The spiky-lashed, hazel-green gaze, very like Amanda’s own, burned back at her.
I’m missing something here, thought Amanda, and remembered. “Oh, and don’t worry about Apple either. I’ll feed her and tuck her in for the night. Or I might take her home with me, just for a day or two, until we hear what the doctor says. I’ll feed and water Drougette too, so don’t concern yourself about that.” Apple, more formally Dreamspinner’s Golden Apple, was Mrs. Balsam’s cherished young Afghan hound, Drougette a palomino mare she was boarding for friends. The horse had escaped from its somewhat inadequate corral two nights earlier, causing Mrs. Balsam to roam the area for an hour before she caught it, and the dog was an occasional roamer, like most of her breed, so why, in answer to the assurance of their being taken care of, was a tear forming and then falling on Mrs. Balsam’s cheek—not felt, not brushed away?
Because up until early that afternoon she had been a well and active woman, able to perform these chores herself, as well as a pretty one?
“Aunt Jane,” began Amanda helplessly, “don’t—” Don’t what? Be terrified because she had had a stroke massive enough to paralyze her right side and deprive her of speech? Amanda was saved from any such ludicrous injunction by the entrance of the nurse, who took a glance at her patient and said at once, “I think Mrs. Balsam would like to rest now.”
Amanda stood, buttoning her coat, ashamed that she was grateful. She said to the marred and flaring-eyed face on the pillow, “I’ll be back in the morning, with whatever you were reading as well as some other creature comforts,” because in spite of the hooding of the right eye her aunt’s alertness did not seem to be at all impaired.
There was a sudden small thrash from the bed. “There, now, we’re responding,” said the nurse, but the flip of her hand was dismissive, and Amanda left.
Outside it was bitter indeed, with a wind that wrenched threateningly at the car door when she reached it, running, head down. As she had promised, Amanda set out for the house near the mesa twelve miles away.
Strings of colored lights and tinsel dipped and swung over the streets, clogged with desperate, last-minute shopping traffic. As the city fell behind, Christmas trees on lawns or behind picture windows took over, and then Amanda was in luminaria territory: the lighted long-burning candles in brown paper bags partly filled with sand, tops neatly folded down, to guide the Christ Child. They made golden punctuations in the night by the thousands, outlining driveways and adobe walls and rooftops. Amanda had her own luminarias in place, but, a stern traditionalist in such matters, would not light them until tomorrow night, Christmas Eve.
Which brought to mind the already-wrapped white coral earrings and vivid silk scarf which could almost literally be pulled through a ring. How long—Amanda could not phrase it to herself in any other way—before her aunt would wear either?
There was no point in speculating upon how long she had lain immobilized a few yards from her front door, or the horrifying fact that except for the arrival of a United Parcel Service truck at about three o’clock she might still be lying there in the freezing dark. There were no immediate neighbors, and her car had shielded her from the view of what little traffic there was on the narrow climbing road.
It was not one of the two afternoons a week she did volunteer work at the very hospital she was now in, but she had obviously been starting off on an errand when something had prompted her to get out of the car, leaving the key in the ignition, the driver’s door open, her handbag on the passenger seat. The stroke had felled her halfway along the flagstone walk.
The girl driver of the truck, arriving on the scene, hadn’t wasted any time looking for the keys which turned out to be under Mrs. Balsam’s prone form, but sped off to the nearest house to call the emergency number. A police car had responded along with the ambulance, and Amanda hoped sincerely that they had made a routine check of all the doors and windows. This was a lonely spot, and the house was going to be a concentration of blackness.
A rabbit leaped out of her headlights as she turned into the drive and parked behind her aunt’s car. Before leaving the hospital she had accepted and signed a receipt for Mrs. Balsam’s navy calf handbag—they were understandably not anxious to be in charge of cash or credit cards or other valuables—to which someone had restored the house keys, and as she approached the front door, leather case in hand, she listened for the Afghan’s surprisingly baritone bark. Apple was a shy dog, but as long as she remained invisible she might have been a reverting mastiff.
Silence, except for the wind.
Apple had been in the car, then, grown impatient when her mistress did not return to it, bounded out, perhaps nosed affectionately around the stricken woman under the delusion that this was a game of some kind, gotten bored with it, and wandered off. She had probably been back a number of times since, crying plaintively to be let in for her dinner.
Amanda lit three matches with great difficulty before she was able to unite key with lock. Hand on the knob, she turned and called, “Apple?” but not very loudly, because she was curiously reluctant to pinpoint herself in this empty, windrushing dark, and opened the door.
The interior was even blacker than she had expected, as if walls and
