“Dark blue Cherokee,” Hudley said. “Yes, she came to the door but I didn’t see a baby.” His gaze took stock of her dirty clothes and her bandaged hand. “She knew my name, too. What the hell’s this all about?”
“How long ago was that? The woman. When was she here?”
“It wasn’t over fifteen minutes ago. She said she was trying to find Muir Road. Listen, I think you’d better explain—” He suddenly looked toward the street, and Laura turned in time to see a police car speed by, going west with its lights flashing but no siren.
Muir Road was to the west, Laura realized.
She turned away from Nick Hudley and ran to the Cutlass. She started the engine and left rubber on the pavement as she sped west along Overhill, looking for Muir Road. Somehow, Mary Terror was only fifteen minutes ahead of her instead of three or four hours. There was still hope of getting David back…still hope…still…
A dark blue vehicle roared around a curve in front of Laura, hugging the center line, and Laura saw the face of the woman behind the wheel. At that same instant Mary Terror recognized Laura, and the Cherokee and the Cutlass slid past each other by no more than three inches.
Laura fought the wheel with her hand and elbow, taking the car up onto somebody’s lawn, skidding it around and back onto Overhill but now going east. She put her foot to the floorboard, the Cutlass coughing black smoke but gaining speed. The Cherokee was flying in front of her, and in another few seconds they passed Nick Hudley’s house, the scream of engines scaring birds out of the birdbath.
On the next curve the Cherokee went up over the curb and knocked a mailbox into the air. Laura got forty feet behind Mary and stayed there, determined not to lose her again. She didn’t know if David was in the vehicle or not, or why the police car was on its way toward Muir Road, or if Jack Gardiner was in Freestone, or how Mary’s lead had dwindled to forty feet, but she knew Mary Terror would not get away from her. Never. No matter how long it took, no matter where she went. Never.
The Cherokee and the Cutlass swerved onto Parkway, roared under the caution light and past the WELCOME TO FREESTONE sign. Mary’s eyes ticked back and forth from the winding road to the car in her rearview mirror. The shock of seeing Laura had been only a further kink in the warp of Mary’s mind. Everything was karma, after all. Yes, Mary had decided, it was karma, and karma could not be denied. Let the bitch come. Before Mary took the baby’s life and her own, she would execute the bitch who had killed Edward and Bedelia.
Mary’s tears had stopped. Her face was a ruin of smeared makeup, her eyes bloodshot and deep-sunken. Her heart had reached its final evolution. It was empty now; there was nothing to dream on anymore. She was the last survivor of the Storm Front, and she would end it where it had begun.
Six miles out of Freestone, she turned onto a country road that led west to the Pacific. Laura kept with her. The miles flashed past, the road deserted. Mary took a turn to the left, following the route on her map, and Laura stayed close. Mary smiled to herself and nodded. The baby was quiet, his hands grasping the air.
The road wound through dense woods. A sign said POINT REYES RANGER STATION, 2 MI. But before a mile had passed, Mary whipped the Cherokee to the right onto another narrow dirt road. She put on speed, dust billowing back into the windshield of the Cutlass as Laura took the turn, too. “Come on!” Mary said, her voice a husky rattle. “Follow me! Come on!”
Laura sped after the Cherokee, her tires bouncing and jubbling over potholes. After a mile or so there was no more dust, but the woods on either side of the road were cob-webbed with mist. Laura could smell the salt air of the Pacific leaching into the car. She followed Mary Terror around a curve, mist swirling between them, and suddenly she saw the taillights flare.
Mary had just stomped on the brake. Laura wrenched the wheel to the right, her shoulder muscles shrieking. The Cutlass missed a collision, but went off the road into the pine woods. The tires plowed through a mossy bog, blue mist hanging between the trees. Laura’s foot was on the brake, and the Cutlass grazed a treetrunk and stopped in swampy, rim-deep water.
Laura picked up her pistol. Through the mist she could see the Cherokee sitting there, its taillights no longer flared. The driver’s seat was empty. Laura opened the door and stepped out into a bog that claimed her to her ankles. The Cherokee’s engine wasn’t running. In the silence, Laura heard the thudding of her heart and the cries of sea gulls.
