She moved on, praying Lucas was being as cautious as she. At any moment, she expected a gunshot to ring out. She feared how she might react when it came. A single gunshot without any follow-up shots must mean Lucas had been hit and brought down like Jeff and Tommy. She prayed it would not come before she could get to the squad car.
Then she froze, seeing the sash at the second-story window overlooking the lawn and lake move with the glint of steel revealed by returning moonlight, but that same blue moon meant danger for her and for Lucas. She dared not move a muscle, her painted face turned up, her eyes watching the dark figure at the window. It was Lauralie.
She wished to God she could get a message to Lucas; he was free for the moment to rush the stable door and gain the safety of the interior, but he had no way of knowing Lauralie was surveying this side of the house. "Go, Lucas, go now!" she whispered, willing him to somehow psychically hear her plea. But suddenly Lauralie was gone from the window.
"My time to go!" she told herself, lifting from her belly and racing for the safety of the Farnsworth truck, hiding behind it. Glancing inside, she saw there were no keys in the ignition. She slipped around the rear, and glancing up at the bedroom window, she dashed to the gardener's truck, skirted round it, and found herself kneeling outside Lucas's car.
She was winded from the effort, breathing so heavily, she feared anyone within fifty feet must hear her. She inched along the length of the car to the front door, quietly, cautiously squeezed the handle, and opened the door just as a blast from the hunting rifle thundered, startling Meredyth into action. She leaped into the car and grabbed for the radio receiver, but it was not there. It'd been ripped out, gone.
She sat for a moment, paralyzed, hearing only the single shot and fearing that Lucas was down, bleeding, lying halfway between the trees and the stables in the sawdust road. She then heard a second shot and did not know whether to be relieved or not; she recalled what the second shot had meant for young Tommy and for Jeff.
"Lucas!" she called out, and leaped from the car, returning to Kemper's truck and grabbing at his tools, finally selecting a long-handled, three-pronged earth turner, a kind of clawing pitchfork. With it clutched in her hands, disregarding any obstacle in her way, she raced up the steps and through the front door as a third shot rang out. A good sign, she prayed. Perhaps Lucas, while spotted, and perhaps even wounded, had found a hiding place, and Lauralie was attempting to ferret him out with additional shots. A lot of good a damned table leg was now, Meredyth thought bitterly as she inched her way quietly to the second floor.
Making the second-floor landing, Meredyth now inch- wormed her way toward the expansive second-story bedroom. Glancing in, she saw that Lauralie Blodgett's complete attention was on Lucas, trapped somewhere below and under her gaze through the scope. Was she about to squeeze off another shot to pump an additional bullet into him where he lay helpless? Or was she patiently awaiting his next move, anticipating where he would next dart? Meredyth could feel the woman's unadulterated hatred culminating in the finger curled about the trigger of the big gun held snug against her shoulder here in the dark.
Slowly, cautiously, the barefoot Meredyth tiptoed over the carpet, moving within striking distance, raising the neat little earth turner with its three razor-sharp prongs over-head. She could stab the woman in the back of the neck and end it now and shed no tears, but a small voice held her in place. Can you do this? Is it murder? How will it play in the cold light of day to the outside world, to the police, to a D.A…, a grand jury, a judge? Was she justified morally and legally to murder the murderer? Lucas would not hesitate. It's either her or Lucas, her mind screamed at the instant one of the cell phones in the room went off, causing Lauralie to start and turn just as Meredyth let the mini- pitchfork fall. The fork bit into Lauralie's neck just as she had turned. Lauralie tried to bring the big gun around to bear, the pitchfork swinging wildly around with her, Meredyth having let go of the handle. The trio of teeth at the end of the spear had bitten deep into Lauralie's jugular vein, spraying the air with her blood, causing her grip on the rifle to steal away. The deadly weapon hit the win- dowsill and thudded against the garden tool, which had already released its stinging bite on her, leaving her fatally punctured. Lauralie's eyes had gone wide, her nostrils flaring, bleeding, and her gaping mouth swallowed repeatedly, desperate for air, choking on her own blood, struggling against the pain in a pirouette of horror about the room that painted Meredyth's white bedclothes red. Even dying so, Lauralie fought to speak.
"Mommie? Is it…you? 'Ave you…come back…for… for me?"
She fell forward into Meredyth in a paroxysm of cold trembling, and Meredyth, overwhelmed, took Lauralie's hand as she lay dying in Meredyth's ams. Meredyth's muddy feet had left a trail from the doorway to here, and Lauralie's blood commingled with the muddy tracks in a starburst of purple spreading over the carpet.
Meredyth eased the now-silent girl from her embrace, and she rushed to her bathroom, finding and tearing into her state-of-the-art first-aid kit to the sound of a gurgling death rattle beginning a slow roll that welled up from Lauralie's depths. She tore into the case, tossing aside creams and syringes, bottles and pills to get at the Fresh Flesh textured bandage wrap, an item developed in aerospace technology for stopping blood loss in a battlefield wound. She rushed back to Lauralie Blodgett and worked the bandage into the wound, allowing the blood to coagulate around the porous synthetic weave of the bandage to eventually stem the blood flow.
Lauralie spat up blood as Meredyth worked to save the life of the multiple murderer. On her knees over the woman, Meredyth caught a glimpse of herself in a full- length mirror. Her features and body caked in dried mud, she realized that the lunatic Lauralie had driven her to become an assassin herself. "Christ, what am I doing? Saving you for what? To give you just what you've wanted all along? A media-circus arrest and incarceration, a jury trial, a forum for your twisted mind? A lifetime in a federal facility for the criminally insane?"
Meredyth's action to stop Lauralie's bleeding to death here and now had simply been an automatic response to help the wounded animal at her feet. But now she slowed for a moment in her ministrations over the weakened, wounded Ripper, allowing the ramifications of saving Lauralie to sink in. "I should fucking let you die. Damn you… damn child of Satan."
A moment's hesitation more, and then Meredyth's instinct to save the young woman took root, as she yanked tightly at the bandages and tied off the porous, textured spider's web of nylon threads that acted as an effective seal, a dike and a tourniquet at once. The blood flow at the wound site ended.
Blinking, her brain getting more oxygen now, Lauralie looked up into Meredyth's mud-caked features. She painfully choked out a handful of broken words. "Hooow'd you…clim' owt… hell?"
Meredyth realized for the first time that the girl, in her pain-induced hallucination, mistook her muddy appearance here in the dark for that of her mother's cemetery ghost, returned to drag her into eternity with her, finally a family. Lauralie then fell unconscious.
"Go ahead, die, Lauralie Blodgett. Go with your mother," Meredyth said, and thought: Justice it isn 't, your going out so peacefully, but maybe now Mira Lourdes and the rest of your victims can rest in peace.
Meredyth lifted the bloodied rifle and went to the window with it in her hands. She called out to Lucas down below, unable to actually see him. "I've ended it, Lucas! You can come out now! She's dead! The wicked bitch is dead! Here's the rifle!" She hurled the Remington as far as she could. It responded with a thunderous clatter down the tin roof of a shed situated below the window, and then it slid to the earth into a clump of bushes to do no more harm. Atop the shed, the night breeze twisted a black, wrought- iron windmill in the shape of a greyhound, reminding her of the two hounds Lauralie had poisoned and posed at Arthur Belkvin's feet.