He plunged the living room into darkness then, and Amanda walked out into the night ahead of both men, hearing Apple’s disappointed whimpers as the door closed with finality. The Volkswagen’s windows had to be cleared of snow, and that was left to her, but in less than two minutes she was in the driver’s seat, hands wet and burning with cold because at some unrememberable point she had lost her gloves, with Ellie Peale’s murderer beside her.
When he had said goodnight to Amanda’s friend Williams, Justin proceeded to his kitchen to make himself the most delicious meal that occurred to him in his extremity: a fried egg sandwich. He felt as if he had not eaten in two days.
He had been half right in his latest surmise, he reflected, disinterring a small iron pan with the resultant shrieking collapse of every other cooking vessel he owned; Mrs. Balsam was away. It was reassuring to know that Amanda was safely under cover, in this weather, but there was something undeniably flat about receiving the information secondhand. To an ear in the inveterate habit of attaching flesh and blood to disembodied voices, Williams had sounded tall, correct, and well dressed. (But would he have expected Amanda to take up with a rude threadbare dwarf?)
Butter to sizzle; presently, egg. A familiar feeling was beginning to steal over Justin, but he ignored it and pressed two slices of bread down into the toaster; white, which he bought occasionally under the censorious regard of shoppers with brown or black loaves. Amanda was also of the whole-wheat persuasion, although where liver pate and transparent rings of onion were concerned her principles fell by the wayside.
Amanda. For just a second she seemed to look at him out of the air: copper-brown hair which she wore in a variety of ways, very clear and noticing greenish eyes, long vertical dimple in her right cheek when she smiled. It was warming but odd that she had thought to relay a message to him on the evening when he had discovered her to be an absolute necessity, but hadn’t been able to tell her so or find out whether she felt even remotely the same way about him.
He assembled his sandwich, distributing a little ketchup here and there along with salt and pepper. And the inevitable happened: Ravenous hunger had turned into the full and leaden feeling of having eaten far too much. He took a single bite, had to chew interminably to force it down his throat, deposited his handiwork in the garbage, and went morosely to bed.
Chapter 12
I’ll be behind you, all the way.
Amanda had never driven the Rabbit, and would have felt a certain hesitance with a strange dashboard and a different response even by herself on a dry sunlit road. Under Dickens’ stark threat, her hands had a tendency to shake, and after she had located the windshield-wiper knob she got into reverse with a noise that suggested gear-stripping, wobbled her way into first, skidded going out of the driveway because the accelerator pedal was a livelier one than her own. The pickup’s headlights began to follow steadily.
Which of them had the knife used to slash her tires? It could not be the murder weapon, because no sane man . . . and there went that argument.
She had known when she saw the grotesque hand of the man beside her that she was to be recruited as driver in an enforced change of plan. Had they found their bolthole closed, or been alerted by something on the police radio? Whichever the case, there was an element of safety in this particular dividing. The authorities by now might be thinking in terms of a body rather than a captive, but would they be looking for Ellie Peale’s killer in the company of a woman?
Amanda, glancing up at the headlights in the rearview mirror, discovered that she did not even want to think about the police at the moment. Would she dare, in the unlikely event of meeting a patrol car, slew deliberately toward it and stake everything on one fast burst: “This is the man who murdered Ellie Peale and the truck behind me has a kidnapped child in it”?
No, she would not. No officer would act instantly on such a wild declaration—she could envision being asked for her driver’s license and registration—and she believed implicitly Dickens’ statement that he would mislay Rosie if he felt threatened. He was hanging well back, and once they were off this stretch of road he would be able to dart off into the night if he chose. And, approaching it from the front, she had never seen the pickup’s license plate.
. . . Here was the crossroads, and the telephone booth where she had listened helplessly to Justin’s acceptance of her and Rosie’s safety and well-being. If she had known then that the man in the passenger seat was incapable of driving away at a signal from the flashlight . . . ? Even now, with the memory of that savage impact of fist against wall, she would not have risked it.
Ahead and below were the scattered streetlights of the town center, a quarter-mile of small businesses, bars and eating places, tiny library, police and fire stations. Having grown somewhat more accustomed to the car, Amanda reached for the pack of Mrs. Balsam’s cigarettes on the dashboard, shook one free, lit it with a match from the accompanying folder. At once, the man who had been staring silently out the side window swung his head and said in his strange voice, “Put that out. I’m allergic.”
Allergic. Having stopped a young girl’s heart with a knife, and so recently helped cram her body back into hiding, he was troubled by secondhand
