Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

Linda Thompson pumped harder on the stationary bike, slowly adding speed, watching the digital readout on the little electronic podium in front of the handlebars. Thirty miles an hour, thirty-five, forty. She moved her legs faster, then pushed the thumb-lever forward to jump to a higher gear, and the speedometer told her she was going fifty. She gradually worked the gears back until the pedaling was almost effortless. She kept moving her legs for a long time to avoid getting knots in her muscles, but she had lost interest in the machine. Nobody went fifty on a bicycle. The scale was designed to give suckers a warm, cozy feeling.

She dismounted and looked out the glass wall of the exercise room. She was still alone. The gawkers were probably at their sales meetings. She went to the weight area, did a few more bench presses, a few more curls, then went to work on her latissimus dorsi, always using light weights and many repetitions to keep the muscles supple and avoid adding ugly body mass.

She had been eager to begin hunting, and it was frustrating to be stalled for days right at the start. Hatcher might have been dumb enough to ditch the car at the Kingman airport or the Havasu airport, but the woman had not been dumb enough to let him. Earl wasn’t saying it yet, but none of the flights out of either airport fit the schedule. The woman wouldn’t set it up so that Hatcher had to drive out of Las Vegas at midnight and wait in an airport until seven for a flight. That was the kind of thing they did later, when she and Earl were getting close, and they were scared and desperate. At the beginning they still had a choice, and the first moves were smooth and efficient.

She walked into the tiny changing area and came out the other door in her swimsuit, cap, and goggles. She ran her toes along the surface of the water and verified that it was cold. It was a pretty good trick to have a cold swimming pool in a place where it was over a hundred degrees in the shade. She slipped in and endured the shock, then began to swim slowly up and down, warming her body and letting the long, slow strokes stretch the muscles and clear her lungs. It was already nearly eleven, so she decided she would do only a half mile and get out. Hotels started to get busy around noon, even in places like Havasu, Arizona. She resented having to do everything in the morning each day. Linda was a night person.

When she had finished her swim, she slipped back into the dressing room, and in a few minutes she was walking back up the hallway of the hotel. She opened the door and found Earl sitting at the table, tapping the keys of the laptop computer. Then she saw that the bags were packed.

“What is it?” she asked. “What are you looking at?”

“Airline schedules.” Earl grinned that strange grin he had. At times like this his face seemed more animal than human. “I think I figured out why none of the flights he could have gotten out of Arizona fit.”

“Why not?” She set down her gym bag and waited. She was relieved that he had not made her bring that up. But he must have found something else. He actually looked happy.

“Listen carefully,” said Earl. “He takes the car from the parking lot in Las Vegas. It’s about midnight. He drives two hours south toward Kingman or Havasu, Arizona. What time is it?”

Linda shrugged. “Two o’clock. Nothing takes off for four or five hours, and then it’s just local stuff.”

“Right. Suppose he doesn’t drive to Arizona. Suppose he drives north about a hundred and eighty miles at sixty miles an hour. He’s at Cedar City, Utah. What time is it?”

“Three o’clock.”

“Nope. Four o’clock. He’s crossed from the Pacific time zone into Mountain.”

Linda sat on the bed. “But Utah is in the same time zone as Arizona.”

“Yeah, but Arizona doesn’t do daylight savings time. That’s why we didn’t have to set the clocks forward when we got here.” He looked at her intently. “Okay. He’s driven three hours to Cedar City. It’s four o’clock. What time is it in Las Vegas?”

Linda lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “Three o’clock. She’s just finishing up with Seaver’s men.”

Earl nodded. “We ruled out Cedar City because it was too far to reach before Seaver’s men started looking. I would have ruled out his flight, too, because it left so late. She couldn’t have hoped to buy him enough time to make it, so why would she bother to buy him any time at all? But it wasn’t late. It was just the amount of time she was buying for him. It’s Flight 493 to Denver, at four eighteen A.M.”

Earl looked at her expectantly, but she opened her suitcase, took out a comb, and walked to the mirror.

“Aren’t you interested?”

“Interested?” asked Linda. “Oh, sure.”

“Then why aren’t you happy?”

She sat down on the bed facing away from him to comb her hair so he couldn’t see her. “I was thinking about them. Hatcher and that woman. It’s such a simple trick, and I’ll bet when they thought of it they were laughing at us.”

8

Jane heard a noise in the dark outside. She sat up and listened. The noise came again. She crept to the wall beside the bedroom window and leaned slowly to the side to bring one eye to the edge of the curtain to see. The wind was blowing from the east, making the long, leg-thick limb of the old maple tree behind the house bob its heavy foliage up and down. When it moved, there was a creak. There it was again, a rubbing sound that came once, then was quiet, a sound an intruder would make while he slipped into the house.

She stepped back from the window and watched the soft, hot wind blow the curtain inward so a little glow of moonlight showed her the room. Sprawled on the other side of the bed was Carey, his eyes closed and his jaw slack in an almost-snore, a long silence and then, after it seemed too late, a soft, gentle indrawing of breath. She admitted to herself that she would probably wake up this way for a few more months. She had slept—happily fallen asleep—beside a few men over the years, and Carey was one of them. But now she was sleeping in Carey’s bed in the house where Carey had been a baby, which was now her house too. She had been in another life too long, a place where noises that might be intruders didn’t always turn out to be made by the wind. She sat on the bed and spent a minute staring at him. She let herself adore the big foot sticking out from under the sheet, the long, hard muscles of the arm. She leaned over to stare at his eyelids. She could see his eyes moving in little nervous twitches underneath, and she knew he was dreaming.

She resisted the urge to touch him. She was his wife now, and that was different. She was supposed to take responsibility for the fact that he had to be at the hospital at six if he was going into surgery at seven, not wake him up and ask him what he was dreaming. She slowly lowered herself beside him, then lay on her back, closed her eyes, and listened to the wind fluttering the leaves of the maple outside the window until they made no sound.

After a time, she sensed from the way that the trees around her kept revising their shapes until she got them right that she was in a dream. It was night, and low, thin clouds made the moon a small ball with a rainbow ring around it. She didn’t like the dream, but when she tried to fathom why that was, she found she had already known the answer before she had wondered. It was because the place where she was standing was familiar. She had not moved. She was still on the ground where Carey’s house was going to be built some day.

She felt uneasy as she looked toward the street, because she saw only a narrow gap in the trees. There was no use trying to walk and find her way home, because if the path was there, the road was not yet on top of it, and the forest still stretched like this from the ocean to the Mississippi, and from the tundra to the Gulf of Mexico.