the revolver with both hands now.
He kept one hand on her shoulder. 'We don't mean to hurt you.'
Her spine went rigid. For a terrible moment, she thought he spoke to her; then she realized the soft clamor below had ceased.
'We want to help.' He called through the basement door. 'Do you understand? I know what you are.'
'Jesus.' Suddenly, the revolver weighed too much for her to hold it steady.
'We saw the room upstairs.' In front of her now, he edged closer to the door. 'Can you hear me? I know what they did to you, and I understand why.' Gently, he pressed the palm of his hand to the wood. 'Let me help you.' His voice splintered, went ragged. 'Let it be over. There's a place I can take you.'
Behind them, wind hissed through broken glass.
'Don't open that door, Barry.'
'Can you hear me?'
'I'm warning you. I'll shoot anything that moves.'
'Do you understand me?' As he twisted the doorknob, a scrambling noise receded. 'I'm coming down now.'
'No!' Her revolver trembled wildly.
'Don't be afraid.'
The hinge shrieked. The corrupt damp of rotting timbers seeped into the kitchen, slowly at first. Then it poured upward, a geyser of stench, unpurified by frost, issuing up from the pit.
'This is the real house, isn't it?' Her voice became almost inaudible. 'Like that room upstairs.'
'I'm coming now.' He angled the flashlight downward, but the faint oblong only spilled across the first few steps, revealing corroded wood and crumbling plaster walls. At the bottom, filthy darkness writhed.
Her face had hardened into a numb mask, and she seemed to have lost all feeling in her arms and legs. No sound reached her ears save a tiny scrabbling. It climbed, growing louder, a terrible murmur that struggled toward clarity, and she knew she'd been hearing it all along, ever since she'd entered this house, aware of it only on the edges of her consciousness.
The steps sagged softly beneath his tread. In the beam, tiny creatures seethed and darted, soft, bloated bodies hopping off the stairs as the light found them. The boldest one stood its ground on the bottom step, its quivering snout smeared with foulness. Dainty paws dug at the feast.
The pistol hung uselessly at her side. 'Oh dear Jesus.' She was conscious of making a wheezing sound, of blood circulating in the veins of her scalp.
He pounded his fist on the wall until the squirming gray mass receded, exposing the thing they'd gorged upon.
Over his shoulder, she glimpsed it: the snarling teeth, the blackened talons held up as though it were still trying to defend itself. Rigid darkness looped through the exposed ribs. And Kit began to scream.
XVI
'I always wondered how I'd handle a real crisis.' Pacing into the wind, she sipped coffee through a hole in the plastic lid. 'Now I know.'
Below them, a pipe cut across the narrow beach into the surf, and receding waves revealed a slime trail in the mud.
'You did okay.'
'I froze.'
'You're not the type that freezes. You're more dangerous than that.'
'Well, I'm freezing now.' Shivering in the early morning light, she tried to laugh.
'Charging in that way. Typical rookie maneuver.' He shook his head. 'Trying to prove something. Good way to get killed.'
'I...'
'Think about it. Why did you go to that house alone?'
'Why did you?' She grinned. 'Exactly. It's my job too. The difference is I don't do mine very well.'
'You did okay.' By now his words had become a comforting litany, having been repeated over and over since the previous evening. After their grisly discovery in the Chandler basement, she'd seemed to go numb, calmly allowing him to lead her back outside. She'd even surprised him by insisting--in a faint monotone--that they pay a call on the closest neighboring house. He'd thought it best not to argue. After a flash of Kit's badge, an elderly woman had peered nervously into the twilight. The woman told them she'd seen no one entering or leaving the Chandler house in months but had indicated she found nothing unusual in this. 'They mostly come and go at night, and, Officer, the sounds from that house, the noises.' Then she'd clapped a hand over her mouth.
Kit sipped her coffee, and the wind stung at her from across the boardwalk. 'We haven't any choice now.'
'We've been all through this.' He stalked around her. 'You said it yourself. He's got a hostage. He'll kill her if he sees uniforms. How many more times can I say it?'
Her voice rose sharply. 'But the body...'
'Could have been anyone, Kit. Even Ramsey himself.'
'No--he called me.'
'How much could you really tell about whoever called you?'
'It was him. It had to be.' Her fingers went to her temples, as though she could push away the headache. The previous night came back in vividly chaotic flashes: she could remember the sudden rush of cold when he'd gotten out to retrieve his own car from its hiding place off a side road; then blankness settled. She recalled nothing of the drive home, except perhaps for his headlights, icy and remote in the mirror. Reflexes alone must have guided her. By the time they'd reached the duplex, the shaking had started, and she remembered his arm around her shoulder, helping her up the stairs. She'd barely resisted when he made her take the last of the Xanax he found in her medicine cabinet. He'd spent the night on her sofa. Vaguely, as from a dream, she retained some impression of his making a phone call in the middle of the night. Before dawn, she'd come anxiously awake to find him sitting at her kitchen table with the cat glaring at him from the windowsill. That's when they'd decided to head out to the boardwalk. She couldn't remember why.
'Was it you who broke into Chandler's office?' she asked. Bleak sunlight glimmered down on them, and despite the chill, she suddenly needed to walk. 'Before me, I mean?'
'Somebody broke in?' He met her stare. 'No, I swear it wasn't me.'
'I don't believe you,' she told him simply as she moved to the rail.
'Kit...'
'Look at that sky. It's going to be a pretty day. You think it might warm up a little?' She squinted toward the end of the jutting pier. 'I can remember watching the old men fishing out there when I was little.' Like fragments of mica, sunlight glinted from the water. She sipped more coffee, then tossed the remnants of a doughnut at the scattered pigeons. With a rapid slapping, the birds rose at her movement, then settled back, twitching along the walkway.
He also surveyed the dock and turned his collar up against the wind. 'Why does it go so far out?'
Beyond the edge of the dock, gulls wheeled.
'Didn't used to.' Shading her eyes, she watched the birds. 'It's even low tide now. The sea gains a little ground every year. I used to play right underneath here, right where the water is. Can you believe it? I remember the sand always felt cool, like a slice of winter. And the old men had to fish from the very end.' She paced along the rail, the wind blowing the short curls of her hair into a bright tangle. 'You've been lying to me all along.'
A tern shrieked, and the laughter of gulls echoed from the beach.
'Kit, I...' He seemed to concentrate on getting the lid back on his coffee. 'Uh...why are you looking at me like that?'
'I was just thinking--I've never seen you out in the sun before.'
'What's the verdict?'
'Your eyes are almost the same color as the sky. What?'
'Nothing. Just I don't much like this sky.'
