and not even move it, letalone pull it off the bedposts, she thought, and let her hands fall back to their former slack, chain-supported position above the bed. A despairing little cry escaped her. To her it sounded like the caw of a thirsty crow.
"What am I going to do?" she asked the shimmers on the ceiling, and at last gave way to desperate, frightened tears. "Just what in the hell am I going to do?"
As if in answer, the dog began to bark again, and this time it was so close it scared her into a scream. It sounded, in fact, as if it was right outside the east window, in the driveway.
CHAPTER FIVE
The dog wasn't in the driveway; it was even closer than that. The shadow stretching up the asphalt almost to the front bumper of the Mercedes meant it was on the back porch. That long, trailing shadow looked as if it belonged to some twisted and monstrous freakshow dog, and she hated it on sight.
Don't he so damned silly, she scolded herself. The shadow only looksthat way because the sun's going down. Now open your mouth and makesome noise, girl-it doesn't have to be a stray, after all.
True enough; there might be a master in the picture somewhere, but she didn't hold out much hope for the idea. She guessed that the dog had been drawn to the back deck by the wire-covered garbage bin just outside the door. Gerald had sometimes called this tidy little construction, with its cedar shingles on top and its double latches on the lid, their raccoon-magnet. This time it had drawn a dog instead of a coon, that was all-a stray, almost certainly. An ill-fed, down-on-its-luck mutt.
Still, she had to try.
"Hey!" she screamed. "Hey! Is anyone there? I need some help if you are! Is anyone there?"
The dog stopped barking instantly. Its spidery, distorted shadow jerked, turned, started to move... and then stopped again. She and Gerald had eaten sub sandwiches on the ride up from Portland, big oily salami-and-cheese combos, and the first thing she'd done when they arrived was to gather up the scraps and wrappings and dump them into the garbage bin. The rich smell of oil and meat was probably what had drawn the dog in the first place, and it was undoubtedly the smell which kept it from bolting back into the woods at the sound of her voice. That smell was stronger than the impulses of its feral heart.
"Help!" Jessie screamed,-and part of her mind tried to warn her that screaming was probably a mistake, that she would only scrape her throat raw and make herself thirstier, but that rational, cautioning voice never had a chance. She had caught the stink of her own fear, it was as strong and compelling to her as the smell of the sandwich leftovers was to the dog, and it quickly carried her into a state that was not just panic but a kind of temporary insanity.
"HELP ME! SOMEBODY HELP ME! HELP! HELP!
HELLLLLLP!"
Her voice broke at last and she turned her head as far to the right as it would go, her hair plastered to her cheeks and forehead in sweaty licks and tangles, her eyes bulging. The fear of being found chained up naked with her husband lying dead on the floor beside her had ceased to be even a casual factor in her thinking. This new panic-attack was like some weird mental eclipse-it filtered out the bright light of reason and hope and allowed her to see the most awful possibilities of all: starvation, thirst-induced madness, convulsions, death. She was not Heather Locklear or Victoria Principal, and this was not a made-for-TV suspense movie on the USA cable network. There were no cameras, no lights, no director to call cut. This was happening, and if help didn't come, it might well go on happening until she ceased to exist as a life-form. Far from worrying about the circumstances of her detention, she had reached a point where she would have welcomed Maury Povich and the entire film crew of A Current Affair with tears of gratitude.
But no one answered her frantic cries-no caretaker, down here to check on his places by the lake, no curious local out rambling with his dog (and perhaps trying to discover which of his neighbors might be growing a little marijuana among the whispering pines), and certainly not Maury Povich. There was only that long, queerly unpleasant shadow, which made her