The air inside was already hazy with smoke and, of course, the lights had failed; he made his way by the fireglow from the windows and found the phone in the place where the carpenter had been sleeping. He picked it up, and heard a tone. He dialled quickly, not knowing how long it would be before the line came down. The smoke was getting perceptibly thicker. Any minute now, the walls or the roof would burn through and he didn't want to be inside when that happened.
He closed his eyes and gave a brief, teeth baring groan of frustration when he heard the ringing tone stop and the line switch to the distinctive hiss of the answering machine. His own voice came on a moment later and he drummed his fingers, looking around; the message seemed endless. He wondered if Loren was home, or not. Sometimes she just ignored the phone and let the machine take care of business; she'd stand by and listen, but she wouldn't pick it up.
"Loren?" he said. "It's me. It's Ross. If you're there, lock the doors and windows. Or better still, get out of the house. Don't leave a message or anything to say where you've gone, I'll phone around and find you. Don't be scared. I'll explain when I get back."
An intense, reddish light under one of the doors told him that it was time to get out of there, and fast.
He hung up, and he ran. He was coughing when he got outside. The building was lit from within now, like a shadow theatre, and it was almost as if he could see figures dancing across the big foyer windows.
But he turned his back, and started away.
He'd only one regret.
And this was that he'd told her, Don't be scared.
It was dark when he finally got there, but the outside light was on. Maybe Loren had only just arrived back from wherever she'd been. The side door to the house was on the latch but there was a window open alongside it. Village life had tended to make them lazy about home security. He went in and called her name.
There was no response. The house gave back nothing but an ambience of emptiness.
She'd heard the message, and had gone around to a neighbour. What else could she have done? But she should have secured the place behind her, at least. He went through into the small police office to check on whether the answering machine had been reset.
It hadn't.
It had been unplugged. Both cassettes had been removed, the one for the incoming messages and the looped cassette that carried his own voice. They were nowhere around. He looked at his desk. There was no definite sign, but he knew almost immediately that it had been searched and then set right again. It was still something of a mess, but it wasn't quite his mess anymore. He turned around and went out, intending to call Loren's name to the empty house once more.
He found her on the stairs.
She was lying just above the middle landing, around the corner where she couldn't be seen from the hallway. She was head-down, feet pointing back the way she'd apparently fallen. One shoe had come off and was sitting on the third step from the top. To his eye it looked too neat, too much as if it had been placed there for an effect rather than simply lying where it had landed.
Aldridge sat down heavily on the lower stairway, and put his head in his hands.
He didn't make a sound. He didn't do anything. His mind raced, but to no purpose whatsoever. He seemed to stand apart from his own thoughts, watching them go by like an out of control carousel too fast to be boarded. And all that he could say was a low, "Ohhh, shit," again and again.
After a while, he sighed and straightened.
She was still warm. And she was damned heavy.
There had been a time when he could lift her like nothing. These last few years, he hadn't ever lifted her at all. They'd outgrown those kinds of games. Seemed to have outgrown everything, in fact, and nothing had come along to fill up the spaces. Their time in the Bay and the valley hadn't been their best.
But, still…
He managed to pull her to the top of the stairs and then, with a little more dignity, to lift her up and carry her through to the bed. He laid her on top of the covers and then went back for the lost shoe. But then he couldn't get it onto her foot, and so he took off the other one and set the pair on the floor next to her. He avoided looking at her face. Her face was a stranger's now, too relaxed, and with its lines wiped like a tape. He ought to cover it with something, really, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to do it. Too much of an admission of the end. Too final.
He straightened her clothes. He crossed her hands and they fell into place quite naturally; by her hands, she might almost be sleeping. He kissed her once, on the forehead. Her body was warm, but the skin on her face was cool. The curtains were half open. He drew them shut.
From the doorway, he looked back. The way he'd laid her out, she looked like a Pope or something. A sudden rage turned in him like a beast in the deep, but within a second he'd fought it down. The surface remained calm. He went along the upper landing to the linen cupboard, and got out a folded bedsheet. It wasn't one of those they'd bought for the nursery; that had all been cot sized stuff. He wasn't exactly sure at which point she'd got rid of it; like everything else it had just gone, with no mention from either of them.
Like everything else.
This time, he looked at her face. All hurts forgotten.
And then he covered her.
He walked down the stairs like a man of twice the weight. He felt sick and impossibly, impossibly weary. His mind took in the details but made very little of them. Nothing stolen, nothing interfered with; to the unsuspicious observer, it might well have looked like yet another accident. No drowning element this time, though. She was widening her scope. One death by fire, another by falling.
For how long did the woman think she could go on like this?
Forever, in her own mind, perhaps; because Aldridge could see no end to it. He thought of the others. He thought of the children. And now this.
How was he going to tell anyone? You couldn't explain her. Not without looking into those eyes, and glimpsing what concealed itself behind them. Whatever it was, it was sharp and it was very, very clever. Whether it was really only a part of her, he couldn't say; expensive doctors argued over that kind of thing in courtrooms for days.
Mad dog, he thought.
According to procedure, he ought now to be calling his area sergeant. But he went back into the police office.
And there, without anger and without any obvious trace of passion, he got out the keys to his gun cupboard.
Ted Hammond's dream.
He's walking through the boatyard, while a mist is rising out over the lake. In the dream he comes across the dripping figures of Wayne and Sandy; they're down by the one of the docks, the one of the old dry docks that he's been cleaning out and restoring. Now that the boards are completely off, it's a square, dark pit that in certain light can look like an open grave. Although he's drained it now, in his dream it's still half filled by water and weeds. The two are stepping up out of the darkness of the pit.
His appearance is a surprise to them.
He says, "Wayne? Is that you?"
And Wayne says, "Go back, dad. You're not supposed to see us."
"But why, Wayne?" he says — the one, all encompassing question that he's been asking over and over since the day of their discovery. "Why?"
"She wouldn't like it," Wayne says.
"Come home," Ted pleads. "I'm sorry I got angry about your exams."
"No, dad," Wayne says, and he turns to look out over the water. There might be something in his expression, but Ted can't actually make out his face.