He didn’t like the idea, either. The thought of being high on a ladder in the middle of a thunderstorm made his scalp prickle.
She said, “I don’t want you to go out there if—”
The hammering stopped.
They waited.
Wind. The patter of rain. The branches of a tree scraping lightly against an outside wall.
At last, Paul said, “Too late. If it was a shutter, it’s been torn off.”
“I didn’t hear it fall.”
“It wouldn’t make much noise if it dropped in the grass or the shrubbery.”
“So you don’t have to go out in the rain,” she said, crossing the foyer toward the short hall that led to the kitchen.
He followed her. “Yeah, but now it’s a bigger repair job.”
As they entered the kitchen, their footsteps echoing hollowly off the quarry-tile floor, she said, “You don’t have to worry about it until tomorrow or the day after. Right now, all you’ve got to worry about is the sauce for the fettuccine. Don’t let it curdle.”
Taking a copper saucepan from a rack of gleaming utensils that hung over the center utility island, he pretended to be insulted by her remark. “Have I ever curdled the sauce for the fettuccine?”
“Seems to me the last time you made it, the stuff was—”
“Never!”
“Yes,” she said teasingly. “Yes, it definitely wasn’t up to par the last time.” She took a plastic bag of mushrooms from the big, stainless-steel refrigerator. “Although it breaks my heart to tell you this, the last time you made fettuccine Alfredo, the sauce was as lumpy as the mattress in a ten-dollar-a-night motel.”
“What a vile accusation! Besides, what makes you such an expert on ten-dollar-a-night motels? Are you leading a secret life I ought to know about?”
Together, they prepared dinner, chatting about this and that, bantering a lot, flying to amuse each other and to elicit a laugh now and then. For Paul, the world dwindled until they were the only two people in it. The universe was no larger than the warm, familiar kitchen.
Then lightning flickered, and the cozy mood was broken. It was soft lightning, nothing as dazzling and destructive as the bolts that had struck outside of O’Brian’s office a few hours ago. Nevertheless, Paul stopped talking in midsentence, his attention captured by the flash, his eyes drawn to the long, many-paned window behind the sink. On the rear lawn, the trees appeared to writhe and shimmer and ripple in the fluttering storm light, so that it seemed he was looking not at the trees themselves but at their reflections in the surface of a lake.
Suddenly, another movement caught his eye, though he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. The afternoon, which had been gray and dark to begin with, was now gradually giving away to an early night, and thin fog was drifting in. Shadows lay everywhere.
The meager daylight was deceptive, muddy; it distorted rather than illuminated those things it touched. In that penumbral landscape, something abruptly darted out from behind the thick trunk of an oak tree, crossed a stretch of open grass, and quickly disappeared behind a lilac bush.
Carol said, “Paul? What’s wrong?”
“Someone’s out on the lawn.”
“In this rain? Who?”
“I don’t know.”
She joined him by the window. “I don’t see anybody.”
“Someone ran from the oak to the lilac bush. He was hunched over and moving pretty fast.”
“What’s he look like?”
“I can’t say. I’m not even sure it was a man. Might have been a woman.”
“Maybe it was just a dog.”
“Too big.”
“Could’ve been Jasper.”
Jasper was the Great Dane that belonged to the Hanrahan family, three doors down the street. He was a large, piercing-eyed, friendly animal with an amazing tolerance for small children and a liking for Oreo cookies.
“They wouldn’t let Jasper out in weather like this,” Paul said. “They pamper that mutt.”
Lightning pulsed softly again, and a violent gust of wind whipped the trees back and forth, and rain began to fall harder than before—and in the middle of that maelstrom, something rushed out from the lilac bush.
“There!” Paul said.
The intruder crouched low, obscured by the rain and the mist, a shadow among shadows. It was illuminated so briefly and strangely by the lightning that its true appearance remained tantalizingly at the edge of perception. It loped toward the brick wall that marked the perimeter of the property, vanished for a moment in an especially dense patch of fog, reappeared as an amorphous black shape, then changed direction, paralleling the wall now, heading toward the gate at the northwest corner of the rear lawn. As the darkening sky throbbed with lightning once more, the intruder fled through electric-blue flashes, through the open gate, into the street, and away.