Lightning

In the meantime, of course, they had seen her son, Chris, as the weak link. They had not pounded at him as they had at her, choosing instead to use false affection, guile, trickery, and deceit to lure the boy into making the revelations that his mother refused to make. But when they questioned him about the missing, wounded man, he told them all about Indiana Jones and Luke Sky walker and Han Solo instead. When they tried to pry from him a few details about the events in the arroyos, he told them all about Sir Tommy Toad, servant of the queen, who rented quarters in his house. When they sought to elicit at least a hint of where his mother and he had hidden out—and what they had done—in the sixteen days between January 10 and 25, the boy said, “I slept through it all, I was in a coma, I think I had malaria or maybe even Mars fever, see, and now I got amnesia like Wile E. Coyote got that one time when the Road Runner tricked him into dropping a boulder on his own head.” Eventually, frustrated with their inability to get the point, he said, “This is family stuff, see. Don’t you know about family stuff? I can only talk with my mom about this stuff, and it’s nobody else’s business. If you start talking family stuff with strangers, pretty soon where do you go when you want to go home?”

To complicate matters for the authorities, Laura Shane publicly apologized to everyone whose property she had appropriated or damaged during the course of her attempts to escape from the hired killers who had been sent after her. To the family whose Buick she had stolen, she gave a new Cadillac. To the man whose Nissan plates she had taken, she gave a new Nissan. In every case she made restitution to excess and won friends at every hand.

Her old books went back to press repeatedly, and some of them reappeared on paperback bestseller lists now, years after their original successes. Major film studios bid competitively for the few movie rights to her books that had remained unsold. Rumors, perhaps encouraged by her own agent but very likely true, circulated to the effect that publishers were standing six deep for a chance to pay her a record advance for her next novel.

During that year Stefan Krieger missed Laura and Chris terribly, but life at the Gaines’s mansion in Beverly Hills was not a hardship. The accommodations were superb; the food was delicious: Jason enjoyed teaching him how film could be manipulated in his home editing studio; and Thelma was unfailingly amusing.

“Listen, Krieger,” she said one summer day by the pool. “Maybe you would rather be with them, maybe you’re getting tired of hiding here, but consider the alternative. You could be stuck back there in your own age, when there weren’t plastic garbage bags, Pop Tarts, Day-Glo underwear, Thelma Ackerson movies, or reruns of Gilligan’s Island. Count your blessings, that you should find yourself in this enlightened era.”

“It’s just that . . .” He stared for a while at the spangles of sunlight on the chlorine-scented water. “Well, I’m afraid that during this year of separation, I’m losing any slim chance I might have had to win her.”

“You can’t win her, anyway, Herr Krieger. She’s not a set of cereal containers raffled off at a Tupperware party. A woman like Laura can’t be won. She decides when she wants to give herself, and that’s that.”

“You’re not very encouraging.”

“Being encouraging is not my job—”

“I know—”

“—my job—”

“—yes, yes—”

“—is comedy. Although with my devastating looks, I’d proba­bly be just as successful as a traveling slut—-at least in really remote logging camps.”

At Christmas Laura and Chris came to stay at the Gaines’s house, and her gift to Stefan was a new identity. Although rather closely monitored by various authorities for the better part of the year, she had managed through surrogates to obtain a driver’s license, social security card, credit cards, and a passport in the name of Steven Krieger.

She presented them to him on Christmas morning, wrapped in a box from Neiman-Marcus. “All the documents are valid. In Endless River, two of my characters are on the run, in need of new identities—”

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