by Thomas Perry
“Do you?”
“I just said that I did. Do you?”
“Of course.”
“Then we will. But you’ve got to stop staring at me like you do. And don’t act like you never saw me before either. Treat me like you treat everybody.”
“I will.”
“All right then.” She turned away and took another branch of the path that went off to the right. He went to the left, and took his time getting down to the big clearing where the buildings were so they wouldn’t arrive at the same time.
For the next few days Ed kept at the project he was working on. He saw Charlotte only a couple of times and even then from a distance. She did more digging and planting at the big vegetable garden with about thirty other people. He saw her once bringing drinking water in buckets to share with the crew of planters. He saw her another time at the lake where people swam, keeping an eye on a dozen children from the age of about twelve down to the size she had to carry while she held another by the hand. He moved on as quickly as he could without looking at her again.
Two nights later he was at the dinner serving line holding a plate and silverware. He accepted a good-looking piece of beef from Adam Hayes, who had the unofficial title of “grill master.” He felt pleased about the beef, because Hayes had been known to give people he didn’t like or respect inferior cuts. He thanked him and went on to the table of casseroles and bread and salads, and let the women there put a couple of spoonfuls on his plate. He said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and moved on.
Then, from somewhere behind him, he heard Charlotte’s voice. “Don’t turn around. Look to your left. That’s my house, with the wooden bluebird nailed to the door.” He looked that way and identified the bird.
“Be at the back window at eleven thirty-seven.”
He didn’t look behind him, just moved to the next station, which had cups of water. He took one and went to sit with Lee Wolf, the first one at a picnic table.
Wolf looked up and said, “Hey, Ed. I’ve been meaning to tell you what a fine job you’ve been doing. Good for you.”
“Thanks, Lee,” he said. “Folks have been nice.” It occurred to him that he had never in his life referred to a group of people as “folks.” He’d been born in Worcester, Massachusetts. But the Swift Sword people’s way of talking was as contagious as prison talk.
After dinner and the evening meeting he went back to the storage building where he and Lonny Mann slept. They had divided the place in half after the other three were killed, because sleeping in close quarters was like prison, and space was a luxury. Each man had a bunk with a blanket and pillow, placed near the door at one end of the rectangular building so he could go out his own door to the nearest outhouse. Ed lay still in his bunk and listened to Lonny Mann’s breathing.
He waited while it slowed down, and then while it turned into a snore. He used some of the time after that rolling his blanket into a torso, stuffing it into a T-shirt and jeans, and then covering it with a spare blanket. At 11:30 p.m. he went out and around the back of the storage building and into the woods.
Ed made a wide circle around the meadow where the community houses stood and emerged from the woods behind Charlotte Carpenter’s house at 11:37.
The rear window was four panes fitted like double doors with hinges and a latch. He was sure that was because the group hadn’t had skilled carpenters who could have installed sliding windows with sash weights. This kind of window was quieter, so he was glad. The window swung open inward and he followed it, climbing over the sill into a dark room. All he could tell about the space was that it was small and square, not a bedroom, but something else.
The window swung shut, and a graceful hand latched it again. She stepped into him. Her body pressed against his, and his arms automatically encircled her. She was naked.
She said, “Don’t be shy, hon. Take them off. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
He stepped out of his jeans and shorts, tugged his T-shirt up over his head, and realized she was helping him get it off. They seemed to melt together, and in a moment they were crouching on a soft surface that was not a bed, but a mattress that had a plastic surface and a few inches of foam rubber like the narrow mattress of a piece of lawn furniture. There were also some throw pillows. He gave the mattress no thought because by then his attention was fully engaged with her, his hands moving to caress her, exploring her body and letting her touch his. The process was hurried and eager, and the excitement grew, until in a short time they were making love. That was the term that came to him. They were quick and wild, even feverish in the small, dark room. There was a voracity that seemed to come from the forbidden nature of their new relationship, which was partly an agreement to do what they were not supposed to do. The transgression made them elated and burned away all the barriers and caution and even gentleness. They had granted themselves the right to take and take.
When they at last had to stop and lay side by side for a moment, he whispered, “Is this safe?”
“Do you mean is my husband home, or do I take the pill? He’s away tonight, and I do.”
“Good.” He lay still for a moment. “Of course, worrying about those two questions helped me last longer.”
She giggled. “You’ll just have to go back to thinking about baseball to control yourself, like other men.”
“It’s our national game.”
She put one leg over him and raised herself up to straddle him. “No, this is our national game.” She leaned forward and kissed his lips, a long, lingering, wet kiss. He felt her nipples just barely touch his chest, and her hips began to move, her pelvis grinding slowly against him, reawakening his feelings for her.
He adjusted his position on the mattress slightly, and she gave a sigh that trailed off into a moan. “Second inning,” she said.
The lovemaking went on for about two and a half hours before they lay still and stayed there, both covered with sweat and panting. When Charlotte’s breathing returned to normal, she said, “What time is it?”
