and all, and for a while there he might have been closer to the precipice than he cared to think about, but that was all behind him. This morning’s grandfather sighting was only a flashback, he told himself. Too many drugs lately-or at least too many of the wrong drugs in the wrong combinations. From now on he’d be sticking to crosstops and weed, the former for energy and clarity of purpose, the latter for imagination and creativity-all of which would be required for the game.
As would handcuffs and either a scalpel or a narrow-bladed knife-at any rate, something with a pointed, thrusting edge, as nasty-looking as it was sharp, to go along with the box cutter he’d picked up at Conroy Circle. As he searched the house, it occurred to Simon that if he wanted to hear Pender pleading for Skairdykat and Skairdykat pleading for Pender, then he’d have to leave both their mouths free. Which meant at least part of the game had to take place in the cellar, where, if pleading turned to screaming, the screams would be less likely to be heard down by the canal. Later in the afternoon, he decided, he would bring one of the kitchen chairs down to the cellar-for now, he would continue to search for the handcuffs, and further refine his game plan.
Pain had been no stranger to Linda Abruzzi in recent months, but she’d never known agony like this. Catch the snake first, worry about holding on to it later, was easier said than done.
Linda’s sense of the passage of time was necessarily vague. It felt as if she’d been lying on her side at the foot of the stairs, holding the coral at arm’s length and listening to Childs’s footsteps overhead for days now (whenever it sounded as if he was approaching the kitchen, she would replace her gag and hide both the coral and the parted rope behind her back), but the dim cellar light told her it was still Thursday afternoon.
The living room television came on. From Linda’s current location, she couldn’t make out the program. Sounded as if it might be
No rest for Linda, though. And as if the pain, the thirst, and the hunger weren’t bad enough, she had to fight the cramps that for the last few hours had been hopscotching unpredictably up and down her arm-now the thumb, now the shoulder, now the wrist, now the elbow. If she could have changed hands, she would have, but she couldn’t trust the benumbed fingers of the left one anymore.
More insidious than the pain and cramping was the almost hallucinatory exhaustion. She’d been awake since yesterday morning. And unlike her pain, she knew, the exhaustion could well prove fatal. The coral was no longer thrashing, but neither had it gone back to sleep. Instead it was waiting, biding its time. And every so often, it tried her-a powerful, quicksilver-smooth shifting of the bands of muscle beneath the scales; she would tighten her grip and it would relax again. Waiting. Biding.
Just a little bit longer, she promised it in her mind. And when it’s all over, I’ll let you go. You can live here under the house forever and I’ll bring you all the fat mice you can eat, and a hamster every Christmas.
The television fell silent; the footsteps began again. By the time Childs actually opened the cellar door and started down the steps, Linda had been visualizing the scenario for so long that it was almost as if it had already happened. He trots down the steps, she plays possum, he bends over her, she thrusts the coral at his eye, his neck, his-
The footsteps came halfway down the stairs, then receded; the cellar door closed again. The disappointment was crushing. Linda hadn’t been willing to admit to herself how whipped she really was until she thought her ordeal was nearly over; now she didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to hang on.
Oh, you scumbag, she called after him in her mind-get back here, you shitsucking scum-
The coral, perhaps sensing a moment of inattention, gathered itself and lunged for freedom. Linda’s grip tightened reflexively, but she had it around the midsection now instead of behind the head; as she brought her left hand over to grab it higher, she felt a sensation like two needles sinking into the back of her left wrist.
4
It must have been quite a sight. The middle-aged couple, huge man with a Panama hat and a broken arm, big woman with a long brown braid and a broken nose, all but skipping down the ramp into the terminal.
“We did it!” Dorie exulted, still flushed with the glory of having licked her last phobia.
“You did it,” said Pender. He was happy for her, of course, and not unmindful of his contribution, but mostly he was just glad to be out of goddamn coach. One first-class flight with Sid had been enough to spoil him forever.
Normally, Sid would have been waiting at the curb in front of the baggage claim. There are friends, and then there are friends who pick you up at the airport-Sid was the latter to Pender, and vice versa. Pender hadn’t asked him this time, though-he wasn’t sure Sid was still talking to him, after the stunt he’d pulled at SFO last Friday. So after they picked up Dorie’s baggage, the suitcase and footlocker-and mirabile dictu, both arrived safely, sliding down the designated carousel in the designated airport-Pender hailed a cab.
The ride from Virginia to Maryland was Dorie’s first experience with honest-to-God autumn foliage. Pender got a kick out of watching her-the expression on her face was MasterCard-ad priceless: not so much that of a kid in a candy shop as a teenage boy in a whorehouse.
Pender turned tour guide for the last leg of the drive, pointing out Civil War sites, detailing the history of the C amp;O. At the bottom of Tinsman’s Lock Road, a canopy of yellow-leaved box elders shut out the sky. Dorie had never seen light like that before-where she came from, bowered light was always green.
Pender pointed out his driveway, warned the cabbie about the ruts. They jounced the last few hundred yards. Then, as the driver carried the luggage to the front doorstep, Dorie told Pender she wanted to see the canal while it was still daylight.
“Follow that path around the side of the house,” Pender told her, “and keep going downhill until you see a woman in a bloodstained nightgown looking for a redheaded baby. I’ll catch up as soon as I pay the man.”
Phasmophobia-fear of ghosts. Despite her protestations last night, Dorie didn’t have it, had never had it-after all, who ever heard of a ghost wearing a mask?
The path was steep and narrow; it wound down through a dense wood, then opened out suddenly on a scene Dorie longed to paint with all her heart, and doubted she could ever capture. Pender had been right-she would need to add a few new oils to her palette to get it all: the formal strips of color in the foreground, emerald green lawn, malachite green water, reddish brown canal wall built of rough-hewn, fitted sandstone blocks; the particulate air, the long black shadows, the horizontal light streaming in from dead ahead, but cut into dazzling vertical columns by the single row of flaming trees towering behind the towpath running along the raised berm of the far bank.
Impossible, though, to capture all that in a plein air, then paint in any of the detail-the footbridge, the miniature waterfall tumbling down the flume, the split-rail wooden fences, never mind the joggers and dog walkers on the towpath-before the light faded entirely.
Still, wouldn’t it be something to try! If the weather held, she could set up her easel in the same spot a few days in a row, paint in one section at a-
“Well? Did I lie?” Pender caught up with Dorie as she mentally began cutting the scene into horizontal sections-the landscape defined its own verticality.
“It’s beautiful, Pen. I can’t wait to paint it. Or try, anyway. Where’s the nearest art supply store?”
“We’ll have to consult the yellow pages on that, scout,” said Pender as they started back up the path to the house. “The last time I bought any art supplies, they came in a Crayola box with a built-in sharpener.”
“I loved that built-in sharpener,” said Dorie.
“Me too.”
When they reached the house, Pender nodded toward the porch. “Let’s go in that way-I want you to see the panorama.”
“Technically, a panorama is an unbroken view or a series of pictures representing a continuous scene,” Dorie explained as she trudged up the steps after him.
Pender stopped on the landing and turned back to her as if he had something important to say. Actually, he was just winded from the climb. “Did anybody ever tell you you were extremely argumentative?”
