It was the next day that they saw Barton. He was at a distance. They were out for a walk, crossing a footbridge, and he was down below, on a park bench. He was hunched, seemingly against a nonexistent breeze. His mother sat beside him, facing straight ahead, still as a statue.
Roslyn was the one to spot them, and her first impulse was to say nothing, to keep walking and pretend they weren’t there at all. But she was unnerved and did not want to be alone in that feeling.
“Look,” she said, without pointing, just a quick gesture of her head. “There’s Barton.”
Quake peered over the edge of the bridge. He leaned against the railing so his feet left the ground a few inches, his torso tipping into nothingness.
“Well I’ll be,” he said. Then, “My God, he looks awful. Even worse than before.”
“You aren’t surprised to see him?” Roslyn asked.
“Of course not. Any big city becomes a small town if you stay long enough.”
“How quaint.”
“Isn’t it?”
They walked on and Roslyn was flooded with disgust that she had chosen to remain in a small town with Barton Heydale.
She wanted to be like Quake, who seemed to have brushed the image of Barton off like water from a duck. But what did Quake have to linger on? He’d said he felt guilty for getting Barton hanged, but then Barton hadn’t been hanged after all, and so Quake felt fine. He even hummed a little to himself, the whole scene either dismissed or forgotten entirely. Roslyn wished it could be so easy for her.
As they walked on, she found herself testing the waters.
“Perhaps I will leave Portland sooner rather than later,” she said to Quake.
He didn’t ask why, only nodded, and she took this to mean he understood her angst.
“I’ve been mulling over the same,” he said. “I think some time elsewhere could be grand for us both. Very grand indeed.”
Roslyn wasn’t sure what Quake meant, but he wasn’t talking about Barton after all. His tone was too light, his words suggesting something that had been bouncing around in his own brain well before they sighted Barton. It reminded her of the way Barton himself sometimes spoke, so caught up in his personal schemes that he could fold Roslyn’s words into whatever he wanted, regardless of what she’d said. A trick of men in all states of mind, she thought, but she did not bother to correct him.
They saw Barton a second time a week later. They were at the Central Market in downtown Portland. The market was indoors, a sprawling warren of shops and stalls. Roslyn and Quake weren’t there for anything in particular—just to wander and look. Something to do. Quake had bought her a flower, an orchid in a pot. The orchid was tall and as she walked, she struggled to find a way to hold it that did not obscure her vision in some way, but eventually she gave up and just let the thing bounce around in front of her eyes—a blur of color adding to the disorientation of the market. So, perhaps because her eyes were busy elsewhere, it was Quake who spotted Barton this time.
“Oh ho! Your buddy’s back.”
“He’s not my buddy.”
“Nor mine,” Quake said, pulling her by the arm down a narrow aisle and into a bookseller’s stall. They crouched between tables piled high with paperbacks.
“Do you think he saw us?” Roslyn asked.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “We were far too cunning and crafty.”
She watched from her awkward hiding place as Barton’s slouched form shuffled by. He was, like in the previous week, wearing too many clothes—dressed for a season later than it really was. This time he was alone. No mother by his side. Maybe the old woman had died. That was Roslyn’s first thought and it gave her the creeps: an image of Barton living in the company of a corpse. He seemed the sort of man who might do such a thing.
She was startled from her morbid reverie by footsteps so close as to be just behind her. Barton had seen them and was now upon them, with what intentions, she didn’t know, but they couldn’t be good. She closed her eyes tight, like a child who still believes not seeing is the same as not being seen.
“Buy a book or move along,” a voice said. It belonged to the foot stepper. Not Barton at all; only the owner of the haphazard bookstall.
“Dammit, man! Can’t you see we’re in hiding here! This is serious business,” Quake hissed. But when Roslyn looked, he was smiling.
“Come on,” he said to Roslyn, taking her arm again, “let’s follow him.”
“Why?”
“To see what he’s doing, obviously. Aren’t you curious?”
She let herself be led. Always so much easier to follow than to say no.
They walked through the aisle, popping back into the market’s main thoroughfare a few shops down. They were behind Barton now, but not far. Quake bobbed and weaved as they went, encouraging Roslyn to do the same, ducking behind stalls and shelves to exaggerated effect. None of it was necessary. Barton didn’t look back. That didn’t seem to matter to Quake. He was having fun, making a game of it.
When Barton went into a store, Quake tiptoed right up to the entryway and pressed himself against the outer wall. Roslyn did the same, thinking, if anything, they were making themselves more conspicuous with this behavior. Quake peered through the doorway.
“Look,” he said.
She looked. The store was cramped, full of little decorative things arranged across shelves and in bins. Barton walked like a man on his way to someplace else. But every few feet, he’d pause just long enough to tip something from a shelf into one of the pockets of his unnecessary coat.
“Is he stealing?” Roslyn asked.
“Most certainly.”
When he reached the end of the shop, Barton turned, facing back toward Roslyn and Quake. Roslyn felt a crush of fear press through her, but he wasn’t looking at them. She and Quake stepped out of the doorway and he passed right by them. His eyes had a glazed look, as if he were so focused on his task, or so unfocused entirely, that he was incapable of seeing anything in particular at all.
Roslyn relaxed a little then, and they continued to follow him. Every so often, he would move near enough to a vendor’s stall to pocket some small good or another. There was no theme to what he took, beyond objects little enough to swipe.
“We’re onto his game now! Stay low,” Quake said. “No, no, now go high.”
Roslyn laughed and put her hand to her mouth to stifle the noise.
“You’re getting the hang of it,” he said.
“I learned from the best. A man of cunning and intrigue taught me everything he knew.”
“Well, not everything. I’ve still got a few tricks up my sleeve. But stick with me and you’ll be a master spy yet.”
Roslyn laughed again, caught up in Quake’s game. It felt good to let herself go along with this reality where Barton was a ridiculous plaything.
Barton entered another shop. This time Quake held up a hand and told her to wait for him. She did, and watched as he walked at normal speed—no more effort, real or fake, to stay hidden—to the storefront. For a moment, Roslyn thought he was going to go inside and confront Barton. But no. He stopped out front to talk to a man seated in a chair. The store’s proprietor, she guessed. After a moment, the man in the chair nodded, stood to shake Quake’s hand, then disappeared inside the shop.
Then he was back at Roslyn’s side. “Let’s go back the way we came.”
“You don’t want to see if he’ll be caught?” she asked.
“No. It’ll just get sad from here. We’ve had our fun.”
It was exactly the kind of scenario Barton might have concocted in his own mind, Roslyn thought: Quake Auchenbaucher, not content to have ruined him in Spokane Falls, was now following unseen to make his life miserable in Portland. Too bizarre and paranoid to be true. Except that it was.
She found the feeling of Barton-as-a-game lingered even after they’d left. What if everything could be a game? That was how Quake lived, wasn’t it? He had even made a game of the fire. Wouldn’t it be lovely to turn all her guilt, all her remorse, all her visions that followed her like hungry dogs, into some sort of plaything? It seemed Quake had the power to make it so. This revelation made her now consider seriously an offer he’d presented two days prior, for which he was still awaiting her response.