women whose social lives revolved around an obsessive interest in one-armed bandits, even though the nickel machines were pretty much ancient history. Nickel duchesses always played the cheap slot machines — nickels and dimes in the old days, now quarters — never the dollar- or five-dollar slots. They pulled the handles for hours at a time, often making a twenty-dollar bill last a long afternoon. Their gaming philosophy was simple:
The duchesses, who for the most part were widows and spinsters, often ate lunch and dinner together. They cheered one another on those rare occasions when one of them hit a really large jackpot; and when one of them died, the others went to the funeral en masse. Together they formed an odd but solid community, with a satisfying sense of belonging. In a country that worshiped youth, most elderly Americans devoutly desired to discover a place where they belonged, but unlike the duchesses, many of them never found it.
Vivienne had a daughter, a son-in-law, and three grandchildren in Sacramento. For five years, ever since her sixty-fifth birthday, they had been pressuring her to live with them. She loved them as much as life itself, and she knew they truly wanted her with them; they were not inviting her out of a misguided sense of guilt and obligation. Nevertheless, she didn’t want to live in Sacramento. After several visits there, she had decided that it must be one of the dullest cities in the world. Vivienne liked the action, noise, lights, and excitement of Las Vegas. Besides, living in Sacramento, she wouldn’t be a nickel duchess any longer; she wouldn’t be anyone special; she would be just another elderly lady, living with her daughter’s family, playing grandma, marking time, waiting to die.
A life like that would be intolerable.
Vivienne valued her independence more than anything else. She prayed that she would remain healthy enough to continue working and living on her own until, at last, her time came and all the little windows on the machine of life produced lemons.
As she was mopping the last corner of the kitchen floor, as she was thinking about how dreary life would be without her friends and her slot machines, she heard a sound in another part of the house. Toward the front. The living room.
She froze, listening.
The refrigerator motor stopped running. A clock ticked softly.
After a long silence, a brief clattering echoed through the house from another room, startling Vivienne. Then silence again.
She went to the drawer next to the sink and selected a long, sharp blade from an assortment of knives.
She didn’t even consider calling the police. If she phoned for them and then ran out of the house, they might not find an intruder when they came. They would think she was just a foolish old woman. Vivienne Neddler refused to give anyone reason to think her a fool.
Besides, for the past twenty-one years, ever since her Harry died, she had always taken care of herself. She had done a pretty damn good job of it too.
She stepped out of the kitchen and found the light switch to the right of the doorway. The dining room was deserted.
In the living room, she clicked on a Stifel lamp. No one was there.
She was about to head for the den when she noticed something odd about four framed eight-by-ten photographs that were grouped on the wall above the sofa. This display had always contained six pictures, not just four. But the fact that two were missing wasn’t what drew Vivienne’s attention. All four of the remaining photos were swinging back and forth on the picture hooks that held them. No one was near them, yet suddenly two photos began to rattle violently against the wall, and then both flew off their mountings and clattered to the floor behind the beige, brushed-corduroy sofa.
This was the sound she had heard when she’d been in the kitchen — this clatter.
“What the hell?”
The remaining two photographs abruptly flung themselves off the wall. One dropped behind the sofa, and the other tumbled onto it.
Vivienne blinked in amazement, unable to understand what she had seen. An earthquake? But she hadn’t felt the house move; the windows hadn’t rattled. Any tremor too mild to be felt would also be too mild to tear the photographs from the wall.
She went to the sofa and picked up the photo that had dropped onto the cushions. She knew it well. She had dusted it many times. It was a portrait of Danny Evans, as were the other five that usually hung around it. In this one, he was ten or eleven years old, a sweet brown-haired boy with dark eyes and a lovely smile.
Vivienne wondered if there had been a nuclear test; maybe
But, no, she was stuck in the past: The Cold War was over, and nuclear tests hadn’t been conducted out in the desert for a long time. Besides, the house hadn’t shuddered just a minute ago; only the photos had been affected.
Puzzled, frowning thoughtfully, Vivienne put down the knife, pulled one end of the sofa away from the wall, and collected the framed eight-by-tens that were on the floor behind it. There were five photographs in addition to the one that had dropped onto the sofa; two were responsible for the noises that had drawn her into the living room, and the other three were those that she had seen popping off the picture hooks. She put them back where they belonged, then slid the sofa into place.
A burst of high-pitched electronic noise blared through the house:
Vivienne gasped, turned. She was still alone.
Her first thought was:
But the Evans house didn’t have an alarm system.
Vivienne winced as the shrill electronic squeal grew louder, a piercing oscillation. The nearby windows and the thick glass top of the coffee table were vibrating. She felt a sympathetic resonance in her teeth and bones.
She wasn’t able to identify the source of the sound. It seemed to be coming from every corner of the house.
“What in the blue devil is going on here?”
She didn’t bother picking up the knife, because she was sure the problem wasn’t an intruder. It was something else, something weird.
She crossed the room to the hallway that served the bedrooms, bathrooms, and den. She snapped on the light. The noise was louder in the corridor than it had been in the living room. The nerve-fraying sound bounced off the walls of the narrow passage, echoing and re-echoing.
Vivienne looked both ways, then moved to the right, toward the closed door at the end of the hall. Toward Danny’s old room.
The air was cooler in the hallway than it was in the rest of the house. At first Vivienne thought that she was imagining the change in temperature, but the closer she drew to the end of the corridor, the colder it got. By the time she reached the closed door, her skin was goose-pimpled, and her teeth were chattering.
Step by step, her curiosity gave way to fear. Something was very wrong here. An ominous pressure seemed to compress the air around her.
The wisest thing she could do would be to turn back, walk away from the door and out of the house. But she wasn’t completely in control of herself; she felt a bit like a sleepwalker. In spite of her anxiety, a power she could sense — but which she could not define — drew her inexorably to Danny’s room.
