Jeffery Deaver - Solitude Creek

‘You kept an eye on it?’

‘I did.’

Dance’s rule was that the children could Skype or go online only if an adult was nearby and checking in occasionally.

‘An official club?’ she asked.

‘I’m not sure Pacific Heights Grade School requires much in the way of charter for a club to be official.’

‘Good point... Secrets Club,’ she mused. ‘And what do they do? Gossip about their American Girl dolls?’

‘I asked her and she said it was a secret.’

They both laughed.

Boling waved off another pour of wine. Since the children were here, he was present only until bedtime, then would drive back home. Just like he never drank when he was chauffeuring them anywhere.

‘And Wes?’

‘Donnie came over for a while. I like him. Really smart. I was teaching them how to code. He picked it up fast.’

‘What do you think about that game they’re playing now — Defend and Respond Expedition? What is it again?’

‘Service.’

‘Right.’

‘I have no idea what it’s about but what I’m fascinated with is that they’re rejecting the computer model. Writing out their battle plans, or whatever they do, sort of like football plays. Or like the old Battleships game. Remember?’

‘Sure.’

‘It’s a return to traditional game practices. I think there’s even an aspect where they do a scavenger hunt or something outside, find clues in the park or down by the shore. They’re out in the real world, ride their bikes, get some exercise.’

‘Like I used to play when I was a girl.’

‘Have to say I was pretty box-oriented, even that age.’

Boxes . Computers.

She said, ‘I heard people’re going back to paper books, away from e-books.’

‘True,’ he said. ‘I prefer the paper ones. And, besides, given my typical reading material, you’re probably not going to find Vector Modeling and Cosine Similarity as Applied to Search Engine Algorithms on Kindle.’

Dance nodded. ‘They’re making a movie of that, aren’t they?’

‘Pixar.’

Patsy and Dylan wandered out onto the Deck. Molecules of roast beef aroma carry far on nights like that. They plopped down and Boling furtively, but not too, slipped them bits. He asked Dance, ‘Okay, how bad was it?’

She lowered her head, sipped wine again.

He said, ‘You didn’t want to talk about it. But maybe you do.’

‘It’s bad, Jon. This guy, we don’t have a clue what he’s up to. Tonight— Did you hear the news?’

‘Gunman, but he wasn’t actually shooting people. Just making them panic. They jumped into the water. Four or five dead.’

Dance fell silent, looked out over the tiny amber lights in the backyard. As she leaned back, a bone somewhere in her shoulder popped. Didn’t used to happen. She stared up through the pines at the stars. This was the Peninsula of Fog but there were moments where the temperature and moisture partnered to turn the air into glass and, with little ambient illumination here, you sometimes could peer up through a tunnel between the pines and see the start of the universe.

‘Stay,’ she said.

Boling looked down at the dogs. They were asleep.

He glanced at her.

A smile. ‘You. Not them.’

‘Stay?’

‘The night.’

He didn’t need to say, ‘But the children.’ Kathryn Dance was not somebody you needed to remind when it came to the obvious.

And he didn’t need to hesitate. He leaned over and kissed her hard. Her hand went around his neck and she pulled him to her.

Neither asked about finishing dinner. They picked up their half-empty plates and carried them inside to the sink. Then Dance ushered the dogs in, and locked the doors.

Boling took her hand and led her up the stairs.

The alarm went off at seven thirty.

A classical tune — Dance, a musician, never did well with dissonance. It was the ‘Toccata and Fugue’, Phantom of the Opera — no, not that one. An earlier version.

She opened her eyes and fumbled for the stop button.

Yes, it was Saturday. But the unsub was still out there. Time to get up.

She turned to see Jon Boling brush back his thinning hair. He wasn’t self-conscious: it was only that strands were sticking out sideways. He wore only a T-shirt, gray, which she vaguely remembered him pulling on somewhere north of midnight. She was in a Victoria’s Secret thing, silk and pink and just a little outrageous. Because, how often?

He kissed her forehead.

She kissed his mouth.

No regrets about his staying. None at all.

She’d wondered what her reaction would be. Even now, hearing the creak of a door downstairs, a latch, muted voices, the tink-tink of cereal bowls, she knew it was the right decision. Time to step forward. They’d been dating a year, a little more. She now marshaled arguments and prepared a public-relations campaign for the children, thought about what they would and wouldn’t think, say, do when they saw a man come down the stairs. They’d have a clue about what had been going on: Dance had had The Talk with them, several years ago. (The reactions: Maggie had nodded matter-of-factly, as if confirming what she’d known for years; Wes had blushed furiously and finally, encouraged to ask a question, any question, about the process, wondered, ‘Aren’t there, like, any other ways?’ Dance, struggling to keep a straight face.)

So. They were about to confront the fact that Mom had had a man stay over, albeit a man they knew well, liked and who was more relative to them than her own sister was an aunt (flighty, charming and occasionally exasperating, New Age Betsey lived in the hills of Santa Barbara).

Let’s see what the next half-hour holds.

Dance considered just throwing on a robe but opted for a shower. She slipped into the bathroom and, when out, dressed in jeans and a pink work shirt while Boling, looking a bit uneasy, brushed his teeth. He, too, dressed.

‘Okay,’ he said slowly.

‘No.’

‘No?’ he asked.

‘You were looking at the window. You can’t jump out of it. You’re going to come downstairs with me and we’ll have my famous French toast. I only make it on special occasions.’

‘Is this special?’

She didn’t answer. She kissed him fast.

He said, ‘All right. Let’s go see the kids.’

As it turned out, however, it wasn’t just the kids that Dance and Boling saw.

As they stepped to the bottom of the stairs and into the kitchen, Dance nearly ran into Michael O’Neil, who was holding a glass of orange juice and walking to the table.

‘Oh,’ she whispered.

‘Morning. Hi, Jon.’

‘Michael.’

O’Neil, his face completely neutral, said, ‘Wes let me in. I tried to call but your phone was off.’

She’d shut it off intentionally before easing into bed, not wanting to risk a call — that is, risk hearing O’Neil’s ringtone, an Irish ballad, courtesy of the kids — at a moment like that. She’d fallen asleep before turning it back on. Careless. Unprofessional.

‘I...’ she began, but could think of not a single syllable to utter past that. She glanced toward the busy bees hard at work on breakfast.

‘Hi, Mom!’ Maggie said. ‘There was this show on TV about badgers and there’s this one kind, a honey badger, and this bird called a honeyguide leads it to a beehive and a badger rips it open and eats honey and its coat is so thick it doesn’t get stung. Hi, Jon.’

As if he’d lived there for years.

Wes, on his phone, nodded a cheerful greeting with a smile to both mother and boyfriend.

Mother and daughter went to work, wrangling breakfast — including honey for the French toast, of course. Dance glanced toward Wes. ‘Who?’ she whispered, nodding at his phone.