He hurried back upstairs to Meredyth where she sat quietly sobbing. He helped her to her feet, turned out the light, and guided her back into the kitchen. "No doubt she's emptied the place of any keys and cell phones along with any weapons." He indicated the empty chopping block.
"Not entirely," said Meredyth, upending the dining table.
"What're we doing?"
"Arming ourselves." She began unscrewing one of the table legs. In a moment, she had a baseball-bat-sized weapon with a two-inch screw protruding from the end.
Lucas removed a second table leg. "Makes a damn nice war club."
"Lucas, you see what I see?" Meredyth pointed to a clear cookie jar on the countertop, and inside were keys.
Lucas grabbed the jar and emptied out the set of Chevy keys. "I think it's the RV. Come on! We're out the back door and to the car."
Outside, they strapped in before Lucas learned that neither the correct key nor hot-wiring would do, as he could not get a spark from the ignition. Exiting the RV, he rounded to the front and lifted the hood, flashing a light found in the glove compartment now over the dead motor. She had gotten out, clutching her table leg and asking, "What is it?"
He pointed. "She's made off with the distributor cap. Biiiitch!" He ground out the word.
"She's got us right where she wants us, doesn't she?"
"How could she've known we were without our phones, my gun?" he lamented. "Hell…I even left my Texas toothpick in your bedroom, Mere."
"A bowie knife's hardly going to help us now."
"I think it'd beat nothing."
"We have our war clubs, remember?" She hefted her chair leg. His lay on the seat inside the RV. "Lucas, she's thought every detail through. She's been in this house for hours and hours, all damn day. And she's been watching us."
"From where? Exactly where to watch our every move, Mere?"
"Upstairs…Candice's room in the front. It overlooks the lake and she…she is a stargazer, owns a super telescope."
"How damn fortunate for Lauralie."
"She knew when we got up, when we ate, when we left for the stables and left on horseback. All of it."
"She saw the rifle when we passed it back and forth at the stable," he thoughtfully said. "Saw everything that happened across the lake."
"She saw when Howard arrived to do the lawn, and gauged how much time she had to row across and take his identity before we'd be back."
"But how'd she arrange for Kemper's body in the boat to bump into us out there on the lake?"
"She didn't, but she arranged it as a horrid, heinous crime designed for maximum effect whenever I should discover it," Meredyth said. "Didn't matter whether it was to-night, tomorrow, or the next day, because-"
"— because you'd be left alive to savor all the terror she wants to rub your face in."
"Exactly." Meredyth's knuckles had gone white with the grip she held on her table leg club.
"So…here we stand in the dark, and she could be anywhere out there, taking a bead on you at this moment, Lucas. She'd like nothing better than to leave me entirely alone, holding your bloodied body in my arms throughout this night of terror she has planned for me. So, if you please, can we take cover and decide what we do next?"
"What are our options?"
"We go back inside the house, huddle up in the dark in a center room without windows, and wait for daylight."
"Can we walk out of here?"
"Not another house or a road for several miles this side of the lake, and if she is watching, she'll stalk us and either kill us or turn us back."
"What about Jeff and Tommy's place, their mother's home?" he asked.
"God, I pray she hasn't been killed, and oh, God, if she is alive, how are we to tell her about her sons, Lucas? How do we explain their deaths?"
"As the senseless act of a madwoman, Mere. Their deaths are not your fault. You give into such guilt, and Lauralie wins. She puts you precisely where she wants you."
"Oh, you mean like now?" She threw up her hands, the flashlight in them sending up crazy circles of light into the leaves of overhanging trees. "Look where she has us! Drip-ping wet, freezing, trapped, and at her mercy!"
"Then we don't lay down for the bitch."
"What do you mean? Go after her?"
"Go after her, yes."
'Tonight?"
"Now."
"In the dark?"
"In the dark."
"With a lake between us and her?"
"Guide me to Candice's room and that telescope."
Meredyth took a deep breath and nodded. "Follow me."
"Douse the light first, will you?"
"Yeah, good idea." Meredyth's mind again filled with the image of Jeff and Tommy lying dead on her front lawn. This followed by the image of the dead in the Brody basement. This followed by the awful image of the worm-covered gardener at the bottom of the waterlogged rowboat.
She led Lucas back into the house through the rear door, both carrying their war clubs. He followed her inside, up the stairs, and to Candice's pitch-black room. Meredyth switched on the flash, but he grabbed it, covering it with his hand and shutting it off. "No lights! It'll tip Lauralie off to our plans!"
"Sorry…I knew that." The little light that guided him to the telescope came in the form of stars reflecting off its metal veneer where it poked through the open window. Balancing the table leg in his crotch, Lucas settled in at a chair before the telescope, realizing that he was in the exact position that Lauralie Blodgett had been in for most of the day. Had she planned this too? For them to be here in the dead girl's room eyeballing Meredyth's cabin on Lake Madera through the very telescope Lauralie had used?
How devious is this sick mind we 've locked horns with, he wondered, in this life-and-death competition?
From the condition of the Brody family bodies downstairs, he guessed the murders here had taken place as early as nine A.M., possibly earlier. He imagined that somewhere hidden in the surrounding woods they might find Arthur Belkvin's BMW, but stumbling about in the dark in search of the car would likely prove as futile as an attempt to walk out of here or around the enormous lake to Mrs. Famsworth's for a phone. The nearest contact opportunity remained the one he now stared at across the lake, his radio car, if she had not destroyed it.
He searched the grounds for any sign of Lauralie, imagining that by now she had shed the gardener's clothes for something out of Meredyth's closet. Behind him, he sensed Meredyth's growing trepidation.
"What do you see? Anyone on the water? Any movement up at the house?"
"No…nothing. She could be anywhere, like you said."
"Damn it, Lucas. What're we going to do?"
"The horses. If we could get to the horses, we could ride out of here."
"No, it's too risky."
"It'd be a piece of cake. We could upend the rowboat. It's still down by the pier, and we float quietly over to the boathouse. From there, we take that back path to the sta-bles."
"Don't you see, Lucas? She's planned it this way, every step of the way. She knows we'll go for the horses, because she's cut off every other alternative means of escape or communication with the outside."
"All right, say she is lying in wait at the stables. We at least know to expect it, and so we're tuned in."
"And she's tuned in at two hundred yards from the house with that damned gun of Jeff's. You don't stand a chance."
Frustrated, he swore and stood up, pushing the chair over and making her start and back up. When she did so, her back hit something solid in the dark-Lauralie Blodgett, her mind screamed even as she called out the name! And the dark figure swayed and returned to hit Meredyth a second blow, and she slipped and fell, her bare feet skidding as if still wet. On hands and knees, she was stung by an unmistakable odor of blood, bile, and decaying flesh as it filled her nostrils. She screamed again as Lucas pushed himself between her and the shadow in the darkness-the thing attacking her. He grunted with the power behind the blow he dealt Lauralie-defending Meredyth with the table leg, slamming it into the dark terror.