Meet on Friday? she wrote.
I can do that, Ethan wrote back.
Caroline: It’s Halloween Weekend
Ethan: Is that a big weekend for you? Should we cancel?
Caroline: It’s a very big weekend for my students. Lots of sexy outfits.
Ethan: You invited to a party?
Caroline: Always. One of my colleagues always has something on the Saturday night around Halloween.
Ethan: Should we make it another weekend
Caroline: God, no. Seeing you will mean I don’t have to think about a costume.
Ethan: Slutty Sylvia Plath
Caroline: I did that two years ago. People would remember. What about you? Party?
Ethan: There’s a party I could go to but I’d much rather go to Illinois Caroline: I’m glad. What was going to be your costume?
Ethan: Down-and-out rock star. Same costume every year
They texted back and forth for another hour and by the end of it, Ethan had booked two nights at the cabin for the following Friday and Saturday nights.
Caroline got into bed and tried not to worry about seeing Ethan, and what he’d expect, and what it might feel like to be with him. Instead she worried about who she’d get to watch Estrella and Fable, and she worried about the dangers of traveling to a place that would put her and Ethan together, considering they were both on someone’s kill list. Maybe it was stupid to even attempt to get together. But part of her didn’t care, or at least didn’t care enough. The feeling she had when she was talking with Ethan, or even emailing or texting him, was so intense, so freeing, that she needed to see if that feeling would persist when they were face-to-face. She sometimes wondered if she’d ever truly been in love before. Her only serious boyfriend had been Alec Gresham, whom she’d met at Oxford, when she was there for her Fulbright. He’d moved to America for two years to be with her as she completed a PhD in Ithaca, and by the end of his stay, they had felt more like best friends than lovers. No, that wasn’t true. She loved him then, and she still loved him, in a way. But she had never felt about him the way she suddenly now felt about Ethan. A quote from Sense and Sensibility kept running through her head: “It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.” Was that what Ethan and she had—a disposition? Or maybe it was only their circumstance, but she needed to find out one way or another.
The next morning she talked to Maeve, an adjunct and fellow feline lover she’d gotten to know, and Maeve agreed to take care of her cats over the weekend （“I might just steal them from you”） and then she talked with Officer Hanley, who was in charge of her police protection detail. Officer Hanley told her that she’d arrange to have police officers posted outside of the Rolling Brook Cabins in Illinois, that she’d get back to her with details. At the end of the phone conversation, Liz said, “That’s a long way to go for a booty call,” and punctuated the sentence, as she often did, with a loud laugh.
“Yeah, it is,” Caroline said, resisting the urge to tell her it wasn’t exactly a booty call, even though she kind of knew it was.
5
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 5:33 P.M.
Jack Radebaugh made the phone call from the comfortable bed in his high-end hotel room. There were two rings, and then an answer. “Ellen Mercer here.”
“Agent Mercer, hi. This is Jack Radebaugh. I spoke with you after—”
“Hi Jack, I know who you are. How are you?”
“I’m fine. Everything is fine. But I remembered you telling me that if I thought of anything, of any possible connection …”
“Right.”
“Well, the other names on the list are still not familiar to me, but I did do some googling, actually, and I read that Frank Hopkins owned the Windward Resort. Is that true?”
“It is.”
“Well, unless I’m mistaken, I’m pretty sure that I stayed at the Windward Resort. It was in Kennewick, Maine, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“This was about a thousand years ago, when I was eleven. I was there with my family for most of that summer.”
“So do you remember Frank Hopkins?” the agent said.
“No. I mean, I hardly think he’d have been running the resort in 1956.”
“Actually, he was there in 1956. His parents ran the resort before he did, and he lived there his whole life, as far as we know.”
“Oh.”