Such a noise, hellacious noise, booming through the house, had surely drawn the killer’s attention away from the approaching truck.
Chyna fumbled, found the knob, and twisted it. The door was unlocked. Gasping, she pulled it open.
A cool breeze out of the northwest, faintly scented by freshly turned vineyard earth and fungicide, whistled through the bare limbs of the maple trees that flanked the front walkway. Snuffling like a pack of hounds, it rushed past her into the foyer as she stepped out onto the front porch.
The truck had already passed the house and was heading away from her. It would come around for a second approach on the end-loop of the driveway, which was wide enough to accommodate produce haulers in the harvest season, and park facing out toward the county road. But it wasn’t a truck after all. A motor home. An older model with rounded lines, well kept, forty feet long, either blue or green. Its chrome glimmered like quicksilver under the late-winter moon.
Amazed that she had not yet been stabbed or shot or struck from behind, glancing back at the open front door where the killer hadn’t yet appeared, Chyna headed for the porch steps.
The motor home rounded the end of the loop, beginning to turn toward her. Its twin beams swept across the Templetons’ barn and other outbuildings.
Larch and maple and evergreen shadows fled before the arcing headlights. They flickered darkly through the trellis at the end of the porch, along the white balustrade, across the lawn and the stone walkway, stretching impossibly, swooping into the night as if trying frantically to tear free of the trees that cast them.
The deep quiet in the house, the lack of lights downstairs, the killer’s failure to attack her as she escaped, the timely arrival of the motor home—suddenly all of those things made chilling sense. The killer was driving the motor home.
“No.”
Chyna swiftly retreated from the porch steps and scrambled back into the foyer.
At her heels, the headlights came all the way around the end of the driveway loop. They pierced the trellis grid, projecting geometric patterns across the porch floor and the front wall of the house.
She closed the door and fumbled for the big lock above the knob. Found the thumb-turn. Engaged the heavy deadbolt.
Then she realized her mistake. The front door had been unlocked because the killer had gone out that way. If he found it locked now, he would know that Laura wasn’t the only person alive in the house, and the hunt would begin.
Her sweaty fingers slipped on the brass thumb-turn, but the bolt snapped open with a hard clack.
Earlier, he must have parked the vehicle near the end of the halfmile-long driveway, out toward the county road, and must have walked to the house.
Now tires crunched through gravel. Air brakes issued a soft whoosh and a softer whine, and the motor home came to a full stop in front of the house.
Remembering the oval rug that had turned under her feet and had nearly sent her sprawling, Chyna dropped to her knees. She crawled across the wool, smoothing the rumples with her hands. If the killer tripped over the disarranged rug, he would know that it hadn’t been in that condition when he’d left.
Footsteps arose outside: boot heels ringing off the flagstone walkway.
Chyna came to her feet and turned toward the study. No good. She couldn’t know for sure where he would go when he reentered the house, and if he stepped into the study, she would be trapped in there with him.
His tread echoed hollowly from the wooden porch steps.
Chyna lunged across the foyer, through the archway, into the dark living room—and immediately came to a halt, afraid of stumbling into furniture and knocking it over. She edged forward, feeling her way with both hands, vision hampered by the muddy-red ghost images of the motor-home headlights, which still floated faintly across her retinas.
The front door opened.
Less than halfway across the living room, Chyna squatted beside an armchair. If the killer entered and switched on the lights, he would see her.