Lila rolled her eyes in a didn’t-I-tell-you look. She said, “Thanks for the dinner, Bobo. See you in the morning.”

“Yeah, buddy, thanks,” Sammy added. “Next time, I get the check, though.”

“Next time,” I promised.

I watched them walk inside the Inn, Sammy’s arm locked around Lila’s waist.

I did not drive to Margaretville. I went, instead, to Woodstock, to Jean Archer’s home. I turned the car lights off at the driveway and followed the moonlit, silver bed of gravel to the yard. The house was dark. I sat, looking at it. Because it belonged to Jean Archer, it seemed more magnificent than it had before, somehow more imposing.

I turned off the car motor and got out and went to the rock that covered the key. I knew I did not have permission to go into the house, but that did not matter. I wanted to see Amy Lourie’s face again.

I could not risk turning on the house lights, but there was no need for them. The moon funneled in from the windows, throwing dim pools of light across the rooms. I walked cautiously upstairs to Jean Archer’s bedroom and stood in the doorway. The skylights in the roof filtered the moon to a color of dull pewter. The light fell in slats across Jean Archer’s bed and glazed over the painting of the peasant woman. In the light, the woman’s shadowed face looked at me with resignation and sadness. Her eyes asked me to touch her.

Lila knew, I thought. She knew.

I wanted Amy to appear out of Lila’s thin air.

Lila knew.

I had looked for Amy on every visit, waited for her to be there.

And now I was looking at her.

I thought of Carolyn and I wanted to say, “This is wrong.” I knew it was what I should say, but it was not what I believed.

“No,” I said aloud.

I remembered Amy’s warnings about the problems, about the many things that separated us.

“I know,” I had said to her.

“But not now,” she had whispered. “Not now.” And she had pressed close to me. “I want to be with you now,” she had added in a voice so soft I could barely hear her.

The girl who had kissed me, who had rested against me, was the same woman in Jean Archer’s painting.

Carter could ask, but it was not a doppelgänger. There could be no mistake. It was Amy.

CHAPTER

11