“Only a few months.”

“Did you know then that maybe …”

“No, no. I loved her then.”

“That’s sad.”

Liddon shrugged. “Life.”

“You do a lot of pro bono work.”

“I try to give what time I can.”

“So you have others like me?”

“A couple. If I need them.”

“Well, I want you to know I’m grateful.”

“Thank you, Rudy.”

“Not just for back then, but for this opportunity, too.”

“I know you’re meticulous. Now I better be going.” He took two steps across the green, toward the woods, then turned to look once more at the groundskeeper. “I’m a little curious, too.”

“About what?”

“Since Judy Hardy, have you …”

“Yes.”

“Often?” Liddon asked.

“I make myself wait between.”

“Is it difficult—waiting?”

“Yes. But then it’s sweeter when I do one.”

“How long is the wait?”

“Six months. Eight.”

“Have you ever come under suspicion again?”

“No. And I never will.”

“You’re a smart and careful man. That’s why I took your case.”

“Besides, people like me,” said Neems.

“Yes. They do. That’s always a plus.”

Liddon continued across the green, across the rough, to the footpath through the woods. He was two hundred yards from the most terrifying encounter of his life.

Forty

Henry.”

The dream was a montage of action close-ups: long bare limbs thrashing, blond hair tossing, red-nailed hands clutching with desire and striking out defensively, ripe mouth open in rapture but then shaping a silent scream of sublime terror.

As he woke, Henry Rouvroy thought he heard someone whispering his name.

“Henry.”

In sleep, he had slid onto his side. Now he sat up, his back against the closet wall.

The shotgun. He had let go of it. He fumbled in the dark, found the 20-gauge.

More likely than not, he dreamed the voice. He listened but heard nothing.

Beyond the open door, the bedroom was brighter than when he had taken up his post in the closet, but it wasn’t as bright as it would have been with a lamp on.

Dawn had come. Morning sun seeped around the edges of the closed draperies.

Wincing, flexing his left foot to defeat a cramp, Henry rose and moved cautiously to the doorway.

Again he listened. After a silence, he heard the thinnest of whistles—and his heart clenched for a moment, until he realized that the sound was his own flatulence.

Sausage, cheese, and a plebeian bread for dinner had been a mistake, a shock to the system.

Less than a day on the farm, and already his standards and conduct had begun to deteriorate. One could not overestimate the dangerous effects that a rustic way of life could have on a man’s personality and intellect, even after he had been prepared in the finest private schools and polished to a high finish at Harvard. Without the daily stimulation of life in a big city, without continuous wit-sharpening interaction with other well-educated and sophisticated people, he might become countrified, coarse, uncouth. The Times probably wasn’t distributed in this benighted region’s one-horse hamlets and jerkwaters, and the illiterate inbred clerk at the newsstand no doubt sold Vanity Fair in a plain brown wrapper.

While Henry listened to his oscillating butt whistle as it diminished to a final peep, he realized that when he stocked the potato cellar and the converted horse stalls with women, he should attempt to find at least one who had gone away to the right schools and returned to this intellectual wasteland for whatever misguided reasons. If he couldn’t find one who was witty and sexy, he might be wise to imprison a plain woman who was a good conversationalist with refined tastes, strictly for the purpose of honing his intellect and maintaining his clarified and supreme aesthetics.

The unfortunate consequences of his rectal recital prevented Henry from remaining in the closet. In need of fresh air, he decided that if his name had been spoken, the whisperer had been a figure in his dream, and he moved into the bedroom.

When he switched on the ceiling light, he focused at once on the bed. The covers seemed to drape exactly as he had arranged them, and the shape of the fake sleeper was as he designed it.

If someone had taken the place of the dummy, Henry would have been murdered while he slept. His fear had been irrational.

Nevertheless, he rounded the foot of the bed to stand over the blanketed form. Holding the shotgun in both hands, with a finger on the trigger, he used the barrel to hook the bedclothes and flip them back from whatever they concealed.

Having been hostage to his absurd expectations, his breath blew free of him in a gust of relief.

He pulled the draperies back from the windows and let the early light into the room. He would no longer cower in closets. With the new day, he would follow a fresh strategy. Instead of reacting, he would act, and take the fight to his tormentor.