Mr. Murder

able to tell which rooms are lit, which aren’t. No sense making it easier for him to figure exactly where we are.”

She was quiet. Staring at the amber cloth of the lampshade. As if their future could be prophesied from the vague patterns in that illuminated fabric.

At last she looked at him. “How long have we got?”

“Maybe ten minutes, maybe two hours. It’s up to him.”

“What’s going to happen, Marty?”

It was his turn to be silent a moment. He didn’t want to lie to her, either.

When he finally spoke, Marty was surprised to hear what he told her, because it sprang from subconscious depths, was genuine, and indicated greater optimism than he was aware of on a conscious level. “We’re going to kill the fucker.” Optimism or fatal self-delusion.

She came to him around the foot of the bed, and they held each other. She felt so right in his arms. For a moment, the world didn’t seem crazy any more.

“We still don’t even know who he is, what he is, where he comes from,” she said.

“And maybe we’ll never find out. Maybe, even after we kill the son of a bitch, we’ll never know what this was all about.”

“If we never find out, then we can’t pick up the pieces.”

“No.”

She put her head on his shoulder and gently kissed the exposed penumbra of the bruises on his throat. “We can never feel safe.”

“Not in our old life. But as long as we’re together, the four of us,” he said, “I can leave everything behind.”

“The house, everything in it, my career, yours—”

“None of that’s what really matters.”

“A new life, new names . . . What future will the girls have?”

“The best we can give them. There were never any guarantees. There never are in this life.”

She raised her head from his shoulder and looked into his eyes. “Can I really handle it when he shows up here?”

“Of course you can.”

“I’m just a family counselor specializing in the behavioral problems of children, parent-child relations. I’m not the heroine of an adventure story.”

“And I’m just a mystery novelist. But we can do it.”

“I’m scared.”

“So am I.”

“But if I’m so scared now, where am I going to find the courage to pick up a shotgun and defend my kids from something . . . something like this?”

“Imagine you are the heroine of an adventure story. ”

“If only it were that easy.”

“In some ways . . . maybe it is,” he said. “You know I’m not much for Freudian explanations. More often than not, I think we decide to be what we are. You’re a living example, after what you went through as a kid.”

She closed her eyes. “Somehow, it’s easier to imagine myself as a family counselor than as Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone.”

“When we first met,” he said, “you couldn’t imagine yourself as a wife and mother, either. A family was nothing but a prison to you, prison and torture chamber. You never wanted to be part of a family again.”

She opened her eyes. “You taught me how.”

“I didn’t teach you anything. I only showed you how to imagine a good family, a healthy family. Once you were able to imagine it, you could learn to believe in the possibility. From there on, you taught yourself.”

She said, “So life’s a form of fiction, huh?”

“Every life’s a story. We make it up as we go along.”

“Okay. I’ll try to be Kathleen Turner.”

“Even better.”

“What?”

“Sigourney Weaver.”

She smiled. “Wish I had one of those big damned futuristic guns like she got to use when she played Ripley.”

“Come on, we better go see if our sentries are still at their post.”

In the living room, he relieved the girls of their duty at the only undraped window and suggested they heat some water to make mugs of hot chocolate. The cabin was always stocked with basic canned goods, including a tin of cocoa-flavored milk powder. The electric heaters still hadn’t taken the chill off the air, so they could all use a little internal warming. Besides, making hot chocolate was such a normal task that it might defuse some of the tension and calm their nerves.

He looked through the window, across the screened porch, past the back end of the BMW. So many trees stood between the cabin and the county road that the hundred-yard-long driveway was pooled with deep shadows, but he could still see that no one was approaching either in a vehicle or on foot.

Marty was reasonably confident that The Other would come at them directly rather than from behind the cabin. For one thing, their property backed up to the hundred acres of church land downhill and to a larger parcel uphill, which made an indirect approach relatively arduous and time-consuming.

Judging by his past behavior, The Other always favored headlong action and blunt approaches. He seemed to lack the knack or patience for strategy. He was a doer more than a thinker, which almost ensured a furious—rather than sneak—attack.

That trait might be the enemy’s fatal weakness. It was a hope worth nurturing, anyway.

Snow fell. The shadows deepened.

3

From the motel room, Spicer called the surveillance van for an update. He let the phone ring a dozen times, hung up, and tried again, but still the call went unanswered.

“Something’s happened,” he said. “They wouldn’t have left the van.”

“Maybe something’s wrong with their phone,” Oslett suggested.

“It’s ringing.”

“Maybe not on their end.”

Spicer tried again with no different result. “Come on,” he said, grabbing his leather flight jacket and heading for the door.

“You’re not going over there?” Oslett said. “Aren’t you still worried about blowing their cover?”

“It’s already been blown. Something’s wrong.”

Clocker had pulled on his tweed coat over his clashing orange cashmere sweater. He didn’t bother to put on his hat because he had never bothered to take it off. Tucking the Star Trek paperback in a pocket, he also headed for the door.

Following them with the black briefcase, Oslett said, “But what could’ve gone wrong? Everything was moving along so smoothly again.”

Already, the storm had put down half an inch of snow. The flakes were fine and comparatively dry now, and the streets white. Evergreen boughs had begun to acquire Christmasy trimmings.

Spicer drove the Explorer, and in a few minutes they reached the street where Stillwater’s parents lived. He pointed out the house when they were still half a block from it.

Across the street from the Stillwater place, two vehicles were parked at the curb. Oslett pegged the red recreational van as the surveillance post because of the mirrored side windows in its rear section.

“What’s that florist’s van doing here?” Spicer wondered.

“Delivering flowers,” Oslett guessed.

“Fat chance.”