spooky movies but charlatans in real life. Yet she had been quick to
suggest clairvoyance as an explanation for what had been happening to
Hatch. She had pressed the theory more insistently when he had declared
that he was not psychic.
Now, turning away from the spider and staring frustratedly at the
unfinished canvas before her, she realized why she had become such an
earnest advocate of the reality of psychic power in the car on Friday,
when they had followed the killer’s trail to the head of Laguna Canyon
Road.
If Hatch had become psychic, eventually he would begin to receive
impressions from all sorts of people, and his link to this murderer
would not be unique. But if he was not psychic, if the bond between him
and this monster was more profound and infinitely stranger than random
clairvoyant reception, as he insisted that it was, then they were
hip-deep into the unknown. And the unknown was a hell of a lot scarier
than something you could describe and define.
Besides, if the link between them was more mysterious and intimate than
psychic reception, the consequences for Hatch might be psychologically
disastrous. What mental trauma might result from being even briefly
inside the mind of a ruthless killer? Was the link between them a
source of contamination, as any such intimate biological link would have
been?
If so, perhaps the virus of madness could creep across the ether and
infect Hatch.
No. Ridiculous. Not her husband. He was reliable, levelheaded,
mellow, as sane a human being as any who walked the earth.
The spider had taken possession of the upper right-hand corner of the
window. It began to spin a web.
Lindsey remembered Hatch’s anger last night when he had seen the story
about Cooper in the newspaper. The hardness of rage in his face. The
unsettling fevered look in his eyes. She had never seen Hatch like
that. His father, yes, but never him. Though she knew he worried that
he might have some of his father in him she had never seen evidence of
it before. And maybe she had not seen evidence of it last night,
either. What she had seen might be some of the rage of the killer
leaking back into Hatch along the link that existed between them No.
She had nothing to fear from Hatch. He was a good man, the best she had
ever met. He was such a deep well of goodness that all the madness of
the blond girls killer could be dropped into him, and he would dilute it
until it was without effect.
A glistening, silky filament spewed from the spider’s abdomen as the
arachnid industriously claimed the corner of the window for its lair.
Lindsey opened a drawer in her equipment cabinet and took out a small
magnifying glass, which she used to observe the spinner more closely.
Its spindly legs were prickled with hundreds of fine hairs that could
not be seen without the assistance of the lens. Its horrid,
multifaceted eyes looked everywhere at once, and its ragged maw worked
continuously as if in anticipation of the first living fly to become
stuck in the trap that it was weaving.
Although she understood that it was a part of nature as surely as she
was, and therefore not evil, the thing nevertheless revolted Lindsey.
It was a part of nature that she preferred not to dwell upon: the part
that had to do with hunting and killing, with things that fed eagerly on
the living. She put the magnifying glass on the windowsill and went
downstairs to get a jar from the kitchen pantry. She wanted to capture
the spider and get it out of her house before it was any more securely
settled.
Reaching the foot of the stairs, she glanced at the window beside the
front door and saw the postman’s car. She collected the mail from the
box at the curb: a few bills, the usual minimum of two mailer
catalogues, and the latest issue of Arts America She was in the mood to
seize any excuse nottowork, which was unusual for her, because she loved
her work. Quite forgetting that she had come downstairs in the first