stubborn eel of nausea swam up my throat again, but as before I choked
it down.
Squeezing my eyes shut, trying not to think about the wave of intense
heat that abruptly broke over me, I reached down and gripped Orson’s
thick leather collar, which was easy to find because he was pressed
against my legs.
Orson kept his snout close to the floor, where he could breathe, but I
had to hold my breath and ignore the nostril-tickling smoke as the dog
led me through the house. He walked me into as few pieces of furniture
as he could manage, and I have no suspicion whatever that he was
amusing himself in the midst of such tragedy and terror. When I
smacked my face into a door frame, I didn’t knock out any teeth.
Nevertheless, during that short journey, I thanked God repeatedly for
testing me with XP rather than with blindness.
Just when I thought I might pass out if I didn’t drop to the floor to
get some air, I felt a cold draft on my face, and when I opened my
eyes, I could see. We were in the kitchen, into which the fire had not
yet reached. There was no smoke, either, because the breeze coming in
the open back door drove it all into the dining room.
On the table were the votive candles in ruby-red holders, the cordial
glasses, and the open bottle of apricot brandy. Blinking at this cozy
tableau, I could half believe that the events of the past several
minutes had been only a monstrous dream and that Angela, still lost in
her dead husband’s cardigan, would sit here with me once more, refill
her glass, and finish her strange story.
My mouth was so dry and foul that I almost took the bottle of brandy
with me. Bobby Halloway would have beer, however, and that would be
better.
The dead bolt on the kitchen door was disengaged now. As clever as
Orson might be, I doubted that he could have opened a locked door to
reach me; for one thing, he didn’t have a key.
Evidently the killers had fled by this route.
Outside, wheezing to expel a few final traces of smoke from my lungs, I
shoved the Glock in my jacket pocket. I nervously surveyed the
backyard for assailants as I blotted my damp hands on my jeans.
Like fishes schooling below the silvered surface of a pond, cloud
shadows swam across the moonlit lawn.
Nothing else moved except the wind-shaken vegetation.
Grabbing my bicycle and wheeling it across the patio toward the
arbor-covered passageway, I looked up at the house in astonishment,
amazed that it was not entirely engulfed in flames. Instead, from the
exterior, there were as yet only minor indications of the blaze growing
from room to room inside: bright vines of flames twining up the
draperies at two upstairs windows, white petals of smoke flowering from
attic vent holes in the eaves.
Except for the bluster and grumble of the inconstant wind, the night
was preternaturally silent. Moonlight Bay is no city, but it usually
has a distinct night voice nonetheless: a few cars on the move, distant
music from a cocktail lounge or a kid practicing guitar on a back
porch, a barking dog, the whisking sound of the big brushes on the
street-cleaning machine, voices of strollers, laughter from the
high-school kids gathered outside the Millennium Arcade down on
Embarcadero Way, now and then a melancholy whistle as an Amtrak
passenger train or a chain of freight cars approaches the Ocean Avenue
crossing. . . . Not at this moment, however, and not on this night.
We might as well have been in the deadest neighborhood of a ghost town
deep in the Mojave Desert.
Apparently, the crack of the single gunshot that I had fired in the
living room had not been loud enough out here to draw anyone’s
attention.
Under the lattice arch, through the sweet fragrance of jasmine, walking
the bicycle, its wheel bearings clicking softly, my heart thudding not
softly at all, I hurried after Orson to the front gate.
He leaped up and pawed open the latch, a trick of his that I’d seen