In Cold Pursuit
unencumbered, and technically he was, his wife, mother of their two children, having divorced him on the grounds of abandonment. He was a known user of drugs. He had also served a prison term for aggravated assault.The Actons knew that their only child had a formidable will, but they had assumed that the shock of discovery would offset Jenny’s rage at an action she regarded as unforgivable. They were wrong. Beardsley removed himself from the scene, or appeared to, and Jenny virtually stopped eating. Again, her parents regarded this as being as self-correcting as a child’s vengefully held breath, and again they were mistaken. While they watched helplessly, her body accustomed itself to a glass of orange juice for breakfast, a half-grapefruit for lunch, a thin slice of meat for dinner.
When she had lost seventeen pounds and her elbows were the widest part of her arms, she went docilely enough to a doctor, who recommended psychiatry. Jenny refused; from the mere fact of diet drinks when she was thirsty, it seemed evident that she had now embarked on a dangerous love affair with her own gauntness.
A new doctor was tried, but he and his predecessor could not agree as to whether this was true anorexia nervosa or, as so often happened in medicine, a close and deluding resemblance. As Jenny’s hostility toward her father was implacable under a surface civility—she suspected rightly that he had been the moving force in having Beardsley investigated—the next best choice was to remove her from the battlefield.
The Actons considered their nearby relatives and a few close friends, but they were all too old, or had sufficient problems of their own, or viewed Jenny’s behavior with such severity that it was doubtful whether any good could be accomplished. Except for Mary Vaughan, whose twenty-six was not so very far removed from Jenny’s eighteen. She had met Jenny on occasional trips East for family weddings and funerals, so that she would not be a complete stranger, and Santa Fe would be a total change from New York.
Mary had realized that any rehabilitation would be a considerable challenge—not unlike walking on water, she thought when she met her cousin at the airport—but she had left her job and she had the time to be friendly chauffeur and cunning cook. She made no mention of Brian Beardsley; if Jenny wanted opinions or advice she would ask for them, and until then either was useless. She prepared dishes like eggs Benedict and chicken Tetrazzini and casseroles with calories numbering in the thousands, and at the end of this first week Jenny’s weight had stayed stable and Mary had gained two pounds.
. . . I’ll swim night and day in Juarez, she thought, and turned over and went finally to sleep. But her dreams were not pleasant—Al Trecino was in one of them, bearing down on her in his fisherman’s sweater—and when, at some unnameable hour, she heard what might have been a car and then the imperative barking of a number of neighborhood dogs, she got up and closed and locked her low-set windows on the chilly, rain-smelling air.
In the morning, it was a minor annoyance to discover that for the third time in the last two weeks a Great Dane puppy newly introduced down the road had made off with her newspaper. He was an engaging animal, frequently not answering to the name of Samuel, and Mary had not been able to bring herself to the point of complaining and possibly getting him tied up. When Jenny, who liked to do the Jumble, came back from her fruitless search and said, “Can we get a paper on the way?” Mary vaguely said yes, if they saw a place, although she had no real intention of stopping for anything once they were under way.
Books, sandwiches to eat in the car as a six-hour drive did not allow for a delaying restaurant lunch even if a restaurant existed without long detours, cold drinks to be nestled in ice in a styrofoam cooler. Mary found herself infected by a superstitious need to hurry, like a burglar knowing that the return of the homeowners was imminent, and wasn’t helped by the fact that Jenny had reverted to her detached state and was doing none of the running around. She sat leafing through a magazine in the living room; somehow even her long black hair looked bored.
“Would you take the bags out to the car,” said Mary a little briskly, “while I lock up?”
She had considered and decided against telephoning either the Taylors or the Ulibarris, who were her closest neighbors in this fairly isolated area, with the false information that she would be in Palo Alto for a month. When Brian Beardsley came to the house, and Mary was increasingly sure that he would, it seemed somehow wiser for him to be confronted with a blank wall.
Last check: stove off, ashtrays innocent, no faucets dripping. She had already arranged to have the newspaper suspended. Mary locked the front door, carried the books and sandwiches to the car where Jenny was waiting, got in, switched on the ignition. Fifty yards down the road, almost invisible in a weaving of tree shadows, a blue car also came to life. The man in it, grainy-eyed from watching, put the car into gear.
3
...HE had stared, thunder-struck, at the spindlelegged girl who came out of the house at seven-thirty, wind tugging at the straight dark hair that fell well below her shoulders as she began to saunter along the road-edge, head bent, obviously looking for something.
Had that eternity of hours been for nothing? Had shock and pain . . . ?
No. He refused to be wrong, and everything else fitted. He sat rigid in his nest of shadows, watching and listening, forcing this new factor into place. It wasn’t difficult. The woman he was going to execute lived alone—he knew that—and she had listened to the late news, become afraid to spend the night by herself,