He accepted the lion’s share of the blame. She had wanted a smooth, stable, affluent life. He had felt the much less reasonable need to rattle cages. He supposed it was a common situation-both partners waking up one day, after a number of years, to find that they no longer recognized the person they were married to, while probably unaware how much they themselves had changed.
“I know you had to leave him there,” she said, suddenly laying down her fork. “But I still can’t believe it.”
He exhaled. This was one of the conversations they had had many times before, Gail always understanding and agreeing with his reasons-above all, the need to save Mandrake-but finally not accepting them. And every time, his own anguish crashed back down on him.
“I’ll take care of the check,” he said, standing.
He had expected her to stay at the table, but she waited for him at the restaurant’s door. She wasn’t yet done with him. Outside, the afternoon was warm with spring sunshine, but he could see the graying line of a fog bank beyond the coastal mountains to the west.
“How are you and your new friend getting along?” Gail asked.
“Just fine.”
“How many is this now, since we split?”
“For Christ’s sake,” he said wearily, “are you keeping a scorecard?” In a dozen years he’d had two semiserious affairs and a few flings. He still wasn’t sure which category Sara would turn out to be in.
“Just wondering if you’re getting into a second adolescence, like so many men. Trying to prove your virility.”
“Second?” Monks said. “You’re the one who spent years telling me I never grew out of my first one.”
Her lips twitched in a quick, grudging smile. “You’ll call me if you hear anything?”
“You know I will,” he said.
They exchanged a dry, formal kiss and walked their separate ways.
Monks climbed into his Bronco and drove north on Highway 12, passing through the small settlements of Boyes and Fetters Hot Springs, on his way to Sara’s. He had spent the last three days at his own house in Marin, taking care of necessities and trying to appease three cats that were pissed off by his absences. He was distracted and had to remind himself to keep his accelerator foot light through Sonoma ’s long stretch of its twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit.
The hardest thing about dealing with Gail was the inevitable aftermath of Glenn coming to the forefront of his mind again, along with all the ways that Monks feared having failed him.
He had talked extensively with law-enforcement authorities about what would happen if Glenn did turn up. The issue of his criminal culpability was murky. At Monks’s urging, the courts would probably overlook Glenn’s role in the kidnaping, along with his drug use if he agreed to enter rehab. There was the troublesome possibility that he had used his computer skills to help drain off Motherlode’s inheritance, but at least that was white-collar crime.
Whatever anger Monks had felt toward him was gone, especially as he’d come to realize the extent of Freeboot’s influence. Mostly, Monks nursed the tormenting hope that Glenn would get shaken enough to come home and start turning his life around. But as the weeks had turned to months, it seemed more likely that he was still in deep with Freeboot.
Either that or he was dead.
27
Monks had been right about the incoming fog. It started to thicken when he turned off Highway 101 at Cloverdale and turned into dense gray gloom in the coastal mountains west of Booneville. Everything in sight was coated with a fine sheen of moisture-the trees, the road, the Bronco’s windshield. His sense was of driving through a rainstorm that was trembling on the edge of cracking wide open.
He arrived at Sara’s house a little before four P.M. Both of her vehicles were gone-the pickup truck that she drove to work, and the Nissan Altima that Marguerite had been using.
That reminded him unhappily of another situation that he wasn’t dealing with well. Marguerite had been home for almost two weeks now. He had talked to Sara privately about her probation issues. Sara had soothed him as usual, assuring him that she would work things out as soon as Marguerite calmed down. But that never happened, and it looked to Monks like Marguerite was settling in. She came and went as she pleased, apparently hanging out and partying with friends she had grown up with. Without doubt, she was drinking and using drugs. But no one else seemed concerned, so he had decided to let it ride. At the least, it was a major improvement over her being under Freeboot’s domination.
He poured himself a vodka in Sara’s kitchen, put on a jacket, and took the drink outside. Marguerite’s homecoming had deepened his sense of foreboding, and he had spent the past two weeks in a limbo of drifting from one inconsequential task to another, tense, irritable, and not getting much done.
The fog rolled in like a tide, advancing in swirling clouds and filling the deep ravines that converged down at the ocean. He liked watching it, liked this kind of weather; he supposed that it aroused something atavistic in his gloomy Celtic soul. He thought again about the canceled Ireland trip. Maybe that was what he needed to do-just get the hell out of here for a while and let people and events take care of themselves. Nothing he was doing was helping, that was for sure.
He was starting his second drink when he heard a vehicle pull into the driveway. He walked over to where he could see around the corner of the house. It was the Altima-Marguerite was home. He went back to his fog watching, a little uncomfortable with her presence.
She hadn’t done anything that troubled him directly. For the most part, she politely ignored him. But it was still a bizarre situation-sharing a house with a woman who had helped to abduct him, and sleeping with her mother. He was pretty sure that he wouldn’t have begun the affair if he had known that Marguerite would be around, and he didn’t know if he would be able to sustain it on those terms. That was another thing that he was on the fence about, waiting uneasily for a push one way or another.
The door to the kitchen opened and Marguerite stepped out onto the deck. Monks turned to her inquiringly, assuming that there was something she had to tell him. But then he saw that she was carrying a bottle of beer, one of his Kronenbourgs.
She raised it, as if saluting him. “You won’t turn me in for this, will you?” she said teasingly.
He was surprised. This was the first time that she had been anything like sociable.
“I don’t know,” he said with mock severity. “What’s the reward money up to now?”
She laughed and tipped the bottle up, taking a long drink. A little of the foamy liquid spilled from her lips. Then the bottle slipped from her fingers, bouncing on the deck and spraying beer.
“Shit,” she said. “Would you get me another one? I’ll clean this up.”
He hesitated, suspecting that she had already drunk quite a bit.
“Sure,” he said. “But how about only one more?”
She made a face, an exaggerated pout. That was unlike her, too.
He went into the kitchen and opened another one of the Kronenbourgs, not happy about his own judgment. But if he had refused, she would probably just go back out to the bars.
When he got outside again, she had disappeared. The beer bottle still lay where it had fallen. Then he saw that the styrofoam lid of the hot tub was off. Marguerite’s jeans and blouse were lying beside it in a tangle on the deck. She was in the tub, leaning back, arms spread luxuriantly along the rim behind her, toes just peeping over in front.
“Why don’t you come on in?” she said. “It’s fucking freezing out there.”
Monks stopped walking and tried to think of an appropriate response. Nothing came.
“Hey, why be shy?” she said. “We’ve seen each other’s skin before.” She pushed away from the hot tub’s wall and slid toward him through the water.