Blood in the Water(18)

He went over to the windows and looked out on the golf course again. The houses that ringed it looked awake now. There were people on decks and patios. There were children making their way to the bus stop outside the back gate. It was an ordinary fall morning, and he was an idiot to think there was anything strange about it.

He left the room and went out into the hall. He went down the staircase and into the foyer. He went back through the kitchen to the breakfast nook. He could still hear Cortina somewhere in the house. Her Spanish sounded like music.

He went back into the foyer again and called out. “Cortina? I’m leaving for work.”

There was something that might have been a muffled reply, or might not have been. He didn’t want to spend the time finding out. He got his briefcase off the kitchen counter. He went out into the huge three-car heated garage. He got into his car and closed the door tight. He was having that odd feeling again. The air around him felt patterned.

Martha was Martha. She had committees. She had yoga and facials and all the other things that made him feel as if, talking to her, he was trying to make sense of an alien. It was not impossible that she had had something on her mind and simply forgotten her bag. It was not impossible that she had had something on her mind and preferred to walk instead of take the car. He liked to walk when he wanted to think.

And she had had something on her mind lately. He was sure of that.

He pushed the little button on his visor and the garage door slid open. The area in front of the garage was wide enough for cars to turn around in. It narrowed to a single lane that led out onto the thin access road that went around the houses to the front gate. This was his routine every morning. He did not have trouble following it.

His house was at the far end of the course, as far as you could get from the front gate. That was supposed to be an advantage. Real luxury was supposed to be to live away from people. He passed the back gate just as that Fanny woman—Bullstrode? Bullhorn?—was coming back through it. That would have been her children he saw on their way to the bus stop. Arthur had never been able to understand why anybody wanted to have children.

Fanny What’s-her-name cut across the road and then through somebody’s side yard. She went a little out of her way to do it. Arthur saw Walter Dunbar come out of the house she had avoided, and smiled a little. He’d go out of his way to avoid Walter Dunbar, too. Everybody did.

Stupid ass, Arthur thought, watching Walter pick up his paper from his driveway. Walter paid no attention to him, or pretended to—but that was what Walter did. He actually paid attention to everything. Then he complained.

The clubhouse itself was up at the front gate, far away from him still. He looked through the wide grassy areas between the houses at the green. Nobody was out there playing yet. They could have been. The club was ready and willing for most of the day and the night.

Going around the curve that would let him make the loop, Arthur caught a glimpse of the pool house and its ugly yellow caution tape. It struck the wrong note. It struck just the kind of wrong note Martha’s handbag had. It was out of place. It felt wrong.

The curve continued relentlessly and he went around it very slowly, looking through the yards each time, looking at the way the grass was still green even this late in the fall, looking at the windows gleaming in the sun. The gates to the right of him were lined with evergreen trees. Nobody could see through them from the outside unless they came right up close, and then there would be sensors and other things, things to keep out the dark, to keep out the unsafe.

Arthur Heydreich was not like a lot of the people who lived at Waldorf Pines. He hadn’t grown up rich. He hadn’t even grown up lower middle class, in one of those neighborhoods where everybody knew everybody else and everybody’s mother watched out for everybody else’s children. He knew the world was not a safe place, and never would be.

The trick to the thing was people. That was it. There were a lot of different kinds of people, and most people were truly awful—but most people were not dangerous in any way that mattered, and that was what you had to watch out for. Arthur Heydreich watched, and he knew what he was looking for.

He was almost all the way up the other side of the curve when he saw it, the thing he would describe later, to the police, as “a flicker.”

“Flicker” was the best word he had for it, and he was willing to admit that on another day, on a day when he was not already worried and a little upset, he might not have noticed it. It came up and bent a little in the wind. It shuddered in and out of sight. It was like looking at the flame on a candle on a birthday cake when somebody without much breath was trying to blow it out. And it was—inside the building.