possible, although some noise was unavoidable, a few creaks, a couple of
scraping noises. At the bottom, he hesitated, then turned left, out of
sight.
For a moment Rachael saw his shadow on the wall down there, made large
and twisted into an odd shape by the angle of the light, but as he moved
farther into the cellar, the shadow dwindled and finally went with him.
She glanced at the archway. She could see a portion of the living room,
which remained deserted and still.
In the opposite direction, at the porch door, a huge yellow butterfly
clung to the screen, slowly working its wings.
A clatter sounded from below, nothing dramatic, as if Benny had bumped
against something.
She looked down the steps. No Benny, no shadow.
The archway. Nothing.
The back door. Just the butterfly.
More noise below, quieter this time.
“Benny?” she said softly.
He did not answer her. Probably didn’t hear her. She had spoken at
barely more than a whisper, after all.
The archway, the back door…
The stairs, still no sign of Benny.
“Benny,” she repeated, then saw a shadow below. For a moment her heart
twisted because the shadow looked so strange, but Benny appeared and
started up toward her, and she sighed with relief.
“Nothing down there but an open wall safe tucked behind the water
heater,” he said when he reached the kitchen. “It’s empty, so maybe
that’s where he kept the files that’re spread over the living room.
Rachael wanted to put down her gun and throw her arms around him and hug
him tight and kiss him all over his face just because he had come back
from the cellar alive. She wanted him to know how happy she was to see
him, but the garage still had to be explored.
By unspoken agreement, she removed the tilted chair from under the knob
and opened the door, and Benny covered it with the shotgun. Again,
there was no sign of Eric.
Benny stood on the threshold, fumbled for the switch, found it, but the
lights in the garage were dim. Even with a small window high in one
wall, the place remained shadowy. He tried another switch, which
operated the big electric door. It rolled up with much
humming-rumblingcreaking, and bright brassy sunlight flooded inside.
“That’s better,” Benny said, stepping into the garage.
She followed him and saw the black Mercedes 560
S.E.L, additional proof that Eric had been there.
The rising door had stirred up some dust, motes of which drifted lazily
through the in-slanting sunlight.
Overhead in the rafters, spiders had been busy spinning ersatz silk.
Rachael and Benny circled the car warily, looked through the windows
(saw the keys dangling in the ignition), and even peered underneath.
But Eric was not to be found.
An elaborate workbench extended across the entire back of the garage.
Above it was a peg board tool rack, and each tool hung in a painted
outline of itself.
Rachael noticed that no wood ax hung in the ax-shaped outline, but she
did not even give the missing instrument a second thought because she
was only looking for places where Eric could hide, she was not, after
all, doing an inventory.
The garage provided no sheltered spaces large enough for a man to
conceal himself, and when Benny spoke again, he no longer bothered to
whisper. “I’m beginning to think maybe he’s been here and gone.” “But
that’s his Mercedes.”
“This is a two-car garage, so maybe he keeps a vehicle up here all the
time, a Jeep or four-wheel-drive pickup good for scooting around these
mountain roads. Maybe he knew there was a chance the feds would learn
what he’d done to himself and would be after him, with an A.P.B on the
car, so he split in the Jeep or whatever it was.”
Rachael stared at the black Mercedes, which stood like a great sleeping
beast. She looked up at the webs in the rafters. She stared at the
sun-splashed dirt road that led away from the garage. The stillness of
the mountain redoubt seemed less ominous than it had since their
arrival, not peaceful and serene by any means, certainly not welcoming,