Jane and Christine walked to the beach. Jane kept watch while Christine slept on the sand for a couple of hours, until the air around them seemed to be lightening. Then the two women changed into clean jeans and blouses from Jane's suitcase and threw Christine's stolen scrubs into a trash can. Jane disassembled both of her pistols, removing the magazine, the slide, barrel, recoil spring, guide rod, slide catch, frame.
They walked to the harbor before dawn. As Jane went, she found places to put the pieces of the two weapons—the springs in a trash can, one slide in a storm sewer. The guide rods, slide catches, sears, and triggers went into a row of Dumpsters. She saved the most identifiable parts, the frames and magazines, until they reached the docks, then dropped them in deep water.
When it was fully light they made their way to the zone of resort hotels and went into what looked like the best one to order breakfast. When they had spent the early morning in a leisurely meal, Jane went to the concierge desk. She found a man there who seemed to be in charge and said, "Good morning. Do you speak English?"
"Yes, ma'am," the man said.
"I need to find a travel agent. Can you help me?"
"Certainly," he said. He reached under his counter and produced a glossy brochure, opened it to reveal a map of Ensenada. He used his pen to circle a rectangle that represented the hotel, then circled a spot one block south and four blocks east. He said, "We recommend Tours Riviera to our guests." He scribbled the name Tours Riviera. "Some of us have used their services ourselves."
Jane said, "I should mention that I don't speak Spanish."
"That isn't a problem, Señorita. Most of their customers are American."
"Thank you very much," Jane said. She handed him a twenty-dollar bill, mainly because of her relief that he had not demanded to know if she was a guest of the hotel.
He pocketed the money. "Thank you, Señorita."
Jane and Christine left for the travel agency at ten, and found the office open. The young woman who took charge of them at the door said her name was Estrella.
Jane said, "The reason we've come is that we'd like to change our travel plans. This is a last-minute idea, so tell me if it's not possible."
"Certainly."
"There are cruise ships stopping in Ensenada all the time, aren't there?"
"Oh, yes, especially at this time of year. There are Baja cruises, three-day, four-day, and five-day cruises that start in San Diego, Los Angeles, or Long Beach that stop at Catalina Island, Ensenada, Cabo San Lucas, and go back. There are fifteen-day cruises to Hawaii that stop here. Let me see what's in port now." She typed something into her computer and read off the screen. "The Carnival Paradise, Royal Caribbean Monarch of the Seas, Diamond Princess, Holland America Zaandam."
"Are there ever any empty cabins when they reach Ensenada?"
"I would say there always are."
"Would it be possible for you to book us a cabin on one of them to go to one of the California ports?"
"I think so, but it might be an expensive way to get home. They usually sail from here around five or six o'clock in the evening and arrive in their American port at around six the next morning. So you won't see much."
"That's just fine," said Jane. She looked as remorseful as she felt. "It's a last-minute plan. We came down here by car with two men we didn't know as well as we thought we did. We're going home early."
Estrella looked at them sympathetically. "Say no more. You have your passports?"
"Yes." Jane reached into the side pocket of her suitcase and produced the ones she had received from Stewart Shattuck.
Estrella lifted her telephone, spoke rapidly in Spanish, and in a few minutes, the arrangements were made. "The price is prorated," she said. "It's a three-day cruise, and you will owe one-third."
"We'll take it," said Jane. She looked at her watch. "I wonder if it would be okay for us to go aboard the ship right away and get settled. I think we'd like to explore the ship a little before we sail."
"I think that sounds like a good idea," said Christine.
"Yes," Jane said. "I feel as though we've done everything here that we want to."
36
Ruby Beale was not a fearful or superstitious woman, but she had a bad feeling tonight, and it wasn't new. She had been feeling it, more or less, since she had looked down from the walkway in the great room of the big house and seen the woman staring in the window at her. There was a feeling that the curse had not yet worked all the way through her family and exhausted itself.
A minute after she had seen the woman Ruby had begun to resent the people around her, and the feeling had grown. She had seen something that other people had not seen, and they had not had the sense to realize what it was. Ruby had known. Anybody with any sense would have known. The black-haired woman in the all-black clothes could not have been easier to interpret if she had been a skeleton wearing a hooded robe.
The woman had been staring inside, choosing her way in. Ruby had sensed that she already knew a hundred ways in, as water would have, or air. It wasn't a question of Ruby being lucky and seeing her in time to stop her. It was more like being the one who saw something big and irresistible and destructive while it was still forming—like wind and waves beginning to churn, far out at sea.
Later that night she had thought to herself, Well, this would be the kind of thing that would happen, wouldn't it? Anybody in the world understood that if you did bad, cruel things to people, then some time the hatred you caused would take a form and come after you. Anybody would know, except her stupid son, Richard, who could feel nothing of the rhythms and balances of the world. Revenge was just a restoration of the natural balance. That was why people called it getting even.
They had heard her warn them about that woman, but none of them had believed it or even understood. In their hearts they thought Ruby was just an eccentric, spoiled rich woman, old before her time and scared witless by a five-second exposure to their world, the real world where people used guns to take things. They hadn't known her well enough to have the index to her mind. Even her husband, Andy, and her son, Richard, who both had good reason to know her, had not taken her seriously.
They hadn't seemed to remember that as a nurse she had seen more death than Steve Demming, Sybil Landreau, Claudia Marshall, and Pete Tilton combined. She had seen it arrive in ambulances and bloom in beds in intensive care and on operating tables. Some nights she had left the hospital and felt it plucking at her sleeve, trying to get her to turn around and stare into its face until she couldn't look away again. Death was what she had seen looking in the window that night.
Richard—poor, stupid Richard—had been the first one to actually say she was delusional. His hirelings had been lost from the beginning. They were people who had stopped making decisions. They just heard what the people who were paying them wanted, and thought about ways to oblige. That wasn't thinking. And over the years Richard had become worse than they were. He thought only about what he wanted, and listened only to people who told him reassuring lies.
And now the disaster had come. Since that night she'd had to guard against her own feelings about Andy, too. Ruby's alliance with Andrew Beale had been reasonable. They had lasted a long time, become prosperous and powerful, and she had not found her side of the bargain too hard, or his too easy. She knew that she had to be smart now and focus on the details—count her blessings, as her mother used to put it. She couldn't let herself start thinking too hard about the larger picture. She couldn't look at herself as a person who had come into the contract wanting one specific thing and being denied it. She had wanted to be the matriarch, the honored wife, mother and grandmother of a large and thriving family. She'd had other things, but not that.