head bent backward over the rim of the toilet bowl. Her eyes were as wide, pale, and flat as those of a dead seagull that I had once found on the beach.
At a glance, I thought her throat appeared to have been slashed repeatedly with a half-sharp knife. I couldn’t bear to look at her too closely or for too long.
The smell was not merely blood. Dying, she had fouled herself. A draft bathed me in the stench.
A casement window was cranked all the way open. It wasn’t a typically small bathroom window but large enough to have provided escape for the killer, who must have been liberally splashed with his victim’s blood.
Perhaps Angela had left the window open. If there was a first-story porch roof under it, the killer could have entered as well as exited by this route.
Orson had not barked—but then this window was toward the front of the house, and the dog was at the back.
Angela’s hands were at her sides, almost lost in the sleeves of the cardigan. She looked so innocent. She looked twelve.
All her life, she had given of herself to others. Now someone, unimpressed by her selfless giving, had cruelly taken all that was left.
Anguished, shaking uncontrollably, I turned away from the bathroom.
I hadn’t approached Angela with questions. I hadn’t brought her to this hideous end. She had called me, and although she had used her car phone, someone had known that she needed to be silenced permanently and quickly. Maybe these faceless conspirators decided that her despair made her dangerous. She had quit her job at the hospital. She felt that she had no reason to live. And she was terrified of becoming, whatever that meant. She was a woman with nothing to lose, beyond their control. They would have killed her even if I had not responded to her call.
Nevertheless, I was awash in guilt, drowning in cold currents, robbed of breath, and I stood gasping.
Nausea followed those currents, rippling like a fat slippery eel through my gut, swimming up my throat and almost surging into my mouth. I choked it down.
I needed to get out of here, yet I couldn’t move. I was half crushed under a weight of terror and guilt.
My right arm hung at my side, pulled as straight as a plumb line by the weight of the gun. The penlight, clutched in my left hand, stitched jagged patterns on the wall.
I could not think clearly. My thoughts rolled thickly, like tangled masses of seaweed in a sludge tide.
On the nearer nightstand, the telephone rang.
I kept my distance from it. I had the queer feeling that this caller was the deep-breather who had left the message on my answering machine, that he would try to steal some vital aspect of me with his bloodhound inhalations, as if my very soul could be vacuumed out of me and drawn away across the open telephone line. I didn’t want to hear his low, eerie, tuneless humming.
When at last the phone fell silent, my head had been somewhat cleared by the strident ringing. I clicked off the penlight, returned it to my pocket, raised the big pistol from my side—and realized that someone had switched on the light in the upstairs hall.
Because of the open window and the blood smeared on the frame, I had assumed I was alone in the house with Angela’s body. I was wrong. An intruder was still present—waiting between me and the stairs.
The killer couldn’t have slipped out of the master bath by way of the bedroom; a messy trail of blood would have marked his passage across the cream-colored carpet. Yet why would he have escaped from the upstairs only to return immediately through a ground-floor door or window?
If, after fleeing, he had changed his mind about leaving a potential witness and had decided to come back to get me, he wouldn’t have turned on the light to announce his presence. He would have preferred to take me by surprise.
Cautiously, squinting against the glare, I stepped into the hallway. It was deserted.
The three doors that had been closed when I had first come upstairs were now standing wide open. The rooms beyond them were forbiddingly bright.
14
Like blood out of a wound, silence welled from the bottom of the house into this upstairs hall. Then a sound rose, but it came from outside: the keening of the wind under the eaves.
A strange game seemed to be under way. I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t