by Thomas Perry
Ruby said, "Want to take him out for a while?"
"I don't know," said Christine. "Is it hot out there? I don't want him in the sun."
"So sit in the shade with him. A little fresh air and indirect sunlight will be good for both of you." Ruby held the door open. As Christine walked to the doorway past her, Ruby said just above a whisper, "And if you don't mind my saying it, honey, there's nothing wrong with a little exercise for you, either. The sooner you get rid of that weight, the better things will seem. Nobody feels her best with an ass like a tugboat."
Christine carried Robert down the hall. Her jaw muscles were working, but she didn't realize it until the muscles suddenly felt tired. She artificially relaxed them and blew a breath out through her teeth. When she reached the first sliding glass door she opened it and stepped outside.
Christine walked toward the back of the yard, keeping Robert's face in the shade of her shoulder. When she got a few yards from the house she realized that Ruby had followed her.
Ruby said, "I hope I didn't hurt your feelings, Chris."
Christine gave her a look she hoped was withering. "What hurts me is being a prisoner. I don't really care what any of you think about my ass."
Ruby pursed her lips and moved closer. "I apologize. Sometimes I'm a little too quick to talk without thinking. But I'm just trying to be your friend. I've been watching Richard. It's possible he's gotten over the shock of everything that's happened, and he'd be receptive to some sort of reconciliation if you made the right move."
"I didn't do anything to him—before I was kidnapped or after. If he's unhappy, that's his fault."
"That's not the point. Robert deserves a father. Don't you want to know why I think he might be interested?"
Christine shrugged. "No, but if you want to tell me, I can't stop you."
"I saw him watching you with Robert yesterday. He was in the house while you were out here. He didn't come out to talk to you or anything, but I could see there was something going on in his mind. The two of you just looked so pretty—you with Robert in your arms around sunset. You and I talked about this before. I know that you cared about him once. Loved him, even."
"You mean I'm supposed to try to get Richard to take me back?"
"I know that isn't on your agenda right now," Ruby said. "But sometime you might feel less bitter. You've also got to realize that looking your best isn't giving in to anybody. It gives you the power." She patted Christine's shoulder and stepped back. "Well, I've got to get going. I've got shopping to do, and the cook wants some help picking out dinners for the next few days. We've got so many more people living here now."
Christine began to feel her heart beating faster and faster as Ruby crossed the lawn. Could she be forgetting that Christine was alone out here with the baby in her arms?
Ruby went inside and started to close the door, but before she could do it, Sybil and Claudia both slithered outside and started across the yard toward her. As they came she could see their eyes were like the eyes of cops, full of suspicion and yet detached, confident that they would detect her hidden intentions and be able to block them. They turned their heads this way and that to scan the yard to be sure Christine was alone, then stared at her to be sure she wasn't up to something and wasn't planning to move.
The fact that they would be the ones to watch her this time made her frightened, but she also felt eager. Fooling them would make her revenge even better. Then she wondered if she had been unconsciously feeling reluctant to fool Ruby, or maybe afraid she'd have to hurt her to get away.
As Sybil and Claudia stepped in her direction, Christine pretended not to notice them. She held Robert and turned to walk along the grassy edge of the garden, being sure to turn only to the right so when they arrived she was innocently moving away from the gap in the hedges that led to the driveway.
Sybil stationed herself between Christine and the driveway, and Claudia stopped about twenty feet away, ready to move to the right or left if Christine changed course. Christine kept her face close to Robert's, and murmured to him musically about the green grass and the blue sky and what a beautiful boy he was. And she kept walking. But she could see from their dull expressions and their slouching posture that Claudia and Sybil were already finding this guard duty dull. Christine would pit her love of Robert and her determination to escape against the two women's ability to fight their boredom and laziness.
She knew that they would tire of this job in a few minutes. It had surprised her at first to see that Sybil and Claudia had absolutely no interest in Robert. Most women were fascinated with new born babies, wanted to look at them and touch them and hold them, but these two didn't. The only attention they paid to Robert was the attention necessary to keep him and Christine imprisoned at this house.
Christine kept walking, looking at Robert's face and cooing to him, and that was something she already knew she could do for hours at a time. She never looked at the two women, never talked to them, but kept herself intensely aware of where each of them was.
Christine kept at it for an hour and a half before the two women decided it wasn't necessary to stand while she walked. They sat down, Claudia beside the gap in the hedge and Sybil near the spot where the grass gave way to the grove of trees. Christine waited, and gradually the two began to let their eyes stray and look elsewhere—at the house, the gardens, and each other. When she saw them step close together so they could talk, Christine slowly made the course of her movements take her closer to the house. She picked a poppy at the edge of the lawn and held it up so Robert could see the bright orange flower. She sat on an Adirondack chair overlooking the pool and concentrated on keeping the sun out of Robert's eyes and off his baby skin. She knew that thinking about him would make her able to outlast Sybil and Claudia. Robert was awake, and it seemed to Christine that he was looking with curiosity at the light and shadows as the wind made the trees sway back and forth near the buildings.
