codes—in recent years because it prevented an occupant from getting out in a fire. She stepped back and stared at the house. A lot of modernist architecture was far older than it looked. This place could easily have been built in the thirties, and the bars could simply be relics.
But to Jane the bars looked like a sign of malicious intent. The old word
She moved to the farthest window. In all the rooms in the wing the lights were off, so she had to peer in and strain her eyes to make out shapes. This one held an empty double bed, a dresser, a closet. The entrance to the bathroom was on her left. The small, high window in there had bars across it, too. She moved to the next window. The room was nearly the same, unoccupied but furnished. Jane kept moving along the side of the house until she reached the big room at the center. She stood perfectly still outside the glass wall and stared into the room. First there was a moving shadow, and then a figure appeared on the walkway above the room. There was a woman in a bathrobe and slippers moving sleepily from one set of rooms toward the other. She stopped and turned her head, as though she had to force herself to look down.
30
Ruby Beale saw the woman beyond the glass. She gave an involuntary shudder-jump, as all the muscles in her body tightened. It seemed to squeeze the scream out of her, so loud and high-pitched that she frightened herself, and her body dropped her into a crouch on the walkway. She involuntarily tried to curl up and be smaller as she stared down at the figure beyond the glass wall.
The woman was outside the glass, standing there without moving, her hands at her sides. She was all in black, and her hair was black, and Ruby couldn't make out her face with the moonlight behind her. She stood there staring at Ruby.
There were sounds of heavy, hurried footsteps on both ends of the hallway, and on her hands and knees, Ruby could feel the vibrations from the running men through the floor, and it scared her even more. Lights came on. It felt as though the walkway would be shaken loose. She looked back in the direction of her bedroom, and saw Andy running toward her in his pajamas, with a gun in his hand. From the other direction came Pete Tilton and Claudia Marshall, and both of them were carrying guns, too. The sight of so many guns did nothing to calm Ruby. Everyone was running, and all the guns seemed to be held in front of them and pointed downward, which was where she was.
They all converged and stood over her yelling at once. Andy was gasping, 'Are you all right? What's the matter?' and other variations on the same theme, while the others were shouting, 'What is it? What did you see?' Ruby looked over the edge of the walkway at the glass again.
The woman in black pivoted. Her silhouette was the same from the back, only the face was gone, and she walked into the dark in the garden. 'There!' Ruby shrieked, and managed to point her finger. But the woman had dissolved into the night shadows.
Ruby said, 'It's a woman—tall, thin, long black hair, dressed in black. She's out there.'
'Sybil?' said Claudia Marshall.
'What?' It was Sybil Landreau, who had come out of another room on the top floor.
Claudia turned to see her standing behind her. 'It just sounded like you.'
'I was asleep.'
Ruby was agitated. 'It wasn't her. I would have said 'Sybil,' not 'a woman.''
JANE WAS RUNNING. She knew they would come out after her, and that what she had to outrun was the light. The only sounds in the darkness were the balls of her feet pounding the lawn and her lungs taking in deep breaths as she sprinted. As she approached the place where the grass melted into the stand of pine trees at the end of the property, she heard the sliding of one of the glass doors at the side of the building where she had been standing. She knew they had done the right thing—they had gotten someone outside in the dark who would now get into firing position—but she knew that the tactic would give her an extra five or six seconds at a full sprint. She ran hard, counting the seconds. She dashed past the first few pine trees and threw herself down.
The bright floodlights came on, an explosion of eye-searing glare, but she could see that two of them were outside holding pistols in two-handed stance, turning their bodies as they scanned the back yard for a target. After a few seconds one waved to the other and they turned away from each other to move along the two wings of the house and then continue around toward the front.
Jane knew that this was either her chance to get up and run for the wall, or their way of inducing her to try. She guessed it was a fake, and lay still. A second later they both spun and aimed their weapons down the lawn toward her. She could see beyond the glare of the floodlights mounted along the eaves of the house that there were two people half-hidden beside the sliding doors, staring out at the gardens, trying to act as spotters.
Jane stayed low and moved toward the left, away from the long featureless wall of the garage. She was almost sure that was where they would go to wait for her, thinking she must have come by car and needed to make it over the gate in the hedge to the street.
She found her pine tree lying at the foot of the wall, propped it up so she could climb it to the top, then pushed it back down so it would fall sideways. Then she dropped to the other side. She hurried to the road, lifted her bicycle over the low wall to the street, put on her helmet, mounted, and pedaled hard. She built up considerable speed before she passed the opening in the hedge where the gate was. The only sounds were the whisper of wind in her ears and a slight hiss of her tires on the pavement.
She kept going hard, building her speed as she went. By the time she had traveled two hundred yards, she judged she must be going at least forty miles an hour. Jane knew she probably couldn't go faster than that on this road until the first downgrade. But she was sure it hardly mattered. The people who were hunting for her had not seen her leave or heard a car engine, so they would assume she was still there.
Jane heard a new sound. It was the throaty, burbling sound of a motorcycle engine starting. She had underestimated the hunters. She couldn't outrun a motorcycle, but her bicycle still gave her advantages. It was silent. She could pull off and hide while the motorcycle went past, or find a path that was off the road and try to avoid roads entirely. In a couple of seconds the engine sound rose to a whine, and then a roar as the motorcycle came after her.
She could hear it gaining easily on her and saw the pavement ahead of her begin to glow from its distant headlight. Jane saw a street sign ahead, and she pedaled harder for it, then veered to the right and took the turn around the corner as fast as she dared and drifted almost to the left side of the road. She came upon a grove of stunted oaks, so she steered off the road into it, avoiding the trunks and raised roots until she could coast while she swung her leg over the seat and began to run with the bicycle. When she stopped her momentum fifty feet from the road, she dropped her bicycle in some high weeds and lay beside it.
She heard the motorcycle roar into the intersection, and looked in that direction, not raising her head, but staring through the weeds. There was the bright single headlight, the yellow motorcycle. Its helmeted rider was hunched forward over the handlebars, his legs bent so he held the motorcycle in a knock-kneed crouch. He had lost her, or maybe never caught sight of her, and just come this way because he knew she would be going in the direction of the freeway and the coast, not inland.
His single headlight turned in Jane's direction, and she ducked her head deep in the weeds, but he surged forward toward her hiding place only about thirty feet before he swung around, heading back into the intersection. He turned his motorcycle to the right so his light shone on the stretch of road he had been on before he'd turned, then rode a few feet up to the left, but didn't seem to see anything that way either. He came back along the road toward Jane. This time he seemed to have decided she couldn't have gone down either of the other stretches of road. He came along slowly, and as he approached, Jane saw the trees above her hiding place begin to glow brighter with his headlight.
The engine throttled back, so it was almost at idle again. Suddenly it grew much louder, and the motorcycle came off the road, over the shoulder, and into the grove, heading directly for Jane. She crawled behind a tree and stood, taking off her jacket. She pressed her body to the trunk of the tree, listening to the engine of the motorcycle and watching the beam of the headlight bouncing up and down on the leaves and upper branches of the oak trees