soon enough.
The thought of dawn led him to consider how his situation might deteriorate if his enemy cut power during the night. He didn’t want to be feeling his way through a strange house in absolute blackness.
When the University of Colorado had used this place for forest-management research, it paid to have the power company trench the dirt lane and bury cable. But the line must come out of the ground before entering the house, which was a point of vulnerability.
In the cellar, he’d seen a service panel. If his tormentor was still down there and decided to flip a few breakers, Henry would be effectively blind.
He imagined groping warily through lightless rooms and hearing, close at his side, a low, rough voice whisper
Anxiety spiking, he searched kitchen cabinets and drawers until he found a flashlight and spare batteries. All right. He would be all right.
Now, at a few minutes past ten o’clock, dawn lay at least eight hours away. If he spent the night alert for sounds of an attempted break-in, he would be exhausted by daybreak. Already weary, he needed sleep to regain the necessary edge to stay alive.
He wanted to leave all the lights on. But he had always needed darkness to sleep. If he switched off the lights in only one room, anyone outside would know where he must be sleeping.
After consideration, he switched off the kitchen fluorescents. In the dark, he saw a bright line at the bottom of the cellar door, which might mean either that his tormentor was down there or wanted him to think as much.
He left the lights on in the hallway but turned them off in the study where Nora had intended to prepare the sofa bed for him.
In the living room, he clicked off one lamp but left another aglow near a window.
He would sleep in the bedroom, but not where anyone would expect to find him. The situation required precautions, deception.
He propped the shotgun against the bedroom armchair. He put the flashlight and the package of batteries on a footstool.
In the closet with the riddled door, from a high shelf, Henry took down two extra pillows and two spare blankets. With these, he could create the illusion of a sleeper, under the covers.
Approaching the bed, he saw the gloves.
The pillows and blankets fell from his arms.
On the chenille spread lay the pair of leather work gloves that Jim had worn to chop wood. They hadn’t been there before. They were saturated with blood. The blood had leached into the chenille.
Twenty-four
Cammy Rivers in her kitchen, in the ceaseless throbbing shadow of the light-drunk moth, eliminated protozoan diseases as possible causes of the behavior of the animals at High Meadows Farm.
She seemed to be left with only the possibility that a toxic substance or a drug had been administered to the Thoroughbreds and their pets. The method of delivery would most likely have been through accidentally or intentionally contaminated food.
The different species — horses, goats, dogs — would not have been fed the same things. Even some of the horses might have been on diets different from the others. Consequently, the contamination surely would have been intentional.
This explanation struck her as melodramatic and implausible. But she had no other avenue to explore.
Although she was old-fashioned in her approach to research, preferring books to Internet sources that more often contained misinformation, the time had come to go downstairs to the computer. The large number of drugs with their lengthy lists of side effects and the even larger number of natural and man-made toxins could be considered and eliminated only with the use of carefully composed search strings.
As she pushed her chair away from the table and got to her feet, the wall phone rang. She plucked the handset from the cradle: “Cammy Rivers.”
“Hey, Doc,” Grady Adams said, “hope I didn’t wake you.”
“It’s not even ten-thirty yet, Grady.”
“Well, I know you get up early. Listen, could you maybe come out here?”
“What — now?”
“That’s what I’m hoping.”
“Tell me nothing’s wrong with Merlin.”
She had given Grady the wolfhound as a puppy almost three years earlier.
“No, no, he’s fit enough, you could saddle him up and ride him. There’s this other thing.”
“What thing?”
“This thing — I want you to take a look at it. At them. Bring your bag, whatever you need, ’cause you might want to examine them.”
“They have a name?”
“That’s just it — I don’t think they do. I’ve never seen anything like them. Right now, they’re chasing Merlin around the room, and he loves it.”
“I have to ask you, furniture guy — you been breathing too many shellac fumes?”
“Maybe I have. Maybe I’ve been drinking the stuff.”
Twenty-five
After finding the blood-soaked gloves, shotgun at the ready, Henry Rouvroy searched the house, found no one, then searched it again, with the same result.
The chair still braced the cellar door. The front door remained locked, as did the back door between the kitchen and the rear porch.
The explanation became obvious. The enemy possessed a key. No doubt he took it off either Jim’s corpse or Nora’s.
While Henry had sat at the dinette table, listening for sounds in the basement, drinking dismal wine that might as easily have been pressed from plastic grapes as from real ones, his tormentor used a key to come in quietly through the front door. He left the bloody gloves on the bed, gloves he had worn while moving the bodies, and he left by the way he entered, locking up after himself.
Henry could see how it was done, but he couldn’t understand
Earlier, this kind of prankish behavior seemed to indicate that his tormentor must have an adolescent sense of humor. With so much at stake, however, and with every prank performed at a mortal risk, such behavior was unreasonable if not irrational.
If someone in Washington had become aware of Henry’s theft even as he had been industriously embezzling, if that person monitored him to discover the extent of his larceny and to determine his ultimate intentions, and if that person had either followed him to Jim’s farm or been waiting here for his arrival, common sense argued that Henry should have been killed, shot in the back of the head, before he even realized anyone had become aware of his thievery and his plans to make the farm his redoubt.
Evidently, his tormentor wanted more from him than his money and the farm. He tried to imagine what that might be, but his imagination failed him.
To ensure that his enemy could not get in with a key, Henry braced the kitchen door with a dinette chair. He used another chair to prevent the front door from being opened.
Henry thought of himself as a monster of limitless cruelty and perfect self-interest, whose absolute amorality ensured that he would reliably do the best thing for himself without hesitation. Now he reluctantly recognized that