Where was Mary? Was David still with her, or not?
Laura crouched down, moving through the muddy water, and got a treetrunk between herself and the Cherokee. She was expecting a shot at any second. None came.
“I want my baby!” she shouted. Her finger was poised on the trigger, her broken hand throbbing with renewed pain. “Do you hear me?”
But Mary Terror didn’t answer. She was too smart to give herself away so easily.
Laura would have to move from where she was. She scurried behind another tree, closer to the Jeep wagon, and waited for a few seconds. Mary didn’t show herself. Laura worked her way closer to the Cherokee, mist drifting around her and the sunlight gray through its canopy in the treetops. She gritted her teeth and ran to the vehicle’s rear, where she hunkered down and listened.
She could hear distant thunder.
Waves, she realized in another moment. The Pacific, beating against rocks.
The air was cool and wet, moisture dripping from the trees. Laura peered around the Cherokee’s side. The driver’s door was open. Mary was gone.
Laura stood up, ready to crouch again if she saw movement. She looked into the wagon, saw the clutter of Mary’s journey, the smell of sweat and urine and soiled diapers.
Laura walked past the Cherokee, following the dirt road. She went at a slow, careful pace, her senses sharp for any hint of an ambush. The flesh rippled on the back of her neck, the smell of salt in her nostrils. The sound of thunder was getting louder.
And then the woods fell away from both sides of the road, and a house stood before her overlooking the Pacific and its wave-gnawed rocks.
9
The Thunder House
IT WAS A TWO-STORY WOODEN HOUSE WITH A GABLED ROOF, A widow’s walk with broken railings, and a wide porch that went around the lower floor. A path of fieldstones, overgrown with weeds, led from the road to the porch steps. The house might have been beautiful once, a long time ago. It was past saving now. The salt breeze and Pacific spray had long ago scoured off what paint there had been. The house was dark gray, its walls covered with green moss and lichens the color of ashes. What looked like cancers had taken hold on the wood, grown tendrils and linked with other tumors. Part of the porch’s supports had collapsed, the floor sagging. Vandals had shown their hand: every window in the house was shattered, and spray-painted graffiti was snarled like gaudy thorns between the lichens.
Laura started up the steps. The second one was already broken, as was the fourth. Laura touched the banister, and her hand sank into the rotten wood. There was no front door. Just beyond the threshold there was a hole in the floor that might have been the size of Mary’s boot. Laura walked inside, the smell of saltwater thick and the inner walls dark with growths. Moss hung from the ceiling like garlands. The decorations for a homecoming, Laura thought. She walked toward the staircase, and her left foot slid through the floor as if into gray mud. She pulled free, little black beetles scurrying out of the hole. The first riser of the stairs had given way. So had most of the others. The house was decayed to its core, and the walls were about to fall.
“I know you’re there,” Laura said. The saturated walls muffled her voice. “I want my baby. I’m not going to let you have him, and you know that by now.”
Silence but for the thunder and the noise of dripping.
“Come on, Mary. I’ll find you sooner or later.”
No answer. What if she’s killed him? Laura thought. Oh Jesus, what if she killed him back in Freestone and that’s why the police were—
She stopped herself
before she cracked. Laura walked carefully into another room. Its bay windows, long broken out, gave a majestic view of the ocean. She could see waves crashing against the rocks, spume leaping high. Mist, a silent destroyer, was drifting into the house. On the cratered floor lay beer cans, cigarette butts, and an empty rum bottle.
Laura heard what she thought at first was the crying of a sea gull on the wind.
No, no. Her heart kicked. It was the crying of a baby. From upstairs, somewhere. Tears burned her eyes, and she almost sobbed with relief. David was still alive.
But she would have to climb the stairs to get him.
Laura started up, over the broken risers. David was still crying, the sound ebbing and then strengthening again. He’s tired, she thought. Worn out and hungry. Her arms ached to hold him. Careful, careful! The staircase trembled under her weight, as it must have shaken under the weight of Mary Terror. She climbed into the gloom, moss glistening on the walls, and she reached the second floor.
