She went past the rear door. Through the four glass panes in the upper half, she saw a back porch, a green yard, a couple of big trees, and the barn.
Without any architectural division, the kitchen opened into the dining area, and the combined space was probably two-thirds the width of the house. The round dinette table was dark pine, supported by a thick central drum rather than legs; the four heavy pine captain’s chairs featured tie-on back and seat cushions.
Upstairs, the music started again, but it was softer in the kitchen than in the front room. If she had been an aficionado of big-band music, however, she would have been able to recognize the tune from here.
The noise of the running shower was more apparent in the kitchen than in the living room, because the pipes were channeled through the rear wall of the old house. Water being drawn upward to the bathroom made an urgent, hollow rushing sound through copper. Furthermore, the pipe wasn’t tied down and insulated as well as it ought to have been, and at some point along its course, it vibrated against a wall stud: rapid knocking behind plasterboard,
tatta-tatta-tatta-tatta-tatta
.
If that noise abruptly stopped, she would know that her safe time in the house was limited. In the subsequent silence, she could count on no more than a minute or two of grace while he toweled off. Thereafter he might show up anywhere.
Chyna looked around for a telephone but saw only a wall jack into which one could be plugged. If there had been a phone, she might have paused to call 911, supposing there
was
911 service out here in…well, wherever the hell they were—these boondocks. Knowing that help was on the way would have made the remainder of the search less nerve-racking.
At the north end of the dining area was another door. Although the killer was in the shower upstairs, she turned the knob as quietly as she could and crossed the threshold with caution.
Beyond lay a combination laundry and storage room. A washer. An electric dryer. Boxes and bottles of laundry supplies were stored in an orderly fashion on two open shelves, and the air smelled like detergent and bleach.
The rush of water and the knocking pipe were even louder here than they had been in the kitchen.
To the left, past the washer and dryer, was another door—rough pine, painted lime green. She opened it and saw stairs leading down to a black cellar, and her heart began to beat faster.
“Ariel,” she said softly, but there was no answer, because she had spoken more to herself than to the girl.
No windows at all below. Not even a turbid leak of gray storm light seeping through narrow casements or screened ventilation cutouts. Dungeon dark.
But if the bastard was keeping a girl down there, how odd that he wouldn’t have added a lock to this upper door. It offered only the spring latch that retracted with a twist of the knob, not a real lock of any kind.
The captive might be sealed in a windowless room deep below, of course, or even manacled. Ariel might have no hope of reaching these stairs and this upper door, even if left alone for days to worry at her restraints, which would explain why the killer was confident that one more barrier to her flight wasn’t necessary even when he was away from home.
Nevertheless, it seemed peculiar that he wouldn’t be concerned about a thief breaking into the house when he was gone, descending to the cellar, and inadvertently discovering the imprisoned girl. Considering the obvious age of the structure, its rusticity, and the lack of any apparent alarm keypads, Chyna doubted that the house had a security system. The killer, with all his secrets, ought to have installed a steel door to the cellar, with locks as impregnable as those on a bank vault.
The lack of special security might mean that the girl, Ariel, was not here.
Chyna didn’t want to dwell on that possibility. She had to find Ariel.
Leaning through the doorway, she felt along the stairwell wall for the switch, and snapped it up. Lights came on both at the upper landing and in the basement.
The bare concrete steps—a single flight—were steep. They appeared to be much newer than the house itself, perhaps even a relatively recent addition.
The high-velocity surge of water through plumbing and the hard rapping of the loose pipe in the wall told her that the killer was still busy in the bathroom above, scrubbing away all traces of his crimes.
Tatta-tatta-tatta…
Louder than before but still in a whisper, she said: “Ariel.”
Out of the still air below, no response.
Louder. “Ariel.”
Nothing.
Chyna didn’t want to go down into this windowless pit, with no way out except the stairs, even with a lockless door above. But she couldn’t think of any way to avoid the descent, not if she was to learn for sure whether Ariel was here.
