“Maybe. We just don't know enough to say for sure.”
Speaking even more quietly than before, Lisa said, “Do you think we ought to have a gun or something?”
“No, no.” She looked at the untouched food congealing in the serving dishes. The spilled salt. The overturned chair. She turned away from the table. “Come on, honey.”
“Where now?”
“Let's see if the phone works.”
They went through the door that connected the dining room to the kitchen, and Jenny turned on the light.
The phone was on the wall by the sink. Jenny lifted the receiver, listened, tapped the disconnect buttons, but could get no dial tone.
This time, however, the line wasn't actually dead, as it had been at her own house. It was an open line, filled with the soft hiss of electronic static. The number of the fire department and the sheriff's substation were on a sticker on the base of the phone. In spite of having no dial tone, Jenny punched out the seven digits for the sheriff's office, but she couldn't make a connection.
Then, even as Jenny put her fingers on the disconnect buttons to jiggle them again, she began to suspect that someone was on the line, listening to her.
Into the receiver, she said, “Hello?”
Far-away hissing. Like eggs on a griddle.
“Hello?” she repeated.
Just distant static. What they called “white noise.”
She told herself there was nothing except the ordinary sounds of an open phone line. But what she thought she could hear was someone listening intently to her while she listened to him.
Nonsense.
A chill prickled the back of her neck, and, nonsense or not, she quickly put down the receiver.
“The sheriff's office can't be far in a town this small,” Lisa said.
“A couple of blocks.”
“Why don't we walk there?”
Jenny had intended to search the rest of the house, in case the Santinis were lying sick or injured somewhere. Now she wondered if someone had been on the telephone line with her, listening on an extension phone in another part of the house. That possibility changed everything. She didn't take her medical vows lightly; actually, she enjoyed the special responsibilities that came with her job, for she was the kind of person who needed to have her judgment, wits, and stamina put to the test on a regular basis; she thrived on challenge. But right now, her first responsibility was to Lisa and to herself. Perhaps the wisest thing to do was to get the deputy, Paul Henderson, return here with him, and then search the rest of the house.
Although she wanted to believe it was only her imagination, she still sensed inquisitive eyes; someone watching… waiting.
“Let's go,” she said to Lisa, “Come on.”
Clearly relieved, the girl hurried ahead, leading the way through the dining room and living room to the front door.
Outside, night had fallen. The air was cooler than it had been at dusk, and soon it would get downright cold — forty-five or forty degrees, maybe even a bit colder — a reminder that autumn's tenancy in the Sierras was always brief and that winter was eager to move in and take up residency.
Along Skyline Road, the streetlamps had come on automatically with the night's descent. In several store windows, after-hours lights also had come on, activated by light-sensing diodes that had responded to the darkening world outside.
On the sidewalk in front of the Santinis' house, Jenny and Lisa stopped, struck by the sight below them.
Shelving down the mountainside, its peaked and gabled roofs thrusting into the night sky, the town was even more beautiful now than it had been at twilight. A few chimneys issued ghostly plumes of wood smoke. Some windows glowed with light from within, but most, like dark mirrors, cast back the beams of the streetlanps. The mild wind made the trees sway gently, in a lullaby rhythm, and the resultant susurration was like the soft sighs and dreamy murmurs of a thousand peacefully slumbering children.
However, it wasn't just the beauty that was arresting. The perfect stillness, the silence — that was what made Jenny pause. On their arrival, she had found it strange. Now she found it ominous.
“The sheriff's substation is on the main street,” she told Lisa, “Just two and a half blocks from here.”
They hurried into the unbeating heart of town.
Chapter 5
Three Bullets
A single fluorescent lamp shone in the gloom of the town jail, but the flexible neck of it was bent sharply, focusing the light on the top of a desk, revealing little else of the big main room. An open magazine lay on the desk blotter, directly in the bar of hard, white light. Otherwise, the place was dark except for the pale luminescence that filtered through the mullioned windows from the streetlights.
Jenny opened the door and stepped inside, and Lisa followed close behind her.
“Hello? Paul? Are you here?”
She located a wall switch, snapped on the overhead lights and physically recoiled when she saw what was on the floor in front of her.
Paul Henderson. Dark, bruised flesh. Swollen. Dead.
“Oh, Jesus!” Lisa said, quickly turning away. She stumbled to the open door, leaned against the jamb, and sucked in great shuddering breaths of the cool night air.
With considerable effort, Jenny quelled the primal fear that began to rise within her, and she went to Lisa. Putting a hand on the girl's slender shoulder, she said, “Are you okay? Are you going to be sick?”
Lisa seemed to be trying hard not to gag. Finally she shook her head. “No. I w-won't be sick. I'll be all right. L-let's get out of here.”
“In a minute,” Jenny said, “First I want to take a look at the body.”
“You can't want to look at that.”
“You're right. I don't want to, but maybe I can get some idea what we're up against. You can wait here in the doorway.”
The girl sighed with resignation.
Jenny went to the corpse that was sprawled on the floor, knelt beside it.
Paul Henderson was in the same condition as Hilda Beck. Every visible inch of the deputy's flesh was bruised. The body was swollen: a puffy, distorted face; the neck almost as large as the head; fingers that resembled knotted links of sausage; a distended abdomen. Yet Jenny couldn't detect even the vaguest odor of decomposition.
Unseeing eyes bulged from the mottled, storm-colored face. Those eyes, together with the gaping and twisted mouth, conveyed an unmistakable emotion: fear. Like Hilda, Paul Henderson appeared to have died suddenly — and in the powerful, icy grip of terror.
Jenny hadn't been a close friend of the dead man's. She had known him, of course, because everyone knew everyone else in a town as small as Snowfield. He had seemed pleasant enough, a good law officer. She felt wretched about what had happened to him. As she stared at his contorted face, a rope of nausea tied itself into a knot of dull pain in her stomach, and she had to look away.
The deputy's sidearm wasn't in his holster. It was on the floor, near the body. A .45-caliber revolver.
She stared at the gun, considering the implications. Perhaps it had slipped out of the leather holster as the deputy had fallen to the floor. Perhaps. But she doubted it. The most obvious conclusion was that Henderson had drawn the revolver to defend himself against an attacker.
If that were the case, then he hadn't been felled by a poison or a disease. Jenny glanced behind her. Lisa was still standing at the open door, leaning against the jamb, staring out at Skyline Road.
Getting off her knees, turning away from the corpse, Jenny crouched over the revolver for long seconds, studying it, trying to decide whether or not to touch it. She was not as worried about contagion as she had been earlier after finding Mrs. Beck's body. This was looking less and less like a case of some bizarre plague. Besides, if an exotic plague was stalking in Snowfield, it was frightening virulent, and Jenny surely was contaminated by now. She had nothing to lose by picking up the revolver and studying it closely. What most concerned her was that she might obliterate incriminating fingerprints or other important evidence.