Why was this room alone lit, and where was Amanda?
The time for speculation was past. There was, Justin seemed to recall, a glass door opening on a patio. He ran to it, collecting a snowy rock on the way, and smashed a pane just above the lock. Although he thought he reached in with reasonable caution, he cut his wrist at once, but the door was open.
The Afghan had fled at the shattering of glass, but when he had found a light switch she put her head around a doorway—to the living room, Justin recognized—and peeked shyly at and then recognized him. This process took the form of prancing and bowing, after which she sat abruptly back on her haunches and regarded him with glowing expectancy.
Even to someone who did not live with her, she was asking for food or water. “. . . taking care of Apple and the horse,” Williams had said of Amanda’s mission here, but the dog at least had not been attended to.
“In a minute,” Justin told her. He had not accoutred himself with a handkerchief in his hasty dressing, and he was dropping blood onto Mrs. Balsam’s carpeting. He found a bathroom on the first try, pressed tissue against his wrist, moments later was gazing into the empty guest room.
The near twin bed had been remade without the motel perfection of the other, testimony to the child’s interrupted sleep there. A fraying tip of dun-colored cloth showed under the edge of the bedspread. When Justin picked it up, because everything in this room was of importance to him, it was a shortish length of rag with a couple of knots in it.
He gave up on that. Ridiculously, as if Amanda were playing some coy game with him, he looked into the closet. It contained only hangers and a small suitcase which, from its tiny cotton underwear and striped shirt and miniature blue jeans, belonged to Rosie Lopez. Why had Amanda left it behind, with no easy way to collect it in the morning?
Because an explanation had been taking shape in his mind in connection with the tire tracks which seemed to have been made at approximately the same time. Amanda, discovering that the telephone had become inoperative, might well have had second thoughts about staying here after Williams’ departure; might have said to Mrs. Balsam’s putative friend, arriving on his heels and probably known to her, “Would you do me a very great favor and drive us home?”
In which case, on a generally maddening night, Justin might have just missed her in his swing past her house with Lucy Pettit. This hypothesis did not explain the nonfeeding of Apple, now scraping beseechingly at his knee, or the abandonment of the suitcase—unless, instead of second thoughts, Amanda had had a genuine fright.
Was there really anything wrong with the telephone, or had the voice identifying itself as Williams simply not wanted Justin to call?
Try it, right away. Justin had had automatic intentions of closing Mrs. Balsam’s bedroom window and switching off the light, as if her utility bills mattered at the moment; instead, he walked rapidly into the living room, Apple eager at his heels. Its serenity was underscored by the pretty little Christmas tree waking up on a bookcase and a novel open facedown beside the couch.
The telephone offered only emptiness when he lifted the receiver. The cord, cleanly severed, swung free. What had been by turns relief and wild anxiety and bafflement assumed an entirely different shape.
Apple placed an imploring paw on his knee. She looked ready to sob if not fed, and Justin mounted the step that led to the kitchen, turned on the light, gazed blankly around at its bright tidiness, and located a large bag of dog food in the pantry. He filled her bowl, provided her with water, stood staring into the living room while she crunched at high speed.
Theories as to what had happened here, all untenable for one reason or another, blazed and tumbled through his head. Kidnap designs on the child? The Lopezes weren’t targets for that. An intruder (leaving no signs of forced entry) expecting to find an elderly woman and coming upon Amanda instead? Simple enough to tie her up—she would know better than to resist—and ransack the place.
Had Mrs. Balsam gone away of her own volition; had she in fact gone away at all?
Gradually, Justin became aware that he was focusing on a splash of brownish-yellow on the living room wall opposite. Close up, there were flying, radiating specks. The substance wasn’t quite dry when he touched it, and it smelled like mustard. On the rug at his feet was an answering little puddle with a few smeared glints of glass, as if someone had started to tidy up and then abandoned the effort.
He turned, measuring the distance from the kitchen. The quiet house, lying to him all along, must have echoed when that happened.
The police, he thought with a peculiar reluctance. They might smile over a hurled mustard jar; a cut telephone cord was something else again, and there was a small child involved. But there was one more thing to do here first, one place still unexplored, and for some reason it filled him with dread. The plant room.
Unlike the Christmas tree, the plants, deep green and pale, a few in flower, trailing and thrusting and burgeoning, did not wake at the passage of air but only trembled a little in their damp earth-scented sleep. Justin, for whom houseplants died the instant they discovered where they were, had never envied this luxuriant collection; now he found it sharply unpleasant although the room was innocent enough.
No, not completely. Between the back wall and a tub of some leathery growth that looked freshly fed was an inch or two of navy leather strap.
A woman’s handbag.
Chapter 14
At the sudden sound of the telephone giving an abbreviated scream
