That had been only two hours ago. He would have expected to sleep straight through.
Perhaps a residuum of excitement over last night’s successful enterprise had roused him. Or the nagging sense of urgency, the awareness of a looming deadline, which had been with him for the past two weeks.
He studied the wall opposite the bed, bare of ornament save for the single decorative item found in his apartment, a calendar showing scenes of America’s national parks. Today’s date was April 17. A Tuesday.
It had been April 3 when he purchased the two cans of gasoline that now lay under the tarp in the rear of his van. Three days later he had bought a badminton set at a toy store. The net, shuttles, and rackets had gone into the trash; he had wanted only the metal stakes used to put up the net.
They were hidden under the tarp also.
Funny how he had done these things without quite permitting himself to know where his actions would lead. Oh, he did know, of course, but in some peculiar way he seemed able to block out that knowledge and operate on automatic pilot, making his purchases and preparations with no conscious planning, no definite intentions.
It was always that way. But this time things would be different. This time he had Erin Reilly to help him.
If she could.
And if not ...
Then the stakes and the gasoline would be used for her.
His mouth twisted, and a groan shuddered out of him, thick and wheezy.
He wondered how much time he had before the compulsion became irresistible. A month? Two weeks?
Perhaps not long enough for Erin to do her work. But it had to be. For his sake and hers.
Therapy. The prospect simultaneously frightened and intrigued him. He supposed she would ask him about his childhood, his sex life. Those appeared to be the standard avenues of inquiry.
Some evasion would be necessary in both areas. There were things he wouldn’t reveal, secrets he meant to keep.
Dreams. That was another topic sure to arise. Well, there was only one dream that mattered, the dream that had visited him on so many nights, the dream that would not let him go.
A frown crossed his face. The dream ...
That was what had woken him ahead of the alarm clock. Of course.
Slowly he raised his head and, for the first time since opening his eyes, looked at himself. He preferred never to see his unclothed body. His pale white flesh, thick around his waist, repelled him, and he found the hairy swatch of his genitalia troubling in some obscure way.
Still, he looked, then released a relieved sigh. His penis was soft, flaccid. He did not have an erection. Good.
Erections scared and disgusted him. Pain and shame were inextricably intertwined with any reminder of the sexual act.
He thought again of the dream. Lotion on her finger; her finger between her legs ...
The stream of images would unwind in his mind throughout the day, persistent as a migraine, unless he did something to push the memory away.
He knew what was necessary. The photo. His special picture.
Quickly he rose from bed and threw on a robe, belting it to hide his body from himself. Barefoot, he left the bedroom and proceeded down the hall to the den at the far end.
The den contained just three sticks of furniture—a writing desk he’d salvaged years ago from a retiring professor’s office, the desk’s swivel chair, and a steel file cabinet. Dust dressed everything in a dull gray coat.
At the back of the file cabinet, in an unlabeled manila folder, he kept the photograph.
Carefully he took it out, then sat in the desk chair and studied it in a band of light filtering through a gash in the curtain.
The photo’s corners were dog-eared, the edges worn from repeated handling. It had been crisp and new when he’d obtained it. But since then, nearly every night, he’d found himself drawn to the picture, gazing at it sometimes for hours.
The picture calmed him, as it always did. He lost himself in it and felt the world slide away.
Relaxed now, the dream banished, he could examine his own feelings more objectively.
Yes, his ugly impulses were stirring. But he could control them. He could hold off the need to take action. He could refrain from taking Erin outside the ranch, to the arroyo. He could stop himself from ending her life in a shout of flame.
He was certain of it.
Almost certain, anyway.
14
Late.
Annie checked her watch for the fifth time.
She sat alone at a table for two, a menu in her hands, the table’s umbrella unfolded to shelter her in shadow. Around her, bright noon sunshine fell in ribbons of glitter through a scrim of fluttering banners and rippling leaves, the sun rays shifting with the wind.
Voices murmured over the clink of silverware. At a table across the courtyard, half a dozen women in power suits laughed at a shared joke. Nearer to Annie’s table, two men pursued an intense discussion of the upcoming NFL draft.
Pleasant here, in this courtyard restaurant in the heart of Tucson’s downtown. Ordinarily, Annie could relax in a place like this as easily as slipping into a warm, soapy bath.
Today, foreboding overlay her impressions of the restaurant, the bright sun, the blue sweep of sky. Foreboding—and a memory of her insomnia last night.
She had sensed danger to Erin. A premonition, irrational and no doubt groundless. Yet even now she couldn’t shake it.
And Erin was late.
The two of them had made a lunch date for twelve o’clock. Annie had been waiting fifteen minutes already, and she’d arrived ten minutes late to begin with.
Her sister was maniacally punctual, always had been. Whichever gene was responsible for tardiness had been omitted from her complement of chromosomes. For her to be this far off schedule was simply unheard of.
Possibly an unexpected crisis had come up in her practice. Suicidal patient, say.
Or maybe something had ... happened to her.
Traffic accident.
Random violence.
Medical emergency.
Hell, anything. Anything at all.
