the house, with Einstein close behind him. The kitchen was large enough to serve
also as the dining room, yet it was cozy: oak walls, a Mexican-tile floor,
beige-tile counters, oak cabinets, a hand-textured plaster ceiling, the best
appliances. The big plank table with four comfortable padded chairs and a stone
fireplace helped make this the center of the house.
There were five other rooms—an enormous living room and a den at the front of
the first floor; three bedrooms upstairs—plus one bath down and one
up. One of the bedrooms was theirs, and one served as Nora’s studio where she
had done a little painting since they moved in—and the third was empty, awaiting
developments.
Travis switched on the kitchen lights. Although the house seemed isolated, they
were only two hundred yards from the highway, and power poles followed the line
of their dirt driveway.
“I’m having a beer,” Travis said, “You want anything?”
Einstein padded to his empty water dish, which was in the corner beside his food
dish, and scooted it across the floor to the sink.
They had not expected to be able to afford such a house so soon after fleeing
Santa Barbara—especially not when, during their first call to Garrison Dilworth,
the attorney informed them that Travis’s bank accounts had, indeed, been frozen.
They had been lucky to get the twenty-thousand-dollar check through. Garrison
had converted some of both Travis’s and Nora’s funds into eight cashier’s checks
as planned, and had sent them to Travis addressed to Mr. Samuel Spencer Hyatt
(the new persona), care of the Marin County motel where they had stayed for
nearly a week. But also, claiming to have sold Nora’s house for a handsome
six-figure price, he had sent another packet of cashier’s checks two days later,
to the same motel.
Speaking with him from a pay phone, Nora had said, “But even if you did sell it,
they can’t have paid the money and closed the deal so soon.”
“No,” Garrison had admitted. “It won’t close for a month. But you need the cash
now, so I’m advancing it to you.”
They had opened two accounts at a bank in Carmel, thirty-odd miles north of
where they now lived. They had bought the new pickup, then had taken Garrison’s
Mercedes north to the San Francisco airport, leaving it there for him. Heading
south again, past Carmel and along the coast, they looked for a house in the Big
Sur area. When they had found this one, they had been able to pay cash for it.
It was wiser to buy than rent, and it was wiser to pay cash rather than finance
the house, for fewer questions needed to be answered.
Travis was sure their ID would stand up, but he saw no reason to test the
quality of Van Dyne’s papers until necessary. Besides, after buying a house,
they were more respectable; the purchase added substance to their new
identities.
While Travis got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, twisted off the cap,
took a long swallow, then filled Einstein’s dish with water, the retriever went
to the walk-in pantry. The door was ajar, as always, and the dog opened it all
the way. He put one paw on a pedal that Travis had rigged for him just inside
the pantry door, and the light came on in there.
In addition to shelves of canned and bottled goods, the huge pantry contained a
complex gadget that Travis and Nora had built to facilitate communication with
the dog. The device stood against the rear wall: twenty-eight one-inch-square
tubes made of Lucite, lined up side by side in a wooden frame; each tube was
eighteen inches tall, open at the top, and fitted with a pedal-release valve at
the bottom. In the first twenty-six tubes were stacked lettered tiles from six
Scrabble games, so Einstein would have enough letters
to be able to form long messages. On the front of each tube was a hand-drawn
letter that showed what it contained; A, B, C, D, and so on. The last two tubes
held blank game tiles on which Travis had carved commas—or apostrophes—and
question marks. (They’d decided they could figure where the periods were