Every hour or so on Saturday, Ned listened to the news on the car radio. He was glad that Annie had made him buy the groceries the other night. It wouldn’t have been safe to go to a store now. He was sure his picture was being shown on television and over the Internet.
Armed and dangerous. That’s what they said.
Sometimes after dinner Annie would stretch out on the couch and fall asleep, and he’d go over and hug her. She’d wake up and look startled for a minute. Then she’d laugh and say, “Ned, you’re dangerous.”
But that was different from now.
Without refrigeration the milk had gone sour, but he didn’t mind eating the cereal dry. Ever since he shot Peg, his appetite had been coming back. It was as if a big stone inside him had started to dissolve. If he hadn’t had the cereal and the bread and the peanut butter, he would have gone over to the guest house and killed Lynn Spencer and taken food from her kitchen. He could even have driven her car out of here, and no one would have been the wiser.
But then if her boyfriend came back and found her, they’d know her car was missing. The cops would be on the lookout for it everywhere. It was flashy and cost a lot of money. It would be easy to spot.
“Wait, Ned,” Annie was saying to him. “Rest for a while. There’s no hurry.”
“I know,” he whispered.
At three o’clock, after he’d been dozing on and off for a couple of hours, he decided to go outside. There was little room to walk around in the garage, and his legs and neck felt cramped. The garage had a door on the side next to the car. He opened it very slowly and listened for the sound of anyone outside. But it was all right. There was no one around this part of the property. He would have bet that Lynn Spencer never walked over here anyhow. But just in case he ran into any trouble, he carried his rifle with him.
He went around the back of the pool house as far as the trees that screened the pool from the guest cottage. Now that all the leaves were out, no one in the guest cottage could see him even if they were looking that way.
He could see the cottage, though, by looking through the branches. The shades in the guest house were up, and a couple of the windows were open. Spencer’s silver convertible was in the driveway. The top was down. Ned sat on the ground with his legs crossed. It felt a little damp, but he didn’t mind.
Because time didn’t mean anything to him, he wasn’t sure how long he had been there when the door to the house opened and Lynn Spencer came out. As Ned watched, she pulled the door closed and walked to the car. She was wearing black slacks and a black and white blouse. She looked dressed up. Maybe she was meeting someone for a drink and dinner. She got into the car and started the engine. The car was so quiet that it hardly made a sound as it started, then went around the side of what was left of the mansion.
Ned waited three or four minutes until he was sure she was gone, then he moved quickly across the open space and to the side of the house. He walked from window to window. All the shades were up, and as far as he could see, the house was empty. He tried to open the windows on the side, but they were locked. If he was going inside, he had to take a chance and go in through a front window where anyone who happened to come up the driveway would see him.
He took time to rub the bottom of his shoes back and forth on the driveway so he wouldn’t leave any dirt on the windowsill or inside the house. Then, in one quick move, he shoved up the left front window and, propping his rifle against the house, hoisted himself up. When he got one leg over the sill, he reached for his rifle and, once inside, lowered the window back to just the spot it had been when he opened it.
He checked to make sure there was no dirt on the windowsill or that his shoes didn’t make any marks on the floor or carpets. He did a quick search of the house. The two bedrooms upstairs were empty. He was definitely alone, but he knew he couldn’t count on Lynn Spencer staying out long even though she was dressed up when she left. She could even have forgotten something and come back in a minute.
He was in the kitchen when the sharp peal of the phone made him clutch the rifle and press his finger on the trigger. The phone rang three times before the answering machine on the counter picked it up. Ned opened and closed cabinet drawers as he heard the recorded message. Then he heard a woman’s voice saying, “Lynn, this is Carley. I’ll be doing a draft of the story tonight and wanted to ask you a quick question. I’ll try you again later. If I don’t reach you, I’ll see you tomorrow at three in Bedford. If you’ve changed your plans and are coming back to New York early, give me a call. My cell phone number is 917-555-8420.”
Carley DeCarlo was coming here tomorrow, Ned thought. That was why Annie had told him to wait and to rest today. Tomorrow it would be all over. “Thank you, Annie,” Ned said. He decided he should get back to the garage, but first there was something he had to find.
Most people kept an extra set of keys around the house, he thought.
Finally he found them, in almost the last drawer he opened. They were in an envelope. He knew they’d be there somewhere. Each of the housekeepers probably had a key to this house. There were two sets of keys in two different envelopes. One envelope was marked “Guest House,” the other, “Pool House.” He didn’t care about the pool house, so he left that, taking just one set of the house keys.
He opened the back door and made sure that one of the keys fit into the lock. There were only a couple of things more that he wanted before he went back to the garage. There were six cans of Coca-Cola and club soda, and six bottles of water in the refrigerator, lined up two by two. He wanted to take those, but he knew the Spencer woman would notice if any were missing. But he found that one of the overhead cabinets had boxes of crackers, bags of potato chips and pretzels, and cans of nuts—he didn’t think she’d miss one of those.
The liquor cabinet was full as well. There were four bottles of unopened scotch alone. Ned took one of them from the back. You couldn’t even tell it was missing unless you pulled the drawer out all the way. They were all the same brand, too.
By then he felt as if he’d been inside the house a long time, even though it really had been only a few minutes. Still, he took the time to do one more thing. Just in case there was anyone in the kitchen when he came back, he’d leave a side window unlocked in the room with the television.
As he hurried down the hall, Ned’s eyes darted from the floor to the staircase to be sure there wasn’t a single mark from his shoes anywhere. As Annie used to say, “You can be neat when you want to be, Ned.”
When the window in the study was unlocked, he took long strides to the kitchen, then with the bottle of scotch and box of crackers under his arm, he opened the back door. Before he closed it behind him, he looked back. The blinking red light of the answering machine caught his eye. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Carley,” he said quietly.