Celeste moved close to Joey, pressed against his side, needing the comfort of contact. "He's setting up… some sort of a symbolic tableau?"
"With corpses," Joey said. "He intends to kill everyone who still lives in Coal Valley before the night is through and bring their bodies here."
She paled. "Did that come to pass?"
He didn't understand. "Come to pass?"
"In the future that you've already lived — were all the people in Coal Valley killed?"
With a shock, Joey realized that he didn't know the answer to her question.
"After that night, I pretty much stopped reading newspapers, news magazines. Avoided TV news. Changed stations on the radio every time a news report came on. Told myself that I was burnt out on news, that it was all just airplane crashes and floods and fires and earthquakes. But what it really must have been… I didn't want to read about or hear about any women being mutilated, murdered. Didn't want to risk some detail of a crime — eyes cut out, anything like that — making a subconscious connection for me and maybe blowing away my 'amnesia.'
"So for all you know — it happened. For all you know — they found twelve dead people in this church, lined up on the front pews, one of them on the altar platform."
"If it did come to pass — if that's what they found — no one ever nailed P.J. for it. Because in my future, he's still on the loose."
"Jesus. Mom and Dad." She pushed away from him and ran down the center aisle toward the back of the nave.
He rushed after her, through the narthex, through the open front doors, into the sleety night.
She slipped on the icy walkway, fell to one knee, scrambled up, and hurried on, rounding the car to the passenger side.
As he reached the driver's door of the Mustang, Joey heard a rumble that first seemed to be thunder — but then he realized that the sound was coming from beneath him, from under the street.
Celeste looked worriedly at him across the roof of the car. "Subsidence."
The rumble built, the street trembled as though a freight train were passing through a tunnel under them, and then both the shaking and the ominous sound faded away.
A section of a burning mine tunnel had collapsed.
Glancing around them, seeing no disturbance of the ground, Joey said, "Where?"
"Must be somewhere else in town. Come on, come on, hurry," she urged, getting into the car.
Behind the wheel, starting the engine, afraid that a sudden fissure in the street might swallow the Mustang and drop them into fire, Joey said, "Subsidence, huh?"
"I've never felt it that bad. Could be right under us but very deep, so far down that it didn't affect the surface."
"Yet."
EVEN THOUGH THE TIRES HAD WINTER TREAD, THEY SPUN USELESSLY A couple of times on the way to Celeste's place, but Joey concluded the short trip without sliding into anything. The Baker house was white with green trim and had two dormer windows on the second floor.
He and Celeste ran clumsily across the lawn to the front-porch steps, avoiding the walkway, which was far more treacherous than the frozen grass.
Lights glowed throughout the downstairs, glittering in laces of ice that filigreed some of the windows. The porch lamp was on as well.
They should have entered with caution, because P.J. might have gotten there ahead of them. They had no way of knowing which of the three families he intended to visit first.
But Celeste was in a panic about her folks, so she unlocked the door and plunged heedlessly into the short front hall, calling out to them as she entered. "Mom! Daddy! Where are you? Mom!"
No one answered.
Aware that any attempt to restrain the girl would prove futile, brandishing the crowbar at every shadow and imagined movement, Joey followed close behind her as she burst through doorways and flung open those doors that were closed, shouting for her mother and father with increasing terror. Four rooms downstairs and four up. One and a half bathrooms. The place wasn't a mansion by any definition, but it was better than any home that Joey had ever known, and everywhere there were books.
Celeste checked her own bedroom last, but her parents weren't there, either. "He's got them," she said frantically.
"No. I don't think so. Look around you — there aren't any signs of violence here no indications of a struggle. And I don't think they would have gone out with him anywhere willingly, not in this weather."
"Then where are they?"
"If they'd had to go somewhere unexpectedly, would they leave a note for you?"
Without answering, she spun around, dashed into the hall, and descended the stairs two at a time to the ground floor.
Joey caught up with her in the kitchen, where she was reading a message that was pinned to a corkboard beside the refrigerator.
Celeste,
Bev didn't come home from Mass this morning.
No one knows where she is. The sheriff is
looking for her. We've gone over to Asherville
to sit with Phil and Sylvie. They're half out
of their minds with worry. I'm sure it's all
going to turn out fine. Whatever happens,
we'll be home before midnight. Hope you had
a nice time at Linda's place. Keep the doors
locked. Don't worry. Bev will turn up. God
won't let anything happen to her. Love, Mom
Turning from the corkboard, Celeste glanced at the wall clock — only 9:02—and said, "Thank God, he can't get his hands on them."
"Hands." Joey suddenly remembered. "Let me see your hands."
She held them out to him.
The previously frightful stigmata in her palms had faded to vague bruises.
"We must be making right decisions," he said with a shiver of relief. "We're changing fate — your fate, at least. We've just got to keep on keeping on."
When he looked up from her hands to her face, he saw her eyes widen at the sight of something over his shoulder. Heart leaping, he swung toward the danger, raising the iron crowbar.
"No," she said, "just the telephone." She stepped to the wall phone. "We can call for help. The sheriff's office. Let them know where they can find Bev, get them looking for P.J."
The telephone was an old-fashioned rotary model. Joey hadn't seen one of those in a long time. Curiously, more than anything else, it convinced him that he was, indeed, twenty years in the past.
Celeste dialed the operator, then jiggled the cradle in which the handset had been hanging. "No dial tone."
"All this wind, ice — the lines might be down."
"No. It's him. He cut the lines."
Joey knew that she was right.
She slammed down the phone and headed out of the kitchen. "Come on. We can do better than the crowbar."
In the den, she went to the oak desk and took the gun-cabinet key from the center drawer.
Two walls were lined with books. Running one hand over their brightly colored spines, Joey said, "Just tonight, I finally realized… when P.J. conned me into letting him… letting him get away with murder, he stole my future."
Opening the glass door of the gun cabinet, she said, "What do you mean?"
"I wanted to be a writer. That's all I ever wanted to be. But what a novelist is always trying to do… if he's any good, he's trying to get at the truth of things. How could I hope to get at the truth of things, be a writer, when I couldn't even face up to the truth about my brother? He left me with nowhere to go, no future. And he became the writer."