Shadow Woman

22

Earl sat up and looked out his hotel window at Pete Hatcher’s car. He was through staring at its dusty finish, each day picking out new spots of birdshit on the windshield with his binoculars, never seeing a human being go near it. Now he needed to think ahead. He unfolded his road map and studied it, then picked up the telephone again and dialed.

He heard the sleep in Lenny’s voice. “Yeah?”

“It’s me,” said Earl. “Listen. I want you to close the place up and get on a plane right away. Get a suite at the Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, Montana. Stay there until I call. It could be two weeks, or the phone could be ringing when you walk in the door.”

Earl could hear rustling noises and groaning. Lenny must be sitting up in bed. Lenny coughed to clear his throat. “The place already is closed up. I went to bed an hour ago. What’s up?”

“Did you understand what I said? This isn’t a dream.”

“Rocky Mountain Lodge in Kalispell, Montana. Wait there for you. Right.” Earl could almost hear him thinking. “Hey—Rusty and T-Bone. What do I do with the dogs?”

“Bring them.”

Earl hung up before Lenny could start protesting about the difficulty of flying dogs around. If people did it with fancy show dogs, then it certainly wouldn’t harm two big, muscular beasts like the Rottweilers, and he didn’t care what it did to Lenny.

He walked into the bathroom and turned the water on cold, then stepped under the icy stream. He gasped, then slowly let the water warm up. He was fully awake now, confident that he was thinking clearly. It would take ten minutes to dress, pack, and clean his prints off everything he had touched. It might take another ten minutes to check out and get on the road.

It had not escaped Earl that Linda had been talking in a whispery voice over the telephone at one in the morning. That was three A.M. in Buffalo. Linda would have called with Hatcher’s location as soon as she could—the first minute when she could reach a telephone. If she was with this Carey McKinnon at three o’clock in the morning, worried that he would overhear her, then there wasn’t much question what they were doing. She had been doing it with him for hours, letting him put it to her until he had used himself up and fallen asleep. This was not a simple flirtation where she got a fact out of him that he wouldn’t remember saying and probably didn’t even know was a secret. This was a full night of it, her hair probably wet with sweat and his sperm still dripping out of her, sticky and warm when she called to tell Earl.

He was enraged. He hated this man, and he felt a mixture of awe and disgust at Linda. She had said she would do anything to find Pete Hatcher. But what she had done was not brave or cunning. It was pathetic, requiring only a fawning sort of guile and a strong stomach. It was like biting the head off a chicken. She was soiled. Unclean. The only way he was ever going to feel right about this was to make it even. He was going to do the same to Jane Whitefield before he killed her. Then he was going to make Linda go back and watch him drop the hammer on Carey McKinnon. Maybe he would make her go back and do it herself.

He stepped out of the shower, quickly dried himself, and dressed, tossing pieces of clothing into his suitcase as he saw them. Then he remembered the way she had cut him off at the end of the call—quickly, abruptly. It was probably because McKinnon was awake again. He nearly reeled with the sudden realization that it was worse, more humiliating than he had thought. McKinnon was awake. She would have put down the telephone and needed to distract him. She was doing him again right now, this second, while Earl was two thousand miles away in a hotel room. He didn’t dare close his eyes, because he knew that the sight of it was forming behind his eyelids.

He slammed his suitcase shut, stepped to the door, and hurried out of the room. He took long, purposeful steps down the hallway toward the check-out counter. He was in a perfect mood to kill somebody.

As Jane walked back to the hotel room along the road through Salmon Prairie, she considered whether she had succeeded in leaving the right kind of trail in the wrong direction. She had charged some plane tickets for flights out of Missoula and Helena to credit cards. The accounts were held by male identities that were unripe enough to attract the attention of a hunter who was using a computer network to search. She had made guaranteed reservations for hotels and rental cars in the destination cities so the charges would be recorded and would appear on credit reports.

Her temptation was to use ten identities to build twenty trails in twenty directions. There was no reason to save false faces for fugitives anymore. This was her last trip. But two identities were the right number. If the chasers picked out both of them, they would think that one was an innocent who was not running from anything but didn’t have much of a history. But they couldn’t pick out one and ignore the other, so they would split up. If she left twenty trails, they would sense that she had made them all and wait.