Tatta-tatta-tatta-tatta-tatta…
It always came to this, even with childhood long past and being grown up and everything supposedly in control, everything supposedly all right; even then it
still
came to this: alone, dizzy with fear, alone, down into a bleak-dark-cramped place, no exits, sustained only by mad hope, with the world indifferent, no one to wonder about her or care where she might have gone.
Listening intently for the slightest change in the sound of the rushing water and the vibrating pipe, Chyna went down one step at a time, her left hand on the iron railing. The gun was extended in her right hand; she was clenching it so fiercely that her knuckles ached.
“Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive,” she said shakily. “Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive.”
Halfway down the stairs, she glanced back and up. At the end of a trail of her wet shoeprints, the landing seemed a quarter of a mile above her, as far away as the top of the knoll had seemed from the front porch of the house.
Alice down the rabbit hole into a madness without tea parties.
At the open doorway between the in-kitchen dining area and the laundry room, Mr. Edgler Vess hears the mystery woman call to Ariel. She is only a few feet away from him, around the corner, past the washer and the dryer, so there can be no mistake about what name she speaks.
Ariel.
Stupefied, he stands blinking and open-mouthed in the fragrance of laundry detergent and in the wall-muffled rattle of copper pipes, with her voice echoing in memory.
There is no way for her to know about Ariel.
Yet she calls to the girl again, louder than before.
Mr. Vess suddenly feels terribly violated, oppressed, observed. He glances back at the windows in the dining area and the kitchen, expecting to discover the radiant faces of accusing strangers pressed to those panes. He sees only the rain and the drowned gray light, but he is still anguished.
This is not fun any longer. Not fun at all.
The mystery is
too
deep. And alarming.
It is as if this woman didn’t come to him out of that Honda but came through an invisible barrier between dimensions, out of some world beyond this one, from which she has been secretly watching him. The flavor is distinctly supernatural, the texture otherworldly, and now the laundry detergent smells like burning incense, and the cloying air seems thick with unseen presences.
Fearful and plagued by doubt, unaccustomed to both of those emotions, Mr. Vess steps into the laundry room, raising the Heckler & Koch P7. His finger wraps the trigger, already beginning to squeeze off a shot.
The cellar door stands open. The stairwell light is on.
The woman is not in sight.
He eases off the trigger without firing.
On those infrequent occasions when he has guests to the house to dinner or for a business meeting, he always leaves a Doberman in the laundry room. The dog lies in here, silent and dozing. But if anyone other than Vess were to enter, the dog would bark and snarl and drive him backward.
When the master is away, Dobermans vigilantly patrol the entire property, and no one has a hope of getting into the house itself, let alone into the cellar.
Mr. Vess has never put a lock on the door to the cellar steps because he is concerned that it might accidentally trip, imprisoning him down there when he is at play and unawares. With a key-operated deadbolt, of course, this catastrophe could never happen. He himself is incapable of imagining how any such mechanism could malfunction and trap him; nevertheless, he’s too concerned about the prospect to take the risk.
Over the years, he has seen coincidence at work in the world, and people perishing because of it. One late-June afternoon near dusk, as Mr. Vess was driving to Reno, Nevada, on Interstate 80, a young blonde in a Mustang convertible had passed his motor home. She was wearing white shorts and a white blouse, and her long hair streamed red-gold in the twilight wind. Filled with an instant and powerful need to smash her beautiful face, he had pressed the motor home to its limits to keep her swifter Mustang in sight, but his quest had seemed doomed. As the highway rose into the Sierras, the speed of the motor home had fallen, and the Mustang had pulled away. Even if he had been able to draw close to the woman, the traffic had been too heavy—too many witnesses—for him to try anything as bold as forcing her off the highway. Then one of the tires on the Mustang had blown. Traveling at such high speed, she nearly spun out, nearly rolled, swerved from lane to lane, blue smoke pouring off the tires, but then she got control and pulled the car off the road onto the shoulder. Mr. Vess had stopped to assist her. She had been grateful for his offer of help, smiling and pleasantly shy, a nice girl with a one-inch gold cross on a chain around her neck, and later she had wept so bitterly and struggled so excitingly to resist surrendering her beauty, to turn her face away from his various sharp instruments, just a high-spirited young woman full of life and on the way to Reno until coincidence gave her to him.
