The Long Way Home

Part I
Alibi Days

One

• Manchester.
• Friday, July 8, 1:30 pm.

Given just two extra seconds, Clare would have made it.

But the light went red. She stood on the brakes and screeched the Buick Riviera to a stop, its front tires on the white stripe. With a roar of engines, a steady torrent of cars began to flood across the West Dixie Highway intersection from her left and her right, one more hurdle between her and home.

Clare Reichert sat back in the luxurious leather bench seat, her pale ringless fingers absently drumming the steering wheel. She was a young woman, 31 that summer, fair of hair, clear of skin, short of stature, soft and pretty. Her gentle looks made her seem less astute and more innocent than she really was.

Tired, though. So tired she felt this warm humid afternoon, as around her raged the pre-weekend exodus of vehicles from metropolitan Manchester. Behind her was a 300-mile stretch of freeway. Ahead of her, just a mile, was home. Home again, after a week on the road.

Her weariness was not the draining, deadening kind she remembered from those long teenage days baling hay on her father's Sun Valley farm. It was, rather, the pleasant residue of a job well done. On this, her fourth tour of her upstate territory, she had hit Port Sydney, LaFayette, St. Joseph, Huntington, Midland, and Covington. She had made a dozen sales calls and written nearly fifty thousand dollars worth of computer leases. I'm starting to make it, she told herself. Seven months into this job and I'm really starting to move the paper. Wait till Ron finds out; he'll be so pleased.

At the thought of Ron, she smiled. But it was not the businesslike smile of an employee for a respected which usually meant feared boss. Rather, it was the warm smile of a young woman thinking about the love of her life. The man that had captured her heart, bewitched her body, instilled in her a longing that had only grown since that night seven months ago. A magical night, during which he had made love to her twice, and declared himself forever hers, and then sent her away.

"There's no choice, Clare," Ron had said quietly on that January night long ago and far away. They had stood naked together at the picture window, looking out over the misty San Benito riverfront. "I've got to get you out of the way for a while."

She had faced him in the dim light and masked her worry with a joke. "Why? Have I been bad?"

He took her in his arms and smiled. "Only in good ways," he said, speaking down from his greater height. "This isn't about you. It's about me. I can't stop thinking about you. I can't keep my hands off you "

"Me either," she answered, touching him where it counted, privately surprised, and more than a little pleased, at her boldness.

He smiled briefly. "That's the problem. We're both good play-actors, but we can't keep it up for much longer. People around Herkules are starting to talk. The way things are going, sooner or later Wendy will find out, and you know what that means."

She had stared at him stubbornly. "I love you," she said, "and you love me. That's all that matters."

He had kissed her. "Feelings are only part of the equation, I'm afraid."

Oh no, she had thought, not this again. "Feelings are all that matter."

"We have to be practical, too."

Meaning money, Clare had thought. Damn. Do we have to talk about this now?

"You know how Wendy is," Ron had said. "Spiteful. Vengeful. She could really hurt us, if I don't handle things right."

"She can't change how we feel about each other."

But Ron was off on one of his tangents. "If I ease her out with a big fat settlement, we'll be okay. But if she finds out about you, she'll go ballistic. She'll challenge the pre-nup, and she'll go after everything I've got including Herkules. I'll spend the next five years in court, and could end up broke. I don't want that. Neither do you."

She had looked up into his hawklike angular face and piercing gray gaze and briefly pressed her soft naked length against his. "All I want," she had whispered into his shoulder, "is to be your wife. Even if we have to start all over."

He had hugged her. "You're young," he had said quietly. "You don't know what starting all over means. Before Herkules, I started two companies, and lost them. I don't think I have it in me to do it all again, I really don't. Do you understand?"

"Yes," she said. Which was not true. Clare had no way of understanding Ron's entrepreneurial drive. What she did understand, as an underpaid clerical of the scrimp/save/squirrel- away school, was the notion of going broke. Her desire to avoid that was strong stronger than it should have been, she thought guiltily, for one who saw herself as idealistic and principled.

Ron had disengaged, put his strong hands on her bare shoulders, and stared down into her eyes. "Then you've got to help me. We can't let Wendy find out about us. The only way to guarantee that is to get you out of the picture for a few months."

"I see," she had whispered. "So are you firing me?"

"Firing you?" he had replied, and laughed. "I'm promoting you."

And that was how Clare Reichert, former Sun Valley farm girl and San Benito secretary, moved some 700 miles north and east to the bright lights and big city of metropolitan Manchester. There she became Herkules Computer Leasing Corporation's sales rep for the newly formed Territory 52.

There had been challenges aplenty.

The first of these more an annoyance than a challenge, really was dealing with questions about the nonstandard spelling of "Herkules". Someone had said that Ron, for whom spelling was not a strong suit, had written it out that way for the printer of his first business card. There it appeared as written, "K" and all. Far from embarrassed (Ron was almost impossible to embarrass), he had kept the spelling, superstitiously crediting that business card with landing him his first big sale. Typical Ron, Clare thought with tolerant affection. But she wished the company would not parade his illiteracy on its logo.

The second challenge was adjusting to the switch from private secretary to field sales rep. Once she had been a clock-watching nine to fiver who worked in one place at a steady pace for just one person. Now she worked variable hours, averaging 60 per week, in many places and with many people. The toughest part of sales work was the rejection she encountered. But she was intelligent and persistent and did not want to let Ron down. So, as the year wheeled slowly from January snow through March mud to June sunshine, she began to succeed and to prosper. She even found herself liking the work, not to mention the new, improved earnings.

