He backed away from the doorway and bumped into the kitchen drawers by the sink.
The top drawer held silverware. The bottom one was filled with sandwich bags, plastic wrap, aluminum foil, empty paper sacks, and pairs of light bulbs in flimsy cardboard cartons.
Brian tugged open the middle drawer. It was heavy with kitchen gadgets and utensils. And knives.
He moved aside a cheese grater and a bread knife before he saw what he was looking for. It was a heavy-bladed butcher knife with a black wooden handle. Brian knew that he shouldn’t be doing this, and he felt a slight thrill of excitement as he reached in and grasped the handle. He’d seen his mother use the knife once to chop up something for a stew, but he’d never actually held the knife before. It was heavier than it looked. He held it in both hands and raised it up, his arms straight out before him, the way he’d seen Lord Doom stand.
His eye ran up the sharp edge of the wide blade to its point. The blade was nearly as long as his arms, and the shape was perfect, just like the Sword of Power. Of course, this sword was curved only on one side, whereas that sword was curved on both sides. But he could take care of that on his drawing.
He shut the drawer by leaning into it with his hip, then crossed the kitchen and turned out the light. He held the knife before him as he found his way to the stairs, daring anyone who might be hiding in the shadows to try to get him.
He tiptoed up the stairs and down the hall toward his room. Even though he was certain his parents were still asleep, when he neared their room, he held the knife in his left hand down at his side, its point near the carpet, its blade shielded from view.
But as he passed before his parents’ room, he heard his mother call his name.
Sarah awoke from a light sleep.
She’d heard a noise downstairs. It had been a distinct, metallic-sounding noise—a muffled crash. Patches? Sarah wondered. She sat up in bed, and Alex stirred beside her.
Then she heard a creak on the stairs. Then another. Her hand was on Alex’s back, ready to shake him out of his sleep. A form slid past their doorway.
“Brian?” she said.
“What, Mom?”
“Are you okay, hon?”
“Yes, Mom,” Brian said, and disappeared.
Sarah slipped quietly out of bed. She padded in her bare feet down the cool hallway to Brian’s room, hugging herself through her thin nightgown. When she got to his room, Brian was already in bed, the blanket pulled up to his chin. Sarah sat on the edge of the bed and reached down to stroke his hair.
“Why were you up?”
“I was, um, getting a drink of water.”
“Did you go downstairs?”
“Yes.”
“How come? Why didn’t you just go into the bathroom?”
“Um, I don’t know.”
“Well, next time, turn on the light, okay? It’s not safe to go down the stairs in the dark. Okay?”
“Okay, Mom.”
She kissed him on the forehead.
“Good night, pumpkin.”
“Night.”
Sarah walked back to the master bedroom feeling uneasy. She had to admit that she’d been afraid, if ever so briefly, when she’d heard the creak on the stairs. She’d gone to bed with Christine Helstrum on her mind, and when she’d seen someone in the doorway, for a brief moment she’d thought …
Sarah climbed back into bed, angry at herself for succumbing to her imagination.
But when she closed her eyes, she remembered seeing Brian in the doorway. Before she’d realized that it was Brian, she thought she’d seen something at his side—the dull glint from the blade of a knife.
11
WHEN SARAH AWOKE SUNDAY morning, it was nearly nine. Alex was already gone from bed.
She recalled how upset he’d been after the phone call. She’d tried to make him—and herself—focus on the favorable things that Frank O’Hara had said. First, that Christine probably no longer remembered her threats to Alex. And second, that she might not even be alive.
But Alex had refused to listen to either suggestion.
“She’s alive,” he’d said to her, “and she’ll never forget her promise to me.”
They’d gone to bed without speaking further of the matter, a quiet tension between them.
Now Sarah got up, washed and dressed, then looked into Brian’s room. His bed was empty. She straightened the sheet, blanket, and quilt and fluffed the pillows, then went downstairs.
A moment later, Alex came inside carrying the Sunday newspaper. Even though he was wearing a bulky cable-knit sweater, he shook his shoulders from the cold. He quickly closed the front door to shut out the frosty air.
“Hi,” he said, smiling uneasily.
“Good morning.”
Sarah crossed the foyer, and when she put her arms around him, she could feel the cold air clinging to his sweater. “How long have you been up?” she asked.
“Not long. I made coffee and mixed up some pancake batter and—”
“No kidding,” she said.
“And I would have had the bacon strips separated and the grapefruits sliced, but Brian came down and wanted to know where the Sunday comics were.”
Sarah smiled, thankful that for the moment at least things were back to normal.
While Alex finished preparing breakfast, Sarah read the comics with Brian. She encouraged him to read where he was able, and she carefully pronounced the words that were new to him. That was the easy part. The hard part sometimes came afterward.
“I don’t get it, Mom.”
“Well, maybe that one wasn’t too funny.”
“Then why is it in the comics?”
“Because it’s supposed to be funny. Some people would think it was funny.”
“Why?”
Sarah sighed and looked toward Alex for help. But he was idly poking at his pancakes, his mind elsewhere.
