Benny stared worriedly at the knife, then turned toward one of the three doors that, in addition to the kitchen archway, opened off the living room.

Rachael was about to pick up some of the papers to see what they were, but when Benny moved, she followed.

Two of the doors were closed tight, but the one Benny had chosen was ajar an inch. He pushed it open all the way with the barrel of the shotgun and went through with his customary caution.

Guarding the rear, Rachael remained in the living room, where she could see the open front door, the two closed doors, the kitchen arch, but where she also had a view of the room into which Benny had gone. It was a bedroom, wrecked in the same way that the bedroom in the Villa Park mansion and the kitchen in the Palm Springs house had been wrecked, proof that Eric had been here and that he had been seized by another demented rage.

In the bedroom, Benny gingerly rolled aside one of the large mirrored doors on a closet, looked warily inside, apparently found nothing of interest. He moved across the bedroom to the adjoining bath, where he passed out of Rachael's sight.

She glanced nervously at the front door, at the porch beyond, at the kitchen archway, at each of the other two closed doors.

Outside, the gusty breeze moaned softly under the overhanging roof and made a low, eager whining noise. The rustle of wind-stirred trees carried through the open front door.

Inside the cabin, the deep silence grew even deeper. Curiously enough, that stillness had the same effect on Rachael as a crescendo in a symphony: while it built, she became tenser, more convinced that events were hurtling toward an explosive climax.

Eric, damn it, where are you? Where are you, Eric?

Benny seemed to have been gone an ominously long time. She was on the verge of calling to him in panic, but finally he reappeared, unharmed, shaking his head to indicate that he had found no sign of Eric and nothing else of interest.

They discovered that the two closed doors opened onto two more bedrooms that shared a second bath between them, although Eric had furnished neither chamber with beds. Benny explored both rooms, closets, and the connecting bath, while Rachael stood in the living room by one doorway and then by the other, watching. She could see that the first room was a study with several bookshelves laden with thick volumes, a desk, and a computer; the second was empty, unused.

When it became clear that Benny was not going to find Eric in that part of the cabin, either, Rachael bent down, plucked up a few sheets of paper — Xerox copies, she noted — from the floor, and quickly scanned them. By the time Benny returned, she knew what she had found, and her heart was racing. “It's the Wildcard file,” she said sotto voce. “He must've kept another copy here.”

She started to gather up more of the scattered pages, but Benny stopped her. “We've got to find Eric first,” he whispered.

Nodding agreement, she reluctantly dropped the papers.

Benny went to the front door, eased open the creaky screen door with the least amount of noise he could manage, and satisfied himself that the plank-floored porch was deserted. Then Rachael followed him into the kitchen again.

She slipped the tilted chair out from under the knob of the basement door, pulled the door open, and backed quickly out of the way as Benny covered it with the shotgun.

Eric did not come roaring out of the darkness.

With tiny beads of sweat shimmering on his forehead, Benny went to the threshold, found the switch on the wall of the stairwell, and flicked on the lights below.

Rachael was also sweating. As was surely the case with Benny, her perspiration was not occasioned by the warm summer air.

It was still not advisable for Rachael to accompany Benny into the windowless chamber below. Eric might be outside, watching the house, and he might slip inside at the opportune moment; then, as they returned to the kitchen, they might be ambushed from above when they were in the middle of the stairs and most vulnerable. So she remained at the threshold, where she could look down the cellar steps and also have a clear view of the entire kitchen, including the archway to the living room and the open door to the rear porch.

Benny descended the plank stairs more quietly than seemed humanly possible, although some noise was unavoidable: a few creaks, a couple of scraping noises. At the bottom, he hesitated, then turned left, out of sight. For a moment Rachael saw his shadow on the wall down there, made large and twisted into an odd shape by the angle of the light, but as he moved farther into the cellar, the shadow dwindled and finally went with him.

She glanced at the archway. She could see a portion of the living room, which remained deserted and still.

In the opposite direction, at the porch door, a huge yellow butterfly clung to the screen, slowly working its wings.

A clatter sounded from below, nothing dramatic, as if Benny had bumped against something.

She looked down the steps. No Benny, no shadow.

The archway. Nothing.

The back door. Just the butterfly.

More noise below, quieter this time.

“Benny?” she said softly.

He did not answer her. Probably didn't hear her. She had spoken at barely more than a whisper, after all.

The archway, the back door…

The stairs: still no sign of Benny.

“Benny,” she repeated, then saw a shadow below. For a moment her heart twisted because the shadow looked so strange, but Benny appeared and started up toward her, and she sighed with relief.

“Nothing down there but an open wall safe tucked behind the water heater,” he said when he reached the kitchen. “It's empty, so maybe that's where he kept the files that're spread over the living room.”

Rachael wanted to put down her gun and throw her arms around him and hug him tight and kiss him all over his face just because he had come back from the cellar alive. She wanted him to know how happy she was to see him, but the garage still had to be explored.

By unspoken agreement, she removed the tilted chair from under the knob and opened the door, and Benny covered it with the shotgun. Again, there was no sign of Eric.

Benny stood on the threshold, fumbled for the switch, found it, but the lights in the garage were dim. Even with a small window high in one wall, the place remained shadowy. He tried another switch, which operated the big electric door. It rolled up with much humming-rumbling-creaking, and bright brassy sunlight flooded inside.

“That's better,” Benny said, stepping into the garage.

She followed him and saw the black Mercedes 560 SEL, additional proof that Eric had been there.

The rising door had stirred up some dust, motes of which drifted lazily through the in-slanting sunlight. Overhead in the rafters, spiders had been busy spinning ersatz silk.

Rachael and Benny circled the car warily, looked through the windows (saw the keys dangling in the ignition), and even peered underneath. But Eric was not to be found.

An elaborate workbench extended across the entire back of the garage. Above it was a peg board tool rack, and each tool hung in a painted outline of itself. Rachael noticed that no wood ax hung in the ax-shaped outline, but she did not even give the missing instrument a second thought because she was only looking for places where Eric could hide; she was not, after all, doing an inventory.

The garage provided no sheltered spaces large enough for a man to conceal himself, and when Benny spoke again, he no longer bothered to whisper. “I'm beginning to think maybe he's been here and gone.”

“But that's his Mercedes.”

“This is a two-car garage, so maybe he keeps a vehicle up here all the time, a Jeep or four-wheel-drive pickup good for scooting around these mountain roads. Maybe he knew there was a chance the feds would learn what he'd done to himself and would be after him, with an APB on the car, so he split in the Jeep or whatever it was.”

Вы читаете Shadowfires
Добавить отзыв
ВСЕ ОТЗЫВЫ О КНИГЕ В ИЗБРАННОЕ

0

Вы можете отметить интересные вам фрагменты текста, которые будут доступны по уникальной ссылке в адресной строке браузера.

Отметить Добавить цитату