Really, though, it was silly to get all worked up. The simple truth was that Annie had almost certainly misunderstood the arrangements she and Erin had made. Probably she’d gotten the time, the date, or the location wrong—very possibly all three. She’d done it before.
Her sister could remember every detail of her schedule without strain. Annie had trouble enough just remembering to get up in the morning.
Most likely Erin was still at her office, expecting to have lunch at one o’clock—or she was waiting at a different restaurant entirely and wondering how scatterbrained Annie had managed to screw up again.
Of course. It had to be something like that.
I’ll just call her office, Annie thought, and—
“Still waiting?”
The male voice startled her. She looked up from the menu held indifferently in one hand, and her waiter was there, a blond kid with Malibu surfer looks, incongruous in the desert.
“Uh, yeah.” Annie put down the menu. “I may have been stood up. Is there a phone around here?”
“Right outside the rear entrance.”
“Thanks.” She pushed back the tubular chair. “If a woman comes in—redheaded like me, but a lot better looking—please tell her I went to make a call.”
“I’ll tell her. But she won’t be better looking.”
The compliment lifted a surprised smile to her lips. The smile lingered as she left the cafe.
Nice to be admired by a younger man. Of course, he probably had no idea how much younger he was. Most people took her to be about twenty-five, but she and Erin had both turned thirty last month and had commiserated together.
Erin. The smile faded.
A telephone kiosk, fortunately not in use, was just where the waiter had said it was.
Though she had dialed the switchboard at Erin’s office countless times, the number was gone fro
m her memory. Hardly an unusual occurrence—she had no head for figures, and she wasn’t good with names and faces either.
The number was in her address book, and her address book was somewhere in the chaos of her purse. She pawed through a clutter of key rings, tissues, cosmetics, coupons, scribbled notes to herself, Life Savers, breath mints, pens, business cards, loose coins, and out-of-date lottery tickets before she found the booklet.
Then she fed a quarter into the phone and punched in the number.
The receptionist answered. “Sonoran Psychological Associates.”
“Hi, Marie, this is Anne Reilly. Is my sister—”
“Annie. I’ve been calling your shop.”
Tension in the words—alarm, even. Fear pounced on her like a tiger. “You have? Why?”
“You didn’t get my message?”
“No, I’ve been out, I’m still out, what message, what’s going on?”
“It’s Erin. We can’t find her.”
“You can’t find her?” She felt stupid repeating the words.
“No one knows where she is. She missed her ten-fifteen, and her eleven o’clock, too.” A truck rattled past the pay phone, and Annie had to strain to hear. “I’ve called her home three times; her machine keeps answering. Tried calling you forty minutes ago, left a message with your assistant—”
“I was already on my way downtown. For lunch with Erin. She hasn’t shown up here either.”
Unthinkable for Erin to miss even one appointment with a patient, let alone two. The world would end before she would permit herself that kind of irresponsibility.
Could she have had a seizure? Terrible thought. Erin’s last epileptic episode had occurred in high school; since then the prescription medicine she took had kept that problem completely under control.
Still, it was possible. If she’d suffered convulsions while driving to work—or fallen in her apartment and struck her head ...
“Okay,” Annie said, holding her voice steady. “I’ll take a run over to her place and see if she’s there.”
“Let us know—”
“I will, I will. Thanks, Marie.”
She hung up and drew a shallow, shaky breath. For a panicky moment she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t recall where she’d parked her car. Then she remembered—the county parking structure, a couple of blocks from here. Yes.
She walked swiftly to Alameda Street. The main branch of the public library rose on her right, a handful of taller buildings assembled behind it. None stood higher than thirty-five stories.
For the most part, downtown Tucson could have been downtown Des Moines or Tulsa or Toledo, any small city that had begun as a few square blocks of brick and concrete. Outside the small historic district, there was little in the town’s business section that was distinctive. The area retained none of the Wild West flavor of Tucson’s outlying horse ranches and saguaro forests; it owned no particular charm or glamour, save perhaps for one evocative street name, Broadway, said to have been the inspiration of a visiting New Yorker at the turn of the century.
Though big-city magic was absent here, so were the worst excesses of urban blight. A few transients slept in El Presidio Park, and some spidery graffiti clung to alleyways and street signs, but otherwise downtown remained remarkably orderly and clean.
Whitewashed walls gleamed in the strong sunlight. Patches of grass made squares and crescents of green. Mulberry trees sighed, lovesick, in a gentle breath of breeze.
Annie barely noticed any of it. Her mind replayed the phone conversation, hunting among Marie’s words for some overlooked clue, finding none.
This was bad. Really bad.
Erin was in trouble. Might be injured.
Even ... dead.
Ugly thought. A shiver skipped over her shoulders.
“No way,” she said firmly, drawing a stare from a vendor at a sandwich cart.
Erin couldn’t be dead. Annie refused to so much as consider the possibility.
People died all the time, but not her sister.
15
The radio came on when her car started, a blast of Billy Ray Cyrus exploding from the speakers.