Everything about the way they had tracked and cornered Pete Hatcher looked like at least two people. A lone woman might play the broken-car game, pop him on the spot, and walk away, but she wouldn’t put him in the trunk and expect to drive him away. There must have been at least one man waiting unseen to do the heavy lifting and solve problems. It wasn’t easy to kill an armed cop when he was looking at you.

Jane was almost certain that she had made no mistakes since she had found Hatcher in Montana. They had been on the move for a month, traveling as husband and wife. They had spent a lot of time in the car each day, then used different names in each town where they stopped to check into a motel late in the afternoon. Pete was always visible to motel clerks and guests, but always imperfectly and from a distance. Jane would stand at the counter and sign a name, and Pete would be busy with his head under the lid of the trunk pulling out the suitcases, or under the hood checking the oil. Even if the searchers stopped at the same motels later and asked the right questions, the clerks would not have been able to give them a direction. Jane and Pete had gone slowly, taking detours like tourists who had all summer.

She knew that she was just thinking of reasons to turn Pete loose and go home. Carey had sounded as though her call had depressed him, and the knowledge stung her. When she tried to repeat the conversation now, everything that she had said sounded empty and foolish, and she could do nothing to change it.

Jane stared up the road at the hotel and gave herself a reprimand. The quickest way home was to concentrate on preparing Pete Hatcher for his new life. He had already gotten accustomed to using false names, and he had begun to develop a good sense of how to make himself invisible in public places. He had listened carefully while she had explained how the tricks were done and what to do when they didn’t work.

Now she had to teach him something more subtle and difficult. The way he would defeat his enemies was to outlast them. While they were staring at computer screens or loitering late at night in airport baggage areas or sitting in cars outside hotels at check-out time studying each male who came out the door, he had to be somewhere living a normal, reasonably contented life. If he could do that for long enough, they would give up. Even the owners of a casino couldn’t keep a team of assassins on the payroll forever to search for one man. And the longer he went without showing any intention of doing them harm, the more pointless the search would seem.

Jane had watched the changes in Pete for several days, and she was satisfied with his progress. When she had picked him up in Billings, his personality had already retreated into him like a turtle’s head. Now he was slowly emerging, getting his sense of humor back, looking less like a person recovering from some illness. If she could get him to rebuild himself—not to return to the same old Pete Hatcher, but to see the man he now was as normal—then he had a chance. With a few cosmetic changes and a surrounding establishment—a job, a place to live, a car, a couple of promising friendships—he would be better off than the people who were hunting him.

The last danger that she would have to save him from was the biggest. She had to teach him not to throw away the advantages she had built for him, sink into a depression, and stop trying, or grow so paranoid that he jumped at every shadow and attracted attention. That had been her mistake in Denver. She had sent him off to isolation in a small, dark apartment and effectively severed all of his ties to other human beings. To a man like Pete, who seemed able to maintain a sense of himself only by watching the reflections in other people’s eyes, the days of solitude had been like continuous, small doses of poison. She was going to have to keep being his buddy, build up his confidence, and make him strong again.

She reached the gift shop of the hotel and found it had closed hours ago. She continued to the room, gave her familiar knock, and used her eyes, her ears, and the soles of her feet to try to sense where he was at each moment. Finally he opened the door. “Very good,” she said as she entered and locked the door. “I couldn’t have done anything but fire blind through the door, and I would have missed.”

Pete walked back to his chair and sat down. She could see he was watching something on the television that featured a lot of men flying upside down in fighter planes and shouting into radios. “Good,” he said. “That’s one for me.”

“I just walked by the pool,” said Jane. “There’s nobody in it, and the lights are off.”

“Then it’s probably a septic tank.”

“Nope. There’s a diving board. I’m going for a swim. Want to come?” She found the bathing suit she had worn in Missoula at the bottom of her suitcase. “We’ll have to be quiet.”

He glanced up from the television screen for a second, then shrugged. “Can’t. No suit.”

She reached into his suitcase, held up pairs of pants until she found a pair of jeans with a worn knee. “Are you saving these for the Levi Strauss museum?”

He seemed to consider. “I’ve heard I could get a good price for those in Tokyo. I don’t know how to get there, though, so I guess that’s out.”

“Good thinking,” she said. She put her foot on the bed and pulled her boot knife from her ankle, sliced the legs off the jeans, and tossed what was left in Pete’s lap. “I’ll change in the bathroom. Knock when you’ve got those on.”