He sat up, held his watch to the window, and moved the curtain an inch. “About two. But if that’s what you’re thinking, it’s time for me to go.”
“That’s true,” she said. “We both have to get up in three or four hours and put in a day of work, or people will wonder why we’re both tired.”
“Will they?”
“You bet.” She took his face in her hands and kissed him. “Don’t let me down on that, because I just had a really great time, and I won’t be able to invite you again if I can’t rely on your judgment.”
He kissed her back. “I’ll see you at six.” Then he said, “No, better not. But I’ll be up then doing some kind of work where people can see me.”
“There you go,” she said. “I knew you weren’t stupid.”
He dressed quickly, and they both stood on the mattress. “What is this, anyway? Your bed?”
“No,” she said. “I have a regular bed in the bedroom that I share with my husband. This is just a pad from a lawn chair. It means I don’t have to change the sheets and blankets before he comes home.”
“Does eleven thirty-seven have some meaning?”
“The opposite. No meaning. People who are meeting in secret usually meet on the hour or half hour.”
“Very practical,” he said. “I hope you get in touch with me soon. I’ll be thinking about you.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Let me do the thinking.”
He went out the back window and heard the slow, soft sound of it closing and then the latch turning to lock it. He made his way around the margin of trees and brush to the building he shared with Lonny Mann. He set his alarm and went to sleep.
33
Leah worked each day from early morning until late at night. She could not be as open and visible in towns as she would have liked, because during the raid on Weldonville city hall, all three fugitives had seen her. She tried to do much of her searching for them by car, driving up and down the streets near
bars and restaurants, parking in the lots of supermarkets, and watching the checkout lines through the big front windows.
Every evening Leah explored night spots, usually restaurants, diners, and quiet places where there was a chance to overhear conversations. She also went to a number of fast-food and take-out places, because the Swift Sword people were probably not rich. After it was too late to order food, she would go to bars. She knew that some members of a religious group probably wouldn’t be drinkers, but some might be, and she also knew that she might hear more from people who weren’t members than from people who were. People gossiped about new neighbors and strangers who had secrets, not about themselves.
One night she was sitting in a gravel parking lot casing a bar that was housed in a giant converted barn with a neon sign that said, WALLY’S SKY CLUB. She supposed the name had to do with the fact that it was at the top of a mountain. As she watched, four couples walked from the dimly lit gravel parking lot into the barn-like wooden structure. Leah considered that a good omen, because the more pairs and single women were in a bar, the less likely the men had nothing to do but fight. She heard the sound of a violin being tuned, a burst of applause, and then a live country band began to play. The door opened and stayed open as the couples streamed inside, and Leah watched men and women in jeans, cowboy hats, and boots form themselves into ranks and begin doing a line dance.
Leah stayed outside. A tall woman like her coming in alone attracted a certain amount of notice, and the right amount of notice tonight was none. The new couples formed their own row in the back and did a boot scoot with the others. After a few minutes, the band didn’t stop, but just moved on into a new song, and the crowd started an electric slide. Leah spotted a pretty woman with long black hair wearing a crushed straw cowboy hat, a white lace top, and skin-tight jeans who seemed to be acting as the dance leader. Whatever she was doing, the rest of the people did too. It occurred to Leah that maybe she was paid by the bar or the band. When the song ended, the woman went off for a drink, so the crowd began to dance on their own, most of them doing a two-step, cruising around the floor on random courses.
She scanned the faces of the men she could see through the open door, but none of them looked like the men she was hunting for. She turned her attention to people coming and going in the parking lot. Wolf, Mann, and Leonard might not be dancers, and they probably wouldn’t dare go out to pick up strange women this soon after the raid on Weldonville, but they probably didn’t mind having a drink. She sat through the band’s second set, and then saw some of the patrons going outside.
Some of them had come out to cool off, as though Wally’s air-conditioning wasn’t sufficiently powerful to make up for the dancing. Some lit cigarettes, and she could see the tiny orange tips and then the strands of smoke curling and folding in on themselves and rising to catch the light from fixtures mounted above the barn door.
She watched one couple separate themselves from the others. The woman, who had long, dark hair, lifted it off the back of her neck to let the air cool her. She followed her escort away from the building and then stopped under one of the lamps mounted on a pole in the lot. The man was big and tall, with a short, thick beard with a little gray in it, but the woman was the one who caught Leah’s attention.
She was wearing a bright yellow T-shirt with black printing on it. There was a picture of a broadsword with the hilt up and the blade down, so it looked like a cross. And above the handle were the three letters “SSS.”
Leah slumped low in the driver’s seat of her rental car and let her eyes follow them. The man opened the driver’s side of a red pickup truck and got in, and the woman headed for the passenger side and climbed in after him.
Leah waited to hear the man start the pickup before she turned the key on her rental car.
34
Bob Carpenter drove the red pickup out of the parking lot behind Wally’s Sky Club. As he accelerated, the rear tires threw a volley of pea-size gravel into the air, where it bounced off the cars in the last row.
Charlotte said, “Jesus, Bob. You’re driving way too fast.”
