Nine Lives(39)
He took a few side streets, most of which were dead ends, paying the most attention to the properties that looked like summer homes. Several had no cars parked in front of them—the season was definitely over—and several had long driveways or were surrounded by thickets of pine trees. He ignored these houses. If he had to, he’d check them out later, but for right now, he was just hoping to get lucky. He drove all the way to Port Clyde, the furthest village on the peninsula, and took a road out to a pretty lighthouse with a visitor’s center. There was a white sedan in the parking lot that turned out to be a Corolla. Backtracking, he took another road that led him to the village center. A ferry was unloading passengers on a dock. He parked his car, put on his Toronto Raptors hat, and wandered through the town, looking at cars, but also looking at the harbor. The sky was still dark but there was a gap in the clouds where the late afternoon light was streaming through, illuminating a patch of the still water. Gulls wheeled overhead, and the air smelled sharply of the sea. Fischer had grown up on the Gulf Coast of Florida, in a family and a town that he’d been desperate to leave, entering the military the moment he’d been eligible. He never thought of himself as having particular feelings about the ocean one way or another, but the smell of it now, a different smell than the one in Florida despite its being the same ocean, somehow brought him back to his long, anxious childhood, his father sometimes employed but mostly not, his mother often absent, often drunk. Fischer had been the oldest of four kids and was more often than not the one who made dinner every night.
He hoped that he would find Jessica Winslow soon so that he could get back in his car and return home to Virginia and his own family.
He caught a young woman looking at him; she was coming off the ferry, wearing a backpack, and trailing a dog that was at least part pit bull on a leash. This woman had fair, freckled skin—not unlike Fischer’s—and pale red hair. He raised his brow to acknowledge her and that made her look away. It didn’t escape him that spotting Jessica Winslow here in Maine might be easier than spotting her car. Everyone he’d seen so far had been white—a woman of color like Jessica would be fairly easy to spot. As a white man with a Black wife, and with three children, Fischer thought about race fairly often. People pretended that in America everyone was equal, but all that meant was that the ones in charge were happy to screw you over regardless of what color your skin was.
Back in his car Fischer drove out of the village and began to wend his way off the peninsula, taking side roads whenever possible, keeping his eyes on the parked cars in driveways. When he got back onto Route 1 he decided to go check out Rockland. According to his GPS it looked like a decent-size town. The tail that had lost Jessica just south of here would have sped right through to see if she were still heading north. So it was definitely possible that Rockland was her destination. Fischer drove into the town, parking his car on a main thoroughfare, either side lined with brick storefronts.
It was starting to get dark and Fischer knew that he wasn’t going to find her today. Frankly, it would have been miraculous if he had. Still, he walked through the town, peering into storefronts, but really looking at the reflections of cars passing by, hunting for the color white. He passed a restaurant and read the outside menu, intrigued by the special of the night, which was sautéed cod cheeks. His wife was a great cook, but she wasn’t inventive. She liked chicken and steak and hamburgers. Not a big fan of fish, and definitely not a big fan of anything that reminded her too much of the animal she was eating. She loved pulled pork but wouldn’t touch ribs, and it often freaked her out when she even saw her husband eating something with a bone in it, say. So whenever Fischer was out on an assignment he liked to take advantage of trying some adventurous foods. The menu he was looking at had oysters on it, and it had been a while since he’d had one of those. Definitely better to eat without Valerie staring at him from across the table with a look of horror on her face.
But first he needed a place to sleep. He’d passed several inns and motels on Route 1, but unless he absolutely had to, he preferred to not stay overnight at a place where he had to use a credit card. He was being overly cautious, he knew, but so far in his life being overly cautious had worked out for him. He got back in his car, and drove further north, hitting side roads until he found a trailhead with no cars parked in its lot. He walked about a hundred yards down a dark narrow trail hemmed in by thick stands of pine until he came to a clearing just big enough for his one-man tent. He set it up, then went back to his car.
His plan was to go back into town and eat at the fancy-looking restaurant that had the oysters and the cod cheeks. He’d see if he could get a window seat so he could watch cars and people go by. Then he’d drive back to the trailhead, park the car, and go sleep in the tent, making sure that he was up and back on the road by dawn. That gave him a whole day tomorrow to hunt for a white Camry and for Jessica Winslow. She was somewhere here and he’d find her.
9
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 11:14 A.M.
For the first time since she’d arrived two days earlier, Jessica picked up the telephone that was secured to the kitchen wall of the cottage and checked for a dial tone. There was one, which surprised her, mostly because the phone itself was so old-fashioned. It was a pale green, the color of dated kitchens, and the handset was connected by a long, twisted cord.
The night before, she’d checked her messages; there was one from Aaron, congratulating her on giving her protective detail the slip, and also providing a phone number for Arthur Stearns Kruse, the father of Arthur Kruse. He’d told her to not call Kruse until the following day at the earliest, that he was set to be questioned by one of the agents in charge of the investigation.