He knocked on the door sooner than she had expected. When she came out, she carried the two big towels from the rack by the tub, holding them in front of her casually to disguise the way the suit rode up at the hip. The suit seemed to her to be less modest than she had remembered it, but maybe it was just the unfamiliar feeling of wearing one at night; there was no sun to warm the places that weren’t usually uncovered. She plucked the room key off the table. “Here. You have pockets.”

He took the key and she approached him in a way that forced him to go out the door first and start across the lawn to the pool. She dropped the towels, then walked down the steps into the warm water at the shallow end of the pool. She ducked down and swam the length of the pool under water. The pool was so dark that when she reached the end, she nearly crashed into him. Her fingertips brushed flesh, and she came up to find his face a few inches from hers. “Sorry,” she whispered, then sank, pushed off the wall and glided away again in the silent darkness of the water.

While her momentum was slowing, she felt a shiver of embarrassment. There was no reason for being so squeamish about touching his belly. She was the best friend he had right now, and she had not done it on purpose. She gave a kick and rose to the surface, looking around for him. He was invisible, under the glassy surface somewhere.

With a sudden start she felt his big arm hook around her waist and lift her in the water. She was held against his big body in a feeling that was at once smothering and too pleasantly familiar. She gave a little cry, and he spun her around to face him.

She could see the white teeth in his smile, and the whites of his eyes, much too close. She leaned away, but that brought her pelvis into contact with his, so she jerked back. The white teeth disappeared and she felt the brush of his shaven upper lip and the touch of the soft lips. “Time out,” she said, too loudly. She put her hands on his chest, and she was aware of the hard, hairy torso as she pushed him away.

She could see the silhouette of his head and shoulders, but his face was in shadow. “I made a mistake,” she said quietly. “I never told you I was married.”

She could see him tilt to sink backward into the water like a man blown over by a sudden wind. He rose to the surface floating on his back, took a couple of shallow breaths, and bobbed to his feet again. “I’m the one who made a mistake,” he said. “I apologize. Please, forget it ever happened. I didn’t know, and … I guess that’s just me. I meant no harm.”

Jane found herself in a depth where her toes brushed the bottom, so she stood on them. “Look, don’t overdo it,” she said. “It’s reassuring to an old bat like me. It’s just that—well, you know—I’m taken.”

She swam the rest of the way to the shallow end and sat on the bottom step with the water up to her neck. From here the light of a fixture on the wall of the hotel reflected on the surface and she could see him swimming. He was not very graceful, but he was strong, each armstroke pulling him a few feet. She knew he was trying to work out a way to face her after making a pass and being turned down flat. It occurred to her that it was probably a new experience for him.

Jane wished she had never thought of swimming at this hour. The night was unseasonably warm, and she had wanted to get him involved in something that was careless and fun. Now she was afraid he was going to withdraw again. But there was something worse going on, and it was something that she had not prepared herself to defeat. She had almost let it slip out while she was saying no, detected it crowding up behind the other words and put her face into the water to keep it from coming out. It was, “I’m not offended. I don’t have anything against sex.”

If she weren’t married, if this had all happened years ago, she might very well have let Pete Hatcher’s hand stay around her waist, might have stayed in the water and waited with great interest for it to move where it pleased. And even worse, if she had not considered the marriage vow unconditional and permanent, Pete was exactly the sort of man she might have chosen to disregard it with, and this was exactly the sort of time and place when it could have happened. The incredibly clear, warm night air with the strange brightness of the stars, the feeling of floating weightless in the dark water might have made it seem to be an exception.

Pete disappeared again and surfaced at her feet. He was smiling tentatively, the water gleaming on his smooth, hard shoulders. “I think we’d better clear the air,” he said.

She nodded. “Good idea.”

“I’ll never put you in a position where you have to feel uncomfortable again.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I won’t do that either. What you did wasn’t exactly assault, you know. It was a question. The answer is no, that’s all.”

“You don’t wear a ring, you never mentioned a husband. Maybe because we spent so much time alone, I’ve been holding you under a magnifying glass. I interpreted a lot of things wrong—movements, words, everything. I like you. You’re not like anybody I’ve ever met, and—”

“Relax,” said Jane. “I like you too. I’ve said that before, and maybe I shouldn’t have, or I said it wrong. We’ll still be just as close. Maybe closer, because of this. But I’m your sister, not … not anybody else. Have we said enough?”

