Silence

17

IT WAS AFTER TEN in the morning. Ann Donnelly did not dare to dial the Henderson number again. Ann Delatorre had said that she would call again this morning, but she had not called. Ann Donnelly had suspected from the start that the man who had gone to the house in Henderson was not Jack Till. Six years ago, when Jack Till had taught her how to escape, he said that he did not want to know where she was going, or what name she was going to give herself.

He had said, “You know what a secret is?”

“Tell me.”

“It’s something that only one person knows. Giving it to someone else is like trying to pass a handful of water to a friend. The best part of it gets spilled.”

“That’s why you don’t want to know? You’re not going to spill it.”

“If the people who want you have found out about me, then they’ll be watching me. They’ll watch until one of us tries to communicate. It’s not you or I who will give up the secret. It’s the empty space between us.”

“You don’t sound like a cop anymore.”

“That’s how I learned it. I caught a few people by watching their friends and relatives. More than a few. It takes a very special kind of person to cut off all contact with everyone, because it goes against instinct. Most of the people who can do it easily aren’t people you’d like.”

She remembered saying, “There are certain people who will be hard for me. I’ll think about Eric every day. My friends from college in Wisconsin will be a loss, and the ones who built up the restaurant with us.”

“There’s still time to come back to L.A. and help the police find these guys. Even if you change your mind later, you can come home.”

“I don’t think I will.” How had she known that? Was it because she had decided nothing could depend on other people—their decisions, their assessments of what she was feeling and thinking and capable of doing? She had made a decision to act, to leave nothing up to anyone else.

After that conversation, she had looked up at Jack Till and experienced an odd temptation. She could remember the surprise of it even now, six years later. He was completely wrong for her, a mismatch. He was older, his eyes already acquiring that hooded look that at first glance seemed sleepy, but then was sad and very wise. He was tall and thin and hard, with narrow feet and hands. The hands were, oddly, part of the attraction, because they weren’t thick and clumsy like the hands of a cop. They were long and thin, and when they moved they seemed to have a grace and exactness, like the fingers of a pianist. Watching them when Jack Till did things—wrote or picked up a key or dialed a telephone—revealed the intelligence that animated them.

She had observed him on the beach with her, the two of them pretending to be a couple of tourists while they waited. Perhaps by pretending to be a couple they were asking for those feelings to develop. So much of what happened between people in ordinary life was induced by their roles, and roles were pretending. It was how doctors and ministers and bosses and—yes—policemen existed. It wasn’t a good idea to examine how much of love was induced by the two opposite roles that two human beings tried to play when they paired off. But she had already known by then that sometimes love was that way. People pretended until they believed.

She had stepped close to Jack, put her arms around his neck, and kissed his cheek. Then she had lingered with her arms around him and her face turned up in case he wanted to turn his face to her, put his arms around her and kiss her, too. That was all it would have taken to have her—either then or anytime afterward. But Jack Till had chosen to misconstrue the kiss to preserve his conscience or her pride. She had been the right kind of woman for Jack to dismiss that way. She was demonstrative, and kissed everybody on the cheek—male, female, old or young—when they showed up at a party, let alone saved her life. At the restaurant Eric had once said she was a health hazard, kissing fifty customers a night, transferring germs from one to the next.

Jack had pretended not to get what she meant, but later on he had said things that made her know that he had understood. “You’re in the scary part right now,” he said. “You’ve jumped off the side of the chasm you were on, and your feet haven’t touched the other side yet. It can make you feel alone and desperate. Pretty soon you’ll be in a new place with new people, and you’ll begin to feel better.”

What he had not known—had not seen because she had not let him—was that she had already taken that into account. She had wanted to get involved with Jack to make the break with the old life final. It was something Wendy Harper would never have done, and Jack Till would have helped her stop being Wendy Harper.

She supposed he had learned his resistance by being a cop. Cops were used to seeing women at moments of their lives when they were most vulnerable and frightened. At those times, a big strong male who was sworn to protect them was what some primitive lobe of their brains craved. It was a bit too easy for someone like Jack.

She remembered the moment hours later when he stopped the car just outside the Santa Barbara airport and sat with her for a moment. She kissed him a second time, but his posture remained stiff and unyielding. She said, “Thanks for saving my life, Jack.” Did she actually add, “If you need a friend, or there’s anything I can ever do for you…” or was she imagining it? Yes, she said that. There could be no reality unless she told herself the truth. She threw herself at him.