The two women were more comfortable now that Christine was away from the forbidden places—the gap in the hedge, which Christine could now see was an open wrought-iron gate, and the pathway around the garage to the cars. As long as the pair were between her and those places, they felt comfortable enough to sit talking. When Robert cried for milk they looked up for a second, saw Christine lifting her shirt to nurse him, and looked away again.
After Robert was fed, Christine began to walk again, holding him upright to burp him with his face resting on a cloth diaper on her shoulder. This time she walked along the side of the house. Robert was happy and full, and after a few minutes he fell asleep. Christine continued walking along in the shade of the house looking in the windows at the deserted rooms, and then came to the barred window of her own room. She used the diaper from her shoulder to wipe a little milk off Robert's lip, but then dropped the diaper. She knelt down, and checked to be sure she was behind the Adirondack chairs and out of sight of the women.
Christine's heart began to speed up as she lay her beautiful, perfect son in his blue blanket on the bed of cedar chips under her window, picked up the diaper and the baby doll wrapped in the same kind of blue blanket, cradled it in her arms just the way she had cradled Robert, and walked along the side of the house in the direction of the sliding door.
She was confident that Claudia and Sybil would never offer to take Robert in to the nurse or to watch over him while he slept. But she was not so sure they wouldn't move close enough to see what she was carrying. She had to dawdle just enough to let them notice that she was taking the baby into the house.
In the reflection in the glass wall she caught the glance that Sybil gave her, saw her say something to Claudia, and then the two got up off the lawn and began to move toward the house behind her. She resisted the temptation to hurry in order to stay far enough ahead of them. They were predatory creatures, unconsciously cruel like a pair of wide-eyed feral cats, and any tiny sign of fear or nervousness would be like the shriek of a wounded bird. They would be on her in a second.<
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Christine went inside and left the sliding door open, hoping it looked as though she simply didn't care enough to shut it. She forced herself to walk slowly down the hallway with the doll wrapped in the blanket, swaying gently from side to side to rock the lifeless piece of rubber to keep it asleep.
As she reached the open door of her bedroom, she turned back and let herself see first Sybil, then Claudia step in through the sliding door and then move beyond her sight into the great room. She slipped into the bedroom and quickly arranged the doll in Robert's crib. She placed it on its side and pushed a small, firm pillow behind its back to keep it on its side, facing away from the doorway, then covered it with another receiving blanket.
Every second that passed, Christine was listening for the sound of Robert's little voice to rise from outside the window a few feet away. She already knew him so well that she could hear in her imagination the first, tentative cooing sound that he would make if he woke up on the ground behind the shrubbery along the house. Then there would be an inquiring noise, a sound that was intended to call her. If he didn't see, hear, or feel her after that, there would be a loud cry. Someone would hear it, and they would know.
She felt afraid to delay by even a second, and afraid to go on with this. She wished she had done more to prepare, wished she had tried instead to find the Beales' bedroom in this huge place and sneak into it alone. There might be an actual telephone plugged in, and not just empty jacks as there were in the rest of the house. But Christine dismissed those thoughts. She was already moving, and she had to think about what she needed to do.
Christine snatched up the magazine she had been reading the night before. The impression she wanted to make was that she had put Robert to sleep under the eye of the baby nurse, and was now taking a break by herself. She sauntered back down the hall, fixing a tired, bored expression on her face.
Where the hallway opened onto the great room, she walked along, aware of Sybil and Claudia. Each of them had arranged herself on one of the big white couches in feline repose. They paid little attention to Christine, but she knew they saw her, and had appraised how she walked and held herself, what she was carrying, how her face looked. If there was a tremor in her hand or a stiffness to her gait that she hadn't suppressed, she knew they had already detected it. She held her mind empty for a few seconds, waiting for one of them to spring up or yell or even shoot her. Nothing happened, so she walked on.
Christine wouldn't do anything but step outside through the same door they had just come in. It was the simplest, most direct route to the safe places, the ones where she was allowed to be. She went out and sat in one of the Adirondack chairs where they could see her without moving from their couches, and began to leaf through the makeup advertising at the front of her magazine.
All of her senses were raw, as though the skin had been peeled back and the nerves were exposed to the air, throbbing and waiting to be irritated. Robert wasn't making noises yet, and the women were lying still. Two cars went past on the road beyond the hedge, and Christine felt worried at first that they would pull into the driveway, and then devastated because they might have been the last cars to go by for an hour. She had missed them, and maybe they had been the ones that had been meant to find her and Robert by the roadside and save them.
Time was short and diminishing now, a lit fuse. She looked up, shaded her eyes from the sun petulantly, got up and moved to another chair, closer to Robert's place under the barred window, and invisible from the couches inside. She needed one of the two women to see her, so she waited. She counted to twenty, then counted fifty more, pretending to read her magazine but unable to concentrate on the sentences, which seemed to be lists of disconnected words.
She caught a movement in the corner of her eye, so she lazily lifted her gaze toward the grove of trees at the end of the yard like a person lost in thought, then half-turned her head and saw Claudia. She was standing on the inner side of the glass door, craning her neck slightly to look along the side of the house at Christine.
