10

She has destroyed her old credit cards but still keeps the old driver’s license; she’ll need it one more time.

The plan is based in part on the cautionary advice with which she was endowed inadvertently by that dreadful little investigator, what was his name? Something aquatic, like his sharkskin clothes …

Seale, that’s it. Ray Seale.

From the outset she has implemented the plan with businesslike thoroughness and she’s applied a ruthless concentration to the details-because she can’t afford to make mistakes, and because for at least some of the time it keeps her mind off her fears for herself and for Ellen.

Much of the time she feels as though she is trying to walk underwater. There seems to be a haze over her vision: a translucence that separates her from reality. The things that she requires of herself are things that she accomplishes with prompt inventive adroitness but it is as if someone else were accomplishing them. Feeling dreamlike, trancelike, she knows she must keep moving briskly because, like a bicyclist, she’ll fall down if she stops.

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