Besides, even if she could find a sharp-toothed saw small enough to be easily handled, she wouldn't be able to use it at an angle that would allow her to bear down with effective force. To free the lower chain from the chair, she would have to cut through all three of the horizontal stretcher bars between the chair legs, each of which was an inch or an inch and a half in diameter, around which the links were wound. To accomplish this, she would have to sit, bend forward, and saw backward under the chair. Even if the upper chain had sufficient slack to allow her to reach down far enough for the task, which she doubted, she would only be able to scrape feebly at the wood. With luck, she'd whittle through the third stretcher sometime in the late spring. Then she would have to turn her attention to the five sturdy spindles in the back of the chair to free the upper chain, and not even a carnival contortionist born with rubber bones could get at them with a saw while pinioned as Chyna was.
Hacking through the steel chains was impossible. She would be able to get at them from an angle better than that from which she could approach the stretcher bars between the chair legs. But Vess wasn't likely to own saw blades that could carve through steel, and Chyna definitely didn't have the necessary strength.
She was resigned to more primitive measures than saws. And she was worried about the potential for injury and about how painful the process of liberation might be.
On the mantel, the bronze stags leaped perpetually, antlers to antlers, over the round white face of the clock.
Eight minutes past seven.
She had almost five hours until Vess returned.
Or maybe not.
He had said that he would be back as soon after midnight as possible, but Chyna had no reason to suppose that he'd been telling the truth. He might return at ten o'clock. Or eight o'clock. Or ten minutes from now.
She shuffled onto the floor-level flagstone hearth and then to the right, past the firebox and the brass andiron, past the deep mantel. The entire wall flanking the fireplace was smooth gray river rock-just the hard surface that she needed.
Chyna stood with her left side toward the rock, twisted her upper body to the left as far as possible without turning her feet, in the manner of an Olympic athlete preparing to toss a discus, and then swung sharply and forcefully to the right. This maneuver threw the chair-on her back-in the opposite direction from her body and slammed it into the wall. It clattered against the rock, rebounded with a ringing of chains, and thudded against her hard enough to hurt her shoulder, ribs, and hip. She tried the same trick again, putting even more energy into it, but after the second time, she was able to judge by the sound that she would, at best, scar the finish and chip a few slivers out of the pine. Hundreds of these lame blows might demolish the chair in time, turn it into kindling; but before she hammered it against the rock that often, suffering the recoil each time, she would be a bruised and bloodied mess, and her bones would splinter, and her joints would separate like the links in a pop-bead necklace.
By swinging the chair as though she were a dog wagging its tail, she couldn't get the requisite force behind it. She had been afraid of this. As far as she could determine, there was only one other approach that might work-but she didn't like it.
Chyna looked at the mantel clock. Only two minutes had passed since the last time she'd glanced at it.
Two minutes was nothing if she had until midnight, but it was a disastrous waste of time if Vess was on his way home right now. He might be turning off the public road, through the gate, into his long private driveway this very moment, the lying bastard, having set her up to believe that he would be gone until after midnight, then sneaking back early to-
She was baking a nourishing loaf of panic, plump and yeasty, and if she allowed herself to eat a single slice, then she'd gorge on it. This was an appetite she didn't dare indulge. Panic wasted time and energy.
She must remain calm.
To free herself from the chair, she needed to use her body as if it were a pneumatic ram, and she would have to endure serious pain. She was already in severe pain, but what was coming would be worse-devastating-and it scared her.
Surely there was another way.
She stood listening to her heart and to the hollow ticking of the mantel clock.
If she went upstairs first, maybe she would find a telephone and be able to call the police. They would know how to deal with the Dobermans. They would have the keys to get her out of the shackles and manacles. They would free Ariel too. With that one phone call, all burdens would be lifted from her.
But she knew in her heart-the old friend intuition-that she was not going to find any telephones upstairs either. Edgler Vess was unfailingly thorough. A phone would be in service in the house whenever he was home-but not when he was away. He might actually unplug the unit and take it with him each time he left.
Trammeled, unbalanced by the chair and therefore dangerously clumsy, Chyna would be risking a crippling fall if she climbed the stairs. She would face an even greater risk when, after finding no telephone, she had to come back down again. And in the process, she would have wasted precious time.
Turning her back to the river-rock wall, she shuffled six feet from it, stopped, closed her eyes, and gathered her courage.
Possibly one of the spindles in the rail-back chair would crack apart and be driven forward. The splintered end would puncture the tie-on cushion or slip past it and then skewer her, back to front, straight through her guts.
More likely, she'd sustain a spinal injury. With all the force of the impact directed against the lower half of the chair, the legs of it would be driven into her legs; the upper half would first pull away from her then recoil and snap hard against her upper back or neck. The spindles were fixed between the seat and the wide slab of radius-cut pine that served as the headrail, and the headrail was so solid that it would do major damage if it cracked into her cervical vertebrae with sufficient force. She might wind up on the living-room floor, under the chair and chains, paralyzed from the neck down.
Sometimes she brooded about possibilities too much, dwelt beyond reason on all the myriad ways that any situation or any relationship could go terribly wrong. This was also a result of having spent her childhood hiding on the wrong side of bedsprings, waiting for either the fighting or the partying to stop.
For a while when Chyna was seven, she and her mother had stayed with a man named Zack and a woman named Memphis in a ramshackle old farmhouse not far from New Orleans, and one night two men had come to visit, carrying a Styrofoam cooler, and Memphis had killed them less than five minutes after they arrived. The visitors had been in the kitchen, sitting at the table. One of them had been talking to Chyna and the other had been twisting the cap off a bottle of beer when Memphis withdrew a gun from the refrigerator and shot both men in the head, one after the other, so fast that the second one didn't even have time to dive for cover before she put a round in his face. As slippery and quick as a skink, Chyna fled, certain that Memphis had gone crazy and would kill them all. She hid in a drift of loose hay in the barn loft. During the hour that the adults took to find her, she so often visualized her own face dissolving with the impact of a bullet that every image in her mind's eye-even fleeting glimpses of the Wild Wood to which she could not quite escape-was entirely in shades of red, wet red.
But she had survived that night.
She had been surviving for a long time. Eternity.
And she would survive this too-or die trying.
Without opening her eyes, Chyna hurtled backward as fast as her leg irons would allow, and in spite of her fear, she figured that she must be at least a somewhat comic sight, because she had to shuffle frantically to build speed, had to throw herself toward spinal injury in quick little baby steps. But then she slammed into the rocks, and there was nothing whatsoever funny about that.