He leaves the room through the door to the kitchen and sees the double doors at the back of the dining room standing wide, with rain slanting in to puddle on the floor, and he realizes he’s lost track of time. It could have been a minute since Treasure ran out of the train room, or it could have been five.
He does a quick check of at the living room-unoccupied-and decides she’s outside. From what he can see, she more or less lives outside. He takes the distance to the back door at a trot, then slows and steps through it into the night.
There’s rain, but it’s not heavy enough to impair visibility. The yards is as wide as the house, though not particularly deep, backing up fifteen or twenty feet to a white plaster wall that’s got some kind of dense hedge growing in front of it, four or five feet thick. The foliage looks black, although it’s probably dark green. Three trees spread their branches to create a sort of canopy over most of the ground.
The water back here is at least four inches deep. He starts by jogging to his left, his shoulder only a few inches from the wall of the house, slowing when he comes to the living-room windows, which permit a long rectangle of pale light to reflect on the standing water and shine off the trunk of the nearest tree. The hedge is a dark green, shiny-leafed, thorny-looking, and dense. At the end of the house there’s a wall that runs straight back to create a corner with the hedged wall at the rear, so unless she’s gone over the wall, this isn’t where she came. He doesn’t see a way over the wall.
Up, he thinks, and he slogs through the water to the nearest tree, but the trunk is smooth, the bark almost slick to the touch. He checks the branches anyway. No platform, no tree house, no fort. Squinting against the rain, he surveys the other two trees, but no straight lines, no paler shapes, reveal a structure in either of them.
He feels time passing. His anxiety level, the terror he deferred while Murphy had his gun on them, has been rising for the past minute or two, and he wills it down, breathing against the tightness in his chest and working his way back along the edge of the house. The wall here is vertical iron bars, and he can see the light from Murphy’s train room shining in the water. Impossible for Treasure to have slipped between the bars.
Water-covered lawn, three trees, hedge. No Treasure. No place for Treasure. He realizes he’s been expecting a structure of some kind, a place she can shut others out of. Someplace where she can be whatever she really is, when her father’s not nearby.
But it’s not here.
So it has to be in the hedge.
He splashes across the yard to the bushes and bends down; she’s much shorter than he is. About halfway across the yard, almost straight back from the dining-room doors, he spots it: an opening in the bushes, perhaps three feet high. In front of it, he drops to his knees in the water and sees that it’s a tunnel, neatly clipped into the foliage. It’s very dark, but it seems to go in a couple of feet and then curve right.
Putting one hand on the lawn below the water, he reaches in and waves his other hand around, hoping to avoid coming face-to-belly with one of the extravagant spiders of the tropics. He’s never lost the fear of spiders that made Frank call him a sissy thirty or so years ago, and he performs this check instinctively even though he’s certain she’s just crawled through here and there won’t be any webs. There won’t be any webs, he says to himself, and he crawls in.
Eighteen or twenty inches in, the tunnel turns sharply to the right. Following it, scraping his back and shoulders on the sheared-off twigs, he puts his hand on something hard, and his fingers turn into a bright orange, barbed-wire jolt of pain. When he yanks his hand up, it brings weight with it. It’s clamped into a mousetrap. He pries the trap off and drops it, then crawls farther in, sweeping the dirt from side to side and finding four more traps, which he pushes out of his way. Suddenly he feels the space expand and rise above him. He stops and looks straight down at the black water, willing his pupils to open wider. He hears the rain pattering on something, but he’s not being rained on.
He puts a hand up and finds smooth, heavy plastic, feeling the sticks and leaves of the hedge on the other side. He tries not to focus on anything, knowing that the peripheral vision is more sensitive, and out of the darkness a shape emerges, a bit farther in and to his right, rectangular and relatively light-colored. It’s wood, his fingers tell him, finished wood with a smooth surface, and he finds the top and immediately knocks something over, small, light, and slick to the touch, and he knows what it is.
A plastic disposable lighter.
He’s certain he’s alone in here, but he doesn’t know how far back the hollow goes. He picks up the lighter and flicks the wheel. And feels the blood leave his face.
Treasure has used pieces of plywood to create irregular walls, not so much walls as a gallery space. Color pictures from books and magazines cover every inch, overlapping here and there. There must be a hundred of them.
Ballerinas. Princesses. Girls in frilly, pale dresses. Girls holding hands with other girls, laughing with other girls. Girls at parties, giving one another presents. One wall is devoted entirely to a single large picture, twenty or thirty copies of it: a young girl in a loose white dress, her hair alive with sunlight, walking a dappled path in green, hospitable woods. The picture has been trimmed to the girl’s left side, and the forest on the right has been left uncropped and the pictures placed seamlessly beside each other so she perpetually emerges from the green of the forest to the safety of her path. Again and again and again. A girl, floating through a world of green light. On a path.
Rafferty wipes his eyes fiercely and wishes Murphy could die twice.
On top of the table are rounded stones and dried thistles and another mud-smoothed bird’s nest. A loose handful of wild grass splays gracefully from the top of what Rafferty recognizes as a cough-medicine bottle. Another medicine bottle holds a single, half-burned candle.
He takes a last look around, replaces the lighter on the table, and crawls out again, back into Treasure’s other world.
33
As he stands up, his eyes go to it immediately, the brightest thing in his field of sight. It’s a small window, high up, and it’s lit, and the light flickers and then intensifies, and he realizes two things simultaneously: that it’s the window in Treasure’s bathroom and that it’s on fire.
He starts to run, splashing toward the doors that lead into the dining room, but he slows at the sight of a small cabinet, about three feet high and four feet wide, built against the rear of the house. It’s rough plywood, and its door lolls open. There, stacked neatly, are six one-gallon gasoline cans.
There is room for three more.
His feet nearly slip out from under him on the wet dining-room floor, and he sees that the living room carpet is on fire, flames inching up the sides of the couches. There’s a foot of gray smoke trapped beneath the ceiling, and the smell of splashed gasoline is overpowering.
Almost thick enough, he thinks, to trigger an explosion. He goes farther in, to the stairs, to see how advanced the fire is.
The carpeting on the stairway is burning, too, but it’s been burning longer than the living room and the flames are five and six feet high, licking at the banister and being drawn upward by the ravenous inhalation of the fire that’s already raging upstairs.
He envisions it all in a second: beginning in her own bathroom and bedroom, pouring the gasoline on cloth and wood, tossing a match and running, spewing gasoline behind her, the flames following obediently along on the wet trail, the gasoline splashing from the can until the can is empty-there’s an empty can at the entrance to the hallway that leads to Neeni’s room-and grabbing another can and then another.