It was a warren of rooms, but David’s crying guided her. Her right foot slid down into the floor, and she nearly fell to her knees. On this second level, much of the floor had already given way, the rest of the boards swollen and sagging underfoot. Laura eased around the rotten-edged craters, where black bugs swarmed, and followed the sound of her child’s voice.
Mary could be anywhere. Lurking around a corner, standing in the darkness, waiting for her. Laura went on, step after careful step, her gaze wary for the big woman suddenly appearing in a doorway. But there was no sign of Mary, and at last Laura came to the room that held her son.
He was not alone.
Mary Terror was standing in the far corner of the room, facing the doorway. She had David in the crook of her left arm. Her right hand held a revolver, aimed at the baby’s head.
“You found me,” Mary said. A smile flickered across a face tight with madness. Her eyes were burn holes, beads of sweat like blisters on her skin. A patch of blood and pus had soaked through the thigh of her jeans.
The hairs had risen on the back of Laura’s neck. She’d seen the gore spattered on the woman’s sweater and the Smiley Face button. The revolver’s hammer was cocked and ready. “Let him go. Please.”
Mary paused. She seemed to be thinking about it, her eyes staring off somewhere beside Laura. “He says I shouldn’t do that,” Mary told her.
“Who says it?”
“God,” Mary said. “He’s standing over there.”
Laura swallowed thickly. David’s crying waxed and waned. He was calling for his mother, and her legs wanted to carry her to him.
“Throw your gun down,” Mary commanded.
She hesitated. Once the gun was gone, she was finished. Her brain was smoking, trying to think of a way out of this. “In Freestone,” she said. “Did you find Jack Gardi—”
“DON’T SPEAK THAT NAME!” Mary shrieked. Her gun hand trembled, the knuckles white.
Laura stood very still, her lungs rasping and cold sweat on her forehead.
Mary’s eyes closed for a second or two, as if she were trying to shut out what she’d seen. Then they jerked open. “He’s dead. He died in 1972. Linden, New Jersey. There was a shootout. The pigs found us. He died…saving me and my baby. I held him while he died. He said…he said…” She looked to God for guidance in this. “He said he’d never love anyone else, and that our love was like two shooting stars burning bright and hot and people who saw it would be blinded by that beauty. So he died, a long time ago.”
“Mary?” Laura kept her voice steady with a supreme effort. If she didn’t do something in a hurry, her infant was going to die. The thought of a police sniper and a madwoman on a balcony whirled through her mind in a horror of flashing blue lights. But that woman had killed the baby because of the death reflex. If Mary had to make a sudden choice, would she kill Laura first, or David? “The baby is mine. Can you understand that? I gave birth to him. He belongs to—”
“He’s mine,” Mary interrupted. “And we’re going to die together. Can you dig it, or not?”
“No.”
It was the only way. Laura’s eyes calculated the inches as her mind measured the dwindling seconds. Time was almost gone. She lunged forward and dropped to her knees, the quickness of her movement catching Mary Terror by surprise.
A single memory passed through Mary’s fevered brain, like a cool balm: Drummer’s small hand, tightening around her index finger as if to stop it from pulling a trigger.
The revolver didn’t go off.
As Laura lifted her pistol and took aim, the gun in Mary’s hand left the child’s head and began to turn toward Laura.
But Laura got off the first two shots.
She was aiming at the woman’s legs, from a distance of ten feet. The first shot missed, hitting the wall behind Mary, but the second bullet grazed Mary’s wounded thigh and burst it open in a hot spray of blood and pus. Mary screamed like an animal, her legs buckling and her gun firing before it could train on Laura. As Mary’s knees hit the floor, Laura scrambled toward her and swung the automatic at the woman’s head, striking her a blow across the left cheekbone. Mary’s gun hand began to spasm uncontrollably, and the revolver fell to the floor. Then Laura grabbed hold of the green parka David was zipped up in. She wrenched him out of Mary’s grasp, and then she kicked the revolver through a hole in the floor and backed away.
