That simple? The invasion of the house taking place long before Amanda got there, the innocent-looking telephone going unnoticed until much later? No. It was a measure of his state of mind that Justin remembered only now the unanswered ringing on Mrs. Balsam’s line all evening.
Amanda herself—inexplicably not answering her own telephone a few minutes ago, or had she silenced it after a long day containing a severe shock?—would explain it to him in a further few minutes. Still, he felt as tense as before, and it took a sudden sharp skid at the traffic light to ease his foot on the gas pedal. He drove the rest of the way with heightened awareness, because these were exactly the circumstances in which a heifer or other large animal would come blundering into his path.
Were the fresh furry-edged tire tracks ahead of him the ones that had left Mrs. Balsam’s house? The local population was not limited to Amanda and Williams, however much it might feel that way—but the tracks separated at Amanda’s empty circular driveway. One vehicle had entered at the far end. There was not a single light showing.
Amanda here, just long enough to talk to the nurse at Saint Swithin’s, and gone again.
A conflagration of rage and something else sprang up in Justin’s abused stomach. He reminded himself, slamming his door so hard that the car rocked, of the serene occupancy suggested by those two gold windows at Mrs. Balsam’s house. False, so that perhaps this black and sleeping shape . . .
He had left his headlights on, and this time, on his way to the spare key which Amanda kept in the trough of a birdfeeder hanging outside the living room window, he made a fast examination of the footprints in the snow. One isolated set belonged to a man; the other scuffled trail, as if made by two people in single file, showed the occasional sharp indentation of a woman’s high heels where they had not been dragged over.
Amanda, almost certainly Williams, and another man.
Justin located the key, wiped it free of snow and birdseed, and fitted it into the lock. The click of metal almost blotted out a sound from within that turned him cold: a kind of broken gasping, not quite crying. He opened the door, knew where to find the hall light switch, and stood staring down at Rosie Lopez.
Chapter 16
Claude. Late, and as if it could help her, Amanda’s brain had identified the single sharp syllable with which Dickens had stopped that deadly rush in her living room. Necessity had jarred it out of him and the response had been instant, so it was the killer’s real name.
She wished her brain had let it alone. Anyone might ciaim that he had returned from an absence to find his van stolen, but how many Claudes could be found in the immediate vicinity of any given crime? And the natural conclusion to that—
Amanda would have thought it impossible for fear to actually stop her ears, but in that herded walk to the car she caught only the echo of a wail from Rosie and then Dickens’ voice, savage: “Okay, okay, I’ll get the damned thing.”
The rag, she thought; the essential talisman. With it, able to pretend that it was the real link to her parents and home and safety, Rosie might fall exhaustedly asleep, not rasping dangerously at Dickens’ nerves. Light from the hall flooded briefly out onto the snow as Amanda half-turned, and there in the doorway was the child in that hard and careless grip, the length of white satin dangling from her fist.
“Here.” Claude thrust the Volkswagen keys at her so roughly that they seemed momentarily like something else and she stepped instinctively back, off-balance, sliding in the snow. “In,” he said, “fast, and then I’ll tell you where to go.”
Amanda slid in behind the wheel, the corner of her eye observing the rapid dark shape of Dickens depositing his burden in the pickup. He had entered the driveway from the far end, so that once more she was presented with the plateless front of the truck. Before the discovery of the body in the church she would have found that reassuring; now it seemed only automatic deviousness, as much a part of Dickens as his clear eyes or disarming smile.
His headlights sprang on, an implacable dazzle: She would have to back out. She turned the key in the ignition, knowing that this was the last leg of the journey, the last—
Abruptly, without warning, her body became one long tremble, the gearshift and floor pedals felt as strange and terrifying as the controls of a jumbo jet. She had trouble with her breathing. She turned her head away from the merciless flare of light and said with effort, “I don’t—think I can drive.”
“You’ll drive if you want to see that kid again.” The foggy voice wasn’t any more threatening than a surgeon’s might have been, announcing an inoperable cancer. “Up to the corner and then left.”
Amanda pulled air into the very bottom of her lungs, let it out slowly, got the car started and hacked. Her hot rush of hatred had a steadying effect, and she registered the fact that one or both of these men knew the valley, although she had never seen either of them before, so that there was no chance of saying that a road was torn up and picking an alternate route of her own.
To where, and what good would it do anyway?
She shut that reflection off, realizing it to be as dangerous as lying down to rest in a blizzard. Beside her, Claude spoke only to give last-second, monosyllabic directions: “Go straight.” “Bear right.” Behind her, his headlights like the hugely magnified eyes of some deadly insect, cruised Dickens.
They were proceeding roughly south, keeping away from the main roads on which, even at this hour and in this weather, there would be a certain amount of traffic. Would they