The third challenge of life in faraway Manchester was adjusting to life without Ron. At least while she was in San Benito they had been able to maintain clandestine contact. A weekly lunch hour in the company suite at One Palma Sola Place. A monthly evening at a motel out in Glacier Moraine. Excursions on his boat on the Elsinore River. And once, out of desperation, a desk-top paper- flying grapple-gigglegasp in Ron's hideaway office on H Street downtown.

But now their only contact was strictly business. Quarterly sales meetings, during which super-salesman Ron would rev up the troops. Casual chat at trade shows in Vegas and Chicago and New York. The "From Your President" column in Herkules's monthly newsletter, which was in fact ghost-written by Frank Bridgman, Herkules' communications guru. As for non non-business contact, there had been none. No winks, touches, personal phone calls. No email Ron was too, um, "economical" to equip his sales force with laptops, and Clare had never learned to operate one anyway or Hallmark cards, or voice mail.

No contact at all, until three weeks ago, when his letter came.

Clare returned to the present. The cross-street traffic had slowed to a snarly crawl. The light had not even turned yellow from that way yet. She turned up the air conditioner, leaned over, and opened the glove box. The top item was the traffic ticket she had gotten, day before yesterday, for a bad brake light. Underneath that was the item she wanted: Ron's letter. Settling back into position, she flipped the letter open against the steering wheel.

There, under the Herkules letterhead, Ron's childish scrawl half-filled the sheet of water-blue Strathmore bond.

A horn honked from behind. Clare's light was now green. She punched the gas and gunned the Riviera across West Dixie Highway. Tucking Ron's letter back into the glove box with the other junk, she slammed the lid shut as she motored south on Muller Road, leaving the congestion behind as the sloping blacktop narrowed to two lanes and plunged into the woods.

The letter had raised conflicting feelings in her. Its avowal of Ron's longing had relieved her. But it had also rekindled her longstanding unease, for it said nothing about his divorce or their eventual wedding. Her love for Ron notwithstanding, she had always been uncomfortable, felt miscast, in the role of mistress. She felt vaguely guilty, due no doubt to her raising by reverent rural folk. More to the point, she had been around the track once or twice and had come to believe, as a matter of principle, that married men were a bad bet.

But Ron, she told herself yet again, was different. Brilliant, articulate, exciting, spontaneous, intense, physical, vigorous, best of all, unpredictable. If Wendy did not appreciate all those qualities, then he was fair game for a woman who did. To Clare, it was just that simple.

Even so, back in January he had sent her away. His reasons seemed sound, but still she had wondered and worried: Did Ron really love her? Did he still plan to spend his life with her? In all those months, there had been no sign. Not until the letter.

She had immediately rented a room at a small, out of the way residential motel: inexpensive and anonymous. Then she had waited anxiously for Ron to contact her. She had waited, and then waited some more, and as of today she had waited nearly three weeks. Nothing.

Still, Clare was tolerant and patient. Her time would come, she knew it. Who knows, she thought, as home appeared on the horizon: Maybe he is there right now, waiting for me.

She drove past several subdivision entrances and then, just before Power Line Road, turned left into her condo development, called Walnut Forest at Shady Stream. As usual, the sight of the Spanish style buildings nestled among the meticulously landscaped slopes, gleaming in the July sunshine, made her feel a quiet sense of pride and accomplishment. Far cry from my old Oildale efficiency, she thought. Beautiful, in fact. But only temporary. Once Ron, as he put it, "unmarried" Wendy, he would marry Clare, bring her back to San Benito, and they would find a place of their own. It did not have to be a palace. It could be in Oildale, or Ascension Parish, even. Anywhere, as long as Ron was there with her.

Clare's condo was an end unit in a rambling building at the back of the development. She slowed, swung right into her two-car driveway and pressed the switch of the remote garage door opener that was affixed to her visor. The curbside and the driveway were vacant; JoAnne, her housemate, would not be home for several hours. Clare would have time to shower, change, do her reports, and sip a wine spritzer before JoAnne got home. She would also make her weekly call to her widowed father down in New Canaan.

She stopped the car on the driveway as the white garage door hoisted out and up and then snug against the ceiling. To her right, inside the garage, sat her white Chevy Citation. Clare made a mental note to drive it this weekend; it had not been run in several weeks. When she took this job, which came with the company-owned Buick Riviera, she had almost sold the older car. But in the end was too sentimental to let the poor old thing go. Daddy had bought it for her, before sending her off to State Christian College. He had fixed it with his own hands many times, and it had seen her through several rough years of hand-to-mouth living. To her, the car personified her father: sturdy, worn around the edges, reliable, dear.

Clare pulled the Riviera carefully into the garage, shut off the engine, and pressed the remote again to send the garage door back down. Weariness suddenly overcame her again as she put her keys into her purse and groped her pumps back onto her feet. Her lower back ached, her right foot was slightly numb from hours of steady pressure on the gas pedal, and every joint felt rusty. Not a shower, she decided. A bath. A very long, very hot soak, with an icy spritzer on the side. Then her call to Daddy down in New Canaan, followed by dinner. Then, after the inevitable hours of paperwork, real rest at last.

Darkness gained as the garage door ground downward behind her. She waited for the automatic ceiling light to turn on. It did not. Bulb must have gone dead. Damn.

Clare opened the car door and got out. The interior dome light shined weakly through the windows. Outside the car, the darkness was near total. The heat was horrific after hours in the frigid Buick. She reached behind the front seat for her purse and briefcase, then shut the door.

Total blackness now. Clare's throat tightened nervously. Have to replace that bulb first thing, she thought.

She stepped hesitantly, guiding herself by memory toward the door to the condo.

A faint noise from behind froze her.

Then steel gripped her throat, yanking her backward. Her purse and briefcase left her hands and clattered to the concrete floor.

Clare tried to scream.