“Hi.” The quiet female voice came from the shadow beside the hotel doorway. Jane spun her head and saw the shape of a woman. Jane’s muscles tensed, and she let herself slip lower into the water, but the balls of her feet found traction on the rough surface of the pool steps.

“Hi,” said Pete. Jane’s jaw tightened. If this was the woman who had tried to kill him in Denver, he had just helped her locate him in the dark water.

“Hello,” said Jane. Maybe two voices would complicate her directional fix on Pete. She studied the silhouette as it took its first step toward her. The towel was wrapped around the waist like a skirt, but there could easily be a gun tucked in back. Then she saw a second silhouette step from the entrance, and for a half second she was sure. She took in a breath to prepare to move, but the two shapes stepped into the dim swatch of light from the lamp at the same time.

She could tell from their bodies that neither was a young girl—not seventeen or eighteen. The curve of hip and thigh and breast were too pronounced. She could see their faces now, and they were both mildly attractive, but to determine age she needed to see them in bright light, where the texture of the skin would show mileage. The thinner one with red hair stuck her toe in the water near Jane’s face. “Oh, good. It’s really warm,” she said. She whisked the towel off and tossed it on the deck. Jane was satisfied that this one was not armed. The green two-piece bathing suit would not have hidden a razor blade.

The second one took off her towel and knelt to touch the water with her fingers. “You’re right. It’s perfect. Just like a bath.” She was wearing a suit that Jane guessed had probably come from the same store, but on this one it looked even more obvious, almost indecent. She was shorter and blond, with big white breasts that seemed painfully confined by the top, and when she stood to dive in, Jane saw the lower part of the suit as a blue line bisecting a heart-shaped flash of white buttocks.

The blond one surfaced near Pete. “I hope you don’t mind our coming in with you. We saw you from our room, and it just looked so good …”

“Not at all,” said Pete. “We’re glad to have you. This way we don’t have to wonder if we’re crazy, because you are too.”

“I’m Pam,” she said. Jane could hear something in the woman’s voice. Then she decided it just sounded tense because she was treading water and in the effort her throat muscles had tightened. “And this is Carol.”

Jane tried to analyze her unpleasant feeling. It was the way bodyguards must feel when their charges decided to go into a crowd. The bodyguard’s adrenaline flowed, her muscles contracted for action, and then the threat turned into a mere distraction.

Pete said, “I’m Jim Holstra. This is … Mary. She’s my sister.” Jane’s distracted thoughts suddenly crystalized. He was using her own words.

“Oh, really?” said Carol. She half-turned toward Jane and smiled faintly. “You two must get along pretty well, to travel together.”

Jane had no direction of escape from this conversation. Was he doing what she thought he was doing? The distraction had blossomed into an annoyance. “Yes,” she said.

Her mind was prickling with irritation. They were gently closing doors on her. She reminded herself that whoever they were, they weren’t killers. They were making it obvious that they were intrigued by Pete. If anyone asked later if they’d seen him, they could hardly forget, but what could they say? She couldn’t take them seriously as a threat to Pete’s safety. She could not think of a reason why they seemed so threatening to her.

The one with the red hair glided out into the deep water and bent at the hips. Her bottom broke the surface and then her feet, and she disappeared in the direction of Pete and the blonde. Jane had to fight some inner resistance to bring the names back. The blonde was Pam; the redhead Carol. In a few seconds Carol emerged again, beside Pete. For a minute the three held on to the tile in the deep, shadowy end of the pool. She couldn’t hear what they said. Then Pete floated out into the center.

Jane saw the copper head slip very close to the yellow head, cup a hand, and whisper something. The blonde gave a little squeal, and they started whispering again, then giggled like two unappealing children in a conspiracy. Then they began to swim slowly on either side of Pete. She stared at the two of them, and found herself thinking, Wait until he gets them under the light.

She was horrified at her thought. She was acting as though she were jealous. For the first time she was glad he had offered himself so she had gotten the opportunity to turn him down and acquit herself of that charge. Why was she suddenly feeling angry? The anger didn’t seem entirely real. It occurred to her that it might be her mind’s way of protecting her from something else, and she could even identify what that something was. It was regret at the loss of something that never could have been, something that would have been beautiful, but was now being transformed into something tawdry. Why did she call it tawdry?

She moved to the top of the steps and she realized that she had been unconsciously moving away, to escape the place where this was happening. She shivered when the air touched her skin. She stopped. If she left, went back to the room, these two almost certainly weren’t going to try to kill Pete Hatcher. But if she weren’t present to control the situation, they might ask him questions he was not prepared to answer, or even attract attention that would get him killed.

