47

All the way up the seventeen miles of one-lane blacktop she’s tense and rigid at the wheel. If you get trapped on this road-if Bert’s decided to come up a day early this week or if one of them is driving toward you from the house right now and recognizes you …

She remembers evenings on this road when you had to stop and wait for the deer to finish bounding across the road-counting them as they leaped: five, six, seven. One time, with Ellen hardly ten weeks old in her arms, she counted out twelve of them.

A car coming forward: she glimpses a glitter of sun reflection as it moves toward her beyond a bend in the trees.

Oh Jesus. If it’s one of ours …

Every quarter mile or so there’s a pullout to allow oncoming traffic to pass. This one happens to be on her left as she approaches it; that’s good in this case because it will put her on the far side of the vehicle-harder for the oncoming driver to see clearly; and her door opens directly onto the woods in case she’s forced to duck and run.

It comes in sight-a white Lincoln, muddy and bug-spattered. She pulls her head back into the shadows of the cab and peers through her sunglasses. The driver of the car-quick glimpse of a black man in a grey windbreaker-waves his thanks and drives by. The car has M.D. plates.

A doctor? No one she’s ever seen before. Possibly from one of the other houses along the road.

Sweating, she drives on.

The gate is shut of course; it’s always shut-a forbidding grillwork of steel appended to stone gateposts amid no-nonsense signs: Private and No Trespassing and Beware of Dogs.

Her palms are damp and she sits taut for a moment, gulping breaths, remembering how she never used to pay much attention to the gate; she always had one of those remote-control transmitter gizmos in the car-you just pressed it and the gate rolled open and you drove through it and it slid shut behind you with a silent assurance that made you feel safe.

She doesn’t even remember which side the lock is on. Getting out of the Jeep she examines the left-hand gatepost, sees nothing on its mortared fieldstones, and crosses to the right-hand post.

There’s the lock. A small brass plate; a keyhole into the mortar.

She’s had these keys for three years. Certainly after she disappeared from the New York apartment two and a half months ago he would have changed all the locks there. But has he bothered to change them here as well?

She’s riding on a big assumption here: that his natural arrogant carelessness toward mechanical details will have extended as far as this gate. Bert’s a good driver but he rarely drives the car himself, especially here in the mountains; he’s usually in the back seat of the limo talking on the phone or hatching plans with whichever of the boys have accompanied him on this weekend’s trip to the cabin. The union bosses or the casino architects or the international bankers or the ones Bert never introduced to her.

So-count on the likelihood that, rapt in scams and schemes, invisible behind the tinted windows of the limousine, he usually can’t be bothered to notice when the car stops for a red light or the opening of an automatic gate.

The key fits in the lock. She turns it against spring pressure. The gate begins silently to slide open.

Blinking with gratitude she climbs back into the Jeep and drives through.

Can’t take the Jeep anywhere near the house; they’d hear it. Got to cut through the woods here. Stay on the downwind side of the house so the noise won’t carry in that direction. Drive tangentially around to the far side of the place-intersect the rough-cut pioneer road back beyond the ridge somewhere.

That’s why the four-wheel-drive vehicle is necessary.

She’s driven these before but nevertheless she has trouble shifting it into the low range and has to break the instruction manual out of the door pocket. After a bit of study and several tries it finally gnashes into gear and to be sure of her bearings she checks the angle of sun shadows on the ground, then tests the wind-a light breeze coming from her left-and goes bucketing to the right across a meadow, crushing flowers and knocking down saplings and trying to avoid the litter of hard New England rocks that could block her passage or puncture an oil pan.

It doesn’t matter about the tracks she’s leaving behind. By the time they’re discovered and followed, either she’ll be long gone with Ellen or it will have failed.

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