The pickup came quietly into the drive, and then Dickens walked in with Rosie.
Even before he set her down so jarringly that her spindly bow legs went out from under her, it was clear that the child had sparked off his temper by wailing out of fright and what must be a sense of total abandonment: One side of her tear-streaked face was a furious red. Far more alarmingly, she sat on the floor with the inertness of a potted plant, past protest, past belief in promises that no one was going to hurt her.
Amanda’s heart shook. People said reassuringly in times of crisis, “Children are tough,” and while they might be right most of the time, Rosie wasn’t tough. It seemed a fresh part of madness that she was here in this depleted state because the doctor had vetoed the plane trip east as too taxing.
“Go get the stuff,” said Dickens peremptorily. His icy eyes dared Amanda to make any outcry about the child now hiccuping at his feet. With the new familiarity she hated, she was sure that he had remembered something, or heard something on the radio, to give him this dangerous concentration, and she only sent him a level look, picked up Rosie, a passive instead of a clinging weight, and started out of the hall.
Her immediate captor was behind her at once; Dickens, she realized, had wheeled purposefully into the living room. In search of the telephone? And who would answer? Almost certainly, thought Amanda, the cool-voiced woman who had made the call about the palomino mare. This night’s work would have to be known only to a bare minimum of people.
A wife, or what was quaintly called a housemate? Either would belong to Dickens; the voice had the same credibility as his, and Amanda would have been willing to bet that she was as attractive as he.
Rosie quaked rhythmically against her shoulder, and this particular beleaguerment was almost more than she could bear: What if it were the onset of the kind of siege which could prostrate a longshoreman? She had read about exotic remedies like burnt feathers, but where did people get feathers?
And those relentless feet following, as though she had acquired them as permanently as her shadow. Amanda had to resist what she knew would be a disastrous impulse to whirl on the man behind her. She snapped on the bathroom light and said to Rosie, “Try to hold your breath,” and took a very deep breath of her own to illustrate.
Rosie, familiar with every place in the house, only gazed distractedly into the mirror over the sink. For a second, the reflection there was a terrible mockery of a family portrait: young woman holding child, man at her shoulder—with, in this brilliant examining light, something oddly smooth about his hairline. A wig.
Amanda jerked the mirror open, destroying an intolerable illusion, stared along the cabinet shelves, and took down two small plastic bottles which she placed without comment on the edge of the basin. She got an angry dark stare. “Open them.”
He couldn’t, at least without considerable pain. Amanda obeyed, because God knew what he might do if she said, “Open them yourself,” and set them down again and walked out of the bathroom. Behind her, water began to rush fiercely into the basin as if he planned to soak his hideous red hand.
Suppose she simply kept on walking, as if in obedience to further orders? He might easily have sent her for something like Epsom salts—and she had Rosie, and in the kitchen there was the back door.
And outside the back door there was the virgin snow. It was at least three hundred yards to the nearest house, black under its grove of cottonwoods when she had passed it earlier; how far would she get before Dickens realized that it was taking her a long time to find the medication and came plunging after her?
In the kitchen, Amanda switched on the light, heartbeat accelerating as she gazed at her pink plaid eggcup soaking in the sink, an unreal reminder of the perfectly normal morning that seemed like several days ago. Was it conceivable that in his preoccupation with his hand the creature in the bathroom had left the Volkswagen keys in the ignition? She couldn’t remember taking them out, although there were things you did so automatically that they left no impression, and she had put her handbag down on the hall chest when she picked up Rosie.
It was worth a try, even though the thought of failure and discovery terrified her. Rosie gave a listless hiccup and Amanda moved soundlessly across the kitchen, charting the distance around the house and the obstacles in the way—and Dickens was in the hall, was rounding the corner. She pivoted and had a cabinet open when he put his head around the door, saying sharply, “Let’s go.”
Reaction had gotten to her hands, so that the glass she reached for rocked and sent another one toppling. “I’ve got to stop these hiccups first. She nearly died of them once,” lied Amanda, growingly afraid of this escorted trip out into the dark. Face under control, she turned to look unwaveringly at him. “It’s perfectly possible, you know.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” said Dickens explosively, but his regard was wary as well as disgusted. The child was his lever, the carrot Amanda would follow. He consulted his watch as she filled the glass and held it to Rosie’s lips—waiting for what? No one was going to drive up and rescue her, everybody in the world was asleep except her and Rosie and Dickens and Ellie Peale’s murderer.
“She’s got two minutes,” he said.
At St. Swithin’s Hospital, blond
