had to leave her here, she knew. He couldn’t stay and be found by the government troops quartering the area for him. She knew he had to leave and she knew she would never see him again, but she sat there and waited for him to at least come and say goodbye.
He never did.
Four
It was not yet dark, but the light was fading as dusk slowly replaced daylight In an old frame house on a street lined with elms, a light came on in an upstairs window. Most people in town still referred to the old house as “the MacAllister place,” though all but one of that family had died or moved away years ago. The one remaining MacAllister, Frances Ann, lived downstairs with her cats, her needlepoint and her family albums.
Jane lived upstairs.
She flipped on the light switch in her kitchen and hurried to the pantry. She pushed aside the gingersnaps, the rice and two boxes of breakfast cereal, muttering under her breath. She was due at the meeting of the Atherton Combined Charities in fifteen minutes. As secretary for the community-wide fund-raising project, she absolutely had to be there. But she was not leaving without her crackers.
She probably wouldn’t be late, she told herself as she switched her search to the second shelf. Even if she had to stop and buy more crackers, she had time. She could get from anywhere in Atherton to anywhere else in fifteen minutes, usually with time to spare. But she didn’t want to get into her car without crackers. Although she seemed to be over the stomach bug that had afflicted her off and on for the past two weeks, she wasn’t taking any chances. The nausea might come back when she started driving.
Ah. She straightened as her hands touched a cellophane-wrapped package. Success.
Jane grabbed her purse, shrugged it onto her shoulder and flipped on her porch light. It would be dark by the time she came home. She stepped out onto the landing and was just pulling her front door closed when the phone rang. She froze.
Her hand went to her chest. She could barely feel the lump her locket made beneath the wool of her favorite pink sweater. Her fingers pressed against that tiny lump. Don’t be silly, she scolded herself. It was probably her mother, calling to check on her. Marilee Smith’s normal fretfulness had escalated to nearly unbearable levels since Jane had returned from the island.
She really ought to go back inside and reassure her mother, but—
The phone rang again.
But what if it was him?
It wasn’t, of course. She knew that He’d had three weeks to call if he were going to. He hadn’t. And why should he? What had happened between them had meant nothing to him, obviously. He hadn’t bothered to say goodbye.
She didn’t even know if he was still alive.
No, whoever was calling now, it certainly wasn’t the man who’d been her lover for fifteen life-changing minutes. And dammit, she wasn’t going to do this to herself anymore. She’d stopped crying, hadn’t she?
The tears that had come at odd, unpredictable moments for the first week after she’d arrived home had embarrassed her as much as they had worried her mother. Trauma could have odd effects on a person, but she was done with that. She had nothing to cry about. Nor did she intend to spend any more nights staring at her ceiling with her mind racing like a hamster running itself crazy on its wheel. She would never know if her mysterious rescuer had lived to leave the island or not, and staying awake worrying about him was as pointless as it was pathetic.
But Jane couldn’t silence the frantic little voice inside that said that this time the call might be from him. What if it was?
The phone rang again.
She rubbed the small lump that her locket made. Papa, she thought wistfully, did you ever wonder if some of the chances you took might not have been worth what you risked? Or am I just a coward? Probably she was a coward. Hadn’t she proved how poor she was at coping with danger? Look at what she’d done—made passionate love with a man whose name she didn’t know. Passionate, unprotected love.
Slowly, Jane pulled the door closed behind her. This wasn’t the first call she had refused to answer since she’d gotten home—just in case.
The wind was picking up. It ruffled her hair as she stood on the landing looking down at her reliable old Toyota. She took a steadying breath and promised herself that tomorrow she would buy a Caller ID machine so she wouldn’t freak out every time her phone rang.
She pulled a cracker from the package she carried and nibbled on it as she started down the steps.
Samuel Charmaneaux pulled off into the rest area at the top of a low hill. He sat in the three-year-old black Jeep Cherokee he’d bought last week, though the registration showed he’d bought it new. The name on that registration matched the one on his driver’s license, birth certificate and all the other papers that made a person real in today’s world.
He turned off the stereo and rolled down the window, wanting to listen to the wind that blew here. To taste it.
Samuel had been planning this for months. Oh, not all of it. He’d had to wait on circumstances to supply some details. Certainly the particular detail that had brought him nearly fifteen hundred miles across the country hadn’t been part of his original plan, but Samuel’s plans were always fluid. Objectives were the fixed points in his universe, and he was very good at achieving his objectives.
Good, but not perfect. His eyes darkened as he remembered the sound of Jack choking on his own blood as he’d fought for breath. Samuel had been far less than perfect that day. He didn’t exactly blame himself for his friend’s death, but he accepted the burden of it, knowing he’d been part of the events that had led to it. With that acceptance had come a certainty: he could no longer be part of the world he’d lived in for the past ten years.
At first, he hadn’t known what he would do instead. He still wasn’t sure, but he knew what his new objective was. Samuel wanted to be part of the world that other people knew. The ordinary world.
It wasn’t going to be easy. The official records of his new identity would hold up under much stronger scrutiny than he should ever receive, but he wasn’t as sure of himself as he was of his papers. He was used to living under other names, living bits and pieces of borrowed lives, but this was different. This time it would be for the rest of his life. And for the first time in years, “the rest of his life” meant more than just the next job.
Having a future was going to take some getting used to.
To the west, the sun still shone at the rim of the world, but twilight was seeping up from its eastern edge, blurring the outlines of things. Samuel looked down at the small town of Atherton, where lights were blinking on in houses as dusk drew near.
He hadn’t expected hills.
Admittedly, these hills weren’t much. Compared to their grander cousins in other parts of the world, such as the tumbled hills of Provence or the worn heights crowding the ancient city of Dharmsala, these were barely lumps. But the fact that he’d had expectations that weren’t grounded in experience or research bothered him. He was a thorough man. He’d gotten a background check on the town as well as the woman, yet apparently he’d allowed his thinking to be colored by ideas formed about Kansas when he was very young. He’d expected pancake-flat
