They stopped when they saw Stan at her knee, then Glen came on with Gillian Farmer following cautiously. Ten feet away Glen stopped and spoke to the dog. "Hello there, Stan. It is Stan, isn't it?"
"That's right," Anne said.
"C'm'ere, boy." McCarthy dropped to his heels and held out a hand. "You remember me. I'm a friend, right?"
The dog shot his mistress a glance, and at her gesture went forward to snuffle with his flat nose at the man's hand. Something tickled his memory, because his tail wagged briefly before he turned his attention to Gillian. With dignity he walked up to her and examined her feet and the hand she ventured out; then, without expressing an opinion, he returned to Anne.
The incident with the dog confirmed Gillian's suspicions, that McCarthy knew Anne Waverly as something more than just an occasional colleague. His intimate acquaintance with the road had been obvious from the time they left the blacktop, for one thing. He knew the dog, knew that the door they would enter was not the one behind Anne Waverly but the kitchen door around the side of the house. He seemed unsurprised by the sharp difference between the dusty, rustic log exterior and the rich simplicity inside, and when he sniffed the air, it was more with the welcome of homecoming than puzzlement at the peculiar combination of the rich, yeasty odor emanating from two pans on the sideboard underlaid with the raw bite of cordite. The cap was put on her confirmation by his first words to Anne.
"Target practice?"
"I thought it might be a good idea," she said. "I was getting rusty." She walked past them and pulled shut a narrow door to what looked like a pantry.
"You shoot indoors?" Gillian asked in disbelief.
McCarthy laughed—actually laughed. She hadn't thought him capable of anything beyond a rueful chuckle. "Like Sherlock Holmes picking out the Queen's initials on the wall?" he asked, which reference meant nothing to Gillian. He looked at Anne and asked, "May I show her?" When she nodded, he went to another door and started down the open wooden stairs heading into a basement.
The bare bulb lit only the immediate area, but McCarthy reached over and flipped a series of switches, and to her amazement Gillian found herself at one end of what could only be called an indoor shooting range, complete with a man-shaped paper target hanging at the far end.
It was also, incongruously, a farmhouse cellar lined with cupboards and shelves, bearing canned goods, economy-sized packages of toilet paper and soap powder, odd shapes wrapped in black plastic garbage bags, and an array of hand tools and power saws—all the necessities of life in the woods. McCarthy called her over to a low table on which lay a pair of ear protectors, an automatic pistol, and the equipment for cleaning it. Standing next to him, she surveyed the panorama of bottled foodstuffs, the fruit on the top shelf, red tomato sauce below, a neat display of jams and preserves and shelled nuts that ended three-quarters of the way down the room at an arrangement of hay bales, tightly laid up to the ceiling. They were tired and dusty-looking, and no longer gave out enough odor to stand up to the gunpowder; they had been in place for years.
Bemused, Gillian studied the odd juxtaposition of home canning and the hanging targets with the cluster of shots in their centers until she realized that the FBI man seemed to expect a reaction.
"Wouldn't want a ricochet to smash your peaches, I suppose," she commented.
He looked a little disappointed at her lack of amusement, but personally she thought it a bit crazy. The woman lived in the middle of nowhere; why not shoot outside, where she could practice at distances of more than twenty yards? Or at a proper shooting range?
"Bring up a bottle of tomatoes when you come, would you, Glen?" the voice at the top of the stairs asked prosaically. "And don't forget to shut off the lights."
Back in the kitchen, they found Anne Waverly at the stove, lighting the gas under a big saucepan. McCarthy closed the basement door, put the quart bottle of tomatoes on the counter, and took a chair at the wooden table. He sat watching Anne Waverly's back, strong and straight with the lovely graying hair, caught up in a clip, that hung down between her shoulder blades, and Gillian abruptly realized what the two of them reminded her of: her sister Kathleen and Kathy's ex-husband when they were forced to be together at some family function. Between them was lingering affection, a heavy residue of physical attraction, and a lot of emotional scar tissue, and although they were polite for the sake of the children, there was also the mutual awareness that if they ever relaxed, blood would flow.
Glen McCarthy and Anne Waverly had been lovers, Gillian was sure of that. She was also quite certain that whereas the professor might be finished with the FBI man, he was afraid that he was not through with her. Gillian Farmer was enough of a cop to disapprove of sex cluttering up a professional relationship, enough of a woman to find it both troubling and mildly amusing. She cleared her throat. "Can I help with anything?"
"No thank you, Inspector Farmer. I'll just dump this together and we can eat when the rolls are done." Anne swept a handful of finely chopped onions and a heap of other vegetables into the seething pot, poured in the bottle of tomatoes and a generous amount of red wine, took a hefty pinch of dried herbs from a pottery jar and sprinkled it over, dropped the top on the pan, and turned the heat down.
"Coffee, tea, or wine?" she asked.
Over coffee, she finally joined them at the table, and Gillian began her side of the report.
It did not take long, or the hint of several culinary interruptions, for Gillian to see that Anne Waverly was not very interested in the events that had brought the group calling itself Change to the attention of the San Francisco Police Department. Missing persons reports and complaints of financial chicanery from swindled relatives were, her attitude seemed to say, only to be expected. She came alert only when Farmer started to tell about the emigration of Change members from their former urban setting into the Arizona high desert. Then she wanted to know precisely when the members had sold the houses they owned, how big the houses were, the physical state they had been left in by the former owners, what had been left behind, and a dozen other equally meaningless questions. Prepared as she was, Gillian had to admit that most of these things she could not answer. She told the professor that she would find out.
This seemed to signal a hiatus in the evening's program. Anne stood up and limped back to the sink, where she fished a head of garlic out of a pot on the windowsill and began to skin some cloves and squeeze them through a press into a small bowl.
"Dinner in ten minutes," she said. "Glen, show Inspector Farmer where the bathroom is—"
"Please, call me Gillian."
"And I'm Anne. And then if you'd choose a bottle of wine, Glen, and get a tablecloth from the drawer under the oven. Gillian, the silver is in that drawer, we'll need soup spoons. Plates and bowls are on that shelf,"
The plates were handmade stonewear, the tablecloth looked as if it belonged in a prosperous farmhouse in Avignon, the silver was silver, and heavy, and the dinner was an intensely flavored stew with olives and vegetables and some unidentifiable meat, with a simple green salad, bread rolls hot from the oven with herbed garlic butter to slather on, and deep red wine that had just enough of an edge to hold its own.
Respectful silence held, until Gillian spoke up. "What kind of meat is this?" she asked. "Bambi," Glen answered, his mouth full. "Venison," Anne corrected him. "My neighbor gives me a haunch every year and it takes me months to get through it. I'm trying to clear out the freezer before I go."
"So, how is dear Eliot?" Glen asked. "Talkative as ever?" He was concentrating on the application of garlic butter to hot bread. Gillian glanced at him curiously, and Anne seemed amused at the asperity of his question.