“I’ve got the truck under control. I drive it every day of my life, so it’s like part of my body. Don’t tell me you’re scared.”
“Yeah, I’m scared. You’re under the influence, for one thing. You’ve got control in the parking lot of a bar lit up like Christmas, but we’re driving onto a dark road through thick woods. What happens when that twelve-point buck leaps into the road? Deer don’t hang around at bars, but a hundred yards down the road we could be dead. It happens all the time on these mountain roads.”
“If it’s a twelve-point buck, I’ll pistol-shoot him and make him into a trophy. You can hang our socks on his antlers to dry.”
Charlotte put her hand on his thigh. “Slow down for me, Bobby.”
He took his foot off the gas pedal, but he also took his eyes off the dark road and looked at her instead. “There. Is that slow enough?”
“It’s a start,” she said. “Just pay attention to the road. I don’t want to spend the night in a jail or a hospital, or move into a cemetery tomorrow.”
He drove on for a time, but she could tell he wasn’t keeping the car straight or steady. He was drifting and then correcting. She watched his eyes closely and kept glancing at the speedometer to be sure he didn’t keep the needle creeping up. He was a man who could be a lot of fun when he was out drinking, but sometimes later, after the drinking was over, he could get cranky and mean. She wanted to keep on his good side so that didn’t happen tonight.
She felt a bit uneasy about things right now. He had been out with Dave Sherman on a handyman job for four days, building a corral and a shed-size barn for a woman in Fayetteville whose daughter had a horse. That was when she had invited Ed Leonard to visit her. It was a matter of importance to her to keep Bob feeling warm and confident about her.
He could be suspicious, and she didn’t always have to make a mistake to make him that way. When he acted jealous, she often sensed that it was because while he had been away on a job, he had slept with another woman and projected his guilt on Charlotte. If he was doing it, maybe she was too.
He had been with Dave Sherman this time, and that was a sign. Dave Sherman was a good-looking single man with no rules to follow. He was sometimes gone for a short job—a delivery or a shopping trip—for five or six days. She had never seen any advantage in spying on her husband when he was off with Dave Sherman. What would she get for catching him? But she thought Bob’s straying at those times was pretty likely. And he did seem to be blaming her for whatever had happened.
Charlotte was determined to keep everything easy and calm tonight, so she said nothing when she saw he was speeding up.
He said, “Wow, that’s irritating.”
“What is?”
“The headlights of that car back there.”
She turned in her seat and looked out the rear window over the truck bed. There was a pair of headlights back there. They didn’t seem overly bright, but they were there. “I see them,” she said. “They’re pretty far back.”
He began to speed up some more. “I didn’t mean the glare. But I don’t want to have them follow us home. We’re only a couple of miles out from Ararat.”
She smiled. “You want me to drive while you get out your toolbox and throw roofing nails on the road?”
“No. I’ll pull onto the uphill road and stop a ways up to wait for them to round the bend, then stop them to ask what they’re up to.”
It was a terrible idea, but she knew there would be no way to dissuade him now that he had an idea and felt it was a good one.
She remained silent and watched the other car, which stayed back so it was only a pair of headlights. She hoped it would make a turn somewhere soon.
The lights stayed behind them for the next two miles until he went upward toward the place where the mountain road began. Bob drove up, his speed higher than it should be, bouncing and turning on the uneven, inclined
pavement. A couple of times Bob took a turn too tightly, and she heard weeds and sticks scraping the side of the truck. He went up about three hundred yards and then stopped. He jumped down from the cab, went to the locked toolbox, opened it, and took out an AR15 rifle.
From far behind them, Leah could see that the pickup’s headlights were now stationary, tilted uphill. They looked like a funnel of light shining upward to illuminate the upper branches of the trees. Then they went out. The pickup had stopped.
Leah drove along the highway toward the entrance to the uphill road, but then stayed on the highway instead of turning upward. She drove on for a few minutes, until she was sure the red pickup truck hadn’t turned around and come back down to follow her. She made a turn at the next opportunity and took a slightly longer route toward the hotel where she was staying the night.
Up the mountain road, Bob and Charlotte Carpenter were in the open flat bed of the pickup. She sat with her back leaning against the cab and her arms folded, while Bob crouched, his rifle at his shoulder and resting on the built-in toolbox, aiming the weapon at the center of the narrow road.
As the minutes passed, Charlotte felt more and more firmly convinced that the second car had not been following them. Why would anybody do that anyway? To rob them? Any conscious adult human being who got one look at Bob Carpenter would know he was not the man they wanted to pick on. He was big and formidable physically, and everything about him said he was probably armed. She hoped he wasn’t going to get paranoid every time he got drunk.
She didn’t mind this time, really. They had gotten out for an evening away from Ararat. She loved dancing, and there had been a good country band. It was also nice to be reminded that she was still a pretty woman. Even though she was past the bride stage, she had drawn a fair number of appreciative looks from men tonight. If she had been alone, they would have bought her plenty of drinks and competed for her attention.