She felt the urge to hear what they were saying. She slipped back into the water and drifted toward them. Suddenly there was splashing. Pete was out of the pool walking toward the hotel room. He opened the door and disappeared. Jane looked after him in confusion.

The two women suddenly appeared on both sides of her, heading for the steps. “Your brother is really something.” Pam laughed. Jane altered it: little turned-up nose, pink all over—Spam.

“Yes,” said Jane. “He’s a lot of fun.” She loathed them.

“Aren’t you coming?” asked the other one, turning to the side to wring out the long copper hair. She seemed hopeful.

“Coming where?”

“To our place, for a drink.”

“Your place?” asked Jane. She let her feet touch and began to walk along between them.

“Yeah,” said Spam. “We’ve got a little suite, and we’ve got supplies.”

Jane’s head began to ache, but she hid her distaste at the idea. It was after one in the morning. If these two got tipsy and festive, they could be loud enough to get Pete arrested. Then there would be fingerprints, public records for the killers to find. “Sure,” said Jane. “We’ll stop by for one drink.”

She saw the look that passed between Carol and Pam. They were not pleased.

Jane was still twenty feet from the door of the hotel room when it opened and Pete stepped out wearing a dry pair of jeans and a T-shirt, carrying some glasses. He walked to a room two doors from theirs and waited while Carol unlocked it. She considered calling to him, but it would have to be loud if she wanted him to hear it. She tried to catch his eye, but he was looking down, as though he were staring at the lock.

The two women were busy pretending they didn’t know he was looking at them, and they seemed to enjoy the task, giving little shimmy-shivers they could blame on the cold, then tiptoeing into the room ahead of him.

Jane stepped into her room. She stripped off the wet suit quickly in the bathroom and hung it in the shower. She glanced at her own naked body in the mirror and caught herself making the comparison that seemed inevitable at this strange instant in her life. It made her feel a little better: she was not the hag she was feeling like. She was pretty.

She stepped into a pair of jeans and pulled a sweatshirt over her head. At the door she stopped, stood absolutely still, and took a breath. Why am I doing this? Because if I sit in this room alone, I could wake up alone and wish I had kept him from getting himself killed.

She blew out the breath, closed the door behind her, and walked to the women’s room. The light was on, so she was sure it was the right one. She knocked. The door opened a crack, and she pushed it cautiously to come inside. The connecting door to the next room was open, and a dim light was on in there too. Carol, the copper-haired one, emerged from the next room still in her bathing suit, set two glasses of brown liquor and bubbles on the table, and headed into the bathroom. She stopped in front of the mirror and began to blow-dry her hair with a loud dryer. She yelled over it, “Where are you two from?”

Jane picked up the drink that was closest to her and walked to the doorway of the bathroom. “More important, where are Jim and Pam now?”

Carol clicked off the dryer and began brushing her hair, an amused little smile on her face. “Didn’t they come in there?” Then she stopped brushing. “Why, that little …”

Jane turned toward the open connecting door and Carol stepped to her side. “If you can’t see them, do you really want to go next door looking for them?”

“Probably not.” She took an experimental sip of her drink. It was warm and sweet, like bug repellent.

“Are you really his sister?”

“Sure.”

“You don’t look like him.”

“Different fathers. Our mother was a magnet for bums.” Jane wasn’t sure why she had chosen to make up this kind of story, but it fit her mood. It occurred to her that Pete could easily be telling a different story. “Jimmy might not tell you that, because it’s not nice. And I think men make up nice stories because they need a father they can admire. But we’re all grown-up women here. Are you and Pam related?”

“Just friends,” said Carol. She pulled down the top of her bathing suit and Jane looked away involuntarily to see if Pete was behind her seeing this. But the door to the next room was now closed. Carol slipped the tight suit down from her hips, and Jane looked at her objectively. She had been given to understand that men liked red hair, and hers was at least real.

Carol caught her eye and smiled. “We’re on vacation together from the car agency.” She cocked her head. “You wish we’d drop dead, don’t you?”

“No,” Jane lied. “Why would you think that?”

Carol found a small perfume bottle in the shoulder bag on the counter and dabbed a bit on her neck, then another on her belly, close to the patch of red hair. The little smile was conspiratorial. Jane’s stomach felt hollow. Carol leaned close to the mirror and began to make up her eyes. “I don’t know. That’s what I was wondering.”

