In the Blink of an Eye (33 page)

If he knew there isn't one—and that she trespassed and planted the audio recorder here to get the tape . . .

But he won't have to know, she reminds herself, eyeing the deserted-looking house.
And we aren't hurting anyone. This is our business. We're scientists conducting important research. Who knows what else we'll find if we check out that spot?

“
Let's go, Kent,” she says. “Come on.”

As they move quietly across the damp grass, lugging their equipment, guided by the beams of their flashlights, Miranda wonders if they should have waited until later. After midnight, there will be even less chance of being discovered here.

But here, in the side yard, they're well concealed by the overgrown landscaping. Fortuitously, the blue-painted house next door, whose yard borders this one, is also dark and seemingly deserted. There's no one around to see Miranda and Kent setting up their tripods and cameras.

Miranda takes her Trifield meter from her vest pocket and turns it on.

“Everything set?” Kent asks quietly.

She nods.

With that, they begin to do what they always do, beginning an investigation.

They watch, and they listen, and they wait.

T
HE BED IS
too small for both of them, but Rupert has climbed in anyway. He doesn't want to be on the other side of the house, alone in the big, empty master bedroom. He wants to be with his wife.

Nan is everything to him.

Lying here in the dark beside her, holding her as she sleeps, he is carried back, over the years. Back to so many nights, just like this one—summer nights, with the windows open to chirping crickets and the distant lapping of waves on the lake.

It wasn't always this serene, though.

There were nights in the city, steamy summer nights when street noises filtered up: traffic, sirens, kids playing in open hydrants, people playing cards on stoops.

It was like that the first time he ever slept all night with Nan. They lay on his lumpy mattress in his small, rented room, entwined in each other's arms, soaked from the humidity and the exertion of making love. Long after the mothers below had noisily called their children inside and the raucous card games had given way to quiet chatter punctuated by occasional bursts of laughter, Rupert asked Nan if she should be getting home.

He'll never forget her reply.

“I
am
home,” she said with a sigh of contentment, snuggling against him.

“Your mother is probably frantic,” he pointed out, smiling in the dark.

“So?”

As it turned out, her mother was frantic. Had the police looking for Nan. When she showed up the next morning, instead of being grateful to see her daughter alive, Nan's mother threatened to disown her.

Of course, Nan made up some story. She didn't dare tell her mother that she was in love with an older man.

Rupert smiles, remembering what an issue it had been back then—the few years separating their ages. It doesn't matter now. It hasn't mattered in years. They're soul mates.

He smiles, reaching out to stroke Nan's head. His fingers encounter fabric where her hair should be.

It all comes back to him.

The chemo.

Her illness.

Harsh reality, slapping him in the face.

Well, it always does, doesn't it? Much as he tries to lose himself in dreams of the past, he can't fully escape what's happening today.

He never could. All his life, even in those early days with Nan, he's had the habit of transporting himself away from the present. But in his youth, he was always looking forward, not back—fantasizing about the future, making plans.

Rupert always had big plans.

His mother used to say he was like his father in that way.

Rupert has precious few memories of the man: He was always packing and unpacking, coming and going, taking care of “business.” He always smelled good. He and Mother danced together sometimes, all around the apartment, to music from the radio. And he liked to do tricks.

He made handkerchiefs disappear into thin air, pulled pennies from Rupert's ears. Simple stunts for a career con man. Whenever he left, Rupert's mother cried, and his father told Rupert to take care of her until he came back.

And he always did come back from wherever he was. Sometimes it took a few days, and sometimes months, but he always walked through the door eventually, and he always brought presents. Shiny, expensive toys for Rupert, clothes and perfume for Mother. He was full of stories about where he had been, and plans for their future. He always said that someday, they were going to be rich. They were going to live in a fancy house, and have a car—maybe two cars. Rupert would go to a private school, and he would go to college. And someday, Rupert would have an important job, Father said. He would have a job at a desk in a towering office building in Manhattan, and he would never have to leave his family the way Father had to leave them.

But Father always came back.

Which is why Rupert didn't think much of it the time that he seemed to be away longer than ever before. At first, Mother didn't worry. Then she did worry. That was when Rupert worried, too.

But all that worrying never brought Father back.

There were no more presents. There was no more dancing. Pretty soon, there wasn't even an apartment. Rupert and Mother had to leave, because she couldn't pay the rent.

Rupert remembers telling Mother not to worry—that if Father didn't ever come back, he would get a job and take care of her. He was going to buy her gifts, and make her laugh the way Father did, and when he was tall enough, he was going to dance with her, too. Mother only hugged him and told him that he was full of big plans, just as his father always was.

And then she said his father was never coming back.

“How do you know?” Rupert asked. “Did he tell you? Did somebody tell you?”

“I just know,” his mother said sadly.

They lived with friends for a while, and with an old aunt of Mother's who smelled bad and had a tiny apartment infested with cockroaches.

Then Mother got sick.

It's all a blur, Mother dying. Rupert knows the basics: she died one August night on his aunt's sofa, and he was with her when it happened.

He was there . . . but he doesn't remember. He has never let himself remember the details.

After Mother died, he was taken to a place for orphans. St Bertrand's Home for Boys was a depressing, frightening, Gothic structure somewhere above the Hudson River—New Jersey, or Rockland County—Rupert never knew where, and later, when he was older, he never felt the need to find out.

Wade came along when Rupert was on the verge of adolescence, long since resigned to the fact that he would spend the rest of his childhood in that gloomy institution.

Wade was an old friend of Father's. He told Rupert that his father was dead. And Rupert realized he had already known that.

Father was murdered, Wade said, by somebody who thought Father had stolen money from him.

Rupert never asked Wade whether his father really had stolen the money. He knew the truth about that, too. Instinctively, he understood that his father's “business” was shady, conducted on the fringes of legality.

