Strangers (83 page)

“Yeah? Do they also leave one bone in every fish?”

“And a bit of hoof in every order of beef Bourguignon,” she said.

“One antler in every chocolate mousse?”

“And one shoemaker’s nail in every apple cobbler.”

“One old maid in every apple pandowdy?”

“Oh, God, I hate puns.”

“Me, too,” he said. “Truce?”

“Truce. I’ll grate the cheddar for the omelet.”

Together they made breakfast.

At the kitchen table, Marcie colored moons. And colored moons. And murmured that one word in monotonous, mesmeric, rhythmic chains.

•

In Monterey, California, Parker Faine had almost fallen into the lair of a trap-door spider. He counted himself fortunate to have gotten out alive. A trap-door spider—that was how he thought of the Salcoes’ neighbor, a woman named Essie Craw. The trap-door spider constructed a tubular nest in the ground and fixed a cleverly concealed hinged lid at the top. When other hapless insects, innocent and unsuspecting, crossed the perfectly
camouflaged lid, it opened and dropped them down to the rapacious arachnoid beast below. Essie Craw’s tubular nest was a lovely large Spanish home far more suited to the California coast than the Salcoes’ Southern Colonial manse, with graceful arches and leaded-glass windows and flowers blooming in large terra cotta pots on the portico. One look at the place, and Parker was prepared to encounter charming and exquisitely gracious people, but when Essie Craw answered the door he knew he was in deep trouble. When she discovered that he was seeking information about the Salcoes, she virtually seized him by his sleeve and dragged him inside and slammed the lid of her tubular nest behind him, for those who sought information often had information to give in return, and Essie Craw fed on gossip as surely as the trap-door spider fed on careless beetles, centipedes, and pillbugs.

Essie did not look like a spider but rather like a bird. Not a scrawny, thin-necked, meager-breasted sparrow. More like a well-fed seagull. She had a quick birdlike walk, and she held her head slightly to the side in the manner of a bird, and she had beady little avian eyes.

After leading him to a seat in the living room, she offered coffee, but he declined, and she insisted, but he protested that he did not want to be a bother. She brought coffee anyway, plus butter cookies, which she produced with such alacrity that he suspected she was as perpetually prepared for drop-in guests as was the trap-door spider.

Essie was disappointed to hear that Parker knew nothing about the Salcoe family and had no gossip. But since he was not their friend, either, he offered a fresh pair of ears for her observations, tales, slanders, and mean-spirited suppositions. He did not even have to ask questions in order to learn more than he wanted to know. Donna Salcoe, Gerald’s wife, was (Essie said) a brassy sort, too blond, too flashy, phony-sweet. Donna was so thin she was surely a problem drinker who survived on a liquid diet—or maybe she was anorexic. Gerald was Donna’s second husband, and although they had been married eighteen years, Essie did not think it would last. Essie made the sixteen-year-old twin girls sound so wild, so unrestrained, so nubile and licentious, that Parker pictured packs of young men sniffing around the Salcoe house like dogs seeking bitches in heat. Gerald Salcoe owned three thriving shops—an antiques store, two art galleries—in nearby Carmel, though Essie could not understand how any of these enterprises showed a profit when Salcoe was a hard-drinking libertine and a thick-headed boob with no business sense.

Parker drank only two sips of his coffee and didn’t even nibble at the butter cookies, because Essie Craw’s enthusiasm for malicious gossip went beyond the limits of ordinary behavior into a realm of weirdness
that made him uncomfortable and unwilling to turn his back on her—or consume much of what she provided.

But he learned a few useful things, as well. The Salcoes had taken an impromptu vacation—one week in the wine country, Napa and Sonoma—and had been so desperate to escape the pressures of their various enterprises that they had not wanted to reveal the name of the hotel where they could be reached, lest it get back to the very business associates from whom they needed a rest.

“
He
called me Sunday to tell me they were off and wouldn’t be back until Monday, the twentieth,” Essie said. “Asked me to keep a watch over the place, as usual. They’re terrible gadabouts, and it’s such a bother to be expected to look out for burglars and God knows what. I have my own life to live, which of course concerns them not at all.”

