The Blackstone Chronicles (51 page)

Crazy
, she thought.
I must be going crazy
.

She had lost all sense of time; had no feeling either of night and day, or of how long she’d been in the featureless room. In the muddle of her mind, there was no
longer any difference between minutes and hours, hours and days, days and weeks.

Her wrists and ankles were still bound, but now she was blindfolded, and it felt as if her eyes were covered with the same kind of heavy duct tape that sealed her lips. She was certain she knew why the blindfold had been added: so her captor could see without being seen.

Now, as she came out of the restless sleep she’d fallen into minutes—or perhaps hours—ago, she tried to fathom what it was that had brought her awake.

A sound?

But there were no sounds; the tiny chamber that was her prison was as eerily silent as the palaces of death built for the pharaohs.

Yet she was filled with foreboding, sensing that if she held perfectly still, if she held her breath so that not even her lungs would disturb the quiet in the room, she would hear something.

She waited.

And then she heard it: the scraping of a key being fitted into a lock, followed by the click of a bolt being thrown. The door itself made no sound, but Rebecca, deprived of any visual stimulus, had grown sensitive to other things, and the slight change in the air currents as the door swung open felt like wind against her cheek.

And she could feel that she was no longer alone.

Still, she waited, and though she could hear nothing, she began to sense that whatever had entered the room was behind her now.

She felt a touch against her cheek, a touch so light she could almost imagine it wasn’t there at all.

Then there was a quick movement, and she felt a slash of pain across her mouth. For a moment it was as if her skin were torn away, but then she realized it was only the duct tape that had been ripped off. A tiny moan escaped her lips. Instantly, a hand clamped over her mouth, silencing her.

The hand lingered, its pressure only slowly lightening, but Rebecca made no move, and finally it dropped away. A second after that she felt something touch her lips, and then realized she was being offered water.

Greedily, she sucked it up, swallowing every drop she was allowed.

A moment later the tape was once more pressed in place, but again the fingers lingered on her skin, and now Rebecca could feel the cold smoothness of the latex that covered them.

She held perfectly still, refusing to acknowledge the touch with any reaction. Finally, one of the fingers moved.

Involuntarily, Rebecca shuddered as the finger crept across her throat like the point of a knife.…

Ed Becker stared mutely at his house. Beside him, Bonnie was as silent as he, though their neighbors—who had appeared on the sidewalk before the first fire truck had arrived—seemed to all be talking at once. “What happened?” Ed heard someone say.

“An explosion,” someone else replied.

“I saw a flash,” a third voice said. “Helluva thing—lit up our whole bedroom. Scared Myra half to death!”

“Oh, it did not,” a woman’s outraged voice protested. “You were more scared than I was!”

“So if there was an explosion and a flash, where’s the fire?” the first voice demanded.

And that was the eerie thing. There was simply no fire.

From the moment the gas had exploded in the basement, Ed had waited for his house to burst into flames, certain that by the time the first fire truck arrived, the building would have become an inferno like the one that destroyed Martha Ward’s house only a few weeks ago. But as the sound of the sirens grew louder and louder,
and not just one, but three fire trucks converged on Amherst Street, the house remained silent and dark, looking for all the world as if nothing had happened. As the fire trucks braked to a stop, their sirens were abruptly cut off, then three crews began pulling hoses from the reels on the trucks. Larry Schulze pulled up in the white Chevy Blazer that served as his chief’s car and hurried over to Ed.

“What happened? Where’d it start?”

“It was gas,” Ed explained. “I smelled it coming out of the basement, and got Bonnie and Amy out just before it blew. But I don’t get it—how come the house isn’t burning?”

“You mean ‘how come it isn’t burning
yet,’
” the fire chief corrected him. “Just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not on fire.” Dispatching one man to shut the gas off at the main, he beckoned to two others to follow him as he started down the driveway.

“I’m coming with you,” Ed said.

The fire chief turned back, his stony expression clear even in the shadowy light of the street lamps. “No you’re not,” he declared in a voice that carried every bit as much authority as any judge Ed had ever dealt with in a courtroom. “You’re going to stay right here until I’ve gone around the house and then gone through it. When I’m satisfied there’s no fire and that it’s safe, then you can go in.”

As Ed was considering the merits of trying to argue with the chief, Bonnie laid her hand on her husband’s arm. “Let him do his job, Ed,” she said. “Please?”

Ed nodded his thanks to Bonnie as Schulze and his men set off. In less than ten minutes they had circled the exterior and were back in front of the house. “So far it looks okay,” the chief called as he mounted the steps to the front door, which was standing wide open. “Is the gas off?”

“Thirty seconds after you asked!” one of his men shouted back.

“Okay! We’ll be out in a couple of minutes.”

The crowd waited, finally falling silent as the fire chief inspected the house. When he emerged a few minutes later appearing just as calm as when he’d gone in, an audible murmur of relief rippled through the bystanders, except for two small boys who sounded sorely disappointed that they weren’t going to see the firemen use their hoses.

“You got lucky,” Schulze told Ed Becker as his men began rewinding their unused hoses onto the reels. “If you’d had the kind of trash in your basement most people do, you could have lost the whole house.”

Bonnie Becker stared at the fire chief in disbelief. “You mean it’s all right? It’s not on fire?”

“That happens sometimes,” Schulze explained. “You have to understand what goes on with gas. When it lights off, which probably happened when the freezer kicked on, it goes so fast that unless there’s something in the immediate vicinity that’s pretty flammable, it literally blows itself out. You lose all the windows, and the doors too, but that’s about it. You can take a look now, if you want. But I’ll go with you.”

