The Taker (39 page)

Lanny stands with the sheet still wrapped around her naked body, drinking from a battered red plastic glass, a look of surprise and feigned embarrassment in her eyes. “Oh! I thought I heard someone at the door. Good evening, Officers. Is something wrong?”

The two policemen size her up, head to bare feet, before answering. “Did you register for this room, miss?”

She nods.

“And is this man your father?”

She goes sheepish. “Oh goodness, no. No … I don’t know why I said that to the guy at the front desk. I was afraid he wouldn’t rent us the room, I suppose, since we’re not married. He seemed—I dunno—the judgmental type. I just didn’t think it was any of his business.”

“Uh-huh. We’re going to have to see some ID.” They are trying to be dispassionate, trying to dispel their righteous anger now that there is no pervert here to bring to justice.

“You have no right to check up on us. It was consensual, what we did,” Luke says as he puts an arm around Lanny, drawing her against his side. He wants the police to leave now. He wants this embarrassing, nerve-racking experience behind him.

“We just have to see proof that you’re not—you know,” the younger of the two policemen says, ducking his head and making an impatient gesture with his flashlight. There is no alternative but to let the officers look over his driver’s license and her passport, hoping that any police bulletin from St. Andrew hasn’t made it over the border to Canada.

Luke soon realizes that he needn’t have worried: the two officers are so flustered and disappointed that they make the most cursory pass over the identification, quite possibly not even reading either document, before shuffling backward out the door with barely audible apologies for the inconvenience. As soon as they’ve left, Luke pulls the blind over the window that looks onto the walkway.

“Oh my god,” Lanny says before collapsing on the bed.

“We should leave. I should get you to a city.”

“I can’t ask you to take any more chances for me …”

“I can’t leave you here, can I?” He gets dressed while Lanny is in the bathroom, water running. He runs a hand over his chin, feeling stubble, realizing it has been about twenty-four hours since he last shaved, then he decides to see if the parking lot is clear. He hooks a finger behind the blind and peeks out: the squad car is sitting next to the SUV.

He lets the blind fall back into place. “Damn it. They’re still outside.”

Lanny looks up from her suitcase. “What?”

“The two cops, they’re still out there. Running a check on the license plate, maybe.”

“You think?”

“Maybe they’re seeing if we have records.” He rubs his lower lip, thinking. They probably can’t get answers right away on U.S. license plates or drivers’ licenses; they probably have to wait for a reply to come back through the system, through police liaison units. There might be a sliver of time before …

Luke reaches for Lanny. “We have to go, now.”

“Won’t they try to stop us?”

“Leave your suitcase, everything. Just get dressed.”

They leave the hotel room hand in hand and have started walking to their vehicle when the window of the squad car slides down. “Hey,” the police officer on the passenger side calls out, “you can’t leave yet.”

Luke drops Lanny’s hand so she can hang back while he approaches the patrol car. “Why can’t we leave? We haven’t done anything wrong. We showed you our ID. You don’t have any reason to detain us. This is starting to feel like harassment.”

The two officers bristle, uncertain but not liking the sound of the word “harassment.”

“Look,” Luke continues, opening his hands to show that they’re empty. “We’re just going out to dinner. Do we look like we’re going to bolt? We left our luggage in the room; we’re paid up for the night. If you still have questions when your background checks come in, you can always catch us after dinner. But if you’re not going to arrest me, I believe you can’t stop me.” Luke speaks calmly and reasonably, arms outstretched, like a man trying to dissuade thieves from robbing him. Lanny climbs into the front seat of the big SUV, giving the police officers a hostile glare. He follows her, starts the engine, and pulls out of the parking space smoothly, checking one last time to be sure the squad car doesn’t follow them.

It’s not until they’re well down the road that Lanny pulls the laptop from under her jacket. “I couldn’t leave it behind. It has too much damning information on it, tying me to Jonathan, stuff they could use as evidence if they wanted to,” she explains, as though she feels guilty for having taken the risk to save it. After a second, she removes the
bag of pot from her pocket, like she’s lifting a rabbit from a magician’s hat.

Luke’s heart warbles in his throat. “The pot, too?”

“I figured after they’d realized we weren’t coming back, they’d search the room for sure. This would give them a reason to arrest us …” She stuffs the bag back in her jacket pocket. “Do you think we’re safe?”

He checks the rearview mirror again. “I dunno … they have the license plate number now. If they remember our names,
my
name …” They are going to have to abandon the SUV and Luke feels terrible for having borrowed Peter’s car. He must take his mind off it. “I don’t want to think about it now. Tell me some more of your story.”

PART III

THIRTY-TWO

T
he highway to Quebec City runs two lanes in each direction and is as dark as an abandoned airstrip. The leafless trees and featureless scenery remind Luke of Marquette, the tiny town in the lonely upper corner of Michigan where his ex-wife settled. Luke has been up once to see his girls, right after Tricia moved in with her childhood sweetheart. Tricia and Luke’s two children now live in her boyfriend’s house, on a cherry farm, and his son and daughter stay with them a couple of nights a week, too.

