into which Pendergast had expressly forbidden him entrance.
Wren turned back, gazing down the dim, tapestried chambers through which he had just passed. The long journey reminded him, somehow, of Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which Prince Prospero had arranged for his masked ball a series of chambers, each one more fantastic, bizarre, and macabre than the one before it. The final chamber—the chamber of Death—had been black, with blood-colored windows.
Wren looked back into the laboratory, shining his light toward that little closed door in the far wall. He had often wondered, during his cataloguing, what lay beyond it. But perhaps, in retrospect, it was best that he not know. And he did so want to get back to the remarkable ledger book that awaited him at the library. Working on it was a way to put these strange and disturbing collections behind him, at least for a while.
. . . There it was again: the rustle of fabric, the echo of stealthy tread.
Wren had lived most of his working life in dim, silent vaults, and his sense of hearing was preternaturally acute. Time and again, as he had labored in these chambers, he’d heard that same rustle, heard that furtive step. Time and again he’d had the sense of being watched as he pored over open drawers or jotted notes. It had happened far too often to be mere imagination.
As he turned and began moving back through the shadowy rooms, Wren’s hand reached into his lab coat and closed over a narrow-bladed book knife. The blade was fresh and very sharp.
The faint tread paced his own.
Wren let his gaze move casually in the direction of the sound. It seemed to be coming from behind a large set of oaken display cases along the right wall.
The basement chambers were vast and complex, but Wren had come to know them well in his two months of work. And he knew that particular set of display cases ended against a transverse wall. It was a cul-de-sac.
He continued walking until he was almost at the end of the chamber. A rich brocaded tapestry lay ahead, covering the passage into the next vault. Then, with sudden, ferretlike speed, he darted to the right, placing himself between the set of display cases and the wall. Pulling the scalpel from his pocket and thrusting it forward, he shone his light into the blackness behind the cases.
Nothing. It was empty.
But as he slipped the book knife back into his pocket and moved away from the display case, Wren heard, with utter distinctness and clarity, a retreating patter of steps that were too light, and too swift, to belong to anybody but a child.
Forty-Six
No matter. She’d be in and out of the cave in fifteen minutes. A quick check, that was all.
About a quarter mile beyond the Kraus place, she pulled onto a dirt track heading into the nearby fields. She parked her car in a turnaround where it couldn’t be seen from the road. Over the tops of the corn to the east, she could just make out the widow’s walk of the Kraus place; if she took a shortcut through the corn, nobody would see her.
She wondered briefly if it was such a good idea to be out in the corn like this. But then she remembered Pendergast being quite positive the killer worked only at night.
Pocketing her flashlight, she got out of the car and closed the door. Then she pushed into the corn and walked down the rows in the direction of the cave.
The heat of the corn pressed down on her almost to the point of suffocation. The ears were drying out— gasohol corn was harvested dry—and Corrie wondered mildly what would happen if the corn caught fire. She enjoyed that thought until she reached the broken-down picket fence that separated the Kraus place from the surrounding fields.
She followed the line of the fence until she was behind the house. She glanced back quickly, just in case the old lady had appeared in one of the windows, but they all remained dark and empty, like missing teeth. The house gave her the creeps, frankly: standing against the cruel-looking sky, rundown and alone, a couple of gnarled, dead trees at its back. The weak rays of the sun still illuminated its mansard roofs and ocular windows. But even as she watched, the shadow of the approaching front crept across the corn like a blanket and the house darkened against the background sky. She could smell ozone on the air, and the mugginess grew even more suffocating. The storm was worse than it had seemed from inside the trailer—far worse. She’d better hurry before all hell broke loose.
She turned and skirted the path to the cave, keeping low in case old lady Kraus glanced out an upper window. In a moment she was descending the cut in the earth and had arrived at the iron door.
She looked carefully at the ground before the door, but the dust was undisturbed. Nobody had been through here in at least a couple of days. She felt both relief and disappointment: the killer, if he’d been here at all, was obviously long gone, but the lack of prints made it all the more likely that her theory was just so much bullshit. Still, she’d come this far; might as well check the place out.
She glanced over her shoulder again, then leaned forward to inspect the padlock on the iron door. Perfect: an old pin tumbler lock, the kind they’d been making for over a hundred years, still basically unchanged. This was the same kind of lock as on the front door of her trailer, the lock she’d first practiced on; it was the same kind as in the padlocks on the school lockers. She smiled, remembering the gift-wrapped box of horseshit she had once deposited into Brad Hazen’s locker with a card and a single rose. He never had a clue.
First, she tugged on the padlock hard, to make sure it was actually locked. That was the first rule of lock- picking: don’t try any keyway tools until you’re sure you need them.
It was locked, all right.
She pulled an envelope of green felt out of her pocket and unfolded it carefully. Inside was her small set of tension wrenches and the lifter picks she’d surreptitiously made in shop class. She selected the wrench that seemed
