“If you want to know what she's doing down there,” Elaine said, “you can use the binoculars from the edge of the cliff. That's safer; you won't be seen.”

“I don't know…” But he had already begun to close the door.

“Come on, then,” she said.

He closed the front door and followed her along the corridor that led to the rear of the house and the kitchen. But halfway there, he had already decided that his wife was correct, that nothing was to be gained by watching Gwyn on the beach. Even if she met Younger, her confidence in him would be unswayed, no matter what the boy said. “Forget it, Elaine,” he told her, stopping her before she reached the kitchen door. “She's not going to find anything on the beach.”

“Of course she isn't.”

“This is still a minor crisis,” he said. “But I think it's one we can deal with well enough.”

“What have you in mind?”

“I want to talk to Ben and Penny.”

“About another little performance?” Elaine smiled and touched his arm with one hand.

“You don't think that would be overdoing it, do you?” he asked, taking her hand in his and holding it tightly.

“Penny's a great actress.”

“But we don't want the girl getting too familiar with the — ghost,” he said. “That would take a lot of fire out of the big finale — and we've put too much thought into the last act to ruin it now.”

“Penny can handle it,” Elaine assured him.

He thought a moment and said, “We ought to have something prepared for her as soon as she gets back, to wipe out any gains in self-confidence that she might have gotten from the walk.”

“We'd better see Penny right away,” Elaine said, leading the way back toward the main Starr-case, her flowing brown hair like a cape from a nun's bonnet. “Gwyn might come back at any moment.”

Together, they went upstairs. '

At Ben Groves' door, at the far end of the main corridor from Gwyn's room, Elaine knocked three times, rapidly, waited for an answer. When Groves didn't respond, she knocked again, more insistently this time.

He opened the door, looking worried, smiled when he saw them and sighed. “It's only you,” he said, stepping back out of the way. “I thought it might be the kid.”

“The kid is why we're here,” Will said. He followed Elaine into the room while Groves closed and locked the door behind them. He did not sit down, for his nerves were too keen to allow him relaxation. Instead, he paced to the windows and back again, rubbing his hands together as if they were covered with something sticky.

“What's wrong?” Groves asked.

“She's gone out for a walk,” Barnaby said.

“The kid?”

“That's right — and to the beach.”

“She's supposed to be knocked out,” Groves protested.

“Well, she isn't,” Elaine said, somewhat crossly.

“And we've got to schedule a new performance,” Barnaby added.

“See if you can contact the spirit world now,” Elaine told Groves.

“What?” he asked, bewildered.

“The ghost,” Elaine said. “See if you can scare us up the ghost.”

Groves grinned, now. “Oh. Yeah, just a minute.”

He went to the closet door, opened it, pushed some clothes out of the way and looked up a dark flight of attic steps. “Penny, we're having a conference. You want to come down?”

A moment later, he stepped back to allow a blue-eyed blonde into the room. At her appearance, both Elaine and Will smiled, reassured that their plan was foolproof. Penny was almost an exact double for Gwyn Keller, as much like Gwyn as Ginny had been, at least in appearance.

“I guess it's time for me to start earning my money again,” Penny said, sitting on the edge of Groves' bed.

“That's right,” Elaine said. “And you're worth every penny of it.” She smiled as she offered around a pack of cigarettes.

FIFTEEN

She stood halfway between the surf and the cliff, at the turning in the beach where the dead girl had disappeared two days ago, when Gwyn had been chasing her. This had not been her original destination — at least not consciously. When she'd first left the house, against Elaine's wishes, she'd started walking northward, along the unexplored arm of the beach, with the excuse that the scenery would thus be new and more enjoyable than a walk into familiar places. In fifteen minutes, however, she understood that she was only trying to avoid a confrontation with the landmarks of past terrors. She was running, again. Resolute, then, she had turned and started back to the south, passed the stone steps and went on for another half an hour until she came, at a leisurely pace, to the bend in the beach. She half expected that here she would find something important, something she had overlooked and which would settle this whole thing — though she had no idea what this might be…

The sun was low in the sky, though it continued to make the beach as hot as an oven. And she was weak, still, and tired. She would not, however, give up the last shred of her hope. For the most part, she was convinced the ghost had never existed, that she'd never seen anything more than an hallucination, that the footprints were illusions, as were the broom marks that had followed them. But a glimmer of doubt still existed, deep inside of her, a minim of hope that it would all prove to be something else quite different. This glimmer kept her here, searching the clean sand with an intent gaze.

She searched along the surf for some kind of indentation in the land which would be sufficiently deep to conceal a young woman who was approximately the size of the — the dead girl. She found nothing. Moving slowly in toward the cliff wall, each step rapidly becoming a major effort as her unusual weariness increased, she eventually discovered, to her own great surprise, the well-concealed series of small caves, all large enough to accommodate a man, which lay there…

Even half a dozen steps away from them, one could barely see the tops of these caves. Here, the beach was hove up like the back of an angry cat and was, for the most of its width, higher than the entrances to the caves, providing a natural blind. Within two yards of the cliff wall, however, the beach sloped drastically, giving way to the subterranean chambers at the bottom of a seven- or eight-foot incline.

Gwyn stood at the top of this slope, looking down, not sure if she should risk a moment of optimism or not. Previously, in scouring the beach, she had seen no footprints besides her own; two days of wind and shifting tides had wiped the open sand clean of any trace of the dead girl's ghostly passage. At the bottom of this slope, on the other hand, in the dimly lighted entrance to one of the caves, other footprints marked the sand where the wind and the waves could not get in to erase them.

Careful not to lose her balance and fall, Gwyn went down the steep hill, and braced herself against the cliff wall at the bottom. She crabbed sideways until she reached the cave in question.

Her heart was thudding, more from excitement than exertion, but this was the only sign that she felt close to some strange truth…

In the deeper, looser sand of the slope, the other set of prints was little more than a staggered series of formless depressions, not at all sufficiently well defined for identification. But at the bottom, in the cave entrance where the sand was level and not so deep or dry as on the slope, the prints had taken well and remained clear: slender and feminine, the tracks of a woman in her bare feet — as the ghost had been…

Gwyn would not permit herself the elation that bubbled within her, because she realized that the footprints might have been made by anyone, a curious explorer from somewhere farther south along the beachfront, and not by a ghost. Moving cautiously, so as not to disturb the tell-tale tracks, she slipped to the mouth of the cave and then inside, walking only so far as she could see, though the subterranean system seemed rather large and complex. She saw, when she turned to face out toward the daylight, that the bare-footed woman who had been

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