The Guardian

“Yes.”

Two years ago he’d taken an early retirement, at age forty-two, exactly twenty years after signing up with the Treasury Department. He’d loved the job, but he’d left it in self-disgust after he’d lost Sandra.

He didn’t want to talk about himself or the Service or his relationship to Corbett or to think about Sandra. So he said, “Tell me about this problem you’ve got. Do you think Corbett’s got some lead on the stalker? Something he’s not ready to tell you or me?”

She stiffened as if the word stalker sent a bolt of electricity ripping through her system. She drew her breath between her teeth. “No,” she said. “I don’t think he does. He’s afraid my only option is to go away.” She turned to him. “I have a friend, Carol, in Denver who’ll help. I worked it out with her over a pay phone, so nobody could tap into the conversations. But Corbett still didn’t want us to go straight there. He’s very cautious. I hate imposing on you.”

“Don’t mention it,” muttered Hawkshaw.

“I mean it,” she said. “I hate it. My money situation’s complicated right now, but somehow I’ll reimburse you. I pay my own way. We’re not a charity case, Charlie and I.” She turned away again. “So tell me about yourself,” she said. “What do you do, now that you’re retired?”

“As little as possible.”

“Do you have a first name?” she asked.

“None that I answer to.”

“How long did you and Corbett work together?”

“Fourteen years, off and on.”

“All of it in Washington?”

“A lot of it,” he said.

“Like where else?”

“Here.” he said. “There.”

She shifted in her seat and he could feel her looking at him. “Would you rather we not talk? Is that it? All you have to do is say so.”

The words surprised him. There was a certain sassiness in them he hadn’t expected. But, what, God help him, if she was a talker, one of those women who never shut up?

“I’m out of practice,” he said dryly.

“If you’re worried that we’re going to intrude on your life, don’t be,” she said. “We’ll keep to ourselves as much as possible.”

“Umph,” he said.

“The last thing I want to do is be a bother.”

“Um.”

“I mean, I, of all people, know what it’s like to have your privacy invaded.”

Touché, he thought. A good point, that.

“I have plenty to do,” she said, as if to herself. “I’ve got a lot of decisions to make, things to plan. I mean, if I look at the bright side, I’ve got a whole new life ahead, a completely fresh start.”

He almost said something sarcastic. Already she was trying to look on the bright side? To be optimistic? Lady, don’t you understand what’s happening to your life?

He stole another glance at her. She had one elbow on the window’s edge, her knuckles pressed hard against her jaw.

The moon, nearly full, had broken through the clouds, silvering her profile. She looked like a face delicately carved on a coin.

With a start, he realized she was biting her lip. He thought he saw the glitter of tears in her eyes, but she blinked hard twice, then three times. The glitter disappeared.

He said nothing.

In the back, the dog whined as if its heart were irreparably broken. But Katherine Kanaday kept her back straight, her eyes looking straight ahead, and her chin up.

HAWKSHAW’S PLACE WAS in “the backcountry,” he’d said, but his words had given Kate no hint of how desolate the backcountry could seem.

The van left the main highway, meandered through a small development of homes that stood dark and lifeless as tombstones. Then the houses grew fewer and farther apart, and when, at last they came to an end, civilization seemed to end with them.

The dark land stretched out blackly on either side, thatched with scrub wood. The air was heavy with a rich, swampy scent. The winding road narrowed and seemed to roll on forever, but at last Hawkshaw turned in at a graveled drive. He got out of the van and opened a padlocked gate.

Kate could make out a tall chain-link fence glinting faintly against the trees. After Hawkshaw moved the van through the gate and refastened the lock, he drove on into a darkness so thick it gave her a twinge of claustrophobia.

A small deer leaped across the road and was caught briefly in the van’s headlights. It was such a tiny, elfin creature, Kate thought she was hallucinating.

She gasped in surprise.

“Key deer,” Hawkshaw said, sounding bored. “That’s all.”

She blinked and the animal was gone, as if it had vanished back into the magical world where it belonged. Of course, she thought, it had been one of the miniature deer peculiar to these islands. “Oh,” she said softly. “I read about them.”

He gave no response. He pulled up next to a house that even in the darkness seemed neglected, almost deserted. She heard the lapping of water when she got out of the car and thought she could smell the ocean nearby, but she could not see it.

Hawkshaw carried Charlie up a narrow flight of stairs to what seemed to be a long deck. He unlocked the front door, switched on the inside lights, and took the boy inside. Kate followed, blinking at the disarray.

Hawkshaw was lean of body and spare of speech, and she had expected the house to be lean and spare, as well. But the living room was crammed with run-down furniture and cluttered with fishing and boating paraphernalia. Some sort of huge stuffed fish hung on the wall; it gave her an unwelcoming stare.

“It’s kind of a mess,” Hawkshaw said, in a masterpiece of understatement.

Kate smiled weakly. The decor, she decided, could be described only as Late Bachelor Hellhole.

“Your room’s this way,” he said, moving down a narrow hallway. “Watch out for the oar.”

He hit another light switch with his elbow, and stepping over an abandoned oar, he carried Charlie down the hall to a back room. He turned on yet another light.

Kate followed warily. The bedroom gave off the air of being unused for years, perhaps decades. Boxes were piled haphazardly against the walls, as if Hawkshaw had been moving out, then suddenly changed his mind.

There was little furniture: an old wicker dresser, a metal desk and folding chair, a pair of twin beds with mismatched spreads.

The Ritz it isn’t, thought Kate, with sinking heart.

But Hawkshaw turned down the cover and sheet of one bed with the air of a man who knew what he was doing. She was surprised to see that the sheets and pillowcase seemed crisp and clean, freshly laundered.