would realize I’d done it, even though he didn’t know she’d come down here to see me. Because of where her body was found, so close to here. I should have taken her a long way from Hilliard, a long, long way, but I was so scared that night, I just wanted to get rid of her. But Ron never said a thing to the police. I kept waiting for him to call and accuse me and he didn’t do that, either.”
Alix had moved one full step away from the car and was about to take another. But when Cassie paused, she stood very still. She would need at least two more steps before she was close enough to hurl herself at the woman’s feet “Well, now I know the reason,” Cassie said. “I should have known it right from the first. He couldn’t risk his affair being found out. Oh, I can picture him mouthing platitudes to his colleagues: ‘How could such a terrible thing happen to such a lovely girl?’ He didn’t care about Miranda any more than he cared about any of the others. Or me. But he should have cared about that baby. He-”
Cassie broke off again, and again cocked her head to listen. Alix heard nothing except the wind in the trees outside… and then she did, she heard movement at the open door to Cassie’s right. And she saw someone come in, a shadow at first, then the shape of a man Adam Reese, holding his rifle at an angle in front of him, his clothing damp and disheveled and his eyes bright, hot, flashing a fragmented blue-and-white as they sought Alix, found her, pinned her. His lips were pulled back in a feral grimace, spittle flecking them at the comers. Then he saw Cassie and stopped moving; a look of amazement crossed his features, as if he hadn’t heard them talking from outside, as if he’d expected to find Alix there alone. His body dipped into a crouch and he started to swing the rifle’s muzzle toward Cassie.
But Cassie was quicker. She pivoted in an absurdly graceful motion, like a ballerina doll in a music box, and the pistol bucked in her hand. The sound of the shot was deafening in the confined space. Reese jerked, lost his unfired rifle, staggered with his hands coming up to his chest. Cassie fired a second bullet into him, and Alix heard but didn’t see him fall.
She had already moved by then. She was down on her stomach slithering frantically under the car.
Jan
At the doorway to the lightroom he rolled the barrel of fire sand out of the way, then unhooked the air hose and pulled the diaphone over until it was balanced on the edge of the sill. He went back up to the lantern, unhooked the hose from the compressor, hefted the unit in his arms, and brought it back down to the lightroom, where he set it in the doorway next to the diaphone.
The noise he made doing this seemed to have refueled Bonner’s rage: the obscenities and the pounding increased to another fever pitch. Bonner was still ranting when Jan descended to the trap, but stopped while he was still two risers above it. Jan came to a standstill, breathing through his mouth, listening, as Bonner must have been on the other side. He pushed up his glasses, rubbed at his stinging eyes, squeezed them shut against the gathering pain.
God, he thought, let me get through the next few minutes. Just these next few minutes.
“Ryerson! What you doing up there, you murdering son of a bitch!”
And the pounding started again, savage, rhythmic-one driving thud against the bottom of the trap every two or three seconds.
Quickly, Jan moved down the remaining steps, bent, and threw the locking bolt free of its ring, timing it so that the sound the bolt made releasing was lost in the hollow thud of wood on wood. He was turning, starting back up to the lightroom, when the next blow came. This time the door rose an inch or so in its frame, fell back with an audible bumping sound. There were no more blows-just a heavy silence that lasted five seconds, ten, while Bonner’s slow wits took in the fact that the trap was now unlocked. If he thought that his pounding had somehow broken the lock, if he didn’t suspect a trap above the trap…
The door lifted again, slowly-one inch, two. Jan tensed. And then Bonner shoved up fast and hard, threw the trap back against its hinge stops. His head and shoulders appeared in the opening, eyes wide and wild and gleaming in the weak light.
With his foot Jan shoved the diaphone off the sill, sent it plunging downward. It hit one of the steps with a ringing metallic clatter, bounced straight at Bonner, who threw his arms up in front of his face and started to cry out. The diaphone struck him on one forearm and the side of his head, knocked him backward out of sight. His cry changed into a strangled shriek that was lost, cut off, in the echoing, thumping noise of the heavy instrument and Bonner’s body tumbling down the stairs. When the sounds finally stopped, the silence that filled the tower seemed riddled with ghostly echoes just beyond the range of hearing.
Jan was out on the stairs by then, peering downward, trying to bring the gloom at the bottom of the stairs into focus. He was ready to dislodge the compressor, send that hurtling downward, too, if necessary-but it wasn’t necessary. Bonner lay twisted below, unmoving, the diaphone canted across his legs so that only his upper body and his feet were visible.
The sudden release of tension made Jan’s own legs feel weak, rubbery, as he descended. Bonner’s weapon, an ax handle, lay on one of the steps partway down; Jan bent to claim it before he went the rest of the way. When he got to where Bonner lay, the silence that had built around him was thick, no longer echoing, broken only by the faint thrumming duet of the wind and the fire outside.
He bent to look more closely at Bonner, afraid that he’d killed the man; the last thing he needed right now was a death on his conscience, even the death of a tormentor. But Bonner wasn’t dead. There was a bloody gash on the side of his head where the diaphone had struck him, and one of his legs was bent at an angle that could only mean a bone had shattered; but his mouth was open and he was breathing in ragged, painful gasps.
Jan swallowed against the taste of bile, stepped over him and out into the wreckage of the living room. Holding the ax handle cocked at his shoulder, he looked into Alix’s studio, then hurried through the kitchen, cloakroom, pantry. All of them were empty. He went through the pantry door, around to the front yard. Stood for a moment to let the icy breath of the wind clear his head, dry the sweat on his body.
The station wagon was a blackened hulk inside a dying ring of fire. Beyond it, the garage was sheeted by flame, burning hot and smoky from the paint and oil and chemicals stored inside. If the wind had been strong, gusty, there would have been a danger of the fire spreading to the lighthouse. But it had died down, changed direction-capricious wind. What sparks and embers blew free were being carried away to the southwest, out to sea.
In the fireglow he could see that the grounds were as deserted as the house. Outside the fence, the road-as much of it as his narrowing vision could make out-also appeared to be empty. Nobody here now, just Bonner and him. Just him.
But he couldn’t stay here, couldn’t just wait, because he couldn’t be absolutely sure Alix had made it safely to a telephone. He’d been right about Bonner-but what if he’d been wrong about the others?
He began to run.
It was a hard run at first, but he couldn’t keep up the pace. He was out of shape, and exhausted from the tension and exertion of the past two hours, and his head ached, throbbed with every step. He was worried that the fresh exertion would bring on the bulging, or worse, one of the blackout periods. Or that he would drop from sheer fatigue.
He slowed to a trot, then to a fast walk, and when he had his wind back he began to trot again. The night was black around him, streaked with fog. Anything more than a few feet away appeared to him as smears and blobs. He kept swiping at his eyes, poking and pinching at them in a vain effort to widen his field of vision.
He had gone a mile or so-he had no real sense of distance, nor of passing time-when he came around a bend in the road and one of the larger blobs ahead of him materialized into Reese’s van. He came to an abrupt halt when he recognized it, then warily moved closer. It was angled off on the side of the road, lightless, the driver’s door yawning open.
Abandoned here, he thought. Why?
He went around to the driver’s door, leaned inside. Empty. The ignition lock was empty, too; whoever had been driving it-Reese? — had taken the key. Frustrated, feeling a new surge of anxiety, he backed out and stood indecisively for a moment, knuckling his eyes, staring ahead into the blurry darkness.
Alix, he thought then.
