implication was made to the effect that he might even be dangerous,
although it was so smooth and so subtly inserted that it was more a
matter of the reporter’s tone of voice and expressions than any words in
the script.
Rattled, he switched off the television.
For a while he stared at the blank screen. The gray of the dead monitor
matched his mood.
After everyone was showered and dressed, the girls got in the back seat
of the BMW and dutifully put on their seatbelts while their parents
stowed the luggage in the trunk.
When Marty slammed the trunk lid and locked it, Paige spoke to him
quietly, so Charlotte and Emily couldn’t hear. “You really think we
have to go this far, do these things, it’s really that bad?”
“I don’t know. Like I told you, I’ve been brooding about this ever
since I woke up, since three o’clock this morning, and I still don’t
know if I’m over-reacting.”
“These are serious steps to take, even risky.”
“It’s just that . . . as strange as this already is, with The Other and
everything he said to me, whatever underlies it all is stranger still.
More dangerous than one lunatic with a gun. Deadlier and a lot bigger
than that. Something so big it’ll crush us if we try to stand up to it.
That’s how I felt in the middle of the night, afraid, more scared even
than when he had the kids in his car. And after what I saw on TV this
morning, I’m more–not less–inclined to go with my gut feelings He
realized that his expression of dread was extreme, with an unmistakable
flavor of paranoia. But he was no alarmist, and he was confident that
his instincts could be trusted. Events had dissolved all of his doubts
about his mental well-being.
He wished he could identify an enemy other than the improbable
dead-ringer, for he knew intuitively that there was another enemy, and
it would be comforting to have it defined. The Mafia, Ku Klux Klan,
neo-Nazis, consortiums of evil bankers, the board of directors of some
ferociously greedy international conglomerate, right-wing generals
intent on establishing a military dictatorship, a cabal of in sane
Mideastern zealots, mad scientists intent on blowing the world to
smithereens for the sheer hell of it, or Satan himself in all his horned
splendor–any of the standard villains of television dramas and
countless novels, regardless of how unlikely and cliched, would be
preferable to an adversary without face or form or name.
Chewing her lower lip, lost in thought, Paige let her gaze travel across
the breeze-ruffled trees, other parked cars, and the front of the motel,
before tilting her head back and looking up at three shrieking sea gulls
that wheeled across the mostly blue and uncaring azure sky.
“You sense it too,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Oppressive. We’re not being watched, but the feeling is almost the
same.”
‘ More than that,” she said. “Different. The world has changed or the
way I look at it.”
“Me too.”
“Something’s been . . . lost.”
And we’ll never find it again, he thought.
The Ritz-Carlton was a remarkable hotel, exquisitely tasteful, with
generous applications of marble, limestone, granite, quality art, and
antiques throughout its public areas. The enormous flower arrangements,
on display wherever one turned, were the most artfully fashioned that
Oslett had ever seen. Attired in subdued uniforms, courteous,
omnipresent, the staff seemed to outnumber the guests.
All in all, it reminded Oslett of home, the Connecticut estate on which
he had been raised, although the family mansion was larger than the
Ritz-Carlton, was furnished with antiques only of museum quality, had a
staff-to-family ratio of six to one, and featured a landing pad large
enough to accommodate the military helicopters in which the President of
the United States and his retinue sometimes traveled.
The two-bedroom suite with spacious living room, in which Drew Oslett
and Clocker were quartered, offered every amenity from a fully stocked
bar to marble shower stalls so spacious that it would have been possible
for a visiting ballet dancer to practice entrechats during his morning
ablutions. The towels were not by Pratesi, as were those he had used