Part 2 (1/2)

She wanted to believe that the voice had come from outside, so she continued to stare into the night, surveying the vineyards and the hills beyond. Breeze-driven waves swelled through the dry gra.s.s on the moon-washed slopes: a water mirage like the ghost tides of an ancient sea.

From elsewhere in the large house came a soft thump, as though a heavy object had fallen to a carpeted floor.

Chyna immediately rose from the chair and stood utterly still, expectant.

Trouble often followed voices raised in one kind of pa.s.sion or another. Sometimes, however, the worst offenses were preceded by calculated silences and stealth.

She had difficulty reconciling the idea of domestic violence with Paul and Sarah Templeton, who had seemed kind and loving toward each other as toward their daughter. Nevertheless, appearances and realities were seldom the same, and the human talent for deception was far greater than that of the chameleon, the mockingbird, or the praying mantis, which masked its ferocious cannibalism with a serene and devout posture.

Following the stifled cries and the soft thump, silence sifted down like a snowfall. The hush was eerily deep, as unnatural as that in which the deaf lived. This was the stillness before the pounce, the quietude of the coiled snake.

In another part of the house, someone was standing as motionless as she herself was standing, as alert as she was, intently listening. Someone dangerous. She could sense the predatory presence, a subtle new pressure in the air, not dissimilar to that preceding a violent thunderstorm.

On one level, six years of psychology cla.s.ses caused her to question her immediate fearful interpretation of those night sounds, which conceivably could be insignificant, after all. Any well-trained psychoa.n.a.lyst would have a wealth of labels to pin on someone who leaped first to a negative conclusion, who lived in expectation of sudden violence.

But she had to trust her instinct. It had been honed by many years of hard experience.

Intuitively certain that safety lay in movement, she stepped quietly away from the chair at the window, toward the hall door. In spite of the moonglow, her eyes had adjusted to darkness during the two hours that she had sat in the lightless room, and now she eased through the gloom with no fear of blundering into furniture.

She was only halfway to the door when she heard approaching footsteps in the second-floor hall. The heavy, urgent tread was alien to this house.

Unhampered by the interminable second-guessing that accompanied an education in psychology, reverting to the intuition and defenses of childhood, Chyna quickly retreated to the bed. She dropped to her knees.

Farther along the hall, the footsteps stopped. A door opened.

She was aware of the absurdity of attributing rage to the mere opening of a door. The rattle of the k.n.o.b being turned, the rasp of the unsecured latch, the spike-sharp squeak of an unoiled hinge-they were only sounds, neither meek nor furious, guilty nor innocent, and could have been made as easily by a priest as by a burglar. Yet she knew knew that rage was at work in the night. that rage was at work in the night.

Flat on her stomach, she wriggled under the bed, feet toward the headboard. It was a graceful piece of furniture with st.u.r.dy galbe legs, and fortunately it didn't sit as close to the floor as did most beds. One inch less of clearance would have prevented her from hiding under it.

Footsteps sounded in the hall again.

Another door opened. The guest-room door. Directly opposite the foot of the bed.

Someone switched on the lights.

Chyna lay with her head turned to one side, her right ear pressed to the carpet. Staring out from under the footboard, she could see a man's black boots and the legs of his blue jeans below mid-calf.

He stood just inside the threshold, evidently surveying the room. He would see a bed still neatly made at one o'clock in the morning, with four decorative needlepoint pillows arranged against the headboard.

She had left nothing on the nightstands. No clothes tossed on chairs. The paperback novel that she had brought with her for bedtime reading was in a bureau drawer.

She preferred s.p.a.ces that were clean and uncluttered to the point of monastic sterility. Her preference might now save her life.

Again a faint doubt, the acquired propensity for self-a.n.a.lysis that plagued all psychology students, flickered through her. If the man in the doorway was someone with a right to be in the house-Paul Templeton or Laura's brother, Jack, who lived with his wife in the vineyard manager's bungalow elsewhere on the property-and if some crisis was unfolding that explained why he would burst into her room without knocking, she was going to appear to be a prime fool, if not a hysteric, when she crawled out from under the bed.

Then, directly in front of the black boots, a fat red droplet-another, and a third-fell to the wheat-gold carpet. Plop-plop-plop. Plop-plop-plop. Blood. The first two soaked into the thick nylon pile. The third held its surface tension, s.h.i.+mmering like a ruby. Blood. The first two soaked into the thick nylon pile. The third held its surface tension, s.h.i.+mmering like a ruby.

Chyna knew the blood wasn't that of the intruder. She tried not to think about the sharp instrument from which it might have fallen.

He moved off to her right, deeper into the room, and she rolled her eyes to follow him.

The bed had carved side rails into which the spread was tightly tucked. No overhanging fabric obstructed her view of his boots.

Obversely, without a spread draped to the floor, the s.p.a.ce under the bed was more visible to him. From certain angles, he might even be able to look down and see a swatch of her her blue jeans, the toe of one of her Rockports, the cranberry-red sleeve of her cotton sweater where it stretched over her bent elbow. blue jeans, the toe of one of her Rockports, the cranberry-red sleeve of her cotton sweater where it stretched over her bent elbow.

