A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(31)

“I guess that makes sense, sort of.”

“Yes. So now you stay out of those places. You’re a guy who goes to a job every day and comes home to his wife and kids in the evening. Maybe you’re a lawyer or businessman. You’re local. That’s important. And when you travel, you dress the way that kind of guy dresses for travel. Think polo shirts, light sport jackets, khaki pants, walking shoes.”

“I don’t know if I can carry that off.”

“You’ll learn.”

“Aren’t these clothes kind of expensive?”

“Not as much as you’d expect, but they do look that way. What that accomplishes is that people who see you will make a series of assumptions, based on very little evidence. They’ll think you’re financially solvent. You probably don’t steal hubcaps off cars for a living. You’re probably not physically dangerous. You’re not crazy in any way that matters to anybody. The police, who are the ones we’re concerned about right now, are not looking for a man dressed like you. Most of the time they’re only looking at people dressed the way you used to. And in these clothes you’ll be easily accepted into the kinds of places where the police aren’t looking anyway.”

“A safe car, a safe place to sleep, clothes that will help us hide. That’s a lot to accomplish in one shopping trip. Thank you.”

“You’re forgetting the food,” she said. “I did that too. Let’s make some dinner.”





9



Dan Crane knocked on the door of Chelsea’s house. Knocking on her door always struck him as a stupid formality, a bit of the past blocking his progress in the present. He was a believer in the present. He was busy, in a hurry much of the time, scrambling to get things done. When he’d already come off the highway and driven up a hundred-yard gravel driveway with his Range Rover kicking up dust to get here, then stepped up on the creaking wooden porch, she should know he was here and have the door open by now.

As he thought it, the door swung open. Chelsea stood behind the closed screen door and smiled. “Hi, Dan. I didn’t know you were coming. I look awful.”

Crane detected a hint of a complaint. She didn’t look awful. She looked amazing. She was suggesting that he should have called her ahead of time to ask her permission to come and see her. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I happened to be driving past, so I thought I’d see how you were.” Crane swung his arm around his body from behind his back and held out the small bouquet of flowers. “I’d better leave these with you. I look like a sissy carrying them around.”

Her bright blue eyes widened, and her smile placed two dimples in the smooth white skin of her cheeks. “Are those for me?”

“I happened to be driving by a florist’s shop that was having a sale.”

“Really,” she said as she unhooked the hook-and-eye on the screen door to open it. “You happened to be in a florist’s shop and they fell into your hands. Then, when you drove off you happened to be going by here.”

He stepped inside and she kissed him on the cheek. It was only after that half second that he felt in retrospect the damp, pillowy lips on his cheek and a slight brush of her skin, but she had already withdrawn. His cheek was bereft, feeling where her lips had been.

She was moving away through the little dining room into the kitchen. He followed at a distance, watching the movement of her body in the shorts and the halter top, and hearing the whisper of her bare feet on the floor. She opened a kitchen cupboard, leaned forward over the counter, and stretched upward as far as she could to reach a vase on the top shelf, and he could see a few inches of bare back and the thin white elastic band at the top of the pink imitation silk of her panties. She snagged the vase, a blue-and-yellow glass vessel that nearly matched the small bunch of blue lilies and yellow daffodils. He retreated a few paces.

She came back into the living room, the smile still glowing. “This is just so thoughtful, Dan.”

“It’s nothing. Pretty flowers seem to need a pretty lady to make them complete.”

Chelsea looked up and studied him for the hundredth time. He was kind of handsome, if you were a little ways off or the light was dim. He was tall, with square shoulders and a slim waist, and she liked that. He had a grown-up haircut without any hair over his collar or greased and sticking up straight in bristles or anything like that. But up close, he seemed a little bit more ordinary. He was quite a bit older, at least forty, and you could see the difference in the texture of his skin. You could notice things, like when he said something he thought was clever there was a thing with his mouth that wasn’t quite right. It looked a little like a sneer. She wished, if only for his own sake, that he would stop that. She was ashamed of herself for having such shallow thoughts about a man who was always kind to her.

She overcompensated for what she’d been thinking about him. “Thanks so much, Dan. Since Nick died, you’ve been just great. You’ve turned out to be practically the only one of his friends who didn’t disappear as soon as the funeral was over.”

“Nick was a good guy,” Crane said. “But he’s gone now. We’ve lost him forever. The person who deserves the attention is you.”

He watched her closely. Her eyes lowered, and she seemed to blush. He had never believed that women actually did that. In his life he had never seen any evidence that women were any more delicate or sensitive than, say, dogs or cows. But here it was. She was a princess who wore cutoff shorts and bare feet.