With the unknown ahead, but now also behind her, Jilly did not suddenly discover the elusive inner Amazon, but she didn’t freeze or cringe in fear, either. Her stoic mother and a few bad breaks long ago had taught her that adversity must be faced forthrightly, without equivocation; Mom counseled that you must tell yourself that every misfortune was custard, that it was cake and pie, and you must eat it up and be done with it. If grinning Kenny lurked in the pitch-black living room, stropping knives against each other loud enough to be confident that she would hear him, Jilly had an entire picnic of trouble laid out for her.
She retreated from the stairs into the foyer once more.
Plink, plink. Tick-tick-tick. Zing… zzziiinnnggg!
* * *
Short of inhaling a gale like the big bad wolf in the fairy tale and blowing the covers off the bed, Dylan either had to stand here waiting for the shrouded figure to make the first move, which invited disaster more certainly than did taking action, or he must unveil the twitching form to learn its name and intentions.
Holding the baseball bat upraised in his right hand, he seized the bedclothes with his free hand and whipped them aside, revealing a black-haired, blue-eyed, barefoot teenage girl in cut-off jeans and a sleeveless blue-checkered blouse.
‘Becky?’
Fright possessed her face, her electroshock-wide eyes. Tremors of fear flowed through her in plentiful rillets that repeatedly backed up into an overspilling twitch, jerking her head, her entire body, with the force he’d seen translated through the covers.
Her stricken gaze remained fixed on the ceiling as if she were unaware that help had arrived. Her obliviousness had the quality of a trance.
As he repeated her name, Dylan wondered if she might have been drugged. She seemed to be in a semiparalytic state and unaware of her surroundings.
Then, without glancing at him, she spoke urgently between teeth more than half clenched: ‘Run.’
With the bat raised in his right hand, he remained acutely aware of the open hallway door and of the two closed doors, alert for any sound, movement, swell of shadow. No threat arose on any side, no brutish figure that clashed with the daisy wallpaper, the yellow drapes, and the luminously reflective collection of satin-glass perfume bottles on the dresser.
‘Ill get you out of here,’ he promised.
He reached for her with his free hand, but she didn’t take it. She lay stiff and shaking, attention still focused fearfully on the ceiling as if it were lowering toward her, a great crushing weight, as in one of those old movie serials featuring a villain who built elaborate machines of death when a revolver would have done the job better.
‘Run,’ Becky whispered with a note of greater desperation, ‘for God’s sake, run.’
Her shaking, her paralysis, her frantic admonitions rattled his nerves, which were already rattling like hailstones on a tin roof.
In those old serials, a calculated dose of curare might reduce a victim to the helpless condition of this woman, but not in the real world. Her paralysis was probably psychological, though nonetheless hampering. To lift her off the bed and carry her from the room, he would have to put down the baseball bat.
‘Where’s Kenny?’ he whispered.
At last her gaze lowered from the ceiling, toward the corner of the room in which one of the closed doors waited.
‘There?’ he pressed.
Becky’s eyes met his for the first time… and then at once shifted again toward the door.
Warily Dylan moved around the foot of the bed, crossing the remainder of the room. Kenny might come at him from anywhere.
Bedsprings sang, and the girl grunted as she exerted herself.
Turning, Dylan saw Becky no longer lying face-up, saw her risen to her knees, and rising still, all the way to her feet upon the bed, with a knife in her right hand.
* * *
Tonk. Twang. Plink.
Eating up trouble as though it were custard, but not pleased by the taste, Jilly reached the archway on the tonk, found the light switch on the twang. On the plink, she bathed the threat in light.