“Okay,” Sarah said, “you see, Cathy thought that she was going to have a romantic dinner in a restaurant, and instead she ended up being stuck at home with all this ironing to do.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s the joke.”
“It is?”
“Yes, well, see the joke’s on her, because she thought she was going to have fun and instead she had to work.”
“Why is it funny?”
“Okay, well, maybe it’s not too funny. In fact, it wouldn’t be funny at all if it happened to you, but since it happened to her and since she’s here in the comics, well, we can laugh.”
“We can?”
Sarah sighed again.
“You’re right, Brian, it’s not funny at all.”
After breakfast Sarah asked Alex what he thought they should do today. He shook his head and said he didn’t really feel like doing anything. But Sarah wouldn’t let it go at that, and she began tossing around suggestions.
They almost always did something together on Sundays. If the weather was nice, they’d have a picnic in the park or hike in the mountains or visit the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo or go for a drive or just stay home and toss a Frisbee around the backyard and then cook hamburgers on the grill. If the weather was bad, they’d go to a movie or visit a museum or play one of Brian’s board games.
They rarely went to church. It wasn’t that Sarah and Alex didn’t believe in a Supreme Being. They just didn’t believe in organized religions. Nor did they believe in forcing one on their son. Of course, they did their best to teach Brian the difference between good and bad, right and wrong. But selecting a religion—or no religion—was up to him, they felt. So on the few occasions when they did go to church, they gave equal time to a number of religious denominations. One Sunday they might go to a Catholic high mass (Brian liked the “costumes and the smelly smoke”), and a month or two later they’d go to a Baptist revival meeting (Brian liked the excitement and the singing). Once, they “switched” Sunday to Saturday and visited a synagogue. Brian liked the chants.
But today no one seemed interested i
n anything Sarah suggested.
“Well,” she said, “I know one thing we need to do today: buy party invitations and Christmas cards and get them addressed and ready to mail.”
Brian groaned.
“You know what I’d like to do?” Alex said, a faint smile on his face. “That is, if everyone agrees.”
“What, Dad?”
“Go ice-skating at the Broadmoor.”
“All right!”
Sarah grinned. “But what about my Christmas cards?”
“There’s a shop at the Broadmoor.”
Before Sarah could say that there were less expensive places to buy cards, Brian jumped up from the table.
“I’ll go find my skates,” he said, and ran upstairs.
They drove west on Lake Avenue, which pointed directly at the main structure of the Broadmoor Hotel. Sarah had always thought that the sprawling seventy-year-old building looked like an enormous, elaborate cake—rose-colored and multilayered and topped with red tile frosting.
Alex steered the Toyota Celica around the horseshoe-shaped lot in front of the building complex. He found a space near the entrance to the drugstore marked 30-Minute Parking.
There were about a dozen customers inside, enough to make the small store seem crowded. Sarah guessed that she and Alex and Brian were the only locals, for everyone else was either picking out postcards or marveling at the unique selection of chocolate candies or merely browsing along the aisles of lotions and potions and grooming accessories, as if they’d never been in a drugstore before.
Sarah steered Alex toward the greeting cards, while Brian wandered off to more interesting areas of the store, those stocked with toys and candy.
The selection of party invitations wasn’t as large as Sarah had hoped. However, she did find one design that she felt was satisfactory. As far as Alex was concerned, hey were all satisfactory.
“Only twelve?” she said, looking more closely at the box. “At this price there should be twenty per box.”
“‘When you care enough to send the very best’ …”
“Very funny. So we’ll have to get, let’s see, four boxes.”
“What? You’re planning on having fifty couples in our house? A hundred people?”
“They won’t all be couples.”
“Do we even know that many people?”
“Sure, Alex, when you count the people from my shop and—”
“All your customers?”
“Not all, but there are a lot of them I want to invite. You don’t mind, do you?”
He shook his head, smiling, and put his arm around her waist. “Of course not.”
After Sarah had picked out several boxes of Christmas cards, they paid the cashier, then looked for Brian.
He was nowhere to be found.
They searched up and down every aisle and in the nook housing the candy display and in the rear by the lunch counter. He wasn’t in the store.
Sarah fought back a feeling of alarm.
“Maybe he went out to the car,” she said, and started or the door.
Alex put his hand on her arm.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Come on.”
She followed Alex through the other entrance to the drugstore—the one that led directly into the hotel.
Sarah could imagine Brian setting off to explore new territory and turning down one hallway after another and becoming hopelessly lost.
Well, not hopelessly, she knew. Eventually, someone would take the scared little boy to the front desk, where he would be well cared for until his mother arrived. Still, Sarah felt a sense of urgency about finding him.
She remembered an incident two years ago when she’d become separated from Brian at a department store. She’d searched frantically for him for over an hour, actually running through the aisles in the store, imagining that all sorts of terrible things had happened to him, until she’d been paged to a customer-service desk, where Brian was waiting for her, his eyes red from recent tears. He’d wandered into the toy section, and some older boys had teased him and pushed him around until he’d cried for his mother. Then, of course, they’d laughed at him, which had hurt even more.