Annie punched the on-off button, silencing Billy Ray, and swung the red Miata out of its parking space. At the exit-ramp gatehouse, money and a receipt changed hands, and then she was on the street, hooking north on Church Avenue and east on Sixth Street, heading for Erin’s apartment complex at Broadway and Pantano.
The little sports car was fun to drive, but Annie was too agitated to have any fun now as she cut from lane to lane, bypassing slower traffic, running yellow lights. Normally she didn’t drive like a maniac—well, not this much of a maniac, anyway—but the apprehension that had been building in her for the past twelve hours had reached fever pitch. She had to know if Erin was all right.
Tension set her teeth on edge. She rolled down the window to feel the rush of air on her face.
At Campbell she cut over to Broadway. Vermilion blooms of mariposo lily and purple owl clover blurred past on the landscaped median strip. Despite worry and preoccupation, she greeted the spring blossoms with a smile.
The sight of flowers always pleased her. Flowers, she often thought, had saved her life.
For weeks after that night in 1973, she had been lost, disoriented, a seven-year-old girl with the face of a shell-shocked soldier. The flowers in Lydia’s garden had brought her back. Watering them, plucking weeds, tending to each bud as if it were her precious child, she had found a way to ground herself, to reconnect with reality.
Her sister had spent her teenage years educating herself in the mind’s darker recesses, struggling to understand madness and evil. Annie had never wanted to understand. She had wanted only to escape life’s horror. In gardens and nurseries and florists’ shops, she did.
It took her years to realize that she loved flowers less for their beauty than for the simple fact that they could not hurt her.
Even a tame dog could bite. A kitten could scratch. A loving father ...
But flowers were safe, always.
Almost in Erin’s neighborhood now. The older, more crowded part of town was receding, replaced by newer shopping plazas on larger lots. Developments of tract homes and condos occupied curving mazes of side streets with ersatz Spanish names. The mountains slouched on all horizons, their outlines sharp against a sky scudded with shredded-cotton clouds.
Pantano Fountains, Erin’s place, glided into view. Annie parked outside the lobby and walked briskly to the front door.
She fingered the intercom, buzzed Erin’s apartment. No reply.
Fumbling in her purse, she found the set of duplicate keys Erin had given her. Opened the door, entered the lobby.
The manager was on duty in her glass-walled office, talking on the phone, her words muted by the glass. A white-haired lady with a proud, lined face; Annie had met her several times when visiting Erin on weekends.
What was her name? Mrs. Williams. Right.
Might be necessary to talk with her later, but for now Annie simply sketched a wave through the glass as she hurried to the elevator. She pressed the call button, and the doors parted at once.
As she was traveling to the top floor, she realized suddenly that she should have checked the carport to see if Erin’s Taurus was in its reserved space. That way she would already know if Erin was home.
But of course Erin wasn’t home. She hadn’t answered the intercom, after all.
Unless she couldn’t answer.
A seizure would pass in a few minutes, Annie reminded herself. And it wouldn’t be fatal.
But suppose Erin had been in the shower when she collapsed—suppose her prone body had obstructed the drain, and she’d drowned in six inches of water. Suppose ...
The elevator let her off on the penthouse floor. She ran for Erin’s apartment, propelled by panic.
At the door she hesitated, then knocked loudly.
“Erin?”
No response.
She
inserted the key—no, wrong, that was the lobby key, try the other one. Got the door open finally and peered in.
Again: “Erin?”
Still nothing.
Slowly she stepped inside.
The lights of the apartment were off, the windows darkened by drawn curtains with blackout liners to hold back the desert sun. She found the wall switch and brightened the living room. It looked orderly and normal, almost magically clean, as always—and Erin was nowhere in sight.
From the bedroom, a faint sound. Music. Some classical composition. Rippling piano keys and a weeping violin.
Annie darted into the bedroom, briefly thrilled by hope—a thrill that died when she found the room similarly unoccupied, the clock radio on the nightstand playing to no audience.
The alarm feature was set to switch on the radio at 7:15. Apparently there was no automatic shut-off. Strange, though, that Erin hadn’t turned it off herself before leaving.
The bed was unmade, another oddity. Erin, the neatness freak, invariably fluffed her pillows and smoothed the bedspread upon arising. Loose, tangled sheets were not part of her world.
Her purse was gone, but nothing else of value that Annie could see.
In the bathroom, she found the shower stall dry. She fingered the towels on the racks. They were dry, too.
Into the kitchen, where a few plates soaked in the kitchen sink under a lacy film of liquid soap. Dinner dishes, streaked with tomato sauce and spotted with the remnants of salad greens. No cereal bowl, no spoon.
Den, balcony, hall closet—nothing. No signs of intrusion or disturbance, no furniture or valuables missing, and no Erin anywhere.
She’d left no note, and the only messages on her answering machine were from Marie at the clinic, asking Erin where she was.
Still no answer to that question, and now Annie was finding it harder to shake the cold fear that clutched the base of her spine.
Erin had to be all right. Annie simply wouldn’t permit her to be injured or sick or—worse.
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