Watchers

chairs and a stone fireplace helped make this the center of the house.
    There were five other rooms—an enormous living room and a den at the front of the first floor; three bedrooms upstairs—plus one bath down and one
    up. One of the bedrooms was theirs, and one served as Nora’s studio where she had done a little painting since they moved in—and the third was empty, awaiting developments.
    Travis switched on the kitchen lights. Although the house seemed isolated, they were only two hundred yards from the highway, and power poles followed the line of their dirt driveway.
    “I’m having a beer,” Travis said, “You want anything?”
    Einstein padded to his empty water dish, which was in the corner beside his food dish, and scooted it across the floor to the sink.
    They had not expected to be able to afford such a house so soon after fleeing Santa Barbara—especially not when, during their first call to Garrison Dilworth, the attorney informed them that Travis’s bank accounts had, indeed, been frozen. They had been lucky to get the twenty-thousand-dollar check through. Garrison had converted some of both Travis’s and Nora’s funds into eight cashier’s checks as planned, and had sent them to Travis addressed to Mr. Samuel Spencer Hyatt (the new persona), care of the Marin County motel where they had stayed for nearly a week. But also, claiming to have sold Nora’s house for a handsome six-figure price, he had sent another packet of cashier’s checks two days later, to the same motel.
    Speaking with him from a pay phone, Nora had said, “But even if you did sell it, they can’t have paid the money and closed the deal so soon.”
    “No,” Garrison had admitted. “It won’t close for a month. But you need the cash now, so I’m advancing it to you.”
    They had opened two accounts at a bank in Carmel, thirty-odd miles north of where they now lived. They had bought the new pickup, then had taken Garrison’s Mercedes north to the San Francisco airport, leaving it there for him. Heading south again, past Carmel and along the coast, they looked for a house in the Big Sur area. When they had found this one, they had been able to pay cash for it. It was wiser to buy than rent, and it was wiser to pay cash rather than finance the house, for fewer questions needed to be answered.
    Travis was sure their ID would stand up, but he saw no reason to test the quality of Van Dyne’s papers until necessary. Besides, after buying a house, they were more respectable; the purchase added substance to their new identities.
    While Travis got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator, twisted off the cap, took a long swallow, then filled Einstein’s dish with water, the retriever went to the walk-in pantry. The door was ajar, as always, and the dog opened it all the way. He put one paw on a pedal that Travis had rigged for him just inside the pantry door, and the light came on in there.
    In addition to shelves of canned and bottled goods, the huge pantry contained a complex gadget that Travis and Nora had built to facilitate communication with the dog. The device stood against the rear wall: twenty-eight one-inch-square tubes made of Lucite, lined up side by side in a wooden frame; each tube was eighteen inches tall, open at the top, and fitted with a pedal-release valve at the bottom. In the first twenty-six tubes were stacked lettered tiles from six Scrabble games, so Einstein would have enough letters
    to be able to form long messages. On the front of each tube was a hand-drawn letter that showed what it contained; A, B, C, D, and so on. The last two tubes held blank game tiles on which Travis had carved commas—or apostrophes—and question marks. (They’d decided they could figure where the periods were supposed to go.) Einstein was able to dispense letters from the tubes by stepping on the pedals, then could use his nose to form the tiles into words on the pantry floor. They had chosen to put the device in there, out of sight, so they would not be required to explain it to neighbors who might drop in unexpectedly.
    As Einstein busily pumped pedals and clicked tiles against one another, Travis carried his beer and the dog’s water dish out to the front porch, where they would sit and wait for Nora. By the time he came back, Einstein had finished forming a message.
    COULD I HAVE SOME HAMBURGER? OR THREE WEENIES?
    Travis said, “I’m going to have lunch with Nora when she gets home. Don’t YOU want to wait and