“That’s not the way I feel,” said Jane. “But he’s my little brother, and maybe I’m protective.” She walked into the outer room and sat at the table.

In a few seconds Carol walked out to join her. Only then did she carelessly slip on a terrycloth robe and tie it. She sat on the bed and switched on the television with no sound. “I guess you should be protective,” she said. “He’s such a hunk. Of course, if you’re his sister, he probably doesn’t strike you that way.”

“I can see,” said Jane. She needed to add something malicious. “He seems to attract one after another.”

It didn’t seem to touch Carol. She shrugged. “Life is short. He might as well have some fun.”

Slowly, against all of Jane’s hopes, she began to hear faint noises coming from the next room. The walls were so thin that they muffled none of the sounds. There was a soft, female moan, and then the springs of the bed. She needed to talk. “You said you and Pam work together?”

Carol stared at the silent screen of the television set, but Jane could see she was listening to the sounds behind the door. “Uh-huh.”

“And this is your vacation. Have you been up in the mountains?”

Carol looked at her, the blue eyes focused on something behind Jane’s head. “A couple of hikes.” The voice in the next room was up an octave now, and louder, sounding almost distressed. “Oh,” it said. “Oh, oooh, yes. Please.”

Jane considered that this was one possible way that hell could be. It was torment, and it was designed to make her know, and to feel, that she was bad and weak. She could do nothing but talk to this idiot on the bed, and talking to her was like looking in a mirror and seeing a grotesque parody of herself. Carol was lying there and the robe barely covered her anymore, but she didn’t think to close it, and her face showed that she wasn’t just hearing, she was listening, and wishing more fervently each second that it were she instead of her friend. “Are there any good hikes that we shouldn’t miss?” asked Jane. “We’ve been sticking to the road a lot.”

“No,” said Carol absently. “I don’t really think it’s much fun.” She turned to glance at Jane, then said to the television set, “You get hot, and sweaty, and out of breath.” She lifted her glass to her lips, tasted it, and made a face.

“What’s wrong?” asked Jane. Talk, damn you.

“These taste awful without ice. We need ice.”

Jane almost sprang to her feet. “I’ll get some,” she said. “Do you know where the ice machine is?”

Carol shook her head. “I’ll get it. It’s around a couple of corners.” She stood and walked to the door. Jane noticed that she put no shoes on her feet. She paused and studied the two room keys on the table, then seemed unable to remember which one fit this room and slipped both into the pocket of her robe.

For the first few seconds, Jane was relieved to be out of Carol’s company. But as minutes passed, the sounds from the next room seemed to grow louder and more frequent. Jane tried not to hear them, then knew that there was no way not to hear them and let them induce clear, detailed visual images in the mind. She was ashamed, and she resented having to feel that way. Her mouth was dry and she detested the drink in her hand, and she needed to clear her throat, but if she did, then Pete and the blonde would hear her, and it would show them that it was impossible for her to be in this room without eavesdropping. She could not even deny to herself that she was listening now, feeling each minute that this was some low ebb in her life and that it was sinking lower, and she with it.

Then Jane heard a new sound. For a few seconds, she wondered why it had surprised her. It was the voice of Carol, coming to her through the connecting door like the other one. “Oh, Jim,” it said. “Oh, Jim.” Jane carried her drink to the bathroom sink and poured it out. Then she walked out of the room. When she reached her own room, she remembered that Pete still had the key in his pocket.

She was not going back. She picked a credit card out of her wallet without looking at it, curved it a little so it would fit between the door and the jamb to depress the plunger, then slipped inside and stood alone in the darkness.

She was amazed. She had left her husband and rushed all the way out here, maybe to walk in front of a gun muzzle, because that man had called for help. Then she had carefully piled up day after day of invisible, anonymous travel to let his trail get cold. Now he was busy burning up all of her efforts, making himself as memorable as any human being could be to two women who probably couldn’t wait to meet the next strange man in the next hotel. She hated Pete Hatcher. He had done this to punish her for rejecting him—wanted to make her imagine, know what she had thrown away, and learn to want it. No, that was too simpleminded. It had been for both of them, to prove that he was still attractive, still manly, still Pete. He had done that better than she would ever let him know. The word ever struck her ear as accurate, so she said it aloud: “Ever.”