“You didn’t speak with any of them face to face?”

“I guess they were in a hurry to be off.”

“Did you see them leave?”

“No, though I…well…I looked out a couple of times, but I must’ve missed them.”

“The twins went with them?” Parker asked. “Isn’t school in?”

“It’s a progressive school—too progressive, I say—and travel is thought to be as broadening as classroom work. Did you ever hear such—”

“How did Mr. Salcoe sound when you spoke with him on the phone?”

Impatiently, Essie said, “Well…he sounded…like he always sounds. What do you mean?”

“Not at all strained? Nervous?”

She pursed her tight little mouth, cocked her head, and her bird-bright eyes glittered at the prospect of potential scandal. “Well, now that you mention it, he
was
a bit odd. Stumbled over his words a few times, but until now I didn’t realize he’d probably been drinking. Do you think…oh, that he’s had to go off to some clinic to dry out or—”

Parker had heard enough. He rose to leave, but Essie got between him and the doorway, trying to delay him by making him feel guilty that he had not finished his coffee or even tasted a cookie. She suggested tea instead of coffee, some strudel, or “perhaps an almond croissant.” By dint of the same indomitable will that had made him a great painter, he managed to get to the front door, through it, and onto the portico.

She followed him all the way to the rental car in her driveway. The little vomit-green Tempo looked, for that one moment, as beautiful as a Rolls-Royce, for it offered escape from Essie Craw. As he sped away, he quoted Coleridge aloud, an apt passage.

He drove around for half an hour, working up the courage to do what must be done. Finally, upon his return to the Salcoe house, he parked boldly at the head of the circular driveway, in the shadows of the massive pines. He went to the front door again, insistently pressed the bell for three minutes. If anyone was home and merely unwilling to see visitors, he would have answered that unrelenting ring out of sheer desperation. But no one responded.

Parker walked along the veranda, studying the front windows, being nonchalant, acting as if he belonged there, though the property was so shrouded by trees and lush landscaping that he could not be spotted easily from the street—or from Essie Craw’s windows. The drapes were shut, preventing a glimpse of the interior. He expected to see the telltale electricity-conducting tape of an alarm system on the glass. But there was no tape and no other indication of electronic security.

He stepped off the end of the veranda and went around the western side of the house, where the morning sun had not shrunk the long, deep shadows of the pines. He tried two windows there. They were locked.

In back of the house were more shrubs, flowers, and a large brick patio with a lattice cover, outdoor wet-bar, expensive lawn furniture.

He used his coat-protected elbow to smash in a small pane on one of the French doors. He unlocked the door and went inside, pushing through the drapes into a tile-floored family room.

He stood very still, listening. The house was silent.

It would have been uncomfortably dark if the family room had not opened onto a breakfast area and the breakfast area onto the kitchen, where light entered through the glass in that uncurtained door to the patio. Parker moved past a fireplace, billiards table—and froze when he spotted the motion-detection alarm unit on the wall. He recognized it from when he had investigated security systems for his Laguna house. He was about to flee when he recalled that a small red light should have been visible on the unit if it was in operation. The bulb was there—but dark. Apparently the system had not been activated when the Salcoes had left.

The kitchen was roomy, with the best appliances. Beyond that was a
serving pantry, then the dining room. The light from the kitchen did not reach that far, so he decided to risk turning on lights as he went.

In the living room, he stood very still again, listening.

Nothing. The silence was deep and heavy, as in a tomb.

•

When Brendan Cronin entered the Blocks’ kitchen after rising late and taking a long hot shower, he found little Marcie coloring moons and murmuring eerily to herself. He thought of how he had mended Emmeline Halbourg with his hands, and he wondered if he could cure Marcie’s psychological obsession by the application of that same psychic power. But he dared not try. Not until he learned to control his wild talent, for he might do irreparable harm to the girl’s mind.

Jack and Jorja were finishing omelets and toast, and they greeted him warmly. Jorja wanted to make breakfast for Brendan, too, but he declined. He only wanted a cup of coffee, black and strong.