Ed gazed at the house, remembering just how close he’d come to dying that night. If the gas had exploded as he’d opened the basement door—

He cut the thought short, trying to shut out the image that rose in his mind of a boiling mass of fire erupting around him, snuffing his life out in an instant, or leaving him so badly burned he would have prayed to die rather than suffer the pain the flames would have inflicted.

Though he didn’t want to think about what might have happened to him, he knew he had to go back into the house.

Into the basement, where the explosion had occurred.

With Larry Schulze following close behind him, Ed
started toward the front door. “Is it okay to switch on the lights?” he asked as they stepped into the foyer.

“Can’t. I shut off the power, just in case. Use this.”

Turning on the flashlight Schulze handed him, Ed moved cautiously through the foyer, shining the beam into every corner, barely able to believe the house had suffered no serious damage. But it seemed to be true—everything looked normal; nothing seemed even to have been disturbed. But as he entered the kitchen, he stopped short. “Jesus,” he said, staring at the door to the basement.

Or, more accurately, what
had been
the door to the basement. It now was a heap of shattered lumber so torn by the explosion that it was barely recognizable as having been a door at all. All that remained within the frame were a couple of fragments of wood clinging to the hinges that had been half torn from the frame itself. “That’s where I was standing not more than a minute before it blew,” Ed said, his voice barely above a whisper as the unbidden vision of the exploding fireball rose in his mind once more. Stepping over the shredded wood that had been the door, he gazed down the stairs.

Oddly, the basement looked normal too. It wasn’t until he’d started down the stairs that he realized he’d been expecting everything to be blackened. But apparently it had happened so fast that not even any charring had occurred.

As he came to the bottom of the stairs, he shined the light around and stopped short.

Blood!

There was blood everywhere!

His gorge rising, Ed braced himself against the wall as his knees threatened to buckle beneath him.

The blood was smeared on the walls, puddled on the floor, dripping from the beams overhead. But it was impossible! When the gas exploded, there had been no one down here!

Besides, the blood he’d seen before had existed only in a dream. Yet here it was.

First the explosion, sounding exactly like the shotgun Paul Becker had been aiming at him.

And now the blood.

The blood of the people his clients had murdered splashed through his basement as if in retribution for his having defended the undefendable.

But it was impossible! It hadn’t happened! It was only a dream!

“Ed?” Larry Schulze was gripping his shoulder. “Ed, are you okay? I know the paint’s a mess but—”

Paint?

Paint!

Or course! Not blood at all! Paint!

Though the fire chief was still talking, Ed Becker no longer heard his words. The strength finally coming back into his legs, he moved deeper into the basement.

As he looked around, using the flashlight to explore every corner, the same feeling of horror that had come over him when Riley died that morning crept up on him once again.

Though it hadn’t been the roar of a shotgun, the explosion of the gas had sounded exactly like one.

And though the red stains on the walls and the floor and even the ceiling weren’t blood, they looked no different from the terrifying crimson vision he’d witnessed in his dream.

It had happened again.

For the second time, his nightmare had come true.

T
he crowd in front of the Becker house dispersed almost as fast as it had gathered, and though Bonnie Becker knew the thought was uncharitable, she had a distinct feeling that at least a few of those who’d rushed out of their homes were just a bit disappointed that there had been so little to see. Within minutes after Ed and Larry Schulze emerged from the house, only Bill McGuire was left. Bonnie, feeling at sea, was perplexed—and perhaps just slightly resentful—that none of her neighbors had offered to take them in for the night. Was it possible they actually thought she would go back into the house tonight? Or take Amy back inside?

Bill McGuire read her expression perfectly. “You don’t get invited to stay at anyone’s house until you’ve been here for at least two generations,” he explained, displaying the first semblance of a grin Bonnie had seen on his face since his wife died. “It’s the price Ed has to pay for having married out of town. But don’t worry—I married out of town too. You’ll all stay with Megan and me. Besides, if I know Mrs. Goodrich, she’ll have a pot of tea on.”

Far too upset by fear and its aftermath to offer even the feeblest of polite protests, Bonnie gave Bill a hug instead. “I promise it won’t be for more than a night or two,” she assured him. “I just have to know it’s safe.”

Just as Bill had thought, the teakettle was whistling and Mrs. Goodrich was bustling about the kitchen as they
entered his house, which was across the street. Amy, already having converted the night into a wonderful adventure, slid onto a chair at the kitchen table and demanded a glass of milk.

“Say please,” Bonnie automatically instructed her daughter, but Mrs. Goodrich was already setting a tumbler in front of the little girl.

“Please,” Amy parroted as her hand snaked out to take a cookie from the plate the old housekeeper offered.

Ten minutes later, with Amy making no more than a token protest against having to go to bed, Bonnie tucked her daughter in next to Megan McGuire. Megan was fast asleep, looking angelically peaceful with her arms wrapped around the doll that had been her inseparable companion since her mother died.

“It’s so beautiful,” Amy breathed, gazing at the doll’s porcelain face. “Can I have a doll like that?”

“We’ll see,” Bonnie temporized. “I’m not sure we can find one. But maybe tomorrow Megan will share hers with you. Now, go right to sleep,” Bonnie told her, bending over to kiss her daughter. “And don’t wake Megan up. All right?”

“All right,” Amy promised. But as soon as her mother was gone, she reached over to touch the beautiful doll.

“Don’t,” Megan said, her voice startling Amy, whose hand jerked back before she’d made even the slightest contact. Megan’s eyes were wide open, and Amy realized she hadn’t been sleeping after all.

“She’s mine,” Megan went on, “and she doesn’t like anyone else to touch her. She doesn’t like it one bit.”