Chapter 32

The night and the next day seemed to drag by with infinite slowness, mainly because I had nothing whatever to do with the time. I was on hold until my Internet purchases showed up sometime Wednesday, which was seeming to me eons away, and I had to sit tight until then.

Still worse, I had to keep my secret even from Susan—which wasn't that easy. It had long been my habit to talk difficult problems out with myself, often aloud; my colleagues at work had sometimes found themselves looking at each other askance as I wrestled with conundrums of computer programs and drafted and redrafted code sequences vocally to myself before committing them to my keyboard.

Now, of course, I couldn't even subvocalize, even form my thoughts into coherent words. I had to keep everything below that threshold, to keep it out of my constant companion's awareness.

I was even embarrassed about the reason I couldn't talk to Susan about what I had in mind. Mainly it was because I was pretty sure it was one of those half-baked ideas I sometimes had that never came to fruition. I could well recall too many of those from my past, which I'd been foolish enough to speak about prematurely. Programming A.I., artificial intelligence. Trisecting an angle in geometry. Hell, when I'd been a kid I'd even fooled around with perpetual motion, sure I could get it done where no-one ever had before. And I remembered vividly how foolish, how stupid, I'd felt when I'd, inevitably, failed and had to admit it.

That was a feeling I simply couldn't afford right now. To initiate a move and fail before I'd even got fairly started, especially in front of the woman I loved, would be more of a blow than my always fragile self-esteem could stand. I was already in waters well above my head, with my life recently in dire peril twice—I had no doubt at all that, Cesar Romero's promises notwithstanding, I'd have been dead a split second after handing him the flash drive he was after—and I needed to be at the peak of my game, not enmired in the marshes of self-doubt.

So for now I was keeping my plan firmly under wraps. If the key element, the one I was counting on and around which everything else revolved, proved out, then I could reconsider. I could even abort at that point, with whatever obscure satisfaction I could glean from the fact that my idea was at least viable, and move in another direction. But I needed the confidence that at least a possible resolution could give me.

Monday evening was the nadir for me. With little option I had drinks and dinner with Doug—he and I were the only guests left in the place—and even joined him for an after-dinner digestif. Just one; I firmly begged off when he ordered a refill and seemed ready to continue well into the night. I couldn't afford the let-down. He seemed a perfectly pleasant guy and, when he finally opened up a little from his focus on me, an amusing raconteur of anecdotes about his career as a salesman, but I frankly found that a little of him went a very long way.

However, that was a problem I wasn't going to have again. I'd decided to stick around Tuesday, on the off-chance that one or the other of my on-line vendors might have shipped a day early, and late in the morning—as usual, Doug had missed breakfast—I glanced out the window and saw him walking out to his car with a bag. Apparently he was leaving, which didn't trouble me greatly. But did that leave me the sole remaining guest?

Not really, I found. Mid-afternoon a new arrival showed up—actually a pair of them, both guys. Then another, half an hour later. It was the third car, ten minutes afterwards, that clued me in on why the place had suddenly become so popular; that one was a pickup truck with a gun rack prominent in the rear window. Apparently the place was picking up the slack before skiing took over by doubling in brass as a hunting lodge.

Susan sniffed a bit—"boys and their damn blood sports!" was her comment—but I found quietly that it suited my purposes well. We argued about it a bit; she hated hunting generically, while I was of two minds about it. Hunting for the dinner table, well and good, as I saw it; it culled the herds to prevent overpopulation, it was a lot less cruel than the vagaries of natural selection and winnowing by casual starvation and disease, and the meat went to good use. She reluctantly conceded that point. On the other hand, we shared a distaste for trophy hunting.

Catching a lull between new registrations—by then six vehicles had shown up, each with its complement of hunters—I wandered down to the front desk and inquired. Yes, there were hunting areas around here, though not all that close and not anywhere near the ski lifts.

"Most of the hunting parties go to the places there, but sometimes we take the overflow out of season for us," the girl told me. "They're here 'til Friday." She obligingly got out a map and indentified what was hunting terrain and what was the skiers' preserve. Plenty of separation between them, I noted.

I took the map with me when I left. In a couple of days, I thought, it might come in handy.

For the first time since I'd been at the lodge dinner was offered at staggered hours; you could be seated anywhere between 6:00 and 8:30. On the advice of the girl who took my reservation I opted for late in the shift, 8:00. The hunters, I was told—by now there were more than a dozen in the house—tended to cluster early, since they planned to be up at oh-dark-thirty the next morning to ambush the deer as they foraged their own late-night snacks. The deer had learned they were safer out and about when the sun wasn't up, and when it was illegal to shoot them.