During the visit, Tricia seemed to Luke no happier with her sweetheart than she had been with him, or maybe she was just embarrassed to be seen by her ex in a run-down house with a twelve-year-old Camaro in the driveway. Not that Luke’s house in St. Andrew was much better.

The girls, Winona and Jolene, were unhappy, but that was to be expected; they’d just moved to town and knew no one. It almost broke Luke’s heart to sit with them in the pizza place where he’d taken them for lunch. They were silent and too young to know whom to blame or be mad at. They sulked when he tried to draw them out, and he
couldn’t bear the thought of taking them back to their mother, saying good-bye when all of them were so raw and hurting. He also knew it couldn’t be helped: what they were going through couldn’t be solved in a weekend.

By the end of his time there, as he was saying his farewells on the cement steps in front of Tricia’s front door, things had improved for him and the girls. Their panic had subsided, they had found some solid ground under their tiny feet. They cried when he hugged them good-bye and waved as Luke pulled away in his rental car, but it still tore at his heart to leave them.

“I have two daughters of my own,” Luke blurts out, overcome by the urge to share something of his life with Lanny.

She looks over at him. “Was that their picture, at your house? How old are they?”

“Five and six.” He feels a tiny glow of pride, all he has left of fatherhood. “They live with their mother. And the guy she’s planning to marry.” Someone else was taking care of his daughters, now.

She shifts so she faces him. “How long were you married?”

“Six years. We’re divorced now,” he adds. “It was a mistake to get married, I see it now. I’d just finished my residency in Detroit. My parents’ health was starting to fail and I knew I’d be coming back to St. Andrew … I guess I didn’t want to come back alone. I couldn’t imagine finding someone there. I knew everybody, since I had grown up there. I think I saw Tricia as my last chance.”

Lanny shrugs, an undercurrent of discomfort in her frown. Uncomfortable with too much honesty, Luke decides, whether she’s the one being honest or not. “What about you? Have you ever married?” he asks and his question prompts a laugh from her.

“I didn’t hide myself away from the rest of the world all this time, if that’s what you think. No, I came to my senses eventually. I saw that Jonathan would never commit to me. I saw it wasn’t in him.” Luke thinks of the man in the morgue. Women would throw themselves at a man like that. Never-ending come-ons and propositions, so much
want and desire, so much temptation. How could you expect a man like that to commit to one woman? It was only natural for Lanny to want Jonathan to be faithful, but could you blame the man for disappointing her?

“So you found someone else and fell in love?” Luke tries to keep the hopefulness out of his voice. She laughs again.

“For a man who married in desperation and ended up divorced, you sound like a hopeless romantic. I said I was married, I didn’t say I fell in love.” She twists so that she’s facing away from him again. “That’s not true, exactly. I loved all of my husbands, just not the same way I loved Jonathan.”

“
All
of them? How many times have you been married?” Luke again gets the uncomfortable feeling he had in Dunratty’s, looking at the mussed bed.

“Four times. A girl gets lonely every fifty years or so,” she says, smirking, making fun of herself. “They were all nice, each in their own way. They took care of me. Accepted me for what I am, however much I could share with them.”

These glimpses into her life make him wish for more. “How much did you share with them? Did you tell any of them about Jonathan?”

Lanny tosses her head and shakes out her hair, still hiding her face from him. “I’ve never told anyone the truth about me before, Luke. You’re the only one.”

Is she just saying that for my benefit? Luke wonders. She’s trained herself to know what people want to hear. It’s the kind of skill you have to develop if you’re going to survive for hundreds of years and not be found out. All part of the subtle art of weaving people into your life, binding them to you, getting them to like you, maybe even to love you.

Luke wants to hear her story, to know all about her, but can he trust her to tell him the truth, or is she just manipulating him until they are safe from the police? As Lanny settles back into thoughtful silence, Luke drives on, wondering what will happen when they arrive in Quebec City, if she will disappear and leave him with only her story.

THIRTY-THREE

B
OSTON
, 1819

I
had planned my trip back to St. Andrew with the enthusiasm customary for a funeral. Using a sack of coin from Adair, I booked passage on a cargo ship sailing from Boston to Camden, and from Camden onward, I would travel in a specially hired coach with a driver. The only transportation to and from St. Andrew had traditionally been the provisioner’s wagon, which brought fresh goods for the Watfords’ store twice a year. I planned to arrive in style, showing up in a handsome trap complete with cushions softening its hard benches and curtains over the windows, to let them know I was not the same woman who’d left.

It was early fall, and while Boston was only chilly and damp, the passes on the approach to northern Aroostook County would already have snow. I was surprised to be nostalgic for the snow of St. Andrew, the high, deep drifts and landscapes of unbroken white, the scalloped edges of pine trees peeking out from under thick coats of snow. As a child, I’d look out the frosted windowpanes of my parents’ cabin and watch the wind blow horizontal sprays of snow as fine as dust, and
be grateful to be inside the cabin with the fire and five other bodies keeping me toasty warm.