He pulled on his pants and crept into the hallway. He could hear Stuart,s breathing. Looking into the front bedroom beside his own, he saw Stuart across the bed, dead asleep as Reuben had been only moments ago.
He and Stuart had both given in to sleep because they had no choice. He,d tried to eat a little but hadn,t been able to. Stuart had devoured a porterhouse steak. But both of them had been glassy-eyed, slurry-voiced, weak.
Stuart had said he was almost sure that his stepfather had shot him twice. But there were no bullet wounds.
Then they,d both headed for the beds and gone out, Reuben like a light pinched out in the darkness. Just gone.
He listened. Another car was coming up the road.
Suddenly, he heard the soft slap of Laura,s bare feet on the stairs. She emerged out of the shadows and came towards him, slipping into his arms.
"This is the second time they,ve been here," she whispered. "The alarm,s armed. If they break a window or push in a door, the sirens will blast us from all four corners of the house."
He nodded. She was trembling. Her face was white.
"Your e-mail,s filled with messages, not just from your mother, but from your brother and your father, and from Celeste. From Billie. Something very bad is going down."
"Did they see you through the windows?" he asked.
"No. The drapes are still drawn from last night."
They were calling his name down there, "Mr. Golding, Mr. Golding!" Hammering on the door in the back as they had hammered on the door in front.
The wind sighed and threw the rain gently against the windows.
He took a few steps down the stairs.
He remembered that crash that had awakened him the night Marchent had been killed. We,re living in a palace of glass, he thought, but how in the world can they justify breaking in here?
He glanced back at Stuart. Still barefoot, stripped to his shorts and shirt, sleeping like a baby.
Galton had just pulled up. He could hear Galton calling out to the sheriff.
He went back into the bedroom and drew near to the south-facing window again.
"Well, I don,t know where they are. You can see the same as I can that both cars are here. I don,t know what to tell you. Maybe they,re sleeping in. They didn,t come rolling up the road till early this morning. You mind telling me what all this is about?"
The sheriff wasn,t saying, and neither were the highway patrolmen, and the paramedics from the ambulance were standing back with their arms folded looking up at the house.
"Well, why don,t I give you a call later on when they wake up?" asked Galton. "Well, yeah, I do know the code, but I have no authorization to let anybody in. Listen ..."
Whispers. "All right, all right. We,ll just wait then."
Wait for what?
"Wake up Stuart," he told Laura. "Get him into the secret room. Fast."
He dressed hurriedly putting on his blue blazer, and combing his hair. He wanted to look like the picture of respectability whatever happened.
He glanced at his cell phone: text from Jim.
"Landed. On our way."
What in the world could that mean?
He could hear Stuart protesting in a drunken-sounding voice, but Laura was guiding him firmly into the linen closet and through the secret door.
He checked it behind them. Perfectly smooth wall. He put the shelves back in place against it, and hefted two loads of towels onto the shelves. And then he shut the door.
He crept down to the first floor, and made his way along the hallway towards the darkened front room. The only light came from the conservatory doors. Milky, dim. The rain teemed lightly on the glass dome. A gray mist sealed the glass walls.
Someone was trying the outside knobs one by one of the conservatory,s western French doors.
Another car had pulled up outside, and it sounded as though a truck had come with it. He didn,t want to disturb the draperies, even a little. Quietly, he listened. A woman,s voice this time. And then Galton - talking loudly into his phone.
"... just better get up here right now, Jerry, I mean this is happening here right now at the Nideck place and I don,t see any warrant here, and if somebody is going to break into the Nideck house without a warrant, well, I,m telling you, you ought to get up here right now."
Silently moving to the desk, he stared at the stream of e-mail subject lines crawling