She kicked at his shins again.
“Damn you!” he snarled.
She twisted, bucked, tried to wriggle away from him.
Frustrated with her, he pulled her around, rushed her backward and slammed her up against the corridor wall, effectively cutting down her freedom of movement.
Then, miraculously, Penny was there beside them, pulling at his right arm, trying to make him give up a useless battle, trying to give Gwyn an opportunity to break away.
Groves was beside himself now, and he was in no mood to be dissuaded, not even by Penny. He said, “Get away from me, damn you.”
“I won't let you hurt her!”
“
Though she was clearly stunned by the expletive, she did not let go of him, but continued scratching his arm with her long nails, cutting bright red streaks in his thick biceps.
Suddenly, he let go of Gwyn with one hand, swung that hand and struck his wife across the face.
She fell down.
Now that he was holding her against the wall with only his left hand, Gwyn realized that this was her last best chance of escape, and she put out a burst of effort, kicking and clawing and even biting him, until she suddenly broke from his grasp and ran.
“Hey!” he shouted.
She made for the back steps.
“Ben, let her go!” Penny shouted.
But he came after her.
She felt his hands grasping at her pajama blouse.
She leaped sideways, ran on, reached the steps and went down them, fast, so fast that she thought she'd surely fall and kill herself, just as he had pretended to do on the main steps.
At the bottom of the dark steps, as Groves started down from the top, Gwyn made use of the pantry again, as she had before when she'd made them think she'd gone out of the house, when she heard them talking together by the back door. She hoped that this similar ruse would work; if it did not, she was finished.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Just as Gwyn pulled the pantry door shut, leaving only a tiny crack to see out of, Ben Groves came off the stairs and into the kitchen, standing directly in front of her, breathing hard. His back was to her, and he was studying the shadows in the main room, to see if she were cowering in any of them. He seemed to have forgotten about the food cupboard in the wall behind him.
She hoped his bad memory didn't get any better.
“Ben, where are you?” Penny said, as she came out of the stairwell after him. She saw him, went to him and took hold of his arm. She said, “Won't you please let her go?”
He said, “I can't.”
“Of course you can.”
“I've got to find her.”
“Ben, listen to reason.”
He said, “You're the one who's unreasonable. If that kid gets away, we not only lose any chance at the money, but she can identify us, and we'll both end up in jail.”
“Maybe she won't press charges.”
“Like hell.”
“Even if she does press charges,” Penny argued, “they won't give us more than a year or so. That's not long.”
“That's forever,” he disagreed,
“With good behavior—”
“I'd go insane in a prison,” he said.
Gwyn thought, from her hidden perch inside the pantry, that prison, then, would be ironically just punishment for him, after he had spent so much time to make her think she was losing
“You're just overwrought now—” Penny began.
He said, “You've also forgotten what it's going to be like to face Barnaby if that girl escapes.”
“He'll have to suffer with the rest of us.”
“That's hardly likely,” Groves informed her. “He's too powerful a man, for one thing. And, for another, don't you remember the story of him hiring that guy to burn down that house, so he could force a man to sell the land?”
“So?”
“You seriously believe that a man like Barnaby, a man who has resorted to that kind of force in the past, would take what was coming to him? Of course he wouldn't. He'd cover his tracks so fast that we wouldn't have a chance.”
“You mean he'd hurt us?”
He laughed bitterly. “Hell, love, I wouldn't be surprised if he took it in his mind to kill us.”
“Oh, God, what a mess,” Penny said.
“And my way is the only way out of it,” he said.
“Killing her.”
Groves said, “Yes.”
“I didn't think it would come to this.”
“But it has.” He patted her shoulder and said, “Don't worry, love. I can handle it so that it'll look like an accident. We're going to come out of this smelling like roses.”
Reluctantly, but finally convinced, Penny said, “Okay, kill her. But I don't want to have anything to do with this; I don't want to have nightmares about it for the rest of my life. I don't want any of the responsibility, and I don't want to have to watch you when you — when you kill her.”
Gwyn would have laughed at this hypocrisy if her laughter wouldn't have given her away.
Groves said, “I've got to call Barnaby—”
“Why?” New fear replaced the note of resignation in Penny's voice.
He said, “He should be home to handle the aftermath of all of this. He'll be better prepared to take care of the cleaning up than I will, because he has more contacts. Don't worry, I'm not going to tell him what's gone wrong. With a little bit of luck, I'll catch the kid and have this over with before he gets here.”
“What can I do, anything?” Penny asked.
Gwyn knew, now, that there was no chance of using Penny as an ally in the future.
“Come along with me, to the study,” Groves said. “You can stay there when I'm done with Barnaby, and you can make sure she doesn't use the study phone. She's probably already been on the house phone, somewhere, and found that doesn't work. She'll think of the study line soon.”
Groves and his wife left the kitchen and entered the corridor, the swinging door squeaking shut behind them.
Gwyn waited where she was, wondering if he might be playing a trick, if he suspected she was nearby and intended to come back through that door without warning.
A minute passed.
Then another.
At last, feeling somewhat safer, she came out of the pantry and went to the back door, opened that and stepped outside, closed the door behind her, all without making a sound.
When she had heard Groves say that the main house telephones were out of order, her spirits had sunk to a new low, for she had intended to get to an extension and dial the police the moment she was free to leave the pantry. Now, that course of action was lost to her, and she had a bad moment as she thought that they were too
