Nightlife: A Novel

38

It was shocking. Judith Nathan could hardly believe what she saw in front of her on the television screen. She stood up and stepped closer to the cabinet where the hotel had secured the television set and squinted to be sure that it wasn’t just someone who looked similar. No, it was Catherine Hobbes, absolutely. She was getting out of an unmarked police car with a tall male cop. Now she came around the front of the car and they both pulled another man out of the back seat. He was a shorter man wearing a short-sleeved pullover shirt that looked tight. He seemed to be a bodybuilder.

The picture cut to Hobbes and the other cop, standing outside a police station, and it must have been later. Hobbes was saying, “During our visit Mr. Olson became agitated and tried to run. We searched the house and found Mrs. Olson bound and locked in the trunk of Mr. Olson’s car. The hospital says she’s in stable condition and will recover from her injuries.” She listened to a reporter’s virtually inaudible question, then touched a spot on her forehead where there seemed to be a bruise and a scratch. “This? Yes.” She smiled. “It was a lucky punch.” She turned away from the reporters and went inside.

“Bitch,” said Judith Nathan. “You horrible bitch.” Catherine Hobbes was becoming a celebrity, practically. She was placing herself in front of the television cameras all the time now. Was anybody supposed to believe that it had been just little Catherine Hobbes fighting with that man? What had that big male cop been doing while that was going on? The man they had in handcuffs didn’t even look like a bad person, just some ordinary man the cops had scooped up to use as a fall guy. He would be destroyed to give Catherine Hobbes one more moment of glory. Disgusting.

Everything had turned into a disaster. She had not been given time to start living. Every time she began to get settled, Catherine Hobbes would start in again, telling lies about her, circulating her picture everywhere she tried to live. Every time she went anywhere, Catherine Hobbes seemed to show up a day later. Maybe Judith should have taken Catherine Hobbes more seriously. She had thought that coming back to Portland was a clever idea, because it was the last place anyone would expect to see her. But the price was that she had to live in the same city as Catherine Hobbes.

That night she lay in bed, unable to sleep. Staying free could not be that hard. There seemed to be lots of people who had done things but never got found. It all seemed to depend on who was looking. The main one who was looking for her, the one who kept traveling around and convincing everyone that they had to drop everything and search for small, solitary Tanya Starling, was Catherine Hobbes.

The video clip of Catherine Hobbes on television kept repeating in her memory. It was like one of those dreams she sometimes had that reminded her there was something important that she had forgotten. There was something she was supposed to do that she had not done.

In the morning Judith Nathan left her hotel room, bought a newspaper in the lobby, and went out to begin searching for an apartment. She found one early, and gave Solara Estates in Denver as her last address. Because she had just arrived in town and had no local bank account yet, the landlady didn’t mind taking her rent and deposit in cash.

Judith Nathan drove Tyler’s Mazda to see a garage that was for rent about a mile from her new apartment building. The entrance was in an alley, and the rent was cheap, so Judith Nathan paid the owner in cash for six months’ rent in advance. Judith stopped at a hardware store and bought a good combination padlock for the bolt on the garage door.

Over the next few days Judith Nathan drove to stores where she could buy the things she needed to furnish her apartment—unassembled furniture, a few lamps, and a television set. The apartment had a refrigerator and stove, so she bought groceries.

She was comfortable now, so she filled Tyler’s Mazda with gas, drove it to her rented garage, parked it inside, and locked the garage door. As she walked home, she began to make her next set of plans. It was time to find out what Catherine was doing.