he said, “I can leave everything behind.”
“The house, everything in it, my career, yours–”
“None of that’s what really matters.”
“A new life, new names . . . What future will the girls have?”
“The best we can give them. There were never any guarantees.
There never are in this life.”
She raised her head from his shoulder and looked into his eyes.
“Can I really handle it when he shows up here?”
“Of course you can.”
“I’m just a family counselor specializing in the behavioral problems of
children, parent-child relations. I’m not the heroine of an adventure
story.”
“And I’m just a mystery novelist. But we can do it.”
“I’m scared.”
“So am I.”
“But if I’m so scared now, where am I going to find the courage to pick
up a shotgun and defend my kids from something . . .
something like this?”
“Imagine you are the heroine of an adventure story.”
“If only it were that easy.”
“In some ways . . . maybe it is,” he said. “You know I’m not much for
Freudian explanations. More often than not, I think we decide to be
what we are. You’re a living example, after what you went through as a
kid.”
She closed her eyes. “Somehow, it’s easier to imagine myself as a
family counselor than as Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone.”
“When we first met,” he said, “you couldn’t imagine yourself as a wife
and mother, either. A family was nothing but a prison to you, prison
and torture chamber. You never wanted to be part of a family again.”
She opened her eyes. “You taught me how.”
“I didn’t teach you anything. I only showed you how to imagine a good
family, a healthy family. Once you were able to imagine it, you could
learn to believe in the possibility. From there on, you taught
yourself.”
She said, “So life’s a form of fiction, huh?”
“Every life’s a story. We make it up as we go along.”
“Okay. I’ll try to be Kathleen Turner.”
“Even better.”
“What?”
“Sigourney Weaver.”
She smiled. “Wish I had one of those big damned futuristic guns like
she got to use when she played Ripley.”
“Come on, we better go see if our sentries are still at their post.”
In the living room, he relieved the girls of their duty at the only
undraped window and suggested they heat some water to make mugs of hot
chocolate. The cabin was always stocked with basic canned goods,
including a tin of cocoa-flavored milk powder. The electric heaters
still hadn’t taken the chill off the air, so they could all use a little
internal warming. Besides, making hot chocolate was such a normal task
that it might defuse some of the tension and calm their nerves.
He looked through the window, across the screened porch, past the back
end of the BMW. So many trees stood between the cabin and the county
road that the hundred-yard-long driveway was pooled with deep shadows,
but he could still see that no one was approaching either in a vehicle
or on foot.
Marty was reasonably confident that The Other would come at them
directly rather than from behind the cabin. For one thing, their
property backed up to the hundred acres of church land downhill and to a
larger parcel uphill, which made an indirect approach relatively arduous
and time-consuming.
Judging by his past behavior, The Other always favored head long action
and blunt approaches. He seemed to lack the knack or patience for
strategy. He was a doer more than a thinker, which almost ensured a
furious–rather than sneak–attack.
That trait might be the enemy’s fatal weakness. It was a hope worth
nurturing, anyway.
Snow fell. The shadows deepened.
From the motel room, Spicer called the surveillance van for an update.
He let the phone ring a dozen times, hung up, and tried again, but still
the call went unanswered.
“Something’s happened,” he said. “They wouldn’t have left the van.”
“Maybe something’s wrong with their phone,” Oslett suggested.
“It’s ringing.”
“Maybe not on their end.”
Spicer tried again with no different result. “Come on,” he said,
grabbing his leather flight jacket and heading for the door.