Angela was nowhere to be seen.
A closet door stood open. Perhaps Angela had come upstairs to fetch
something from there. I couldn’t see anything but hanging clothes and
shoe boxes.
The door to the adjacent bathroom was ajar, and the bathroom was
dark.
To anyone in there, looking out, I was a well-lit target.
I approached the bathroom as obliquely as possible, aiming the Glock at
the black gap between the door and the jamb. When I pushed on the
door, it opened without resistance.
The smell stopped me from crossing the threshold.
Because the glow of the nightstand lamp didn’t illuminate much of the
space before me, I fished the penlight from my pocket.
The beam glistered across a red pool on a white tile floor. The walls
were sprayed with arterial gouts.
Angela Ferryman was slumped on the floor, head bent backward over the
rim of the toilet bowl. Her eyes were as wide, pale, and flat as those
of a dead seagull that I had once found on the beach.
At a glance, I thought her throat appeared to have been slashed
repeatedly with a half-sharp knife. I couldn’t bear to look at her too
closely or for too long.
The smell was not merely blood. Dying, she had fouled herself.
A draft bathed me in the stench.
A casement window was cranked all the way open. It wasn’t a typically
small bathroom window but large enough to have provided escape for the
killer, who must have been liberally splashed with his victim’s
blood.
Perhaps Angela had left the window open. If there was a firststory
porch roof under it, the killer could have entered as well as exited by
this route.
Orson had not barked-but then this window was toward the front of the
house, and the dog was at the back.
Angela’s hands were at her sides, almost lost in the sleeves of the
cardigan. She looked so innocent. She looked twelve.
All her life, she had given of herself to others. Now someone,
unimpressed by her selfless giving, had cruelly taken all that was
left.
Anguished, shaking uncontrollably, I turned away from the bathroom.
I hadn’t approached Angela with questions. I hadn’t brought her to
this hideous end. She had called me, and although she had used her car
phone, someone had known that she needed to be silenced permanently and
quickly. Maybe these faceless conspirators decided that her despair
made her dangerous. She had quit her job at the hospital. She felt
that she had no reason to live. And she was terrified of becoming,
whatever that meant. She was a woman with nothing to lose, beyond
their control. They would have killed her even if I had not responded
to her call.
Nevertheless, I was awash in guilt, drowning in cold currents, robbed
of breath, and I stood gasping.
Nausea followed those currents, rippling like a fat slippery eel
through my gut, swimming up my throat and almost surging into my
mouth.
I choked it down.
I needed to get out of here, yet I couldn’t move. I was half crushed
under a weight of terror and guilt.
My right arm hung at my side, pulled as straight as a plumb line by the
weight of the gun. The penlight, clutched in my left hand, stitched
jagged patterns on the wall.
I could not think clearly. My thoughts rolled thickly, like tangled
masses of seaweed in a sludge tide.
On the nearer nightstand, the telephone rang.
I kept my distance from it. I had the queer feeling that this caller
was the deep-breather who had left the message on my answering machine,
that he would try to steal some vital aspect of me with his bloodhound
inhalations, as if my very soul could be vacuumed out of me and drawn
away across the open telephone line. I didn’t want to hear his low,
eerie, tuneless humming.
When at last the phone fell silent, my head had been somewhat cleared
by the strident ringing. I clicked off the penlight, returned it to my
pocket, raised the big pistol from my side-and realized that someone
had switched on the light in the upstairs hall.