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.
He laid Charlie down and started to untie one of the child’s scuffed running shoes, then abruptly straightened. His eyes met hers. “You’ll want to do that,” he said gruffly.
The room was small, its ceiling low, and suddenly Hawkshaw seemed even taller and wider-shouldered than he had at the airport. He hooked his thumbs on either side of his belt buckle and cocked one hip. He looked her up and down, his eyes narrowed. The slant of his mouth was resigned.
“There’s a bathroom in there,” he said, nodding toward a badly chipped door. “I’ll get the rest of your things. And your dog.”
Kate winced. The dog, still caged in the van, had started to bay piteously.
Hawkshaw shook his head, then pulled the brim of his hat down even more. He made his way past her, but the room was so small that he accidentally brushed his arm against hers as he headed toward the door.
The fleeting touch of his body was unexpectedly electric. Once again his gaze locked with hers, and the complexity she saw in those green depths shook her.
Quickly he glanced away, and then he was gone, striding down the little hall. She felt a strange, inner shudder. She’d read a profound resentment burning in his eyes, and she was sure it was resentment of her.
He did not want her and Charlie here. She had almost been scalded by the rancor she had felt flaring in him. Yet she sensed more than rancor in that swift, telling look. There had been something like desire, all the sharper for not being welcomed.
She knew because she had felt the same sensation; a sudden hot spark of sexual attraction that she disliked, and wanted to disclaim.
The slightly musty air of the room seemed to throb with his presence, even though he was gone. Don’t be asinine, she scolded herself. She was so tired that she was drugged by fatigue; it was making her imagine foolish things.
She sighed and bent over Charlie and finished untying his shoes. She slipped them off, loosened the button at the throat of his polo shirt. Then she shook him gently.
“Charlie,” she whispered. “Everything’s fine. We’re in Florida. Get up and go to the bathroom. Then you can go back to sleep.”
Charlie stirred grumpily. His long lashes fluttered open, and he squinted, frowning at her. He tried to roll over and ignore her.
But she persisted. She wanted him to know he was in a new place, but that he was safe and that she was there with him. Finally she roused him enough to lead him into the bathroom.
“We’re in Florida,” she told him, “with a man named Mr. Hawkshaw.”
“I don’t care,” Charlie grumbled.
“I want you to understand. We’re in Florida. With Mr. Hawkshaw. What did I just say?”
“Florida,” Charlie muttered. “Mr. Shocklaw.”
“Hawkshaw,” she repeated, taking him back to the bedroom. “There’s your bed. The bathroom’s right