Mary fell onto her side, grasping her ruined leg and moaning.
Laura began to sob. She pressed David against her and kissed his face. He was squalling, his eyes bright with tears. “It’s all right,” she told him. “It’s all right. Oh God, I’ve got you. I’ve got my sweet baby, thank God.”
She had to get out of there. The rangers’ station wasn’t far. She could go there and tell them where Mary Terror was. Her heart was beating wildly, the blood rushing through her veins. She felt faint, the ordeal about to smash over her like the ocean on the rocks. She held her baby close, and staggered out of the room. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” she kept saying as she carried him toward the stairs.
She heard a whuff.
Behind her.
She turned.
And Mary Terror took one last hobbling lurch and hit her in the face with her right fist, the blow snapping Laura’s head back. As Laura fell, her mind ablaze with pain, she hugged David close and swiveled her body so the impact would not be on him but on her right shoulder. The gun left her fingers, and she heard it thud down somewhere in the gloom.
Mary was on her, trying to pull David away. Laura let go of him and clawed at Mary’s eyes, her broken fingernails raking across the big woman’s face. Mary hammered a punch into Laura’s chest, cheating her lungs of air, and as Laura gasped for breath she felt David being taken from her again.
Laura hooked an arm around Mary’s throat and squeezed. Mary let go of the baby to beat at Laura’s ribs, and then she swung Laura up and around with fierce strength and both the women crashed together against a wall with David on the floor beneath them.
The rotten wall gave way. They went through the soft insect-eaten boards and onto the floor of another room. As they fought, Mary’s knee slammed against Laura’s splinted hand, and the pain was like incandescent light, startling in its power. Laura heard herself moan, a bestial sound. She struck out with her right fist, hit Mary’s shoulder, struck out again, and got her jaw. A blow from Mary hit Laura in the stomach, and then Mary had her by the hair and was trying to slam her head against the floorboards.
Laura fought back with the raw strength of the doomed. She got her fingers in Mary’s eyes and tore at them, and then Mary cried out and was pulling away from her. Blood was spattered all over them from Mary’s thigh wound, splattered all over the floor. Laura kicked out, hit Mary in the ribs, and drew a grunt from her. Another kick missed, and Mary Terror was crawling away, blood dripping from the corner of her right eye. Laura staggered to her feet, and suddenly Mary turned on her again and grabbed her legs, lifting her off the floor and throwing her back
into another wall. Laura went through it as if it were damp pasteboard, and then Mary burst after her through the rotten timbers and sodden plaster with a strangled bellow of fury.
Blood was in Mary’s eyes, her face a crimson mask. She kicked at Laura, who got to her knees and desperately tried to protect her face and head with her arms. She warded off one kick, was struck in the shoulder by another. Freighted with pain, she fought to her feet. And then Mary—half-blinded, her right eye white in its socket—clamped her arms around Laura’s body, trapping her arms at her sides. She began to crush the life out of her.
Laura thrashed, couldn’t break free. Her vision was fading. When she passed out, Mary would beat her to death. Laura rocked her skull back and brought it forward, smashing her forehead as hard as she could against the woman’s mouth and nose.
Bones snapped like twigs. The pressure on Laura’s ribs eased, and she slid down to the floor in a heap as Mary staggered across the floor, her hands pressed to her face. She hit a wall, but this one was solid. And then she shook her head, drops of blood flying, and she leaned over and breathed like a bellows as red drooled from her mouth.
Laura was shaking, her nerves and muscles almost used up. She was about to pass out, and when she put her hand to her face it came away smeared with blood.
Mary snorted gore, and came at her dragging her mangled leg.
The big woman reached down for her, grabbed her hair with one hand and her throat with the other.
Laura came up off the floor like an uncoiling spring, her teeth gritted, and she grasped the front of Mary’s sweater with her good hand and kicked with her last reserve of power into the woman’s bleeding thigh.
A howl of pure agony burst from Mary’s mouth. Mary let go of Laura’s throat to clutch at her leg, and she toppled backward off balance, her shoulders slamming against a wall five feet behind her.