She was thankful that the bed was queen-size, offering more cover than a single or double.

If he was breathing hard, either with excitement or with the rage that she had sensed in his approach, Chyna couldn't hear him. With one ear pressed tightly to the plush carpet, she was half deaf. Wood slats and box springs weighed on her back, and her chest barely had room to expand to accommodate her own shallow, cautious, open-mouth inhalations. The hammering of her compressed heart against her breastbone echoed tympanically within her, and it seemed to fill the claustrophobic confines of her hiding place to such an extent that the intruder was certain to hear.

He went to the bathroom, pushed open the door, and flicked on the lights.

She had put away all her toiletries in the medicine cabinet. Even her toothbrush. Nothing lay out that might alert him to her presence.

But was the sink dry?

On retiring to her room at eleven o'clock, she had used the toilet and then had washed her hands. That was two hours ago. Any residual water in the bowl surely would have drained away or evaporated.

Lemon-scented liquid soap in a pump dispenser was provided at the sink. Fortunately, there was no damp bar of soap to betray her.

She worried about the hand towel. She doubted that it could still be damp two hours after the little use she had made of it. Nonetheless, in spite of a propensity for neatness and order, she might have left it hanging ever so slightly askew or with one telltale wrinkle.

He seemed to stand on the bathroom threshold for an eternity. Then he switched off the fluorescent light and returned to the bedroom.

Occasionally, as a little girl-and then not so little-Chyna had taken refuge under beds. Sometimes they looked for her there; sometimes, though it was the most obvious of all hidey-holes, they never thought to look. Of those who found her, a few had checked under the bed first-but most had left it for last.

Another red droplet fell to the carpet, as though the beast might be shedding slow tears of blood.

He moved toward the closet door.

Chyna had to turn her head slightly, straining her neck, to keep track of him.

The closet was deep, a walk-in with a chain-pull light in the center. She heard the distinctive snap of the tugged switch, then the clinking of the metal beads in the chain as they rattled against the light bulb.

The Templetons stored their own luggage at the back of that closet. Stacked with the other suitcases, Chyna's single bag and train case were not obviously those of a guest in residence.

She had brought several changes of clothes: two dresses, two skirts, another pair of jeans, a pair of chinos, a leather jacket. Because Chyna was the same size as Laura, the intruder might conclude that the few garments on the rod were just spillovers from the packed closet in Laura's room rather than evidence of a houseguest.

If he had been in Laura's bedroom, however, and had seen the condition of her closet-then what had happened to Laura?

She must not think about that. Not now. Not yet. For the moment, she needed to focus all her thoughts, all her wits, on staying alive.

Eighteen years ago, on the night of her eighth birthday, in a seaside cottage on Key West, Chyna had squirmed under her bed to hide from Jim Woltz, her mother's friend. A storm had been raging from the Gulf of Mexico, and the sky-blistering lightning had made her fearful of escaping to the sanctuary of the beach where she'd retreated on other nights. After committing herself to the cramped s.p.a.ce under that iron bed, which had been lower slung than this one, she had discovered that she was sharing it with a palmetto beetle. Palmettos were not as exotic or as pretty as their name. In fact, they were nothing more than enormous tropical c.o.c.kroaches. This one had been as large as her little-girl hand. Ordinarily the hateful bug would have scurried away from her. But it had seemed less alarmed by her than by the thundering Woltz, who had crashed around her small room in a drunken fury, rebounding tirelessly from the furniture and the walls, like an enraged animal throwing itself against the bars of its cage. Chyna had been barefoot, dressed in blue shorts and a white tube top, and the palmetto beetle had raced in a frenzy over all that exposed skin, between her toes, up and down her legs and up again, across her back, along her neck, into her hair, over her shoulder, the length of her slender arm. She hadn't dared to squeal in revulsion, afraid of drawing Woltz's attention. He had been wild that night, like a monster from a dream, and she had been convinced that, like all monsters, he possessed supernaturally keen sight and hearing, the better to hunt children. She hadn't even found the courage to strike out at the beetle or knock it away, for fear that Woltz would hear the smallest sound even over the shriek of the storm and the incessant cras.h.i.+ng of thunder. She had endured the palmetto's attentions in order to avoid those of Woltz, clenching her teeth to bite off a scream, praying desperately for G.o.d to save her, then praying harder for G.o.d to take her, praying for an end to the torment even if by a bolt of lightning, an end to the torment, an end, dear G.o.d, an end.

Now, although she wasn't sharing the s.p.a.ce under this galbe-leg bed with any c.o.c.kroach, Chyna could feel one crawling over her toes as if she were that barefoot girl again, scurrying up her legs as if she were wearing not jeans but cotton shorts. She had never again worn her hair long since the night of her eighth birthday, when the bug had burrowed through her tresses, but now she felt the ghost of that palmetto in her closely cropped hair.

The man in the closet, perhaps capable of atrocities infinitely worse than the wickedest dreams of Woltz, tugged on the chain-pull. The light went out with a click followed by a tinkle of metal beads.

The booted feet reappeared and approached the bed. A fresh tear of blood glistened on the curve of black leather.

He was going to drop to one knee beside the bed.