All of her senses were raw, as though the skin had been peeled back and the nerves were exposed to the air, throbbing and waiting to be irritated. Robert wasn't making noises yet, and the women were lying still. Two cars went past on the road beyond the hedge, and Christine felt worried at first that they would pull into the driveway, and then devastated because they might have been the last cars to go by for an hour. She had missed them, and maybe they had been the ones that had been meant to find her and Robert by the roadside and save them.
Time was short and diminishing now, a lit fuse. She looked up, shaded her eyes from the sun petulantly, got up and moved to another chair, closer to Robert's place under the barred window, and invisible from the couches inside. She needed one of the two women to see her, so she waited. She counted to twenty, then counted fifty more, pretending to read her magazine but unable to concentrate on the sentences, which seemed to be lists of disconnected words.
She caught a movement in the corner of her eye, so she lazily lifted her gaze toward the grove of trees at the end of the yard like a person lost in thought, then half-turned her head and saw Claudia. She was standing on the inner side of the glass door, craning her neck slightly to look along the side of the house at Christine.
Christine sighed and half-turned her body to face away from Claudia, and turned more pages. She counted to seventy again, then glanced back at the door. Claudia was gone. Christine stood quickly, hurried around the Adirondack chairs to the shrubs under her window, and gently lifted Robert. He was still asleep, still peaceful and unharmed.
She followed the steps that she had been imagining in fragmentary form since she had been caught and brought here. She walked briskly along the edge of the vast green lawn toward the back. She had always known this would be part of her route, because she could see the grove of trees, the deep, cool shadows from her room. She had known she could make it all the way—or nearly all the way—to the grove before the angle of the path made her visible to the people behind the glass in the great room. But walking it in real life was an ordeal. It was much farther than she had imagined it to be, and the need to walk fast was a terrible temptation, because walking fast might wake Robert. She held him like a shallow bowl of water, keeping him level and never allowing him to tip or feel a bump. When at last she reached the shade of the trees, she was already breathing hard and sweating. She kept going farther from the house for another hundred feet, so the number of tree trunks between her and the house would make her harder to see.
Christine turned right when she got to the big brick wall at the back of the property. She could tell that she wasn't as hard to see from the house as she had hoped. If they missed her and began to look around, they would certainly be able to spot her within a minute or two. But she was far from the house now, and that would help. The grove was wide—at least as far as a football field—and she had to cross it quickly. The piled-up leaves were slippery and noisy, and once her toe hit a raised tree root, and she jolted Robert so hard that he gave a startle reflex. She hummed to him to make him aware she was there, and corrected the way she cradled him to make him more comfortable, and he sank back into sleep.
The sweat was pouring from Christine's scalp down her forehead now, and her breaths came in little huffs, as though she had been jogging. She could see the back of the long garage ahead through the trees. She kept moving as quickly as she could, corrected her course to go along the outer wall so close that she sometimes brushed it. And then she was there. She walked to the corner of the garage, slipped silently along the narrow passageway between the back wall of the property and the side wall of the garage toward the open brick pavement in front.
She approached the end of the passageway, and she knew there would be open garages and probably cars parked in the open. She stopped, leaned forward slowly and carefully, and looked. There was Richard's car. Her chest seemed to tighten and her eyes watered for joy. She knew the car, knew Richard's unbreakable habit of leaving a magnetic case with an extra key in it in the compartment that held the gas cap. She looked out farther, saw that the six garage doors were all open, and saw the front ends of cars, but saw no people. She stepped out.
Sybil Landreau stepped out of the garage beside her. "Where do you think you're going?"
She had failed. All of that effort had failed. Christine gave a wan smile. "For a little walk, that's all."
"Lying bitch."
She noticed for the first time that Sybil had a gun stuck into the waistband of her jeans. Sybil took a couple of strides toward her, and Christine turned and took two steps to get back around the corner of the garage. When Christine looked the way she had come, she could see Claudia standing at the far end of the passageway, walking toward her.
Claudia called, "This time you don't get another chance. Take a last look at him."
Christine's heart froze. They were going to take Robert away from her. She heard Sybil's footsteps, knelt quickly, set him down, and then leaped toward the sound. She threw her fist into Sybil's face, but somehow the face wasn't there when her fist reached it. She felt Sybil's first blow as a revelation. She had never been hit in that way before, a strike so fast and hard that her head snapped to the side and she felt dizzy. The second blow was a quick punch to her chest. She was down on the hard brick pavement, wondering if the paralysis she felt was permanent. She heard a door slam some distance away. She looked up to see Ruby's overweight, middle-aged body coming from the house, a great deal of arm-pumping and bouncing, but steps that were too small to bring her here in time. Christine heard Ruby's voice: "No! Don't!" and suddenly she knew. Claudia hadn't meant that Robert was the one going away.
Christine saw Sybil Landreau tug the pistol out of her waistband, and hold it out toward her with a straight arm. Christine saw the muzzle flash, heard the bang, and felt something like fire spreading over her upper body.
24
When Carey came home from the hospital at precisely six-fifteen, Jane knew that the traffic had moved at its usual pace, with none of the sudden fits of highway repair that occurred in the Buffalo area during the late summer. Jane stood at the side window in the dining room and watched him drive his BMW up the long, sloping driveway, follow it around the corner of the house to the carriage house his great-grandfather had converted to a garage, and stop. He didn't pull in beside her Volvo, as she had expected. Even though Carey's car wasn't particularly small, when he got out he seemed to be unfolding, his long arms and legs straightening. She could feel the sense of freedom he was feeling to stand at his full height.
She had known him for so long now, listened to him and watched him so many times since she had met him in college, that it often seemed to her that she could feel what his nerves felt, and see what his eyes saw. She turned from the window, then heard him open the kitchen door and then close it.
As Jane walked through the dining room to the kitchen she saw his eyes focus on her and his smile appear, and she felt it again. She began to see herself in his expression. She touched her hair to sweep it back from her eyes.
"Wow," he said. "As I was driving here, I hoped a stunningly beautiful raven-haired woman would just show up. I need a date for dinner tonight."
"Raven-haired?" She laughed. "Do you actually think in words like that?"
"I don't think when I talk to you. I just start talking." He reached out, pulled her to his chest, and kissed her. "So how about that dinner? I made a reservation at Oliver's."