death, they should have called Brinks right away. Valuable antiques
graced every room. But for the longest time after Jimmy had been taken
from them, it hadn’t seemed to matter if anything-or every Uungse was
taken as well.
Throughout dinner, Lindsey was a trooper. She ate a mound of rigatoni
as if she had an appetite, which was something Hatch could not manage,
and she filled his frequent worried silences with natural-sounding
patter, doing her best to preserve the feeling of an ordinary night at
home.
Regina was sufficiently observant to know something was wrong. And
though she was tough enough to handle nearly anything, she was also
infected with seemingly chronic self-doubt that would probably lead her
to interpret their uneasiness as dissatisfaction with her.
Earlier Hatch and Lindsey had discussed what they might be able to tell
the girl about the situation they faced, without alarming her more than
was nary. The answer seemed to be: nothing. She had been with them
only two days. She didn’t know them well enough to have this crazy’
stuff thrown at her. She’d hear about Hatch’s bad dreams, his walking
hallucinations, the heat-browned magazine, the murders, all of it, and
figure she had been entrusted to a couple of lunatics.
anyway the kid didn’t really need to be warned at this stage. They
could look out for her; it was what they were sworn to do.
Hatch found it difficult to believe that just three days ago the problem
of his repetitive nightmares had not seemed significant enough to delay
a trial adoption. But Honell and Cooper had not been dead then, and
supernatural forces seemed only the material of popcorn movies and
National Enquirer stories.
Halfway through dinner he heard a noise in the kitchen. A click and
scrape. Lindsey and Regina were engaged in an intense conversation
about whether Nancy Drew, girl detective of countless books, was a
“dorkette,” which was Regina’s view, or whether she was a smart and
savvy girl for her times but just old-fashioned when you looked at her
from a more modern viewpoint. Either they were too engrossed in their
debate to hear the noise in the kitchen-or there had been no noise, and
he had imagined it.
“Excuse me,” he said, getting up from the table, “I’ll be right back.”
He pushed through the swinging door into the large kitchen and looked
around suspiciously. The only movement in the deserted room was a faint
ribbon of steam still unraveling from the crack between the tilted lid
and the pot of hot spaghetti sauce that stood on a c pad on the counter
beside the stove.
Something thumped softly in the Sped family room, which opened off the
kitchen. He could see part of that room from where he-stood but not all
of it. He stepped silently across the kitchen and through the archway,
taking the Browning 9 MM off the top of the refrigerator as he went.
The family room was also deserted. But he was sure that he had not
imagined that second noise. He stood for a moment, looking around in
bafflement.
His skin prickled, and he whirled toward the short hallway that led from
the family room to the foyer inside the front door. Nothing. He was
alone.
So why did he feel as if someone was holding a nice cube against the
back of his neck?
He moved cautiously into the hallway until he came to the coat closet.
The door was closed. Directly across the hall was the powder room.
That door was also shut. He felt drawn toward the foyer, and his
inclination was to trust his hunch and move on, but he didn’t want to
put either of those closed doors at his back.
When he jerked open the closet door, he saw at once that no one was in
there. He felt stupid with the gun thrust out in front of him and
pointing at nothing but a couple of coats on hangers, playing a movie
cop or something. Better hope it wasn’t the final reeL Sometimes, when
the story required it, they killed off the good guy in the end.
He checked the powder room, found it also empty, and continued into the