To lock her and Rosie in the cellar?
At the very thought, Amanda’s toes curled in her icy shoes. She had never been in a cellar—most Southwestern houses were not so equipped, being built directly on slab—but in fiction at least they were places of rodents, cobwebs, impromptu burials. This one, windowless, would be utterly black. She tried to reassure herself by the fact that Dickens had been forced to mention Mrs. Balsam’s house to Justin—but how much risk was that, with his easy use of her name, and Rosie’s and the Afghan’s? Justin would imagine them all bedded down for the night, warm and safe.
And there was no one else.
They passed the church with its hidden, unstirring occupant—and then her car, looking almost prehistorically dead in its snowy shroud. With the drifting and powdering of white, no one could guess at the state of its tires.
The pickup jolted sharply as one wheel struck whatever it was that Amanda had hit earlier. The hitherto voiceless man let out a harsh strangled protest, and Dickens swung his head to glance across at him. “Okay, hang on, we’ll get you something.”
That peculiar rigidity, with its suggestion of crouch: Was he a drug addict; had he killed Ellie Peale in some disoriented frenzy? Or—for the first time Amanda remembered the two ransacked medicine cabinets— was it possible that she had managed to harm him before she died, featherweight though she was?
With startling suddenness the headlights reached out to a familiar stretch of rail fence, the quenched black glimmer of windows, a snowed-over dark blue Volkswagen Rabbit. For the second time that night, Amanda had arrived at Mrs. Balsam’s house.
In the instant before Dickens cut the ignition, she had a feeling of total unreality. It seemed incredible, in her present circumstances, that she had ever come here with the simple notion of feeding the dog and the horse; that, even entrusted with the forgotten Rosie, she had cooked her dinner, watched the televised news, said goodnight without a qualm to tall, erect Colonel Robinson while all this was gathering around her. (But there had been a moment of real fear before she found the light switch inside the front door; had the very air carried a warning?)
Apple was letting off a volley of deep-throated barks. “Out,” said Dickens tersely, holding the door open on his side and jerking his head at Rosie. “Leave her here.”
“I can’t. She has to go to the bathroom,” said Amanda, equally curt, and it was true that Rosie had begun some anxious fidgeting. She’s only two.”
“ . . . Okay, said Dickens with obvious distaste. He leaned past Amanda as she got out, addressing the other man. “Come on.”
As a safeguard, in case she could put her hand on a weapon in the house? Of course she could; any kitchen was full of them. The drawer where she had found the flashlight for her expedition to the corral also had contained skewers, a roasting fork, all-purpose scissors. Useless, even if they would allow her into the kitchen, with a child as pawn.
At the front door, Dickens produced a ring of keys which Amanda supposed were a duplicate of her aunt’s, found the right one without difficulty, did not have to feel for the light switch. This casual almost-ownership was a ridiculous thing to register a tiny Hare of rage at, and it certainly didn’t matter that one off-white wall now wore a jagged splash of yellow-brown or that a smashed mustard bottle had leaked the rest of its contents onto the gray-blue rug.
After her first horror at having to sort out three people the Afghan came forward in a hostessy rush, dancing first to Amanda and then to Dickens, keeping well away from his companion. The bulbs on the miniature Christmas tree caught a current of air and made curtsies in rose and pink and silver. Amanda turned her head and gazed inescapably at the man who had risen nightmarishly out of the floor.
Inevitably, because the black girl’s glimpse of him in the convenience store had been alarmed and fleeting, he bore only a passing resemblance to the artist’s sketch. There was a certain flattening to the opaque-skinned features, but his mouth was almost arrogantly defined, his face pointed rather than oval. He wore jeans and a denim jacket. His long dark eyes stared back at her as intensely as a strange animal’s.
He held his right hand, the clear cause of his concentrated stillness, curved stiffly in front of him, elbow out as though supported by an invisible sling. The flesh was swollen and inflamed and glazed-looking, suggesting a red-hot throb which would have made Amanda wince if it had been anyone else. Had Ellie Peale used her teeth in her desperation, or had he encountered a scorpion or black widow in the cellar?
“Come on, make it snappy,” said Dickens edgily, and Amanda removed her magnetized glance and followed him along the hall, accompanied by Apple. He entered Mrs. Balsam’s bathroom ahead of her, made a swift inspection of the medicine cabinet, took out and pocketed the safety razor and packet of blades. His frightening gloves—from a surgical supply store?—fitted him as tightly and shinily as healed burns.
An icy little breath was seeping from behind the locked door of Mrs. Balsam’s bedroom, where the window stood wide, but Dickens’ attention was elsewhere as he stepped back to let Amanda pass. “Hurry up,” he said. “And fix your face.”
Fix her. . . P Amanda could scarcely believe she had heard that. He was nervous, she thought, perching Rosie; he had been forced out of his usual poise, and he wasn’t used to it. It was not a cause for elation. Perhaps out of that enforced physical closeness in the phone
