Fading winter remained reluctant to make its peace with the coming spring. The weather was in flux from day to day, and Tuesday arrived cooler than Monday, corsair clouds having pirated the sun.
Wearing long auburn hair and green eyes and horn-rimmed glasses with clear lenses, not wearing her wedding ring with its loving and incriminating words memorializing Nick’s commitment to her, Jane drove through Iron Furnace shortly after eleven o’clock Tuesday morning. The town was enchanting, with marshaled evergreens towering over prime examples of American Victorian architecture.
At the end of town, she turned west toward the resort. The lake was a smooth pool of pewter in the gray light of a sullen sky. Only two blue-canopied electric boats plied those waters, leaving wakes that melted away almost as they formed.
She passed the resort. Two miles farther stood the estate owned by the limited-liability company Apiculus, its massive gate as forbidding as a castle portcullis. She cruised past without slowing.
A mile later, she came to a currently deserted scenic overlook with parking for several cars. She locked the Ford Escape, which contained her suitcases, handbag, and tote.
Carrying binoculars, she crossed the road and entered a pine woods undergrown at first with ribbon grass and snowy wood rush not yet in flower, and then by ferns and spleenwort. The land climbed to an east-west ridge. She followed the crest eastward until pines gave way to witchgrass, whereupon she walked the southern slope, staying below the ridge line to avoid being seen from Lakeview Road.
Opposite the great house, she returned to the ridge crest and lay prone in the grass, from which tiny whiteflies riffled up and away to less contested vegetation. She adjusted the binoculars and glassed the property below, north of the road.
Regarding the secret retreat of a man worth tens of billions, Jane expected not just the walled grounds and the formidable front gate, as existed, but also a gatehouse manned around the clock by at least one armed guard. There was no gatehouse. And the cap of the estate wall lacked the spearpoint staves that would have been both decorative and, if sharp enough, a further impediment to entry.
For a five-acre property, the driveway should have been longer than this, though not for aesthetic reasons. A lengthy driveway gave guards more opportunities to stop an aggressive intruder who either blew down the gate with a package of explosives or rammed it with a fortified truck.
Perhaps D. J. Michael had nixed a gatehouse, a spearpoint wall cap, and other obvious defenses in order not to call undue attention to the property. He could have compensated for those omissions with greater electronic surveillance, armored doors, bullet-resistant glass, more than one panic room, and other security measures.
At the moment, a man was sweeping dead leaves off the driveway where it curved under the receiving portico. He was dressed neither as a gardener nor in the black-and-white livery most common to the staff of a great house. Shirt to shoes, he wore only white, as if he were a dental hygienist or a hospital orderly.
Jane pulled close on the windows, one after another—and found what she least expected on the second floor, at the pair of tall casement panes near the southeast corner of the house: a child. A boy perhaps nine or ten years old.
D. J. Michael had never been married, had no offspring. He was an only child with no nieces or nephews.
Yet here stood a boy, gazing out, towheaded and pale beyond the glaze of window glass, his face not well discerned at that distance. He seemed solemn, though Jane might have been inferring a solemnity in him that matched her mood. Whatever he was feeling, his stillness was unnatural in one so young. She watched him for three minutes, four, and he moved only twice: first to place the palm of one hand against the casement pane, as if some hummingbird or butterfly had ventured close and charmed him from his trance; and then to lower the hand and stand as before, with his arms at his sides.
As she watched him, he seemed like a revenant rather than a real boy, some child ghost haunting a room where he had died, and she thought of Miles, the boy in The Turn of the Screw. A coldness with no source in the weather came over her there in the witchgrass, because this boy also reminded her of Travis, who was younger but likewise alone and beyond her reach.
Even from her elevated vantage point, she could not see the first forty or sixty feet behind the house, but thereafter she had a view of terraced lawns descending toward the north wall and a gate to the lake. Paving-stone walkways wandered under specimen trees of several varieties that stood shadeless under the ashen sky. Some trees overhung the walls, which no security consultant would allow. Water spilled from scalloped-bowl fountains, and a snow-white gazebo appeared to be as frosted with ornamentation as the fanciest wedding cake.
Out from under the screening boughs of a willow, two little girls appeared on a winding path. Jane pulled them as close as the binoculars would allow. She couldn’t see the girls well enough to be certain of their age, though they were surely younger than the boy. One smaller than the other. Walking hand in hand. An indefinable quality of their posture and pace suggested they must be downcast and somehow imperiled, but she might be imagining their mood, ascribing to them the threat that hung over Travis.
She focused the binoculars once more on the casement window at the front of the house and found the boy gazing out, as motionless as if he had never raised a hand to the glass.
The sweeper of leaves had gone from the driveway.
Behind the house, the girls had settled on a white-painted cast-iron bench forged with much filigree. They leaned against each other, like stricken sisters each in need of sympathy.
Beyond them, a woman came into view on the walkway that they had recently followed. Like the man sweeping the leaves out of the portico, she wore white from head to foot. She stopped at a distance from the girls and stood, watching them.
With much cawing and a hollow, throaty rattle, a flock of crows came out of the east, following the two-lane blacktop as if they had been born from it. They arced from the road to the roof of the house, where they arrayed themselves along the peak.
A second scanning of the windows revealed nothing other than the pale-faced boy standing as if at sentry duty.
Suddenly another boy, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, appeared at the younger child’s side and put an arm around his shoulders. The smaller boy stood unmoving until, after a minute or two, the newcomer led him away from the window into shadows and out of sight.
Jane lowered the binoculars and backed off from the ridge line and sat in the witchgrass, from which more whiteflies took flight on wings dusted with powdery wax. No bees had yet come into season; nor were there crickets already singing spring songs.
If the estate on Lakeview Road had once been a secret retreat for David James Michael, it didn’t appear to be one now.
She had thought that Randall Larkin, shackled to a chair in the abandoned factory, had been too desperate to withhold anything from her. And she believed that D. J. Michael owned this estate through an overseas trust, so the attorney hadn’t entirely misinformed her. But the absence of armed security suggested that the billionaire was not in residence, and the presence of the children argued that the estate served some other purpose.
Whether Larkin had expected her to kill him or had thought only to squeeze one lie into all the truths he’d told her before flying off to a new life in the Caribbean, his purpose had been malevolent.
She didn’t think he would have sent her all this way merely to waste her time. More likely, this estate was in some way a trap waiting to spring, and the safest course was to walk away.
She wanted D. J. Michael, wanted to get him alone and break him and record his confession—but he wasn’t here. She had no further reason to remain in Iron Furnace.
Except…Both Bertold Shenneck, father of the nanotech control mechanism, and D.J. had links to this town, which suggested that learning the purpose of the estate might provide her with knowledge that would help her hang the billionaire.
She got to her feet and dusted off her jeans and walked along the south slope of the ridge to the pine woods, on her way back to the Ford, considering approaches to the problem, while behind her the crows racketed off the roof of the mansion. If torn scraps of the previous night itself had snagged on trees and only now come loose, they would have been no blacker than these birds as they shrilled across the ridge and shrieked into the southwest, as though they must be a flock of prophets crying out an impending cataclysm.