He drove on past, pulling in to a Laundromat a hundred yards farther on, and doubling back. Driving slowly past the turnoff, he realized it was the rear entrance to the East Deerfield Inn, a motel you would normally access from the main road down below.
She was getting out of the Lexus as he passed. In place of the yoga pants she’d been wearing when she left the house, she had on a summer skirt. She must have changed her clothing on the way here, he thought, glimpsing her in his mirror. She’d known in advance she was coming, which meant that the business about going to yoga was a premeditated lie.
The playacting sensation had worn off by now, giving way to the less amusing knowledge that he was in fact spying on her. He considered going home and forcing himself not to think about it. But he doubted whether that would be possible, and anyway it occurred to him that, however distasteful it might be, he was under an obligation of friendship to stick around. A double obligation, in fact: one to Chloe in case her presence here turned out to have an innocent explanation, and one to Charlie in case it didn’t.
He had an idea that he might be able to see down into the motel court from the Wendy’s parking lot on the road above it, beyond the hairpin turn, but when he got there he saw that there was a guardrail around the lot that made it impossible to get close enough to the embankment. All he could see was a slice of the building’s flat roof with its bric-a-brac of vents and turban-like fans.
He had no choice but to get out of the truck. Assuming the confident air of someone on legitimate business, he climbed over the guardrail. A stand of thin trees beyond it led to the edge of the embankment, which fell away steeply, giving a view into the motel parking lot. The ground under the trees was littered with old wrappings of burgers and fries. Truck-sized blocks of yellowish stone formed a retaining wall at the bottom of the slope.
Chloe was walking across the parking lot, carrying a canvas bag. Reaching a door on the left arm of the building, with some kind of vintage maroon car parked outside it, she knocked once. The door opened, and she stepped inside.
The day was already stifling. Even in the shade of the little trees where Matthew was standing, it was intensely hot. He stared at the distant door, not knowing what else to do. From time to time he looked briefly away, as if to rest his eyes from a glare.
Twenty minutes passed; half an hour. As the sun climbed higher in the sky the saplings gave less shade. Beads of sweat began trickling down Matthew’s face and neck and under his shirt. He stood there, motionless. It seemed to him he had a responsibility to remain in sight of the door. At the same time, however, he couldn’t bear to think what might be going on behind it, so that even as he studiously faced out in that direction, his mind was just as studiously avoiding it.
A few crickets, day-shift replacements for the katydids that chorused at night, chirped in the foliage. Traffic exhaust mingled with fumes of hot grease. He heard a couple of people pause behind him as they crossed the parking lot. He didn’t turn and they continued on their way. He was barely sheltered now from the midmorning blaze.
Almost an hour had passed by the time the door opened and Chloe came out. Her hair looked damp. She was wearing her yoga pants again, and the black tank top. The sandals were back on too. She climbed into the silver Lexus, and Matthew watched her drive away.
He turned to leave, but then changed his mind. What if there really was an innocent explanation for the visit? He tried to come up with a possible scenario. Nothing he could think of seemed terribly likely, but if anyone was capable of secretly pursuing some unexpected but completely benign activity, it was Chloe.
After about fifteen minutes the door opened again and a man came out, carrying a leather duffel bag. He had a wide head, framed in collar-length hair, and a triangle of pointed beard. A stout, if firm-looking, belly swelled under his billowing blue shirt. Sturdy knees and stocky calves narrowed from his cargo shorts into a pair of blue deck shoes.
He unlocked the maroon car, threw in his bag, and drove away.
Matthew turned and climbed back over the guardrail. He felt as though he had been briefly concussed. Spots drifted on his vision; nausea swayed in his stomach.
Opening the door of the pickup, he was hit with a blast of fishy-smelling heat. In his rush earlier, he’d neglected to leave a window open and now the fish was half cooked. He threw it out and went back to Morelli’s, where the same man served him the same quantities of striped bass and shellfish as he had ordered before. From the man’s sly expression, he seemed to imagine Matthew had absentmindedly forgotten that he’d already made this exact purchase an hour and a half earlier.
Charlie was at the house when he got back, excavating a Brillat-Savarin cheese he’d brought from the city on his last visit. He had a weakness for pungent cheeses and a habit of gorging on them in private, scooping out the soft centers and leaving the hollowed rind.
“No tennis?” Matthew asked, putting the Morelli’s bag in the fridge. He was so uncomfortable he could barely bring himself to look at his cousin. His intention, to the extent that he’d formed one, had been to tell Charlie everything he’d seen at the motel, as soon as he could find a suitable moment. It was just an emergency response at this stage, not a considered plan. The urge to rid himself of the incident, obliterate it from his mind, was overwhelming, and telling Charlie seemed the best hope of accomplishing this.
Charlie yawned.
“Too hot.”
Chloe’s car crunched on the gravel outside a few minutes later-she must have been killing time so as not to be home from “yoga” too early-and she came in to the kitchen, smiling absently and waggling her fingers as she passed through into the sunken living room, where she collapsed in one of the sofas with a copy of the Aurelia Gazette.
She’d made the same kind of entrance numerous times and there hadn’t seemed anything remarkable about it. It was just a natural way of observing basic courtesies while asserting her wish to remain in her own private space. But now it seemed to Matthew steeped in guile.
“How was yoga?” he asked.
She didn’t seem to hear the question.
“Chlo-Matt’s asking how yoga was,” Charlie said.
“Oh, sorry, Matt. It was great, thanks.”
She flashed him her lovely smile and resumed her reading.
He had to admire her poise, but to have betrayed that smile of hers, which had always seemed to him the ultimate expression of her intense and innocent capacity for joy, to have sent that smile out on a mission so perfidious, was strangely upsetting.
Into his mind came another memory: the time her car hadn’t been in the yoga parking lot when Charlie had asked him to get his tennis racket, and she’d claimed to have been in some café instead, drinking a triple latte. He saw her again in his mind’s eye as she recounted it, making fun of her own enervated laziness with the same sparkling smile as she wore now, and the treachery seemed to spread like a crack into the past.
In the afternoon Charlie went out on some errand and Chloe disappeared upstairs. When Charlie came back he went up to join her, and the two of them stayed up there the rest of the day.
Matthew lay by the pool, watching the butterflies. Fu yelped periodically, wanting his walk, but Matthew was damned if he was going to offer to take him. He was going over the events of the morning, retracing the sequence from the moment he’d spotted Chloe ahead of him on the road below the mall, to her exit from the motel, and the man’s emergence a little later. The discomfort provoked by the memory of the events was as sharp as it had been during their actual occurrence, and he wished he could think about something else-his own problems, for instance; the question of how to get himself out of his rut, jump-start his career, find a less grim apartment-which were after all the things he’d come up here to address-but it appeared to be impossible. Again in his mind the events revolved: Chloe at the wheel in her white blouse; the blunt little jolt inside him as he’d realized something suspicious was going on; the hot vigil at the edge of the Wendy’s parking lot; Chloe in her summer skirt entering the motel… It seemed to him he had been presented with some difficult problem to which he alone could provide the solution, and which he was under an obligation to solve as quickly as possible. But instead of formulating an answer, or even groping in the direction of an answer, his mind simply repeated the little sequence yet again, so that once more he was turning up onto the access road behind Chloe, following her past Target and Dick’s Sporting Goods, climbing over the curved metal guardrail, and standing motionless under the thin trees, staring at the motel door with its glinting handle, while the fume-filled air grew hotter and hotter.