In response, he said, “Just take care of yourself. If you need me, you know where I am. Later, if somebody calls or comes looking for you, remember that I don’t know where you are. It isn’t going to be me.”

She’d had no choice. “I’ll never forget you.” She got out of the car, took the small suitcase that contained her few carefully selected belongings and the shoulder bag that contained seventy thousand dollars in cash, and waved to him one last time. Then she walked into the terminal and caught her plane.

Now, as Ann Donnelly was packing to leave again, she was just as frightened as she had been then. Her movements felt unreal. She watched her hands doing things automatically. She reached up to the pole in her closet and selected outfits that she knew would be useful and passed over the rest. It occurred to her that what she was doing now was exactly what Jack Till taught her.

Ann Delatorre should have called her by now. She was afraid. The man Ann described sounded a bit like Jack Till, but Jack Till would never have come after her. Ann should have called. That was the arrangement. The only conclusion she could draw was that Ann Delatorre was dead. Not Ann Delatorre. That was a made-up name. She deserved to be thought of under her real name: She was Louanda Rowan.

Ann Donnelly found herself crying again as she finished packing. She had been crying about Louanda on and off for hours, but now she had to control herself. She closed her suitcase and latched it, then looked around. The bedroom seemed comfortable and reassuring. The big king bed with its high walnut headboard and antique quilt looked so safe and secure. It was terribly hard to leave this room.

When she had run away from Los Angeles, she had looked for a chance to invent a new and better self. She worked on being Ann Delatorre for a time, and then realized that she needed another layer of distance from the past. She conceived the idea of giving Louanda Rowan the identity she had invented, and the business she had built and the house she had bought. It was a chance to repay Louanda for her friendship and help. It was also a way of keeping tough, fearless little Louanda between her and her troubles. She had to acknowledge that now and accept it. She had befriended a woman who was poor and desperate, used her as a surrogate—a double—and put her in terrible danger. She had never intended the danger to be real, but that was how it had worked out. Now, as the minutes went by, it was becoming surer and surer that Louanda was dead, and that she had died trying to protect Ann Donnelly.

Trying. That was a word that raised other problems. If Louanda had been hurt or running, she could have called this house and told Ann Donnelly what to do to help her. But if she had been caught in Henderson and had not been able to keep Ann Donnelly’s name and address from her captors, then waiting for her call was wasting the only time left to escape.

Ann walked slowly through the house again. As she walked, she absentmindedly corrected things that had been left out of place. She straightened the oriental rug in the living room, then used her foot to push the strands of fringe at the ends into place. She gathered a pile of magazines into a stack on the coffee table, picked up a plastic dump truck with a Barbie doll in it, carried it into the playroom, and set it on a shelf. She looked at her watch. It was after eleven. She had given Louanda all the time she could spare. She went back into the hallway, picked up her suitcase, and walked toward the back door.

It was as though she had awakened suddenly. Once she had begun to move, the insanity of waiting here for her executioner to arrive began to seem obvious. She stepped outside, looked up and down the street for signs of unusual activity, then locked the door behind her, went into the garage by the side door, and put the small suitcase into the trunk of her beige Nissan Maxima. She started the car, backed out of the driveway, and noticed again the flat of strawberries that she had bought three days ago, before the call from Louanda, but never planted. She pressed the remote control to close the garage door.

She drove up the street, made a few turns randomly in case somebody had arrived in time to follow her, and then turned onto a pretty street with big trees shading her car. She parked, then dialed her cell telephone and waited.

Dennis’s voice came on, but she recognized the recording instantly. “This is Dennis Donnelly. I’m not available at the moment, but please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“Den, this is Ann. I’m sorry, but the thing I told you might happen someday has happened. I left the kids—you know where I left them, so I won’t say it on the phone. I told them I had to go away for a long time on business, so that’s our story. Don’t try to add details. We’ll just contradict each other. Don’t even think about bringing them back to the house. That goes for you, too. Tell your partners as soon as you get this message that something has come up and you’ve got to take a trip. Pick the kids up and go from there. I’m sure you remember that the kit I put together for this is in the trunk of your car. I love you.” She turned off the telephone and put it back into her purse. She was crying so hard that it took her a minute before she could wipe away enough tears to look behind her and be sure she hadn’t been followed.