Chapter 17: The Garage

Dane went over the garden wall with his shirt still unbuttoned and landed in a flowerbed.

At the front door, Philip rang the bell twice.

Dane crouched behind the hedge in the rain and heard Iris answer, sleepy and cross, in a voice she must have practiced.

"It's one in the morning, Philip."

"My driver said a man was in your garden."

"A fox. Odette chased it with her cane. Go home."

A long silence.

Then Philip laughed, softly, and said he was sorry, and Dane heard his shoes go away down the steps.

Dane stayed behind the hedge until the car had gone.

He was thirty-four years old, a man who had once guarded a senator, and he was shaking from head to foot with something that was not cold.

He had put his hands on her again.

She had asked him to.

He still could not make the two facts sit in the same room.

In the morning he was in a rented sedan at the end of the street, watching the front of Kellaway House through the wipers.

At nine Daphne came out.

She wore a pale yellow raincoat and carried a gym bag, and she walked fast with her head down.

Dane followed her at a distance, through the Common, into a taxi, and across the river to the Seaport.

She did not go to a gym.

She went into a parking garage under a glass office tower, and took the elevator to the fourth level.

He took the stairs.

Her car was a small white hatchback in the far corner.

She stood at the open trunk with her back to him, lifting up the floor panel over the spare tire.

From underneath she took a brown envelope.

"Hello, Daphne," Dane said.

She spun around with a small cry, and the envelope fell.

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