As Jack ate, he examined four handguns that were lying on the table beside his plate. Two of them were Ernie’s. Jack had brought the other two with him from the East. Neither Brendan nor anyone else referred to the firearms, for they knew their enemy might be listening right now. No point revealing the size of their arsenal.

The guns made Brendan nervous. Maybe because he had a prescient feeling that the weapons would be used repeatedly before day’s end.

His characteristic optimism had left him, largely because he had not dreamed last night. He’d had his first uninterrupted sleep in weeks, but for him that was no improvement. Unlike the others, Brendan had been having a
good
dream every night, and it had given him hope. Now the dream was gone, and the loss made him edgy.

“I thought it would be snowing by now,” he said as he sat down at the table with a cup of coffee.

“Soon,” Jack said.

The sky looked like a great slab of dark-gray granite.

•

Ned and Sandy Sarver, serving as the second team of outriders, had driven into Elko to rendezvous with Jack, Jorja, and Brendan at the Arco Mini-Mart at four in the morning, then had cruised around town until seven-thirty, by which time some of those back at the Tranquility would have set out on their tasks for the day. They returned to the motel at eight o’clock, ate a quick breakfast, and went back to bed to get a few more hours of rest in order to cope with the busy day ahead.

Ned woke after little more than two hours, but he did not get out of
bed. He lay in the dimness of the motel room for a while, watching Sandy sleep. The love he felt for her was deep and smooth and flowing like a great river that could bear them both away to better places and times beyond all the worries of the world.

Ned wished he was as good a talker as he was a fixer. Sometimes he worried that he had never been able to tell her exactly how he felt about her. But when he tried to put his sentiments into words, he either became tongue-tied or heard himself expressing his emotions in hopelessly inarticulate sentences and leaden images. It was good to be a fixer, with the talent to repair everything from broken toasters to broken cars to broken people. Yet sometimes, Ned would have traded all his mending skills for the ability to compose and speak one perfect sentence which would convey his deepest feelings for her.

Now, watching her, he realized that she was no longer sleeping. “Playing possum?” he asked.

She opened her eyes and smiled. “I was scared, the way you were watching me, that I was going to get eaten alive, so I played possum.”

“You look good enough to eat; that’s for sure.”

She threw aside the covers and, naked, opened her arms to him. They fell at once into the familiar silken rhythms of love-making at which they had become so sensuously adept during the past year of her sexual awakening.

In the afterglow, as they lay side by side, holding hands, Sandy said, “Oh, Ned, I must be the happiest woman on earth. Since I met you down in Arizona all those years ago, since you took me under your wing, you’ve made me very happy, Ned. In fact, I’m so crazy-happy now that if God struck me dead this minute, I wouldn’t complain.”

“Don’t say that,” he told her sharply. Rising up on one elbow, leaning over her, looking down at her, he said, “I don’t like you saying that. It makes me…superstitious. All this trouble we’re in—it’s possible some of us will die. So I don’t want you tempting fate. I don’t want you saying things like that.”

“Ned, you’re about the least superstitious man I know.”

“Yeah, well, I feel different about this. I don’t want you saying you’re so happy you wouldn’t mind dying, nothing like that. Understand? I don’t want you even
thinking
it.”

He slipped his arms around her again, pulling her very tightly against him, needing to feel the throb of life within her. He held her so close that after a while he could no longer detect the strong and regular stroking of her heart, which was only because it had become synchronized with—and lost in—his own beat.

•

In the Salcoe family’s Monterey house, Parker Faine was looking primarily for two things, either of which would fulfill his obligation to Dom. First, he hoped to find something to prove they had actually gone to Napa-Sonoma: If he found a brochure for a hotel, he could call and confirm that the Salcoes had checked in safely; or if they went to the wine country regularly, perhaps an address book would contain the telephone number of the place where they stayed. But he half-expected to find the other thing instead: overturned furniture, bloodstains, or other evidence that the Salcoes had been taken against their will.