirror on the dresser so he would not have to look into his own eyes. He was ashamed. He had been here over a week, and every day he had let himself slip a little bit further. He supposed that the first day or two he had been tired from his lack of sleep and his long drive. He had been angry and upset and disoriented. Those were the things he had told himself. He had used them to convince himself that what he needed was to give himself a rest.
He had slept in the next morning. The day after that, he had told himself that he was still tired, and the day after that he’d said he needed time to get used to his surroundings and make observations of the area for security’s sake. Then, there were more practical matters: groceries to buy, getting rid of the car he had driven here from Buffalo. On the fifth day he had found himself moving furniture around, as though this room were going to be a permanent residence.
He was afraid he was losing himself. He was losing the man he had built from nothing, and the process was frightening to him. The deterioration seemed to happen so quickly. Suddenly, he felt lazy, tired all the time. He seemed to be breathing in shallow drafts, not getting enough oxygen to allow him to move the way he always had.
It had been a hot, humid week, and the sunlight looked strange and dull to him, filtered through a thin gray haze so that the glare came from every direction and nothing stood out in sharp relief, or had a definite shadow.
He turned from the window, determined to save himself. It was too late to salvage the past week, but today was a new start. He dropped to the floor and did push-ups, counting as he went. When he reached forty, a part of his brain said, “Why fifty? Why isn’t forty enough? It’s the first day. I can do more in my second set, after the sit-ups.” The internal, unvoiced sound of his thoughts horrified him. That was the way of weakness, the way losers thought. He pumped out the fifty, then rolled to his back and rushed into the sit-ups. As he worked, he could feel the effect of his lazy week. Two hundred was going to be too many. Why not a hundred now and a hundred later? The words were so distasteful that he felt disgust and shame. When he had finished the two hundred he punished his abdominal muscles by doing fifty slow, agonizing crunches. Next he went to the empty closet, pushed aside the hangers, and did fifty pull-ups on the clothes pole, and did his second set of push-ups with his eyes already searching the room for his running shoes and shorts. He put on a heavy sweatshirt with them so he would sweat harder when he ran.
He had degenerated so badly that in the seven days, he had not even selected a route for his daily run. He found a way that kept him off the crowded business streets, and eventually came to a large high school field where other people too old to be students were jogging and some kids were playing basketball on a blacktop square with a row of baskets on poles. He used the quarter-mile track to make sure he had covered five miles before he jogged out the gate.