advances, he could make them think that the creaking stairs were only settling noises or a product of the wind.
He went up three more steps.
Ahead, Dawson disappeared around a corner of the mill.
When he reached the same comer a moment later, Paul stopped and studied the north work yard: huge stacks of logs that had been piled up to feed the mill during the long winter; several pieces of heavy equipment; a couple of lumber trucks; a conveyor belt running on an inclined ramp from the mill to the maw of a big furnace where sawdust and scrap wood were incinerated… There were simply too many places out there in which Dawson could hide and wait for him.
He turned away from the north yard and went to the door in the west wall of the building, back the way he had come, thirty feet from the corner. It wasn’t locked.
He stepped into a short, well-lighted corridor. The enormous processing room lay at the end of it: the bull chain leading from the mill pond, up feeding shoots, into the building; then a cross-cut saw, a log deck, the carriage that moved logs into the waiting blades that would make lumber of them, the giant band saw, edging machine, trimmer saws, dip tank, grading ramp, the green chain, and then the storage racks… He remembered all of those terms from a tour that the manager had given Rya and Mark two summers ago. In the processing room the fluorescent strip lights were burning, but none of the machines was working; there were no men tending them. To his right was a washroom, to his left a set of stairs.
Taking the steps two at a time for four flights — the first level was two floors high in order to accommodate the machines in it — he came out in the second-floor hallway. He stopped to think, then went to the fifth office on the left.
The door was locked.
He kicked it twice.
The lock held.
There was a glass case bolted to the corridor wall. It contained a fire extinguisher and an ax.
He jammed the revolver in his belt, opened the front of the case, and took out the ax. He used the flat head of it to batter the knob from the office door. When the knob fell off, the cheap latch snapped. He dropped the ax, pushed open the ruined door, and went inside.
The office was dark. He didn’t switch on any lights because he didn’t want to reveal his position. He closed the door to the hall so that he would not be silhouetted by the pale light that spilled in.
The windows in the north wall of the office opened above the first-floor terrace. He slid one of them up, slipped through it, and stepped onto the tar-papered terrace roof.
The wind buffeted him.
He took the Combat Magnum from his belt.
If Dawson was hiding anywhere in the north yard, this was the best vantage point from which to spot him.
The darkness offered Dawson good protection, for none of the lights was on in the yard.
He could have turned them on, of course. But he didn’t know where to find the switches, and he didn’t want to waste a lot of time looking for them.
The only thing that moved out there was the clattering conveyor belt that rolled continuously up the inclined ramp to the scrap furnace. It should have been shut down with the rest of the equipment, but it had been overlooked. The belt came out of the building directly beneath him and sloped to a high point twenty feet above the ground. It met the furnace door forty yards away. Because the cone-shaped furnace — thirty feet in diameter at the base, ten feet in diameter at the top; forty feet high — was primed by a gas flame, the fire in it was never out unless the mill foreman ordered it extinguished. Even now, when the belt had no fuel for it, the furnace roared. Judging by the intensity of the flames leaping beyond the open door, however, several hundred pounds of the day’s input — conveyed out of the mill before Dawson had halted operations — had yet to be fully consumed.
Otherwise, the yard was quiet, still. The mill pond — with the giant grappling hook suspended from thick wires over the center of it — lay to the right of the ramp and the furnace. It was dotted with logs that looked a bit like dozing alligators. A narrow channel of water called the slip led from the pond to the terrace. When the mill was in operation, slip men poled logs along the slip to the chutes that were covered by the terrace roof. Once in the chutes, the logs were snared by hooked bull chains and dragged into the processing system. East and north of the pond was the deck, those forty-foot-high walls of gargantuan logs set aside to supply the mill with work during the winter. To the left of the ramp and the furnace, two lumber trucks, a high-lift, and a few other pieces of heavy equipment were parked in a row, backed up against the chain-link fence of a storage yard. Dawson wasn’t to be seen in any of that.
Thunder and lightning brought a sudden fall of fat raindrops.
Some sixth sense told Paul that he had heard more than the clap of thunder. Propelled by an icy premonition, he spun around.
Dawson had come out of the window behind him. He was no more than a yard away. He was older than Paul, a decade and a half older, but he was also taller and heavier; and he looked deadly in the rain-lashed night. He had an ax. The goddamned fire ax! In both hands. Raised over his head. He swung it.
Klinger was at the mid-point of the tower when the rain began to fall again. It drummed noisily on the belfry shingles and on the roof of the church, providing excellent cover for his ascent.
He waited until he was absolutely certain that the downpour would last — then he went upward without pausing after every third step. He couldn’t even hear the creaking himself. Exhilarated, brimming with confidence now, the Webley clutched in his right hand, he climbed through the last half of the tower in less than a minute and rushed onto the belfry platform.
Paul crouched.
The ax blade whistled over his head.
Startled to hear himself screaming, unable to stop screaming, abruptly aware that the Smith & Wesson was still in his hand, Paul pulled the trigger.
The bullet tore through Dawson’s right shoulder.
The ax flew from his hands. It arced out into the darkness and smashed through the windshield of one of the lumber trucks.
With a certain eerie grace, Dawson pirouetted just once and toppled into Paul.
The Combat Magnum tumbled in the path of the ax.
Grappling with each other, clinging to each other, they fell off the terrace roof.
The belfry held very little light in the midst of that primeval storm, but it was bright enough for Klinger to see that the only person there was the Annendale girl.
Impossible.
She was sitting on the platform, her back to the half-wall. And she seemed to be regarding him with dread.
What the hell?
There should have been two of them. The nine-foot-square belfry wasn’t large enough for a game of hide- and seek. What he saw must be true. But there should have been two of them.
The night was rocked with thunder, and razor-tined forks of white lightning stabbed the earth. Wind boomed through the open tower.
He stood over the child.
Looking up at him, her voice wavering, she said, “Please… please… don’t… shoot me. ”
“Where is the other one?” Klinger asked. “Where did she go?”
A voice behind him said, “Hey, mister.”
They had heard him coming up the stairs. They were ready and waiting for him.
But how had they done it?
Sick, trembling, aware that it was too late for him to save himself, he nevertheless turned to meet the danger.
There was no one behind him. The storm conveniently provided another short burst of incandescent light, confirming that he saw what he thought he saw: he and the child were alone on the platform.
