The space between door and wall could serve as a temporary hiding place, the kind of nook a child might use in a game of hide-and-seek.
In three quick, soundless steps she ducked behind the door.
He turned the corner. She felt the floorboards quiver with his approach.
Hugging the wall, straining not to breathe, she waited.
His footsteps quickened, then stopped abruptly a yard away in time with a grunt of surprise.
He was standing at the top of the stairs, on the other side of the door. An inch of wood separated her from him.
He’ll hear my heart, she thought insanely. Hear it knocking in my chest.
She remembered childhood nightmares, dreams that had visited her after the summer of 1973, terrible dreams in which she would flee through a labyrinth of darkness, pursued by some shapeless horror. Always the dreams would end with her huddled in a cubbyhole, breathless and rigid, while the beast prowled close by, snuffling nearer, ever nearer, the odor of gasoline on its breath.
This was like that. Except tonight there would be no waking up. And in this nightmare, unlike the others, the beast would not wear the face of her father.
“How could you do this?” he breathed, his voice impossibly close. “How could you leave me?”
Fury in his words, and something more-a threat of tears.
Then a cold click of metal, the release of a pistol’s safety catch.
He had the gun with him. And this time he would use it.
She waited, grimly certain he was on to her, sure that at any moment he would slam the door shut and reveal her pinned helplessly against the wall.
Stamp of feet on the stairs.
He was descending to the cellar.
Relief weakened her. He hadn’t thought to look behind the door, after all. He wasn’t omniscient, wasn’t infallible. He could be beaten at this game.
All right, time to quit the congratulations and get going. No, hold it.
Balancing first on one foot, then the other, she removed her boots. Clutched them in her left hand, the leather warm against her fingers. Her footsteps would be muffled now.
“ I’ll kill you!” he shouted suddenly, his voice more distant than before. He had entered the cellar room.
She eased the door away from the wall and stepped out from behind it.
Do it. Now, while he was preoccupied.
She took a breath, then darted past the doorway. Dared a glance toward the bottom of the stairs, saw his huge, distorted shadow crawling on the brick wall.
Then she was beyond the doorway, padding barefoot down the hall and out into what had to be the main room of the house.
24
The room was large and musty and unfurnished save for a potbelly stove squatting troll-like on the floor. Starlight filtered through dust-coated windows, the panes webbed with cracks. A beamed ceiling, the rafters silvery in the subtle light, hung overhead like rows of leviathan ribs.
Moving cautiously, aware that footsteps could be heard in the cellar, she crossed yards of semidarkness to the front door.
It opened, promptly and fully, as all doors should-no improvised tools, no desperate prayers, simply a twist of the knob.
Air on her face. The oily smell of greasewood. Click and buzz of nocturnal insects.
Quietly she shut the door, then put on her boots and sprinted across a gravel court to the gate.
It was wrapped in multiple coils of chain, secured with a rusty but formidable padlock.
Climb over? No, impossible. Wicked barbed wire was strung across the top. And on both sides of the gate, barbed-wire fence extended along the roadside-five bands of wire, the lowest a foot from the ground, the highest just above her head, knotted to wooden posts driven into the ground at four-foot intervals.
She couldn’t get through that fence or over it, not without slashing herself to tatters and leaving a trail of blood.
She turned and surveyed the area. The place was a ranch of some kind, the main house a one-story wood-frame structure, flanked on the left by a modest barn with a fenced paddock attached. Against a waning crescent moon, the barn’s weathervane and cupola were etched in stark silhouette.
Something was missing from the scene. She looked closer at the house, took note of the carport extending from a side wall.
Empty.
Where was the vehicle she’d heard?
Dimly she made out tire tracks in the gravel at her feet, curving toward the barn. The big double doors were shut to conceal her abductor’s truck or van, parked inside.
And perhaps to conceal her Taurus also.
He had made her write to Annie, saying she’d gone away. The ruse would fool no one if her car was still sitting in its reserved space at Pantano Fountains.
She sprinted for the barn, leaving the gravel behind, crossing yards of stiff, dead grass. The big double door loomed before her, the old wood ragged with strips of peeling paint. The barn must have been green once, with a white roof and orange trim-unusual color scheme for a desert ranch.
One of the doors swung open easily in response to her brief tug. She crept inside and pulled it nearly shut, allowing only a pale fan of starlight to bleed through the crack.
Standing motionless, she waited impatiently for her eyesight to adjust to the gloom.
The place smelled of must and age, and not of hay.
No provender had been stored here for years, for decades.
A central feed passage, trough, and manure gutter bisected the barn. The left side was lined with stalls, the half-doors ajar. Horse stalls. This had been a horse ranch once.
No stalls on the right side, only an open space, filled now with a gray Chevrolet Astro van and, beyond it, faintly visible in the barn’s recesses, her Ford Taurus.
“Oh, baby,” she whispered. “Sweet baby, am I ever glad to see you.”
He had taken the keys from her purse. But unless he was supernaturally prescient, he could not have known about the other car key she carried, the duplicate key reserved for emergencies.
And if her present situation didn’t qualify as an emergency, nothing ever would.
Pulse racing, she ran to the car, then crouched low and frisked the underside of the chassis. A moment of frightened groping, just long enough for her to fear that he’d found it or it had fallen off somehow-and then her hand closed over a small magnetic case.
She detached it, snapped it open, and the spare key dropped like magic into her palm.
Exhilaration at getting this far competed with naked terror at the thought that she wasn’t safe yet; she could still be stopped.
The key in her pocket, she crossed the barn to the main doors, prepared to throw them wide Her heart chilled.
The distant thud she had heard was the slam of a door.
Crunch of gravel, then of weeds.
Through the crack she glimpsed a bulky figure covering ground in long strides, a gleam of metal-the handgun-bright at his side.
Coming here. Coming to the barn.
Silently she eased the door shut.
Total darkness now.
She had to find an escape route. Hunt down a side door and use it.
Sightless, she groped her way along the wall, feeling for a door, finding none.
Too late she realized she shouldn’t have closed the main doors so tight. The blackness around her was absolute, impenetrable, making her progress dangerously slow as she crept forward.
Her questing hands brushed the rear of her car. She could hide inside it-lie on the floor, hope he didn’t see her-but the risk of discovery was too great.
Better to keep going, find some way out. There had to be another door somewhere, had to be.
Past the car, and now she was at the rear of the barn, under the hayloft, she believed.
He would be here any second. And still there was no exit, only empty space, yards of black void in every direction.