And if a blown tire, why not a malfunctioning lock?
If coincidence can give, it can take.
Mr. Vess lives with intensity but not without caution.
Now this woman, calling for Ariel, has come into his life, like a blown tire, and suddenly he’s not sure if she is a gift to him or he to her.
Remembering her revolver and wishing for Dobermans, he glides across the laundry room to the cellar door.
The woman’s voice rises from the stairs below: “China Shepherd untouched and alive.”
The words are so strange—the meaning so mysterious—that they seem to be an incantation, encoded and cryptic.
Confirming that perception, the woman repeats herself, as though she is chanting: “China Shepherd untouched and alive.”
Though Vess is not usually superstitious, he experiences a heightened sense of the supernatural, beyond anything he’s felt thus far. His scalp prickles, and the flesh on the nape of his neck crawls, and his hand tightens on the pistol.
After a hesitation, he leans through the open door and looks down the cellar stairs.
The woman is only a few steps from the bottom. She’s got one hand on the railing, the revolver held out in front of her in the other hand.
Not a cop. An amateur.
Nonetheless, she might be Mr. Vess’s blown tire, and he’s jumpy, twitchy, still extremely curious about her but prepared to put his safety ahead of his curiosity.
He eases through the doorway onto the upper landing.
As close as she is, she does not hear him because all is concrete, nothing to creak.
He aims his pistol at the center of her back. The first shot will catapult her off her feet, send her flying with her arms spread toward the basement below, and the second shot will take her as she is in flight. Then he’ll race down the stairs behind her, firing the third and fourth rounds, hitting her in the legs if possible. He’ll drop on top of her, press the muzzle into the back of her head, and then, then, then when he’s totally in control of her, dominant, he can decide whether she’s still a threat or not, whether he can risk questioning her or whether she’s so dangerous that nothing will do but to put a couple of rounds in her brain.
As the woman passes under the light near the foot of the stairs, Mr. Vess gets a better look at her revolver. It is indeed a Smith & Wesson .38 Chief’s Special, as he had thought earlier, when he had seen it from the second-floor bedroom window, but suddenly the make and model of the weapon have electrifying meaning for him.
He smells a Slim Jim sausage. He remembers liquid-night eyes widening in shock, terror, and despair.
He has seen two of these guns in the past several hours. The first belonged to the young Asian gentleman at the service station, who drew it from under the counter in self-defense but never had the opportunity to fire.
Although the Chief’s Special is a popular revolver, it is not so universally admired that one sees it everywhere in use. Edgler Vess
knows,
with the certainty of a fox on the scent of a rabbit in the weeds, that this is the same gun.
Although there are still many mysteries about the woman on the stairs below him, though her presence here is no less astonishing to him than it was before, there is nothing supernatural about her. She knows the name
Ariel
not because she has been watching from some world beyond this one, not because she is in the dutiful service of some higher force, but simply because she must have been
there,
in the service station, when Vess was chatting up the two clerks and when, moments later, he killed them.
Where she could have been hiding, how he could have overlooked her, why she would feel the need to pursue him, where she got all the courage for this reckless adventure—these are things he can’t discern through intuition alone. But now he will have the opportunity to put these questions to her.
Lowering his pistol, he steps back into the laundry room, lest she glance up the stairs and see him.
His uncharacteristic fear, his eerie perception of oppressive supernatural forces, lifts like a fog from him, and he is amazed by his own brief spasm of gullibility. He, who has no illusions about the nature of existence. He, who is so clear-seeing. He, who knows the primacy of pure sensation. Even he, the most rational of all men, has spooked.