She couldn’t have intuited this interior when earlier she’d been standing on the front porch, talking to Leonard Teelroy, but now she could infer the identity of the inhabitant from the evidence.
In addition to all the other aromas in this rich stew of odors, she smelled blood. Tasted it, too, when she licked her lips.
She was having difficulty opening her right eye, because the lashes were stuck together by a wad of congealed blood.
When she tried to wipe the blood away, she discovered that her hands were bound tightly at the wrists, in front of her.
She was lying on her side, on a matted musty brocade-upholstered sofa. Crowded in front of the sofa were a TV and an armchair.
A pulse of tolerable pain beat, beat, beat along the right side of her skull, but when she raised her head, the pulse became a throb, the pain became an agony, and she thought for a moment that she would pass out. Then the torment subsided to a level she could endure.
When she tried to sit up, she discovered that her ankles were bound as securely as her wrists and that a yard-long tether, which connected the wrist and ankle restraints, would not permit her either to stretch out or stand to full height. She swung both legs as one, planted her feet on the floor, and perched on the edge of the sofa.
This maneuver triggered another paroxysm of head pain that made her feel as though one side of her skull were repeatedly swelling and deflating like a balloon. This was familiar to her; call it party head, morning-after head, just worse than she’d ever experienced it before, not accompanied by the usual remorse, but by cold anger. And this wasn’t the irrational anger she’d so long nurtured as an excuse to isolate herself, but was a rage tightly focused on Preston Maddoc.
He had become for her the devil incarnate, and perhaps not for her alone, and maybe not merely metaphorically speaking, but in fact. In the past few days, a new perception of evil had settled on Micky, and it seemed to her that the evil of men and women was — as she would once have ardently denied — a reflection of a greater and purer Evil that walked the world and worked upon it in ways devious and subtle.
When the pain subsided once more, she leaned forward and wiped her blood-plastered right eye against her right knee, swabbing the glutinous clots from lashes to blue jeans. Her vision proved to be fine, the blood hadn’t come from the eye but from a gash on her head, which might still be oozing but was no longer bleeding freely.
She listened to the house. The silence seemed to grow deeper the longer that she waited for it to be broken.
Logic suggested that Leonard Teelroy had been killed. That he had lived here alone. And that now the house was Maddoc’s playpen.
She didn’t cry out for help. The farmhouse sat on a lot of open land and far back from the county road. There were no neighbors to hear a scream.
The doctor of doom had gone somewhere. He would be back. And sooner rather than later.
She didn’t know exactly what he planned to do with her, why he hadn’t killed her in the woods, but she didn’t intend to wait around for the chance to ask him.
He had fashioned impromptu bonds from lamp cords. Copper wires encased in soft plastic.
Considering the material with which they were formed, the knots shouldn’t have been as tight as they were. Looking closely, Micky saw that these makeshift shackles were cleverly and strongly interwoven, employing as few knots as possible — and that each knot had been fused by heat. The plastic had melted, encasing the knots into hard lumps, foiling any attempt to untie them, and making it impossible to loosen the cords by persistently stretching and relaxing them.
Her attention returned to the armchair. On the table beside the chair, an ashtray brimmed with cigarette butts.
Maddoc had probably used Teelroy’s butane lighter to melt the cords. Maybe he’d left it behind. What had been fused with heat might be entirely melted away, freeing her, if she approached the task with caution.
Her wrists were too tightly bound to allow her to hold a lighter in such a way as to apply the flame to the knots between her wrists without also burning herself. The knots between her ankles, however, could be more safely attacked.
She slid off the sofa and, limited by the tether between ankles and wrists, stood hunched, knees slightly bent. The play in the cord that linked her ankles was insufficient to allow her to walk or even shuffle, and when she tried to hop, she lost her balance and fell, nearly striking her head on the table beside the armchair, meeting the floor with teeth-jarring impact.
Had she not avoided the table, she might easily have broken her neck.
Remaining on the floor, lying on her side, Micky squirmed like a snake, searching for the butane lighter beside the chair, behind it.
Close to the floor, the pervading stink pooled thicker than it had been higher up, so thick that she could actually taste it. She had to struggle to repress her gag reflex.
A crack-boom-crash, loud enough to shake the house, caused her to cry out in alarm, because for an instant she thought that she had heard a door being slammed, slammed hard, announcing the return of the demon himself. Then she realized that the sound was a peal of thunder.
The pending storm had broken.
In his rental car, entering Nun’s Lake after having driven south from the airport in Coeur d’Alene, Noah Farrel used his cell phone to ring Geneva Davis. When Micky had called her aunt this morning before leaving Seattle, Geneva would have told her that her nervy three-hundred-dollar ploy to rope the hapless PI into this game had worked and that he was on his way to Idaho. He wanted Micky to wait for him, instead of going off half-cocked. Geneva would have told her niece, per Noah’s instructions, to call home again from Nun’s Lake to leave the name of a local diner or other landmark where he could meet her as soon as he arrived. Now, when he got Geneva on the line to find out where this rendezvous had been set, he discovered that Micky hadn’t called this morning from Seattle and had not rung from Nun’s Lake, either.
“She has to be there by now,” Geneva fretted. “I don’t know whether to be just worried or worried sick.”
The radiant girl is surprisingly quick to trust strangers. Curtis suspects that anyone who shines like she does must possess exceptional insight that allows her to perceive, to some depth, whether those people whom she encounters have hugely good or bad intentions.
She takes with her no suitcase, no personal effects, as though she has nothing in this world but what she wears, as if she needs no mementos and wishes to walk out of her past entirely and forever— though she does remember the journal on the bed. She retrieves it before coming so close to Curtis and Old Yeller that, through the dog, he can feel the warmth of her glorious shine.
“Mother’s giving a great performance as a wasted acidhead. She’s really into the role,” Leilani says softly. “She might not know I’m gone until I’ve published maybe twenty novels and won the Nobel prize for literature.”
Curtis is impressed. “Really? Is that what you foresee happening to you?”
“If you’re going to foresee anything at all, then you might as well foresee something big. That’s what I always say. So tell me, Batman, have you saved other worlds?”
Curtis is tickled to be called Batman, especially if she is thinking of Michael Keaton’s interpretation, which is the only really great Batman, but he must be honest: “Not me. Though my mother saved quite a few.”
“It figures our world would get a novice. But I’m sure you’ll be good at it.”
The girl’s confidence in him, although unearned, makes Curtis blush with pride. “I’m going to try my best.”
Old Yeller moves from between Curtis’s legs to Leilani, and the girl reaches down to stroke her furry head.
By virtue of the boy-dog bond, Curtis almost swoons to the ground when he is swept by the powerful tidal wash of sister-become’s emotional reaction to Leilani. She is as enchanted as any dog ever could be — which is saying a lot, considering that dogs are born to be enchanted every bit as much as they are born to enchant.
“How do you know that a world needs saving?” Leilani asks.
