"Honey," he said, "I heard those guys talk, and I know they meant it, and I know they're coming back, and I know they're serious."

"They're bozos," she said, and filled her mouth with french fries.

He paused, a fish finger in midair. "Why do you keep saying that?"

"They pranced through here," she reminded him, "the four of them, looking all over for just the right place to hide their precious chess set, and they never even saw us."

"Well, neither do those maintenance guys. We're too smart for them, that's all. Just last week the maintenance guys came through and we've been here for months now and they still don't know we're here."

These were two guys who drove up the first Friday of every month to check the house, flush the toilets, check the smoke alarms, that kind of thing. They were easy to evade, and so Brady and Nessa evaded them.

The very point she now made. "We know they're coming," she said. "They're not searching the place, they're just doing their rounds. Those other bozos suddenly showed up when we didn't know they were coming, they went all through the house with us underfoot—"

"They never went upstairs."

"They went all over downstairs, Brady, and they never even got a glimpse of us, and you say they're serious?"

"They'll be back," he insisted.

"Not this winter," she insisted right back. "And I don't want to still be here next spring."

"Where do you want to be?"

She looked at him. It was a disquieting look, and it went on quite a long while, during which she consumed most of the rest of the greasy food on her plate. He instinctively felt he shouldn't speak during this examination, shouldn't do anything but let her work out her own thought processes inside her own head. He had no idea why she was so discontented with their paradise — she hadn't been at first — but if he just kept very quiet and very attentive, maybe this whole thing would blow over and they'd get back to the way things used to be. Having fun. Not worrying about anything. Not nagging people all the time.

She licked grease from her fingers. They never could remember napkins, so she rubbed her fingers down the leg of her jeans. She said, "I want to go home."

"What?"

"Not right away," she said.

"Wha, wha, we, you, I—"

"But I want to see something first, be somewhere, have things going on around me."

"We, we—"

"I think," she said, "I'd like to go south first, maybe down to Florida. Then we can circle back and head for home."

"Nebraska? Nessa? Numbnuts, Nebraska?"

"I miss all the kids," Nessa said.

"No, you don't," Brady told her. "Those were the bozos. You don't miss those morons any more than I do."

"I miss something," she insisted. "But anyway, we've got to leave here. I will not be snowed in on this mountain, so we just have to go, that's all."

Being reasonable, he said, "How? We don't have any money."

"We'll steal things from here," she said. "Things we can sell to pawnshops. Things like mantel clocks and, and toaster ovens. We'll leave here while we can still get out to the main road, and drive south until we get warm, and then maybe in the spring we'll drive by home again and just look at it, just see what it looks like after we've been away."

"In the world, you mean."

She looked around the big empty dining room. "This isn't the world, Brady," she said.

In the spring, he thought, I'll come back here, the chess set will be on the table where they said, and I'll see it because I know the secret. So for now, let's just keep Nessa happy.

"Okay," he said. "We'll drive south. We'll drive to Florida. We can start tomorrow morning."

"Good." Nessa looked comfortably around at the table. "So at least," she said, "we won't have to wash these plates."

It was beside the pool at a motel in Jacksonville, Florida, that they got into conversation with the advance man for an alternative rock band on tour that would be playing in town that weekend. "Come by the room after lunch, I'll give you a couple ducats," he said, and they thanked him, and he grinned and walked off, hairy shoulders, pool water glistening in his beard and ponytail.

A little later Nessa was ready to leave the pool, but Brady was enjoying himself, mostly looking at college girls on spring break, so he said, "I'll just stick around here a little longer." If he wasn't getting as much as he used to from Nessa, at least he could look at these girls, maybe sneak off with one at some point.

But nothing happened, as he'd more or less realized it wouldn't, so an hour later he went back to the room and Nessa wasn't there. Neither was her little suitcase, nor the cash from his wallet.

Brady never saw Nessa again. Without her, he made his circuitous way back home to Numbnuts, was forgiven, got a job in Starbucks, and was a good boy the rest of his life. There came a time when he never even thought about Nessa any more, but still, every once in a while, he did wonder: Whatever happened to that chess set?

PART TWO

Pawn's Revenge

33

FIONA HAD A window. She had a window just to the right of her reproduction Empire desk here on the upper floor of Livia Northwood Wheeler's duplex apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies, and she never tired of looking out her window at the sweep of Central Park down below, not even when it was snowing, which it was doing right now. Not a heavy snow like those of January and February, turning the world white and thick and hard to move around in, this was a tentative March snow, the snow of a season that knows its end is near, a mere dusting of white to freshen the mounds of old snow gathered beneath the trees and against the low stone wall that separated the park from Fifth Avenue.

Fiona's job as Livia Northwood Wheeler's personal assistant was interesting in its diversity, but it did leave time for gazing out the window at the park, imagining what the view would be when they came to spring and then to summer. When she wasn't park-gazing, though, there was enough to keep her busy in Mrs. Wheeler's affairs, which were many and varied and mostly uncoordinated.

Mrs. W (as she preferred to be called by the staff) was, for instance, on the boards of many of the city's organizations, as well as a director of a mind-boggling array of corporations. Beyond that, she was a tireless litigant, involved in many more lawsuits than merely those involving her immediate family. Solo, or as a very active member of a class, she was at the moment suing automobile manufacturers, aspirin makers, television networks, department stores, airlines, law firms that had previously represented her, and an array of ex-employees, including two former personal assistants.

While passionately involved in every one of these matters, Mrs. W was not at all coordinated or methodical and never knew exactly where she was in any ongoing concern, whom she owed, who owed her, and where and when the meeting was supposed to take place. She really needed a personal assistant.

And Fiona was perfect for the job. She was calm, she had no ax to grind, and she had a natural love for detail. Particularly for all the more reprehensible details of Mrs. W's busy life, the double-dealing and chicanery, the stories behind all the lawsuits and all the feuds and all the shifting loyalties among Mrs. W's many rich-lady friends. And, just to make Fiona's life complete, Mrs. W was writing an autobiography!

Talk about history in the raw. Mrs. W had total recall of every slight she'd ever suffered, every snub, every shortchanging, every encounter in which the other party had turned out to be even more grasping, shrewder, and more untrustworthy than she was. She dictated all these steaming memories into a tape recorder in spurts of venom, which Lucy Leebald, Mrs. W's current secretary, had to type out into neat manuscript.