A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(60)

Jane slipped out and relocked the door. As she stood there she saw a car slowing down and moving to the right slightly as it passed the driveway, as though the driver were planning to park. She moved around the garage to the back, and saw something else that didn’t belong, a lump under a tarp. She lifted it. This time it was a Jet Ski, bright and gleaming. She had no idea what those cost, since she detested them. She covered the Jet Ski again and moved along the side of the garage to watch the street.

She caught the shape of a man moving from the street into the far side of the yard where she had entered, and, as Jane had done, stepping along the high unruly hedge to keep his silhouette shaded by its dark opaque shape. Jane prepared to run. The man was on the side of the yard she had come from, and that put him between her and her car. If she went, she would have to go left for a distance, sneak across the road into one of the yards, and run along the backs of the houses and out to the street where her car was parked.

She pulled her black baseball cap down tight on her head with the brim low on her forehead to shield her eyes from moonlight and the faint light pollution from neon signs and distant streetlamps. She judged where the new man must be and stared to the side of that spot until she saw him move into it. He stood perfectly still for a minute or more, and then began to move again.

Jane stayed still. This man was trouble. He knew how to move in the dark without being easily detected. He took a few silent steps, then stopped and waited. He knew that if someone had heard him or sensed movement, then he must wait until the opponent’s mind had determined that there was nothing there—the impression must have been false or self-generated or unthreatening, because there had not been another to make into a pattern.

He stepped away from the hedge to the side of the house. As he did, the light from the dining room window illuminated him for a second. He was tall, thin, almost stork-like, with very short blond hair. Hello, Ike. It was the man who had been tracking her and Jimmy in Allegheny, Technical Sergeant Isaac Lloyd, State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation. He didn’t stop at the window for long, because in a moment Jane saw him appear at the rear corner of the house. She pulled back her head and crouched on the opposite side of the garage as he kept coming. She heard him open the smaller door of the garage and step inside.

Jane stood and moved quietly up the driveway, across the street into the yard of the house opposite Slawicky’s. She walked along behind it to the street, stayed low as she came around the trunk of her car and into the driver’s seat, slipped the key in, and started the engine.

As she drove along Iroquois Street away from Caledonia, she thought about her visit to Slawicky’s. Apparently what Sergeant Lloyd had been doing since he had lost the trail of Jimmy Sanders in the Alleghenies was looking more closely at the people who had some connection to the murder. Walter Slawicky, the man who had come forward to report that he’d sold Jimmy the murder weapon, seemed to have caught his attention. Sergeant Lloyd had just seen what she had—that the man who had implicated Jimmy Sanders in the murder seemed to have come into some money.





15



Chelsea Schnell sat in the passenger seat of the Range Rover beside Daniel Crane, looking out the windshield most of the time but taking an occasional glance at him when she was sure her eyes wouldn’t meet his. He had taken her to the Escarpment tonight. It was even better than she had imagined it would be. The restaurant was built on a flat limestone shelf high above the Niagara Gorge in Lewiston. After the river washed over the falls, it ran onward through another seven miles of rapids and swift water to Lake Ontario. The river had dug a steep canyon there, three hundred feet below the restaurant’s patio, where she and Dan had sat for dinner on this warm summer evening. They had arrived at seven, when there was still plenty of daylight, and finished by candlelight three hours later.

The quality of the food and wine had taken her off guard. She had only agreed to go with him because he had kept asking and asking, and she had run out of excuses. She hadn’t had the mental and emotional energy to brush him off again. Each of his previous invitations had been to very nice places, but when he had offered the Escarpment, she had finally given in. She had always wished that Nick would take her to a place like the Escarpment just once. No, she admitted to herself, just once wouldn’t have been what she wanted. Once she’d been there, she would have wanted to come on special times, maybe birthdays or anniversaries. The thought of an anniversary made her feel lonely and bereft, so she decided to distract herself.

She said, “That was such a wonderful restaurant, Dan. Thank you so much for taking me.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. “It was my pleasure.”

She waited a few seconds, but he didn’t add anything, so she spoke again. “You were right that I should get out of the house once in a while.”

“I knew you would like it,” he said. “You know another place that’s really nice? There’s a great restaurant—and I mean great—right outside of Rochester, in Pittsford. It’s been written up in a lot of food magazines. It’s where famous people go when they come to Rochester.”

“What’s it called?” What famous people ever went to Rochester?

“It’s called the Old Canal Inn. It’s built on the site of an eighteenth-century hotel. The road and the hotel were there before the Erie Canal, but I guess they want people to know it’s beside the canal. I’ll take you there.”