with firm purpose. This woman had a crooked nose that looked as if it had been brutally broken and never properly set, her jowls were thick, and her chin had receded above a padding of flab. Deep lines flared out from the corners of her eyes and cut across her forehead. Mary could tell that the woman, who stood about five six, was heavy around the stomach and waist, a once-fine figure gone to seed. But the woman had green eyes: green as Irish moss. They were Didi's eyes, in a face that was almost toadish.
'Mary?' she said in Bedelia's voice grown husky and older. 'Mary?'
'It's me,' Mary answered, and Bedelia tried to speak again, but only a sob came out and it was tattered by the wind. Bedelia Morse rushed forward into Mary's arms, and they hugged each other with the pistol between them.
2: The Idiot's Dream
On Monday morning between two and three, Laura Clayborne put on her heavy overcoat, got into her car in the Days Inn parking lot, started the engine, and drove west, heading for Didi Morse's cottage in the woods.
Sleep was impossible, the night full of phantoms. A crescent moon hung in the sky, the road empty before the BMW's headlights. Laura shivered, waiting for the heater to warm up. She and Mark had driven out to the cottage at ten o'clock, to see if Didi Morse had gotten home and was simply not answering her telephone, but the house had been dark. Laura wanted to drive, to have the sensation of at least going from one point to another. Her calls to Agent Kastle in Atlanta had told her how his investigation was going: Kastle, his secretary said, was out of the city and would get in touch with Laura whenever he returned. In other words: don't call us, we'll call you.
That wasn't good enough. Not good enough by a damned long shot.
Laura drove past the cottage. Still dark, no car in front. Wherever Didi was, her weekend trip had stretched out another day. Laura thought she might start chewing the walls of her motel room if she'd come all this way and couldn't find the woman. She'd stopped taking her sleeping pills because she didn't want her brain fogged with drugs. The downside of kicking the sleeping pills, though, was that she had maybe three or four hours of sleep a night and the other hours were haunted by visions of the madwoman on the balcony and the sniper with his rifle. Laura couldn't take looking at her face in a mirror; her eyes had seemingly sunken deeper, and there was a steely shine in them as if something hard and unknown were beginning to peer out.
About a mile west of the cottage, Laura turned around on a dirt road and headed back. Get something to eat, she thought. Find an all-night pancake house, maybe. Someplace with a lot of hot black coffee.
She slowed, nearing the cottage again. She glanced toward it as the BMW crept by. Dark, of course. Didi had gone birding, the old man had said. Borrowed his binoculars, and went bye-bye. Her hands tightened around the wheel. Didi Morse might be her only hope of finding David alive. David might be dead right now, torn apart like the dolls in the box they'd found in Mary Terrell's apartment. Dear God, Laura prayed, help me hold on to my sanity.
A light flashed.
A light.
In a window of Didi Morse's cottage.
Laura was past the house by a hundred yards before she could make her foot hit the brake. She slowed down gradually, not wanting the tires to shriek. Her heart was about to blow out of her chest. A light. Just a brief glimmer, maybe a second and then gone. It hadn't been a reflection of the moon, or of her headlights.
Someone was inside the house, prowling around in the dark.
Laura's first thought was to stop and call the police. No, no; she didn't want the police in this, not yet. She turned around again and drove past the house once more. This time no light shone. But she'd seen it; she knew she had. The real question was: what was she going to do about it?
She pulled the car off the road, stopped it on the brown-grassed shoulder, cut the headlights and the engine.
Her purse was on the seat beside her, but her pistol remained in her suitcase at the motel. She sat there, shivering as the warm air slipped away and the night came in. Who was inside Bedelia Morse's house? A burglar? Stealing what? Her pottery? Laura realized she could either sit there and thrash it around in her mind or walk back to the house. Courage was not a question here: it was a matter of desperation.
Laura got out, opened the trunk, and put her hand around the tire iron. Then she buttoned up her coat to the neck and began walking the couple of hundred yards back to the dirt driveway that curved up through the woods. No light shone in any of the cottage's windows. There was no other car anywhere in sight. Imagination or not? She tightened her grip around the tire iron and started up the driveway, the air's eighteen-degree temperature burning her nostrils and lungs.
The baby was crying again. The sound roused Mary from a dream of a castle on a cloud, and set her teeth on edge. It had been a good dream, and in it she'd been young and slim and her hair had been the color of the summer sun. It had been a dream that she hated leaving, but the baby was crying again. Babies were killers of dreams, she thought as she sat up in bed. Her dream had been to place the baby in Lord Jack's hands, and see him smile like a blaze of beauty. Lord Jack would love her again, and everything would be right with the world.
But Lord Jack wasn't here. He hadn't been at the weeping lady. Lord Jack wasn't coming for her. Not now. Not ever.
The baby was crying, a sound that razored her brain. She stood up, a well of despair, and she felt the old familiar rage begin to steam from the pores of her flesh.
'Hush,' she said. 'Drummer, hush.' He wouldn't obey. His crying was going to wake the neighbors, and then the pigs might come calling. Why did the babies always try to betray her like this? Why did they take her love and twist it into hateful knots? What good was Drummer now if Lord Jack didn't want him? Drummer was a piece of crying flesh that had no purpose, no reason for being. She hated him at that moment because she realized what she'd done to bring him to Lord Jack. Now it was all over, and Lord Jack would never set eyes on the wailing rag.
'Won't you stop crying?' she asked Drummer as she sat on the narrow bed in the dark. She spoke in a quiet voice. Drummer gurgled and cried louder. 'All right,' Mary said, and she stood up. 'All right, then. I'll make you stop.'
She switched on the lights in the kitchenette. Then she turned on one of the stove's burners and swiveled its dial to high.
Laura walked slowly up the front steps of Bedelia Morse's house. A clay cat was crouched near the door, and dead leaves scuttled across the porch. Laura reached out and tried the doorknob, gently working it from side to side. Locked. She retreated from the door, went back down the stairs again and around to the rear of the house. Her fingers, clenched so hard on the tire iron, were stiffening up with the cold. There was a one-car garage and a larger stone outbuilding, its door sealed with a padlock and chain, where Laura assumed the pottery work was done. Strange clay sculptures stood amid the barren trees like alien plant life; Laura couldn't see them now, in the dark, but they'd been apparent when she and Mark had gone back there on their initial visit Saturday. All kinds of clay geegaws – bird feeders, mobiles, and other things not so readily identifiable – dangled on wires from the tree limbs. It was obvious that Bedeua Morse – or Diane Daniells, as she called herself now – had thrown herself heart and soul into the work she'd begun as a member of Mark's commune. Laura went to the back door, her shoes crunching on dead branches and leaves, and she tried this doorknob as well.
It turned easily. Laura's heart kicked again. She ran her hand over the door and found that one of its small rectangular panes of glass had been removed. Not broken, because there were no shards. Removed, as with a glass cutter.
She opened the door and stood on the threshold. Off in the woods somewhere, an owl spoke to the moon. The cold wind hissed through the trees and made the clay ornaments clink and clatter on their wires. She shivered involuntarily, and she stood in the doorway trying to see through the dark. Nothing in there but shapes upon shapes. She and Mark had looked through the door's panes on Saturday and seen a kitchen with a table and a single chair in the middle of the room. On Saturday, the door had had all its panes of glass, and it had been securely locked.
Her heart pounding, Laura lifted the tire iron and walked into the house.
Mary picked up the baby. Her touch was rough. The infant's crying broke, faltered, and began to climb in volume again, a thin, high whine that Mary could not abide. 'STOP IT!' she shouted into his reddened, squawling
