felt vaguely guilty reading it, even ashamed. Yes, he was spying on Laura, and, yes, to uncover a mystery in her, and maybe he,d hoped that she was something so exceptional that she could accept him for what he was.
But this was too much.
He thought of those two little kids in the house in San Francisco, nestled together in that bed. He felt a secret exultation that he,d saved them, and a deep resentment that he hadn,t been there in time to save the mother. He wondered where those little kids were now.
No wonder Laura had come home to disappear into the California forest. The L. J. Dennys website was three years old. She,d probably taken care of her elderly father. And then he,d left her, inevitably, like all the rest.
A terrible sadness for Laura settled over Reuben. I,m ashamed, ashamed that I want you and that it sustains me to think, just to think, that because of all you,ve lost, you might love me.
He could not conceive of being that alone, no matter what he was going through even now. In fact, the new isolation he was experiencing was driving him crazy.
But even in this, he was surrounded by love - intimately connected to Grace and Phil and, of course, his beloved brother, Jim. He had Celeste still, who would do anything for him, and Mort, his true friend. He had the warm hub of the Russian Hill house and the great gang of friends drawn perpetually into the family circle by all its vibrant members. And Rosy, beloved Rosy. Even Phil,s tiresome professor friends were a staple of Reuben,s life, like so many gracious old uncles and aunts.
He thought of Laura and that small house on the edge of the wood. He tried to assess what it would mean to marry, and then lose your entire family. Unspeakable pain.
Now a life like that, he figured, could make one tentative and fearful perhaps. Or it could make you remarkably strong, and what people called philosophical - and fiercely independent. Maybe it could make you careless of your own life, indifferent to danger, and determined to live exactly as you pleased.
Reuben knew a dozen other ways to find out information about Laura - credit score, car registration, personal net worth - but that simply wasn,t fair. In fact, it was obscene. However, there was one more tiny item that he did want, and that was her address, and he found that quickly enough. The house in which she lived had been the subject of a couple of articles. It had belonged to her grandfather, Harper Dennys, and was quite literally grandfathered; no one could have built such a house so deep into the protected forest area today.
He wandered outside and walked around the small motel. The rain was a drizzle. It would be easy after dark to slip out of his room and go up the wooded slope and over the summit and into the thickly forested hills of Mill Valley. From there it would be simple to get to Muir Woods.
Very likely no one was looking for him here now. After all, he had only hours ago killed a man in San Francisco.
That is, nobody was looking for him here unless Laura J. Dennys had told the authorities what happened.
Could she have done that? And would they have believed a word of it?
He didn,t know. He couldn,t imagine her telling anyone.
If there was a television in that small house, if there were newspapers delivered to the door, or brought home from the grocery store in town, then she had to know what had been happening.
Maybe she understood that the Wild Man of the Wood would rather die than bring harm to her - unless harm was his love for her, and his near-mad desire to see her again.
Just before dark, Reuben hit a store for some cheap clothes that actually fit him, clean underwear and socks and such, and stowed all this in a bag that would stay permanently in the Porsche. He was sick of roaming around in the oversized hoodie and trench coat. But he didn,t bother to change now.
As the sun set, he drove into Mill Valley in a thin noiseless rain, and up Panoramic Highway till he found Laura,s house - a small gray-shingled cottage way back from the road, scarcely visible for the trees that surrounded it.
He drove past it and found a small gulley in which to hide the Porsche, and there inside