Sarah and Alex entered a short, wide carpeted hallway with a wall filled with old framed photographs on the left and an information desk on the right. Beside the desk, nearly hidden in the corner, was a glass case with a mannequin of an American Indian wearing a red plaid shirt, blue jeans, and a cowboy hat and seated in a straight-backed wooden chair. Sarah had always thought the display seemed out of place, incongruous with the rest of the hotel. The dummy looked like a carefully preserved mummy.
And there was Brian, standing with his nose and hands pressed to the glass.
“Brian.” Sarah’s tone was part relief, part scolding.
“Hey, Mom, Dad, look at this. Is he real?”
“Brian, I wish you wouldn’t wander away like this,” Sarah said, feeling herself calm down.
“Huh?”
“We thought you were lost.”
“I wasn’t lost,” Brian said. “I was right here.”
“Right,” Alex said. “Let’s go skating.”
They went outside to the car. The sunlight seemed especially bright now, and although Sarah knew the temperature must still be in the thirties, the sun felt warm on her face.
“Why don’t we walk to the arena,” she said.
Alex unlocked the passenger door and put the sackful of cards in the backseat.
“We can’t leave the car here,” he said, pointing at the thirty-minute parking sign.
“Oh.”
“But why don’t you and Brian walk, if you want to, and I’ll meet you inside.”
Sarah looked at Brian.
“How about it? Do you feel like walking around the lake?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess.”
“We can see the geese.”
His face brightened. “Okay!”
Alex climbed into the car, and Sarah and Brian went back into the drugstore, then out through the connecting hallway and past the glass-encased Indian to the hotel lobby. A hand-carved marble staircase spiraled up to their left. It was one of Sarah’s favorite features in the hotel. However, she knew that Brian preferred high tech, so they continued on through the lobby and past the front desk to the escalators. Brian looked as happy as if he were on a ride at Disneyland.
When they got off the escalator at the top, they were once again on ground level, since this part of the hotel was built on a hillside. They walked through a large, open room where a scattering of hotel guests lounged on tasteful, comfortable furniture, then pushed through heavy glass doors to the main patio.
From mid-June until late September the large patio, which bordered on a small, placid lake, would be filled with people taking in the sun on chaise longues. But now the long chairs were folded up and stored away. The patio was empty, and the lake was covered with ice.
Sarah and Brian turned left onto the path. The cement walk had been shoveled clear, and snow was piled in windrows against the barren trees on each side. There were dozens of plump geese waddling around the edge of the frozen pond, poking their beaks through the snow as if they expected to find something good to eat. They looked up expectantly at Sarah and Brian. Sarah wished she’d brought bread crumbs for them.
“Don’t their feet get cold?” Brian asked.
“Maybe. But they don’t seem to mind.”
There were a few other people strolling around the frozen pond, enjoying the bright sun and the brisk winter air. Sarah guessed that they were town residents rather than hotel guests—their winter clothing was more sensible than fashionable.
They reached the narrow end of the lake, and the path curved sharply around it to the right. As Sarah looked to her right over the flat white lake, she glimpsed a woman on the path behind them.
The woman had short brown hair and wore a long dark coat.
She seemed to be staring at Sarah and Brian. But when she s
aw that Sarah had noticed her, she turned quickly away, suddenly interested in some nearby geese that were poking their beaks through the snow.
Sarah took Brian’s hand and walked quickly around the end of the lake, not stopping until they’d reached the World Arena. She looked back, but the woman was not in sight—only the dark leafless trees and the white lake and a scattering of people feeding the geese from the path.
Sarah pushed through the glass doors into the tiny lobby where Alex was waiting, a small pile of skates at his feet.
“Is something wrong?” he asked, looking at her face.
Sarah shook her head. “No,” she said, but she couldn’t help glancing back through the glass doors.
“What?”
“There was a woman,” she said, “on the path. I think she was watching us.”
“What did she look like?” Alex asked quickly.
“I’m … not sure. I just caught a glimpse of her face, and then she turned away. She was wearing a dark coat.”
Alex’s mouth came partly open; then he set his jaw and stepped to the door.
“Where?”
“She’s gone now,” Sarah said, putting her hand on his arm. “I’m sure it was nothing, just someone feeding the geese. Come on, let’s skate.”
Alex stared out the door for a full minute before he turned away.
Since Alex had already paid, they went directly to the stadium seats, removed their coats and shoes, and put on their skates. There were only about a dozen others skaters on the ice, so Sarah and Brian and Alex had plenty of room to maneuver without worrying about getting in anybody’s way.
Alex was a competent, if somewhat ungraceful, skater. He’d taken up the sport in his early teens, then dropped it after college, only to rediscover it shortly before he and Sarah had met. In fact, that was how they had met—skating at the Plaza Ice Chalet. Brian had taken a fall on the ice, and before Sarah could get to him, Alex was helping the boy back onto his skates. They had finished the day skating together.
Brian had been skating for a year and a half, and he still considered it an achievement to completely circle the arena without falling down.
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