Farther back, then, through his narrow domain, with special caution at the end of the dining nook, behind which lies the step well. She's not crouched here either.
Into the hall.
The sound of the rain. The idling engine.
He opens the bathroom door, quickly and noisily, aware that stealth isn't possible in this reverberant tin can on wheels. The cramped bathroom is as it should be, no stowaway on the pot or in the shower stall.
Next the shallow wardrobe with its sliding door. But she isn't in there either.
The only place remaining to be searched is the bedroom. Vess stands before this last closed door, positively enchanted by the thought of the woman huddled in there, unaware of those with whom she shares her hiding place.
No thread of light is visible along the threshold or the jamb, so she no doubt entered in darkness. Evidently she has not yet sat upon the bed and found the sleeping beauty.
Perhaps she has edged warily around the small room and, by blind exploration, has discovered the folding door to the closet. Perhaps if Vess opens this bedroom door, she will simultaneously pull aside those vinyl panels and attempt to slip swiftly and quietly into the closet, only to feel a strange cold form hanging there instead of sport shirts.
Mr. Vess is amused.
The temptation to throw open the door is almost irresistible, to see her carom off the body in the closet, then to the bed, then away from the dead girl, screaming first at the sewn-shut face of the boy and then at the manacled girl and then at Vess himself, in a comic pinball spin of terror.
Following that spectacle, however, they will have to get down to issues at once. He will quickly learn who she is and what she thinks she is doing here.
Mr. Vess realizes that he doesn't want this rare experience with mystery to end. He finds it more pleasing to prolong the suspense and chew on the puzzle for a while.
He was beginning to feel weary from his recent activities. Now he is energized by these unexpected developments.
Certain risks are involved, of course, in playing it this way. But it is impossible to live with intensity and avoid risk. Risk is at the heart of an intense existence.
He backs quietly away from the bedroom door. Noisily, he steps into the bathroom, takes a piss, and flushes the toilet, so the woman will think that he came to the back of the motor home not in search of her but to answer the call of nature. If she continues to believe that her presence is unknown, she will proceed on whatever course of action brought her here in the first place, and it will be interesting to see what she does.
He goes forward again, pausing in the kitchen to pump a cup of hot coffee from the two-quart thermos on the counter by the cooktop. He also switches on a couple of lights so he will be able to see the interior clearly in the rearview mirror.
Behind the steering wheel once more, he sips the coffee. It is hot, black, and bitter, just the way he likes it. He secures the cup in a holder bracketed to the dashboard.
He tucks the pistol in the open console box between the seats, with the safeties off and the butt up. He can put his hand on it in a second, turn in his seat, shoot the woman before she can get near him, and still maintain control of the motor home.
But he doesn't think that she will try to harm him, at least not soon. If harming him was her primary intention, she would have gone after him already.
Strange.
'Why? What now?' he says aloud, enjoying the drama of his peculiar situation. 'What now? What next? What ho? Surprise, surprise.'
He drinks more coffee. The aroma reminds him of the crisp texture of burned toast.
Outside, the elk are gone.
A night of mysteries.
The mounting wind lashes the long fronds of the ferns. Like evidence of violence, bright wet rhododendron blossoms spray through the night.
The forest stands untouched. The power of time is stored in those massive, dark, vertical forms.
Mr. Vess shifts the motor home out of park and releases the emergency brake. Onward.
After he cruises past the damaged Honda, he glances at the rearview mirror. The bedroom door remains closed. The woman is in hiding.
With the motor home rolling again, perhaps the stowaway will risk turning on a light and will take this opportunity to meet her roommates.
Mr. Vess smiles.
Of all the expeditions that he has conducted, this is the most interesting and exciting. And it isn't over yet.
Chyna sat on the floor in the darkness. Her back was against the wall. The revolver lay at her side.
She was untouched and alive.
'Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive,' she whispered, and this was both a prayer and a joke.
Throughout her childhood, she frequently prayed earnestly for that double blessing-her virtue and her life-and her prayers were often as rambling and incoherent as they were frantic. Eventually she had worried that God was growing weary of her endless desperate pleas for deliverance, that He was sick of her inability to take care of herself and stay out of trouble, and that He might decide that she had used up all of the divine mercy allotted to her. God was busy, after all, running the entire universe, watching over so many drunks and fools, with the devil working mischief everywhere, volcanoes erupting, sailors lost in storms, sparrows falling. By the time Chyna was ten or eleven, in consideration of God's hectic schedule, she had condensed her rambling pleas, in times of terror, to this: 'God, this is Chyna Shepherd, here in'-fill the blank with the name of the current place-'and I'm begging you, please, please, please, just let me get through this untouched and alive.' Soon, realizing that God, being God, would know precisely where she was, she reduced her entreaty further to: 'God, this is Chyna Shepherd. Please get me through this untouched and alive.' Finally, certain that God was exasperatedly familiar with her panicky presumptions on His time and grace, she had shortened her plea to a telegraphic minimum: 'Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.' In crises-under beds or lost in closets behind concealing clothes or in cobwebbed attics smelling of dust and raw wood or, once, flattened against the ground in a mire of rat shit in the crawl space under a moldering old house-she had whispered those five words or chanted them silently, over and over, indefatigably,
'Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.'
This time, from the motor-home bedroom, it was simultaneously a report on her survival and a fervent prayer to be spared from whatever brutality might be coming next.
'Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.'
As a little girl, she had loathed her name-except when she had been praying to survive. It was frivolous, a stupid misspelling of a real word, and when other kids teased her about it, she wasn't able to mount a defense. Considering that her mother was called Anne, such a simple name, the choice of