Father was a con man, and so was Wade.

Later, Rupert learned why Wade didn't track him down earlier. It was because he was in prison for several years, serving time on a swindling charge.

But all that ever mattered to Rupert was that Wade finally came, and that he said Rupert could live with him.

Wade took him away from St. Bertrand's. He didn't bring him home, because Wade didn't have a home. He lived on the road. Rupert didn't mind that at first. Not for a long time. Not until he felt the urge to settle down, and went back to the Bronx, moved into that tiny apartment, and met Nan.

Clinging to her now, awash in grief, Rupert can no longer hold it in. He's being strangled by emotion, feels it rising in his throat, threatening to spill over.

And then it does.

A choked sob escapes him.

The foreign, guttural sound startles him into awareness. He clamps his mouth shut, takes a deep breath. And then another.

He will not cry.

He will not let go.

He will be strong, and he will do what has to be done, just as he always has.

P
AINE GENTLY LAYS
Dulcie on the bed in Julia's room. He covers her with the afghan Julia gave him—a heavy yarn one that somebody undoubtedly crocheted by hand. As he tiptoes out of the room, he finds himself looking around, out of curiosity. There is little to see in the light that spills in from the hall: old, mismatched furniture, sheer curtains, a couple of braided rugs on the scarred hardwood floor.

Beside the door is an old-fashioned high bureau. Julia's grandmother's dresser, he remembers. The one she says reeks of mothballs. Paine inhales deeply, but all he can smell is the faint herbal fragrance he has come to associate with Julia. He smiles. He likes the scent.

A white lace-edged scarf is draped across the dresser top, and on it are several framed photographs.

As he glances idly at them, it occurs to Paine that all of the pictures show women: women alone, in posed portraits typical of a bygone era, and women in snapshots, standing together. He recalls Julia telling him that she was raised by her grandmother, who was widowed young, and by her mother, who never married her father—“whoever he was,” Julia added, with a trace of bitterness.

“You mean you never knew your dad?”

“Let's just say that my mother has had quite a few boyfriends. Obviously one of them got her pregnant almost thirty years ago—and she decided that I'd be better off not even knowing who he was. In fact, I doubt he even knows I exist.”

Paine remembers noticing the hurt on Julia's face when she said that. Now he's struck anew by how that must have hurt her growing up. Just looking at her collection of photos, anyone would be struck by the obvious absence of any male influence in Julia's life.

Aside from Andy, of course. Not that there are any photos of him in evidence.

For some reason, Paine is pleased by this. He doesn't think much of Andy Doyle and wonders, not for the first time, what Julia sees in him. There's an air of self-centered arrogance about him that turned Paine off the first time he met him. But he must have his good points.

After all, he most likely saved Dulcie's life. And I didn't even thank him, Paine realizes belatedly.

He glances again at the photographs, zeroing in on one that ostensibly shows all three generations together: Julia, her mother, and her grandmother. Julia looks about eighteen in the photo: carefree and casual in jeans and sneakers, her short dark hair windswept Her grandmother, too—judging by her expression, her clothing, her no-frills appearance—appears to be laid-back and easygoing. But the woman between them bears no resemblance to either of them.

Julia's mother—assuming that's she—stands carefully posed, her face expertly made up, her hair so obviously teased and sprayed that it looks like cotton candy. She's dripping in costume jewelry and wears a bright pink suit with an ultrashort skirt that shows off a length of well-toned, stocking-clad leg in high-heeled pink pumps.

Paine doesn't like her on sight. No wonder Julia rarely seems to mention her—and when she does, it isn't with affection.

About to leave the room, Paine stops short, glimpsing a framed photo he didn't notice until now.

He picks it up, hands trembling slightly.

Julia and Kristin, not more than twelve or thirteen years old, sit on a wooden pier. Both wear bathing suits: Julia's athletic figure in a simple one-piece tank, Kristin's precocious curves already filling out a pink bikini. Julia's hair is damp and her legs dangle in the water, Kristin's sun-streaked tresses are dry and neatly combed. Her knees are bent, with her arms wrapped around them and her feet firmly on the weathered planks of the dock. Both girls are grinning, as though sharing a private joke.

Paine notices that Julia's arm is wrapped around Kristin's shoulders in an almost protective posture.

Then he sees the red depth marker floating in the water in the background,
DEPTH:
6
FEET.

No wonder Kristin isn't damp, as Julia is. No wonder her feet are on dry ground. No wonder Julia looks as though she's poised to pull Kristin back on board if she should slip over the edge of the pier.

The old, familiar image assaults him again. Kristin, struggling underwater. Panic rising, lungs filling . . .

No. Stop.

Paine places the frame back on the dresser and looks back at Dulcie, asleep on the bed. She never even woke up when he carried her into the house and up the stairs, with Julia guiding the way in whispers.

He softly closes the door behind him and makes his way back down to the first floor. On this trip, he notices more about his surroundings—the peeling wallpaper, the water-stained ceiling, the shabby furniture. There is old-house charm, but the whole place could stand to be updated and renovated.

Julia waits in the kitchen, pouring two cups of coffee from the pot she's just brewed. She pours milk into both and hands him one, along with a sugar bowl.

He smiles. “You remembered.”

“The sugar? I just hope there's enough in there. I don't use it very often.”

“There's enough.” He stirs some into his coffee.

“Let's go into the living room,” Julia suggests, with a frustrated glance at the ceiling.

He follows her gaze. Where the roof should be, there's nothing but a length of plastic tarp. One corner flaps audibly in the slight breeze outside.

“How long is it going to be like that?”

“A few more days,” she replies. “Which is fine . . . as long as it doesn't pour out again. Everything was damp in here this morning. Have you heard the weather forecast, by any chance?”