Read Beware the Young Stranger for Free Online Page B

away. Please make them go out for just a few seconds …
    Instead, Vallancourt had jerked the drapery aside.
    He shivered, remembering. And not remembering. For there was no real recollection of the next few minutes, merely a sense of motion. And an echo of Howard Conway’s astounded voice: “Police, John … Head him off!” The voice had been swallowed in the roar of the MG’s engine.
    Keith lifted his hand from the wheel and wiped the sleeve of his checkered sports shirt across his face.
    At least they hadn’t yet headed him off. He had been able to reach this lonely, little-used road. They didn’t know his destination, his reason for being here … unless Nancy had let it slip.
    No, he thought. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t have. They won’t suspect I’m here.
    He dared to think he might get away for good. It had happened. Men disappeared, changed their names.
    The System was the thing you had to beat, not individuals. The System digested a man’s habits, appearance. It was electronic devices, test tubes, cameras, microfilmed files; it never rested, never slept. It picked up a man in one place and through simple routine discovered that his fingerprints matched those left a thousand miles away.
    With the name-change, therefore, had to come a change in personality, habits. He had to find a steady job, live quietly in the endless shadow of the System, never let it touch him, never draw its attention.
    A dense woodland threw a heavy blanket of shadow over the MG. The air was cooler. It felt good on his face.
    â€œI can. I will,” he said to himself. “This won’t be like the other times when I’ve almost made the grade, only to see everything go sour.”
    His stomach muscles quivered at the thought of failure, of letting the System net him. Failure now meant total destruction. They had that Cheryl Pemberton thing in Florida, and now the death of Aunt Dorcas …
    The road coiled with the contour of the land, dropping gradually. Through a break in the timber he glimpsed the sapphire lake. A boarded-up summer cottage shot past, then another. Several such cottages were about the lake, but not in sufficient quantity to spoil its natural beauty.
    The MG rushed past the timber line, and the splendor of the cold, silent, miles-long lake, embraced by the green hills, monopolized Keith’s view. He began to feel better.
    My querencia , he thought with a bitter smile. He wondered if it was the right Spanish word. Querencia , the place where the bull feels strongest. The spot on the sand to which el toro , tortured by the blood-lusting olé from twenty thousand throats, returns time after time. The brave bull, Keith recalled, with the matador’s sword finally piercing his heart, will strive blindly to reach his querencia , his dying place.
    Always the bull dies, he thought, alone on the bloody sand. Always.
    He tried to shake the thought from his mind. A bull was a dumb animal, with no gift or chance for making a choice. He was born to die, his end planned before he dropped from the cow’s womb.
    But a man was different.
    Wasn’t he?
    Opposite a flimsy pier and boathouse, a gravelled driveway lay tangent to the road. Keith braked the MG, nosing into the drive. With a brief spurt of crushed stone, the car rounded the curve; and there was Dorcas Ferguson’s lodge, a rambling, rustic building with a railed-in gallery across the front.
    Parked near the house was a small sedan.
    Keith stopped the MG behind the other car. He got out quickly. As he did so, he heard Nancy Vallancourt’s quick footsteps crossing the porch.
    His throat tightened as he looked at her.
    She ran to him, laughing in relief. And she took his hand, and leaned toward him, and kissed him lightly.
    â€œI was wondering if you’d changed your mind,” she said.
    He drew her over to the split-log steps, sat down on one of them, pulled her down beside him.
    She looked