The cabbie was slumped back behind the wheel, asleep. I looked past him. The backseat was empty.
I reached in and shook his shoulder. “Did you drive a woman here tonight?”
“Hey.” His eyes popped open, startled by my hand still on his shoulder. “Easy.”
“Did you bring a woman here tonight?”
He straightened up on the seat, rubbing his eyes. He looked over at the meter. It was running. He smiled. “She told me to wait.”
“Where is she?”
“In there.” He pointed at the entrance to Gateville.
We hurried down to the guardhouse.
“Where’s Stanley?” the first security guard asked the man at the console. The console was dark. The only light came from a portable electric lantern.
“Around someplace. Haven’t seen him in a while.”
“You hear anything about any tunnels in Crystal Waters?” the first guard asked.
The console guard shook his head. “There are no tunnels here.”
“Did Amanda Phelps get in here tonight?” I asked the console guard.
The console man shook his head. “Strangest thing. She’s almost always gone. Then tonight, of all nights, she shows up, demanding to get some stuff out of her house. Stanley kept telling her, ‘No way,’ over and over, but she wore him down. You know Stanley: anything for the Members. He finally folded and took her up himself.”
“When was that?” I asked.
The console guard checked the log sheet on the masonite clipboard. “One hour and forty-eight minutes ago. Funny, I didn’t see them come back.” He reached for the console microphone. “Stanley,come in, over.” He waited a minute and repeated it. “Stanley, come in, over.” He pushed the talk button again. “Cassidy, you there, over?”
“Cassidy to base, over,” a voice crackled back.
“Where’s Stanley, over?”
“Haven’t seen him, over.”
The console guard checked the other guards. No one had seen Stanley.
I looked out the window, toward the dark, west end of Chanticleer Circle. “I’m going up to Amanda’s house.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” Blonder gestured to a chair. “Park it right there until I come back with Agent Till.” Other took out his handcuffs and jangled them in his hands. Blonder put his hand on my shoulder, hard enough for me to realize he could push me down one-handed.
“You’ll be back right away?”
“He wants to talk to you about those tunnels,” Blonder said.
I sat down. After a glance at Other, Blonder paused at the door and spoke to the console guard. “Mr. Elstrom is a material witness. He can’t leave.” He went out the door and started running toward the lights at the east end of Chanticleer Circle.
Ahead of him, a small army of men with hand shovels worked slowly in the bright lights, poking and digging around the foundations and across the lawns. Their silhouettes were black against the glare of the lights. They looked like ghost soldiers, burying their dead.
“How long have they been working down at that end?” I asked the console guard.
“Since first thing this morning.”
“They haven’t been up by the Phelps house?”
The console guard shook his head. “They won’t get up there for a couple of days.”
“Try radioing Stanley again-”
The sky to the west lit up a fraction of a second before the guardhouse windows blew in. A roof of a house hung suspended for an instant, then it began spewing out a thousand glowing embers, just like the Farraday house on the videotape. The guardhouse shuddered, rocking on its foundation. Next to me, Agent Other swiped at the back of his neck. It was a lazy move, confused, as if he were swatting a mosquito at a summer picnic. Then blood spurted from between his fingers. I turned for help from the guard. He was on the floor beneath the console, not moving.
I turned back to Other. He had his hands locked behind his neck, stanching the flow of blood. “I’m just cut. Get out of here.”
I ran out into the smoke and the fire in the sky. The smell of chemical explosives, thick and sweet, hung everywhere. Behind me, a hundred men were yelling, their shouts lost in a muddle of noise, as, outside the wall, the fire trucks and the ambulances rumbled to life.
I ran up Chanticleer toward the hail of embers that was falling into the flames at the northwest bend of Chanticleer. Amanda’s house was around that bend, obscured by two dark houses on my left.
If her house was still there.
I tripped, on a curb or a yard stone, fell to my elbows. I got up. Pain ran down my leg; wet and raw. I’d been cut. I ran on, screaming into the night, pleading with every deity I knew.
Let her be alive.
Twenty-six
Amanda’s house loomed out of the smoke, dark against the backdrop of leaping fire. Its massive double front doors gaped open, sprung out on their hinges like huge hands, framing the black mouth of the entry. In the pulsating orange light from the inferno next door, the house looked like it was screaming.
Stanley’s station wagon was parked in the driveway, colorless, strewn with charred pieces of wood and roof tile and ash. I pulled open the front passenger door. It was empty. I ran up the brick walk to the entry.
“Amanda? Stanley?” I yelled. There was no light inside; none of the windows faced the flames. I shouted their names again, holding my breath to hear above the pounding in my chest and the rumbling of the motors at the other end of Gateville.
Only cold air came back at me from the darkness inside.
I stepped into the foyer. Grit crunched under my shoes like I was walking on pulverized glass. I turned to shut the ruined doors to the noise outside so I could hear in the house, but they’d been knocked loose on their hinges and wouldn’t pull back. I moved further into the foyer.
Something creaked above my head, and suddenly a curtain of coarse grit, some of it the size of hailstones, started raining from the ceiling. I threw up my hands to shield my face and slammed back against the wall, eyes shut tight. Dust filled the foyer. Then, just as suddenly as it started, the shower of grit stopped. Coughing, I peered through my fingers. Barely visible in the faint light from outside, a massive crack, two inches wide, had split the ceiling, running from above the entry doors into the blackness of the center hall. It had been plaster that had fallen, bits and chunks of it. The blast next door had shaken Amanda’s house loose on its foundation.
The jimjams started in my head, taunting: Why was the station wagon still in the driveway?
I tried to force them away. The station wagon meant nothing. They could have left on foot, carried the art the few hundred yards to the guardhouse. Simpler, and quicker because they wouldn’t have stopped to load the car.
The jimjams tittered: Why haven’t they been seen?
I squinted across the foyer, to the darkness where the center hall was. Thirty feet into that hall, then into the living room, to the wall above the fireplace, and I’d know the Monet was gone. Then I could run.
I started moving along the foyer wall.
POP. POP. Loud, like gunshots, from upstairs. I stopped, pressed back against the foyer wall.
POP. POP. Closer now, right above my head, but not gunshots. Worse. They were nails, ripping out of the walls upstairs. The house was coming down.
Behind me, the orange glow beckoned through the open, ruined front doors. Perversely, it was now a beacon to safety. I turned away from it.
POP, this time followed by the long rip of wood splitting.
I turned and pressed my chest against the wall, hoping it was safer there, away from the center of the falling ceiling. Followingmy outstretched fingertips like a blind man, I pushed into the dark along the foyer wall. Fist-sized chunks of plaster nudged at my feet. I kicked at them, unseeing, sending them skittering noisily across the ceramic tile. The rubble on the floor was getting thicker the farther I got from the support of the outside walls.