Mr. Murder. By: Dean R. Koontz

sure there were no gaps in the drapes through which someone could look

into the room from outside.

As Paige tucked the blankets around Emily’s shoulders, then around

Charlotte’s, she kissed each of them goodnight. The love she felt for

them was so intense, like a weight on her chest, that she could not draw

a deep breath.

When she and Marty retired to the adjoining room, taking the guns with

them, they didn’t turn off the nightstand lamp, and they left the

connecting door wide open. Nevertheless, her daughters seemed

dangerously far from her.

By unspoken agreement, she and Marty stretched out side by side on the

same queen-size bed. The thought of being separated by even a few feet

was intolerable.

One bedside lamp was lit, but he switched it off. Enough light came

through the door from the adjoining unit to reveal the larger part of

their own room. Shadows attended every corner, but deeper darkness was

kept at bay.

They held hands and stared at the ceiling as if their fate could be read

in the curiously portentous patterns of light and shadow on the plaster.

It wasn’t only the ceiling, during the past few hours, virtually

everything Paige looked at seemed to be filled with omens, menacingly

significant.

Neither she nor Marty undressed for the night. Although it was

difficult to believe they could have been followed without being aware

of it, they wanted to be able to move fast.

The rain had stopped a couple of hours ago, but aqueous rhythms still

lulled them. The motel was on a bluff above the Pacific, and the

cadenced crashing of the surf was, in its metronomic certainty, a

soothing and peaceful sound.

“Tell me something,” she said, speaking softly to prevent her voice from

carrying into the other room.

He sounded tired. “Whatever the question is, I probably don’t have the

answer.”

“What happened over there?”

“Just now? In the other room?”

“Yeah.”

“Magic.”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I,” Marty said. “You can’t analyze the deeper effects that

storytelling has on us, can’t figure out the why and how, any more than

King Arthur could understand how Merlin could do and know the things he

did.”

“We came here shattered, frightened. The kids were so silent, half numb

with fear. You and I were snapping at each other–”

“Not snapping.”

“Yes, we were.”

“Okay,” he admitted, “we were, just a little.”

“Which, for us, is a lot. All of us were . . . uneasy with one

another. In knots.”

“I don’t think it was that bad.”

She said, “Listen to a family counselor with some experience it was that

bad. Then you tell a story, a lovely nonsense poem but nonsense

nonetheless . . . and everyone’s more relaxed. It helps us knit

together somehow. We have fun, we laugh. The girls wind down, and

before you know it, they’re able to sleep.”

For a while neither of them spoke.

The metrical susurration of the night surf was like the slow and steady

beating of a great heart.

When Paige closed her eyes, she imagined she was a little girl again,

curled in her mother’s lap as she had so seldom been allowed to do, her

head against her mother’s breast, one ear attuned to the woman’s hidden

heart, listening intently for some small sound that was not solely

biological, a special whisper that she might recognize as the precious

sound of love. She’d never heard anything but the lub-dub of atrium and

ventricle, hollow, mechanical.

Yet she’d been soothed. Perhaps on a deep subconscious level, listening

to her mother’s heart, she had recalled her nine months in the womb,

during which that same iambic beat had surrounded her twenty-four hours

a day. In the womb there is a perfect peace never to be found again, as

long as we remain unborn, we know nothing of love and cannot know the

misery that arises from being deprived of it.

She was grateful that she had Marty, Charlotte, Emily. But, as long as

she lived, moments like this would occur, when something as simple as

the surf would remind her of the deep well of sadness and isolation in

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