He took the spoils from the sofa back up to the guesthouse and put them in the suitcase with Grollier’s things. The suitcase had seemed the safest hiding place for the moment. Nobody was going to stumble on its contents by accident. He’d be in New York in a few days, assuming his luck held (though “luck” didn’t seem quite the word), and there’d be plenty of places to get rid of everything. The Montblanc pen he could sell when the time was right, along with Grollier’s watch. The rest could be bagged and dumped in trash cans across the city, or thrown in the river.
He swam laps for an hour before going to bed that night, forcing himself up and down the length of the pool. Shivering, he ran up to the guesthouse and took a long, hot shower. There was a moment, as he lay in darkness, in which he could feel the proximity of tumultuous thoughts that, if engaged, would almost certainly rule out any possibility of sleep. But he’d managed to exhaust himself sufficiently that fatigue soon got the better of him, and he was asleep by the time Charlie and Chloe got back from Connecticut with their daughter.
A child’s voice singing a Lady Gaga song rang out from the kitchen as he went down for breakfast the next morning.
Lily had been at music camp. She played the violin and clarinet, and mimicked a range of English and American pop divas uncannily well, complete with cheeky glottal stops and tremulous melisma. When she wasn’t making music, however, she was a quiet, watchful girl, with something of Charlie’s distrustful air, as if she thought you might be trying to get something out of her.
She broke off the song as Matthew came in, and gave him a friendly, if somewhat impersonal, greeting. He kissed her on the forehead and realized he should have brought a present for her. At one time she’d treated him as a family member, unselfconsciously jumping onto his lap with a book for him to read to her, but in the past couple of years she’d become more reserved.
“How was camp?” he asked.
“It was good.”
“That camp is something else,” Chloe said. “The show they put on was like Broadway and the Lincoln Center combined. They even served little tubs of ice cream in the intermission.”
Matthew smiled. “I’ve always wondered what I missed out on, not going to camp.”
“You never went to camp?” the girl asked.
“We didn’t have camp in England.”
“But it’s so much fun!”
“That’s probably the reason.”
Chloe laughed and Lily, taking the cue, gave a polite chuckle. That was another thing about her; a habit of doing whatever her mother did: echoing her gestures, acquiescing in her moods and wishes; sometimes with a strange sort of cringing eagerness, as if she weren’t quite certain about her mother’s approval. There was no obvious reason for this: Chloe treated her with impeccable kindness and patience, and yet the effect of her daughter’s behavior was to suggest something faintly strained in her own. It was the only aspect of Chloe that Matthew had ever found remotely troubling, and he preferred not to think about it.
The morning passed unremarkably. After breakfast Chloe and Lily went off to a Zumba class. Charlie worked upstairs in his office. Matthew sat on the terrace with his father’s Pascal. From time to time he checked for news on his computer, an old Toshiba netbook with a cracked screen. He’d brought it down because the Wi-Fi only reached the guesthouse erratically. There was still nothing.
After lunch he joined the family by the pool, lying in the shade while Chloe and Lily splashed in the water and Charlie floated around in his inflatable armchair. The citrusy scent of some shrubs that had started flowering for the second time that summer drifted on the breeze. Heat rose from the flagstones edging the pool. He gazed out at the three figures, noting his own calmness, again with that odd, though not disagreeable, feeling of detachment from himself. A fantasy took shape in his mind, in which time stalled in a kind of endlessly looping eddy and all the pleasant sensations of this moment, the warmth and soft sounds and gentle motions, simply burbled on forever like some changeless screen saver.
But by the late afternoon he was beginning to feel restless again. A part of him wanted this lull to last forever, but another part of him, he realized, was impatient for it to break. He stood up.
“I should get some things for dinner.”
Chloe looked at him, shading her eyes.
“Can’t we make do with what we have in the refrigerator?”
“I need nectarines. I want to make a cobbler.”
“Yummie!” Lily called out. “I love cobbler!”
“Me too,” Charlie said.
“Yes, but… it’s late, and Matthew shouldn’t-”
“It’s no problem,” Matthew interrupted her, opening the gate. “I like going into town.”
He left before Chloe could make any more objections. His desire to drive by the A-frame was as sharp, suddenly, as it had ever been.
This time a Chevy pickup was parked in the driveway, with a metal trailer attached to it.
Forcing himself to keep driving, Matthew glimpsed a man on a riding lawn mower in the backyard, sending out plumes of grass.
He parked by the bridge and climbed straight down to the creek. The daylight seemed to be throbbing around him. At the top of the bank opposite the A-frame he found himself staring straight into the eyes of the man on the lawn mower. He raised a hand as if in casual greeting, and the man waved back as he rotated his machine back toward the house. A second man, wearing goggles, was weed-whacking around some shrubs at the corner of the kitchen. He was stepping slowly backward, moving in the direction of the kitchen door. With an effort, Matthew made himself leave. It was possible that you couldn’t actually see into the kitchen through the door unless you stuck your face right up to the glass, but he didn’t want to be around to find out.
It was coming, he thought. If not now, then soon. Fear was pushing up through the numbed feeling he’d had for the past two days. It was as though what had occurred was only beginning to become real in his own mind, now that the prospect of other people discovering it was looming closer.
He drank copiously at dinner that night, sensing he was going to have trouble sleeping. By the time he’d finished the dishes he could barely keep his eyes open. In bed, he fell asleep instantly. But an hour later he came lurching awake, his heart pounding. Had it happened yet? An awful certainty that it had, gripped him. He got up and took his netbook down to the pool, to search online for news. Still nothing. He stood up, intending to go back to bed, but instead found himself sidling around the house and into the truck. If anyone heard him, he thought, he could say he’d been unable to sleep and had gone to listen to the drumming. Town was deserted. From the county road he turned onto Veery Road. The thin dark triangle of the A-frame reached up like a finger saying, Sshhh. The gardeners’ truck and trailer were gone. Only the LeBaron stood in the driveway, its lonely persistence charged with odd pathos now, like that of some helplessly loyal pet. I ought to be relieved, Matthew thought. But if anything the stillness of the place-as though he’d somehow sealed it in time-made him more restless than ever. Parking in the pull-off beyond the bridge, he felt as if there were two of him; a self and a second self, ghostlier and yet seemingly more in control of him than the first, as it replicated every movement he made: two of him climbing down to the stream, picking their way with identical motions from rock to rock among the white combs of falling water and the black pools; two of him climbing the wooden steps up the bank below the A-frame, and stepping silently across the lawn to the windowed back door, aware of the dark forms of the pear trees on either side of him, the little Buddha cross-legged under the maple.
Covering the door handle with his shirtsleeve, he turned it and stepped inside, closing the door behind him.