I had the recorder tucked into my pocket just in case.

“Not bad traffic,” I said as we headed up the interstate.

Jan turned slightly sideways in her seat, not an easy thing to do in the Jetta. She alternated looking at me, the scenery, the road behind us.

“There’s something I should tell you,” she said.

I suddenly got that feeling again, the one I’d had in the restaurant. “What?” I said.

“Something… I did,” she said.

“What did you do?”

“Actually, it’s more like something I didn’t do,” she said, looking out the rear window, then back out the front.

“Jan, tell me what’s going on,” I said.

“You know that day we took a drive in the country?”

I shook my head. “We do that a lot.”

“I can’t even remember the name of the road, but it’s a place I can find, you know? Like, make a right turn at the white house, keep on going until you go past the red barn, that kind of thing?”

“You’ve always been able to find your way around,” I said. “You just don’t have much of a memory for street names or road numbers.”

“That’s right,” she said. “So I don’t know if I can even tell you where I was, I mean, the road or anything. But you know that back road, it’s well paved but it’s out in the country and it doesn’t get a lot of traffic? On the way to the garden center?”

That narrowed it down a bit.

“And you come up to this bridge? You know where the road narrows a bit to go over it, and even though there’s still a line down the middle, if there’s a truck coming the other way you slow down and let it go through first?”

Now I knew exactly where she was talking about.

“And it goes over the river there, and the water’s moving really fast over the rocks?”

I nodded.

Jan glanced out the back window again, then looked at me. “So I drove up there the other day, parked the car, and I walked out to the middle of the bridge.”

I don’t want to hear this.

“I stood there for the longest time,” Jan said. “I thought about what it would be like to jump, wondered if a person could survive a fall like that. It’s not all that far, but the rocks, they’re pretty jagged down there. And then I thought, if I’m going to jump off a bridge, I should just use the one that goes over Promise Falls. Remember you told me that story, about the student who did that a few years ago?”

“Jan,” I said.

“I stood up on the railing-it’s made of concrete and it’s quite wide. I stood there for a good thirty seconds, I’m guessing, and then climbed back down.”

I swallowed. My mouth was very dry. “Why?” I asked. “What made you not do it?”

Because she loves us. Because she couldn’t imagine leaving Ethan and me behind.

She smiled. “There was a car coming. A farmer’s truck, actually. I didn’t want to do it in front of anyone, and by the time I was back down, the moment had passed.”

I have to take her to a hospital. I need to turn around and drive her to a hospital and have her checked in. That’s what I need to do.

“Well,” I said, trying to conceal my alarm, “it’s a good thing that truck came along.”

“Yeah,” she said, and smiled, like what she’d told me was no big deal. Just something she’d thought about, and then the moment had passed.

I asked, “What did the doctor say when you told him about this?”

“Oh, this happened since I saw him,” she said offhandedly. She reached out and touched my arm. “But you don’t have to worry. I feel good today. And I feel good about tomorrow, about going to Five Mountains.”

That was supposed to be reassuring? So what if she felt good right now? What about an hour from now? What about tomorrow?

“There’s something else,” Jan said.

I gave her a look that said, “What?”

“It might be my imagination,” she said, glancing out the rear window again, “but I think that blue car back there has been following us ever since we left our place.”

SIX

It was maybe a quarter of a mile behind us, too far to be sure what make of car it was, definitely too far to read a license plate. But it was some kind of American sedan, General Motors or Ford, in dark blue, with tinted windows.

“It’s been following us since we left?” I said.

“I’m not positive,” Jan said. “It does kind of look like a million other cars. Maybe there was one blue car behind us when we were driving out of Promise Falls, and that’s a different blue car.”

I was doing just under seventy miles per hour, and eased up slightly on the accelerator, letting the car coast down to just over sixty. I wanted to see whether the other car would pull into the outside lane and pass us.

A silver minivan coming up on the blue car’s tail moved out and passed it, then slid into the long space between us.

“I can’t quite see it,” I said, glancing at both my side and rearview mirrors, while not taking my eyes off the road ahead. Even slowing down, we were gaining on a transport truck.

Jan was about to turn around in her seat but I told her not to. “If someone’s following us, I don’t want them to know we’ve spotted them.”

Aren’t they going to figure that out since we’ve slowed down?”

“I’ve only slowed a little. If he’s on cruise control or something, he’s going to catch up to us pretty soon.”

The van had moved back into the passing lane and whipped past us and the truck ahead. I looked in the mirror. The blue car loomed larger there, and I could see now that it was a Buick with what appeared to be New York plates, although the numbers were not distinct, as the plate was dirty. “He’s catching up,” I said.

“So maybe it’s nothing,” Jan said, sounding slightly relieved. “And it is a pretty long highway, without that many exits. It’s not like he can just turn off anywhere.”

I put on my blinker to move over a lane. Slowly we overtook the truck.

“That’s true,” I said, but I wasn’t feeling any less tense. I was puzzling out the implications if in fact the blue car was tailing us.

It would seem to indicate that someone knew I was meeting with this anonymous source. I couldn’t think of any other possible reason why anyone would want to follow me.

And if someone was tailing me to this rendezvous, it meant, in all likelihood, that the email the woman had sent me had been intercepted, found, something. Maybe it had been found on her computer. Or she’d told someone she was going to meet with a reporter.

Could this be a setup? But if so, who was doing it? Reeves? Sebastian? What would be the point of that?

I passed the truck, moved back into the right lane. Now I couldn’t see the car at all, and I had to maintain my speed or the truck was going to have to pull out and pass me. Gradually, I put some distance between the truck and us.

Jan was checking the mirror on her door. “I don’t see him,” she said. “You know what? I think-you’re going to love this-maybe I’m just a bit paranoid today. God knows, with everything else I’ve been feeling, that might actually make sense.”

Which was worse? To find out we were being followed, or that Jan, already troubled with on-again, off-again depression, was starting to think people were following her?

The blue car passed the truck, moved in front of it.

“He’s back,” I said.

“Why don’t you speed up a bit,” Jan suggested. “See if he does the same.”

I eased the car back up to seventy. Gradually, the blue car shrank in my rearview mirror.

“He’s not speeding up,” Jan said. “You see? It’s just me losing a few more marbles. You can relax.”

By the time we got off at the Lake George exit, I’d stopped checking my mirror every five seconds. The car was probably back there, but it had fallen from sight. Jan was visibly relieved.

It was 4:45 p.m., and my sense of the Google map I’d printed out before we’d left told me we were only five minutes away from Ted’s Lake-view General Store. We wound our way up 9 North. I wasn’t pushing it. I didn’t want to arrive too early, and I didn’t want to somehow speed past Ted’s without seeing it.