Laura took an umbrella from the rack in the foyer and she crossed the street to the church. Outside the red front door she shook out her umbrella and slipped out of her coat as she entered.
The minister's chambers were in the rear, past the pews and the altar. When Laura looked for him there, he was gone. The light was off and his small desk looked untouched. She stared at it for several seconds trying to grasp the meaning.
"Stephen?" she called out. "Stephen?"
There was only the sound of empty rooms in return. It occurred to Laura that Stephen may have left the church through the rear exit, and, as variations of deceit swirled and unraveled before her, she contemplated why. She passed quietly to the doorway adjacent to his chambers. It was locked from the inside.
Facts, Peter Whiteside: Stephen came into this building two hours ago. I have been staring at the front door from across the street. Either I have failed Basic Surveillance or he has not left. He is in this building.
Where? What was he doing?
There remained only the balcony, which was empty, and the front stairway to the belfry and steeple. When she looked at the latter, she found the doorway ajar. She ascended the narrow staircase that wound up to the spire.
As she climbed she listened. She heard her own footsteps on the stairs and the creaks of the aged wood. She came to a first landing, where there was a small window. She stopped, listened, and looked out.
She was higher than the nearest trees. She looked down at the rectory house where she lived and watched the rain sweep over it. She lifted her gaze and could see the road stretching into Liberty Circle. She could see part of the town.
It was a fine view, probably even finer and more dramatic on a clear day or at the next level. Why, she wondered, had Stephen never called her attention to it?
The staircase led to another landing just below the bells. She could smell the mustiness of the seldom-used stairs and could hear the rain driving against the wooden walls. It almost distracted her from the entire point of the search. Where was Steven?
She took the final turn in the staircase and arrived in the bell-tower landing. It was a narrow, square chamber about eight by eight, ringed by panels and several storage closets. The door of one closet was slightly open and she stepped toward it. But as she made her first movement, she saw that several of the panels on the opposite wall had been hastily replaced. She stepped toward them instead.
"Stephen?" she said aloud.
Behind her a closet door exploded open. Laura screamed. She wasn't fast enough to turn to confront the figure that lunged toward her.
It was a man, she was sure, and he hooked one arm around her with his hand covering her mouth. The other hand came up to her throat with a knife and she felt the side of the blade pressed hard-it was hurting her!-to the flesh by the jugular.
He was rough. He forced her all the way forward to the small window in the tower. Her face was pressed roughly to the cold glass.
There he held her and hurt her, until she recognized the hand, the wrists, and the feel of the strong body.
Slowly his hand moved away. Slowly he relaxed the knife.
"Stephen!"
He allowed her to turn slowly to face him. His gray eyes were blazing with a furious cruelty that she had never seen in the man with whom she had shared part of her life.
"You fool!" he said. "What are you doing here?"
"I was looking for you!"
"Why? Why do you have to prowl? Why can't you leave me alone?"
Laura could feel the tears welling up in her eyes. And she was fully aware that he had not for an instant relaxed the grip on the knife.
"You're my husband!" she cried. "I wanted to see you! I wanted to talk to you!"
"You should have stayed home and waited for me!"
She felt her courage rallying. "And wait for what?" she demanded. "Wait until you bloody well felt like coming home and talking to me? What are you doing up here?"
"Nothing that you would understand."
"No? And that?" She stared angrily at the knife, then back at her silent husband. And next there was a horrible moment as she looked into Stephen Fowler's eyes and no longer saw her husband. She saw something cold, mean, and evil that had always before been beneath the surface. But now, when she saw it, the look explained everything.
She saw the man before her for what he was. As his eyes riveted upon her, there was only sheer, paralyzing terror, knowing that the hands that had been intimate hundreds of times with her had manufactured bombs and strangled a strange woman. She knew that Peter Whiteside had been right in everything he had last said about him. And she knew that somehow she had come very close to her husband's secret. Something about this place…
Then she realized. Bill Cochrane had told her. Radio transmissions. A spy. The steeple was the highest point for miles around. That's what had attracted the F.B.I. agent and that was its significance to her husband.
It all came together to her in the space of three seconds, along with the fact that Stephen was intent on killing her. Now! She could tell from his eyes. She could tell by the way his fingers played nervously on the hilt of the knife.
She could think of only one way to save her life.
As his eyes remained locked with hers, she pressed her hand between his thighs. Gently, as she suppressed a shudder, she rubbed him.
The savagery in his face softened with the surprise. Good, she thought, she had done the unexpected.
"Don't you understand?" she asked with a conciliatory voice. "I don't know what you're doing and I don't care. I just want my husband to make love to me. I've missed you.
Can't you comprehend that?"
She did her best to smile receptively. All the while she feared that he would stab her with one sudden upward thrust of the knife.
"I love you, Stephen," she said. "I'd never do anything to betray you. Don't you know that?"
The words were barely out of her mouth when she realized it was the first lie she had told him in more than two years of marriage.
"Let's undress," she said. "Now. Right here. Please, Stephen?" She unbuttoned her blouse as she spoke.
"I'm going to teach you who the master is," he said. "I'm going to punish you for following me."
"Stephen…?"
He raised the knife, then threw it onto the floor, where, point-first, it stuck. Then he looked at his wife, drew back his hand, and slapped her hard across the face, just as he had once struck Charlotte.
Laura's face was on fire where he had hit her. She raised both her hands to where she had been struck and looked at her husband with wide horrified eyes. He grinned. He struck her again. She bolted to flee him, but he held her by the wrist.
"You'll finish undressing," he told her, biting off the words. "You'll do exactly what I tell you, Laura. Nothing less! You belong to me, Laura. You said so yourself. Now, don't you forget it."
She undressed as he watched her in silence. As her undergarments came off, Stephen seemed to be devouring her with his eyes, assessing her as a rapist might a naked schoolgirl. She was completely nude. She covered a small area on the floor with her clothing.
When she turned and looked at Stephen again she realized that there had always been within him a need to brutalize a woman. He had never done it to her before, but obviously he had been doing it somewhere else. She wondered what connection it had with the dead woman behind the church.
Then as he pulled his own clothes off, he made her kneel. He held her by the hair and forced her to take him into her mouth. She had never done that to him before, much less been forced to. As an act of love, had he ever asked, she would have. Today, with a deceitful man whom she knew to be a spy and a killer, it filled her with revulsion.