Chapter 8
If she’d had to guess, she’d say it was about eight in the morning, a little later than she normally slept in, on the days when she did indeed sleep in, which had been... four years ago, maybe? Life had been pretty much a solid wall of work.
She stretched, flinging out all of her limbs like a starfish, and hesitated before reaching for her phone. She was loath to surrender that fresh, innocent, just-woke-up feeling to reality. And the possibility of a text from Corbin.
She had a few texts; none from Corbin.
Relief lifted her mood again.
From Rachel:
I’ll see you in a couple of hours today! I can’t wait to see the place!
Hurrah! She’d be able to replenish her savings sooner rather than later, if her luck held. With credit cards and another scoop into her savings, she could drop about ten thousand on improvements.
From Eden—a photo of that bottle of pink shampoo. Avalon laughed. From Annelise: a photo of her cat, Peace and Love, upside down in the sun. One from her mom:Let us know if you need anything!
Both excellent ways to start her day.
She texted all of themX’s andO’s and a quick pic of the view from her turret window.
Then she went downstairs, made some tea, ate one of her store-bought muffins, curled up on the giant old sofa in the sunny room with her laptop, fielded a few GradYouAte emails (she’d sent the cheerleader avatar art back to the drawing board, with a sardonic, “Surely not all cheerleaders are blond?”) clicked “like” on a friend’s Facebook photo of her baby with cake smeared on its face, then got sucked into a YouTube video about pangolins. All the while she was aware of a very potent urge hovering on the periphery of her awareness like a teenager outside a 7-Eleven waiting to hit up a grownup to buy beer.
She finally caved to it: she typed “Mac Coltrane” into the search window.
As she’d done at least a half dozen or so times before in her life.
And as with every time she’d done it, her heartbeat picked up speed.
Nothing new was revealed. There was the Mack Coltrane in Nebraska, a smiling professor who was a Sylvia Plath expert. “Maximilian” also yielded exactly nothing beyond the odd mention in old articles about his dad.Lotsof those.
His life was pretty inscrutable.
And then a lightbulb pinged on over her head, and she typed in Devil’s Leap, doing the deeper search she ought to have done the other night. She learned that the last known sale price of the parcel at Devil’s Leap was ninety-eight thousand dollars, sold to Graybill Sutherland LLC.
Ah. Mac must have bought it through Graybill. Doubtless he’d had enough publicity to last anyone a lifetime.
She turned toward the window she’d struggled earlier to open a few inches; through it came a grassy-scented breeze and the unmistakable sound of a mail truck trundling down the road. It was about eleven. She decided to go down to the mailbox to see if Enrique had overnighted her anything interesting.
She could feel the house looming behind her as she followed the flagstones down the walk and across the lawn. Maybe not so much looming as... peering. In a companionable fashion. Like a loving partner trying to help with the crossword clues over her shoulder, not like some thug hovering behind her at the ATM trying to steal her password.
She slowed her pace when she reached the gate that had clonked her head.
Then stopped.
A man was sauntering up the dirt road parallel to hers, toward Devil’s Leap swimming hole.
Even from a distance she knew instantly it wasn’t Mac. One encounter with him yesterday had reminded her that his presence disturbed the air around her the way bubbles disturbed champagne.
As he drew closer, she saw that this guy was wearing hiking boots with white socks poking out of the tops and a blue baseball cap that said NPR.
And nothing else.
“Morning,” he said cheerily, and touched the brim of his cap. “Nice day for it, huh?”
He sauntered on, whistling something that sounded like that song by The Baby Owls, the one about going around and around in the forest. There was a little spring in his step, a little white cooler in one hand, and a furled striped umbrella and what looked like a rolled towel tucked into his armpit.
She rotated slowly, slowly, slowly, to watch him go.
