1
The day Thad Beaumont's week of grace ended felt more like a day in late July than one in the third week of June. Thad drove the eighteen miles to the University of Maine under a sky the color of hazy chrome, the air-conditioner in the Suburban going full blast in spite of the havoc it wreaked on the gas mileage. There was a dark brown Plymouth behind him. It never got closer than two car-lengths and never dropped back farther than five. It rarely allowed another car to come between itself and Thad's Suburban; if one did happen to ease its way into the two-car parade at an intersection or the school-zone in Veazie, the brown Plymouth passed quickly . . . and if this didn't look almost immediately feasible, one of Thad's guardians would pull the cover off the blue bubble on the dashboard. A few flashes from that would do the trick. Thad drove mostly with his right hand, using his left only when he absolutely had to. The hand was better now, but it still hurt like hell if he bent or flexed it too ruthlessly, and he found himself counting down the last few minutes of the last hour before he could swallow another Percodan. Liz hadn't wanted him to go up to the University today, and the state police assigned to the Beaumonts hadn't wanted him to, either. For the state boys, the issue was simple: they hadn't wanted to split their watch team. With Liz, things were a little more complex. What she talked about was his hand; he might open the wound trying to drive, she said. What was in her eyes was
quite different. Her eyes had been full of George Stark. Just what in the hell do you have to go up to the shop for today, anyway? she had wanted to know - and this was a question he had had to prepare himself for, because the semester was over, had been for some time now, and he wasn't teaching any summer classes. What he'd settled on, finally, were the Honors folders.
Sixty students had applied for Eh-7A, the Department's Honors course in creative writing. This was over twice the number that had applied for the previous fall semester's Honors writing course, but (elementary, my dear Watson) last fall the world - including that part of it majoring in English at the University of Maine - had not known that boring old Thad Beaumont also just happened to be funky George Stark.
So he had told Liz that be wanted to pull those files and start going through them, winnowing the sixty applicants down to fifteen students - the maximum he could take on (and probably fourteen more than he could actually teach) in a creative writing course. She had, of course, wanted to know why he couldn't put it off, at least until July, and had reminded him (also of course) that he had put it off until mid-August the year before. He had gone back to the big leap in applications, then added virtuously that he didn't want last summer's laziness to become a habit.
At last she had stopped protesting - not because his arguments had convinced her, he thought, but because she could see he meant to go, no matter what. And she knew as well as he did that they would have to start going out again, sooner or later - hiding in the house until someone.killed or collared George Stark wasn't a very palatable option. But her eyes had still been full of a dull, questioning fear.
Thad had kissed her and the twins and left quickly. She looked as if she might start crying soon, and if he was still home when she did that, he would stay home. It wasn't the Honors folders, of course.
It was the deadline.
He had awakened this morning full of his own dull fear, a feeling as unpleasant as a belly cramp. George Stark had called on the evening of June 10th and had given him a week to get going on the novel about the armored-car heist. Thad had still done nothing about starting . . . although he saw how the book could go more clearly with each passing day. He had even dreamed about it a couple of times. It made a nice break from touring his own deserted house in his sleep and having things explode when he touched them. But this morning his first thought had been, The deadline. I'm over the deadline.
That meant it was time to talk to George again, as little as he wanted to do that. It was time to find out just how angry George was. Well . . . he supposed he knew the answer to that one. But it was just possible that, if he was very angry, out-of-control angry, and if Thad could goad him until he was all the way out of control, foxy old George might just make a mistake and let something slip.