Christine sighed and half-turned her body to face away from Claudia, and turned more pages. She counted to seventy again, then glanced back at the door. Claudia was gone. Christine stood quickly, hurried around the Adirondack chairs to the shrubs under her window, and gently lifted Robert. He was still asleep, still peaceful and unharmed.
She followed the steps that she had been imagining in fragmentary form since she had been caught and brought here. She walked briskly along the edge of the vast green lawn toward the back. She had always known this would be part of her route, because she could see the grove of trees, the deep, cool shadows from her room. She had known she could make it all the way—or nearly all the way—to the grove before the angle of the path made her visible to the people behind the glass in the great room. But walking it in real life was an ordeal. It was much farther than she had imagined it to be, and the need to walk fast was a terrible temptation, because walking fast might wake Robert. She held him like a shallow bowl of water, keeping him level and never allowing him to tip or feel a bump. When at last she reached the shade of the trees, she was already breathing hard and sweating. She kept going farther from the house for another hundred feet, so the number of tree trunks between her and the house would make her harder to see.
Christine turned right when she got to the big brick wall at the back of the property. She could tell that she wasn't as hard to see from the house as she had hoped. If they missed her and began to look around, they would certainly be able to spot her within a minute or two. But she was far from the house now, and that would help. The grove was wide—at least as far as a football field—and she had to cross it quickly. The piled-up leaves were slippery and noisy, and once her toe hit a raised tree root, and she jolted Robert so hard that he gave a startle reflex. She hummed to him to make him aware she was there, and corrected the way she cradled him to make him more comfortable, and he sank back into sleep.
The sweat was pouring from Christine's scalp down her forehead now, and her breaths came in little huffs, as though she had been jogging. She could see the back of the long garage ahead through the trees. She kept moving as quickly as she could, corrected her course to go along the outer wall so close that she sometimes brushed it. And then she was there. She walked to the corner of the garage, slipped silently along the narrow passageway between the back wall of the property and the side wall of the garage toward the open brick pavement in front.
She approached the end of the passageway, and she knew there would be open garages and probably cars parked in the open. She stopped, leaned forward slowly and carefully, and looked. There was Richard's car. Her chest seemed to tighten and her eyes watered for joy. She knew the car, knew Richard's unbreakable habit of leaving a magnetic case with an extra key in it in the compartment that held the gas cap. She looked out farther, saw that the six garage doors were all open, and saw the front ends of cars, but saw no people. She stepped out.
Sybil Landreau stepped out of the garage beside her. "Where do you think you're going?"
She had failed. All of that effort had failed. Christine gave a wan smile. "For a little walk, that's all."
"Lying bitch."
She noticed for the first time that Sybil had a gun stuck into the waistband of her jeans. Sybil took a couple of strides toward her, and Christine turned and took two steps to get back around the corner of the garage. When Christine looked the way she had come, she could see Claudia standing at the far end of the passageway, walking toward her.
Claudia called, "This time you don't get another chance. Take a last look at him."
Christine's heart froze. They were going to take Robert away from her. She heard Sybil's footsteps, knelt quickly, set him down, and then leaped toward the sound. She threw her fist into Sybil's face, but somehow the face wasn't there when her fist reached it. She felt Sybil's first blow as a revelation. She had never been hit in that way before, a strike so fast and hard that her head snapped to the side and she
felt dizzy. The second blow was a quick punch to her chest. She was down on the hard brick pavement, wondering if the paralysis she felt was permanent. She heard a door slam some distance away. She looked up to see Ruby's overweight, middle-aged body coming from the house, a great deal of arm-pumping and bouncing, but steps that were too small to bring her here in time. Christine heard Ruby's voice: "No! Don't!" and suddenly she knew. Claudia hadn't meant that Robert was the one going away.
Christine saw Sybil Landreau tug the pistol out of her waistband, and hold it out toward her with a straight arm. Christine saw the muzzle flash, heard the bang, and felt something like fire spreading over her upper body.
24
When Carey came home from the hospital at precisely six-fifteen, Jane knew that the traffic had moved at its usual pace, with none of the sudden fits of highway repair that occurred in the Buffalo area during the late summer. Jane stood at the side window in the dining room and watched him drive his BMW up the long, sloping driveway, follow it around the corner of the house to the carriage house his great-grandfather had converted to a garage, and stop. He didn't pull in beside her Volvo, as she had expected. Even though Carey's car wasn't particularly small, when he got out he seemed to be unfolding, his long arms and legs straightening. She could feel the sense of freedom he was feeling to stand at his full height.
She had known him for so long now, listened to him and watched him so many times since she had met him in college, that it often seemed to her that she could feel what his nerves felt, and see what his eyes saw. She turned from the window, then heard him open the kitchen door and then close it.
As Jane walked through the dining room to the kitchen she saw his eyes focus on her and his smile appear, and she felt it again. She began to see herself in his expression. She touched her hair to sweep it back from her eyes.
"Wow," he said. "As I was driving here, I hoped a stunningly beautiful raven-haired woman would just show up. I need a date for dinner tonight."
