Perhaps because of his sustained lack of food, or that somnolent little period of waiting for Lucy to go safely to sleep, his sense of immediacy was losing its edge. Besides, another explanation had presented itself. This would be Mrs. Balsam’s first Christmas as a widow. What more likely than, to divert her mind from the fact, she had persuaded Amanda to go away with her over the holiday? She liked Santa Fe, and had a number of friends there.
This hypothesis did not take into account Mrs. Lopez’s wild harangue on the telephone, but anybody who could plant fifty King Alfred daffodils upside down (according to Amanda) was not entirely to be trusted about plans or arrangements. Having paused in a coin-flipping way at the end of Lucy’s driveway, Justin wiped the misted windshield with his palm and turned toward home.
Amanda, who had her tires checked regularly and had never driven on even one flat, wrestled grimly with the crippled car, the snow, her own nerves.
As soon as she was out of the driveway, she had fished one-handedly through the glove compartment and found an ancient cigarette so drained of tobacco at one end that it flared like a torch when she lit it. It tasted like engine grime and dead perfume, and she put it out almost at once because this was a job that required both hands and all her attention.
At a bare fifteen miles an hour, she might have been in command of an angry metal bull—or partial command, because the steering answered erratically while the framework bucked in its protestations. From the vibration, it seemed possible that something would break or fall off at any moment, or even that the car would pancake into the snow in a subsidence of nuts and bolts.
It should not have mattered at such a time that she hated what she was doing to the car. She had respected and taken scrupulous care of it, and she flinched from this deliberate abuse, no matter how necessary, in much the same way that she flinched from women who dragged stumbling, crying children along pavements at a punishing adult pace.
Was there still slashed rubber flapping around, or was she now proceeding on pure wheels? Impossible to tell in the snow; equally impossible to know where the shoulder lay. Amanda drove in the middle of the road, bright lights blazing into whiteness that was now whirling as the wind came up, trying to remember whether the arroyo came before or after the abruptly quenched glimmer of lights that had indicated a house.
Because this clanking vehicle would never make it up a steepish slope.
She didn’t have to worry about the arroyo. She hit something without warning, a rock or a pothole, and the wheel jerked sharply in her tense grip. She overcorrected, confused by the jolt and the spinning brilliance, and all at once the car was sharply canted, with two wheels in a ditch. Something—the rear axle?—had broken.
In her despair, Amanda struck the edge of the steering wheel savagely with a clenched fist. Rosie, who had been a core of rigidity because even at two she sensed something odd about this noisy faltering progress, now began to draw deep quivering breaths as significant, to anyone who knew her, as a pitcher’s windup motion. Amanda said automatically, “Don’t, Rosie,” because the child’s inclination toward sobs was dangerously tempting. The engine had stalled. She started it again, felt the right front and rear wheels churn uselessly, switched off the ignition.
What to do? She had alternately coaxed and forced the car almost a mile, because just ahead and on her right, not more than five yards back from the road, was the black shape of a small, long-deconsecrated church. Amanda had been in it once; it was narrow and low ceilinged, with space for only eight or ten short pews on either side of the center aisle. Its windows were broken, and elm seedlings had started up in places where the plank flooring had crumbled.
Was there a very faint suggestion, below her and around a long curve, of car headlights?
She had fortified herself earlier by the possibility of encountering another motorist to whom she could signal distress by using her flashers and her horn. Now she realized that a driver on this approach almost had to be on his way to Mrs. Balsam’s house.
At this hour, on his way back to Mrs. Balsam’s house.
The tinge of pallor vanished, but Amanda felt as if she had been warned and would not be warned again. Her car had turned into a trap; the church at least would not be a tight little corner. There was the matter of footprints, but the wind and snow should smooth them over quite soon. If the man in the raincoat came upon the abandoned car he might easily think—because that decoying female voice would certainly have reported that she would try to find someone to catch the palomino—that a friend had indeed arrived and rescued her and Rosie, the tire tracks buried by snow.
It was fear and not logic which put forward the idea of a return at all. Logic said that that descent upon the house in spite of the failed bid to lure her out of it argued a plan which had to be implemented without delay; that the man who called himself Peter Dickens had delivered that faceless entity from the cellar somewhere and was busily piling up miles in a different direction.
Fear had no rationalization, and needed none. Ridiculously, as if the exact location of footprints mattered, Amanda wriggled over the gear shift so that she could get out of the
