Premeditated murder, that was. Or Doc Spiver had put the gun in his own mouth. Ponser called David at eight o’clock that evening. He’d finished the autopsy and now he was equivocating, damn him. David pushed him, and he ended up saying it was suicide. No, Doc Spiver didn’t have any terminal illness-at least Ponser hadn’t seen anything.
Amabel said to Sally that same evening, “I’m thinking you and I should go to Mexico and lie on a beach.”
Sally smiled. She was still wearing Amabel’s bathrobe because she just couldn’t seem to get warm. James hadn’t wanted to leave her, but then it seemed he remembered something that had made him go back to Thelma’s. She’d wanted to ask him what it was, but she hadn’t. “I can’t go to Mexico, Amabel. I don’t have my passport.”
“Alaska, then. We could lie around on the snowbanks. I could paint and you could do-what, Sally? What did you do before your daddy got killed?”
Sally got colder. She pulled the bathrobe tighter around her and moved closer to the heat register. “I was Senator Bainbridge’s senior aide.”
“Didn’t he retire?”
“Yes, last year. I didn’t do anything after that.”
“Why not?”
Vivid, frenzied pictures went careening through her mind, shrieking as loudly as the wind outside. She clutched the edge of the kitchen table.
“It’s all right, baby, you don’t have to tell me. It really doesn’t matter. Goodness, what a day it’s been. I’m going to miss Doc. He’s been here forever. Everyone will miss him.”
“No, Amabel, not everyone.”
“So you don’t think it was suicide, Sally?”
“No,” Sally said, drawing a deep breath. “I think there’s a madness in this town.”
“What a thing to say! I’ve lived here for nearly thirty years. I’m not mad. None of my friends is mad. They’re all down-to-earth folk who are friendly and care about each other and this town. Besides, if you were right, then the madness didn’t begin until after you arrived. How do you explain that, Sally?”
“That’s what the sheriff said. Amabel, do you really believe that Laura Strather, the woman James and I found, was brought into town by a stranger and held somewhere before he murdered her?”
“What I think, Sally, is that your brain is squirreling around, and it’s just not healthy for you, not with everything else upside down in your life. Just don’t think about it. Everything will be back to normal soon. It’s got to be.”
That night, at exactly three o’clock in the morning, a blustery night with high winds but no rain, something brought Sally awake. She lay there a moment. Then she heard a soft tap on the window. At least it wasn’t a woman screaming.
A branch from a tree, she thought, turning over and pulling the blanket up to her nose. Just a tree branch.
Tap.
She gave up and slid out of bed.
Tap.
She didn’t remember that there wasn’t a tree high enough until she’d pulled back the curtain and stared into her father’s ghastly white, grinning face.
Amabel found her on her knees in the middle of the floor, her arms wrapped around herself, the window open, the curtains billowing outward, pulled by the wind, screaming and screaming until her throat closed and no sound came from her mouth.
Quinlan made a decision then and there. “I’m taking her back to Thelma’s. She’ll stay with me. If something else happens, I’ll be there to deal with it.”
She’d called him thirty minutes before, gasping out her words, begging him to come and make her father leave her alone. He’d heard Amabel in the background telling her she was in no shape to be on the phone to anybody, much less to that man she didn’t even know, to put down the phone, she was just excited, there hadn’t been anyone there, it had just been her imagination. Just look at all she’d been through.
And she was still saying it, ignoring Quinlan. “Baby, just think. You were sound asleep when you heard the wind making strange noises against the window. You were dreaming, just like those other times. I’ll bet you weren’t even awake when you pulled the curtains back.”