pierced by thorns.
This has given Holly an idea. The idea is daring. And scary. But it feels right.
When the killer returns to the van, Holly guesses that he has opened a gate to admit them to someplace, and then has closed it behind them.
In Ermina Something's backyard, the killer buried a 'treasure' of which the old woman would not approve. Holly wonders what that treasure might be, but hopes she will never know.
The van coasts forward maybe sixty feet, on an unpaved surface. Small stones crunch together and rattle under the tires.
He stops again and this time switches off the engine. 'We're here.'
'Good,' she says, for she is trying to play this not as if she is a frightened hostage but as if she is a woman whose spirit is arising to its fullness.
He unlocks the back door and helps her out of the van.
The warm wind smells vaguely of wood smoke. Maybe canyons are afire far to the east.
For the first time in more than twenty-four hours, she feels sun on her face. The sun feels so good she could cry.
Supporting her right arm, escorting her in an almost courtly fashion, he leads her across bare earth, through weeds. Then they follow a hard surface with a vague limy smell.
When they stop, a strange muffled sound is repeated three times — thup, thup, thup — accompanied by splintering-wood and shrieking-metal noises.
'What's that?' she asks.
'I shot open the door.'
Now she knows what a pistol fitted with a silencer sounds like. Thup, thup, thup. Three shots.
He conducts her across the threshold of the place into which he has shot his way. 'Not much farther.'
The echoes of their slow footsteps give her a sense of cavernous spaces. 'It feels like a church.'
'In a way it is,' he says. 'We are in the cathedral of excessive exuberance.'
She smells plaster and sawdust. She can still hear the wind, but the walls must be well insulated and the windows triple-pane, for the blustery voice is muted.
Eventually they come into a space that sounds smaller than those before it, with a lower ceiling.
After halting her, the killer says, 'Wait here.' He lets go of her arm.
She hears a familiar sound that makes her heart sink: the rattle of a chain.
Here the scent of sawdust is not as strong as in previous spaces, but when she remembers their threat to cut off her fingers, she wonders if the room contains a table saw.
'One point four million dollars,' she says calculatedly. 'That buys a lot of seeking.'
'It buys a lot of everything,' he replies.
He touches her arm again, and she does not recoil. Around her left wrist, he wraps a chain and makes some kind of connection.
'When there's always a need to work,' she says, 'there's never really time to seek,' and though she knows this is ignorance, she hopes it is the kind of ignorance to which he relates.
'Work is a toad squatting on our lives,' he says, and she knows she has struck a chord with him.
He unties the scarf that binds her hands, and she thanks him.
When he removes her blindfold, she squints and blinks, adjusting to the light, and discovers that she's in a house under construction.
After entering this place, he has put on his ski mask again. He is at least pretending that she can choose her husband over him and that he will let them live.
'This would have been the kitchen,' he says.
The space is enormous for a kitchen, maybe fifty feet by thirty feet, the ultimate for catering large parties. The limestone floor is adrift in dust. Finished drywall is in place, although no cabinets or appliances have been installed.
A metal pipe about two inches in diameter, perhaps a gas line, protrudes from low in a wall. The other end of her chain has been padlocked to this pipe, as it was padlocked to her wrist. The metal cap on the end of the pipe, almost a full inch wider than the pipe itself, prevents the chain from being slipped loose.
He has given her eight feet of links. She can sit, stand, and even move around a little.
'Where are we?' she wonders.
'The Turnbridge house.'
'Ah. But why? Do you have some connection with it?'
'I've been here a few times,' he says, 'though I've always made a more discreet entrance than shooting out the lock. He draws me. He's still here.'
'Who?'
'Turnbridge. He hasn't moved on. His spirit's here, curled up tight on itself like one of the ten thousand dead pill bugs that litter the place.'
Holly says, 'I've been thinking about Ermina in Rio Lucio.'
'Ermina Lavato.'
'Yes,' she says, as if she had not forgotten the surname. 'I can almost see the rooms of her house, each a different soothing color. I don't know why I keep thinking of her.'
Within his knitted mask, his blue eyes regard her with feverish intensity.
Closing her eyes, standing with her arms limp at her sides and with her face tilted toward the ceiling, she speaks in a murmur. 'I can see her bedroom walls covered with images of the Holy Mother.'
'Forty-two,' he says.
'And there are candles, aren't there?' she guesses.
'Yes. Votive candles.'
'It's a lovely room. She's happy there.'
'She's very poor,' he says, 'but happier than any rich man.'
'And her quaint kitchen from the 1920s, the aroma of chicken fajitas.' She takes a deep breath, savoring, and lets it out.
He says nothing.
Opening her eyes, Holly says, 'I've never been there, I've never met her. Why can't I get her and her house out of my mind?'
His continued silence begins to worry her. She is afraid that she has overacted, struck a false note.
Finally he says, 'Sometimes people who've never met can resonate with each other.'
She considers the word: 'Resonate.'
'In one sense, you live far from her, but in another sense you might be neighbors.'
If Holly reads him right, she has sparked more interest than suspicion. Of course, it may be a fatal mistake to think that she can ever read him right.
'Strange,' she says, and drops the subject.
He wets his peeled lips with his tongue, licks them again, and yet again. Then: 'I've got some preparations to make. I'm sorry for the chain. It won't be necessary much longer.'
After he has left the kitchen, she listens to his footsteps fading through vast hollow rooms.
The cold shakes seize her. She isn't able to get them under control, and the links of her chain sing against one another.
Chapter 61
Mitch in the shuddering shade of the wind-tossed podocarpuses, squinting through windows, finally began to test the doors of the vehicles parked at the curb. When they weren't locked, he opened them and leaned inside.
If keys weren't in the ignition, they might be in a cup holder or tucked behind a sun visor. Each time that he didn't find keys in those places, either, he closed the door and moved on.
