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need a gun for that to be a shock.”
    “I’m trying to do my job,” Marta said, with a pained expression. “In this instance I was a few feet on the wrong side of the property line, which is rare. Then you detected me, also rare. I’m like a commando: I’m in, I’m out. Anyway, all that’s beside the point. How often is he home?”
    “As often as he can be.”
    “Don’t you miss him when he’s gone?”
    “What do you think?” Jane snapped. Marta’s eyebrows rose. She added more calmly, “Some times are worse than others, when someone is away, when you’re missing them.”
    “Don’t you worry about the women he’s working with? They’re beautiful—he’s thrown together with them—you’re apart. Bad combination.”
    “I trust him.”
    “Oh.” Marta put a lot of expression in the word. She appeared to be thinking over what Jane had said. “Do you read the tabloids?”
    “No.”
    “You’ve heard the rumors about his sexuality, though.”
    “Your point is?”
    “You never thought he was gay?”
    “Uh, no.”
    “And the rumors about the other women?”
    Silence.
    “What are you referring to exactly?”
    “Lies get printed all the time, of course. I’m in the business, and I can tell you first hand—but I just wanted you to have a chance to respond to rumors, put them to rest.”
    “You’re saying there are rumors about him now? Since we’ve been married? Recently?”
    “Of course. It goes with the territory.” Marta hesitated.
    “What?”
    “Let’s get back to what we were talking about earlier,” Marta said. “You were telling me about being on the set of Bird in the Hand, and how you fell in love.”

 
     
     
     
    CHAPTER FOUR
     
    M ARTA SAID SHE was exhausted and asked to take a quick nap. Jane found herself agreeing. She cleaned up the small meal she had prepared for the two of them. Helping the woman to the house, nursing her wounded ankle, bargaining for the pictures, and the interview had taken some time. It would have been much easier to call the police.
    She wandered into the living room and looked out the front window, as if there might be another photographer lurking in the shrubbery. The empty fields in front of the house, divided by the front drive, looked bleak in the afternoon light. She felt the outside gloom infecting her mood. Had she done the right thing?
    The interview had gone better than expected. She couldn’t have betrayed so very much with her careful answers. As she replayed the last couple of hours in her head, though, she wasn’t so certain. How perceptive might a woman be, this Marta, who had maneuvered herself into the unlikely position to get such an interview? 
    When Jane woke up this morning no one could have convinced her she would be talking to a member of the press for two hours that day, spilling her guts about her relationship and her life. If Marta didn’t have the ultimate bargaining chip, pictures of Tam, she wouldn’t be in this position. She remembered how Marta’s eyes glittered as they spoke. 
    What’s he like? Jane thought about that question again now. 
    It wasn’t that she expected much more than she had, she told herself. It just got very quiet sometimes. Not when Tam was home: never then. Even when she was asleep, the house still had a satisfied quality to Jane that wasn’t there when Tam was away at school. Jane gazed out the window.
    Raindrops began to fall. 
    She put on a jacket and walked out the front door. The sky was flat gray, like slate. Hands shoved in her pockets, she walked slowly around the house, inspecting it in the gentle rain. A farmhouse, after all, even if immaculate and glistening with fresh paint, rambling in three directions, gray clapboard with white trim. Sometimes, like today, she saw it as if it were someone else’s house. It didn’t look like a house she would live in. No one in her family had ever lived in a house like this. 
    She studied the ground now, her feet crunching on the tiny