Someone was inside the house, prowling around in the dark.
Laura's first thought was to stop and call the police. No, no; she didn't want the police in this, not yet. She turned around again and drove past the house once more. This time no light shone. But she'd seen it; she knew she had. The real question was: what was she going to do about it?
She pulled the car off the road, stopped it on the brown-grassed shoulder, cut the headlights and the engine.
Her purse was on the seat beside her, but her pistol remained in her suitcase at the motel. She sat there, shivering as the warm air slipped away and the night came in. Who was inside Bedelia Morse's house? A burglar? Stealing what? Her pottery? Laura realized she could either sit there and thrash it around in her mind or walk back to the house. Courage was not a question here: it was a matter of desperation.
Laura got out, opened the trunk, and put her hand around the tire iron. Then she buttoned up her coat to the neck and began walking the couple of hundred yards back to the dirt driveway that curved up through the woods. No light shone in any of the cottage's windows. There was no other car anywhere in sight. Imagination or not? She tightened her grip around the tire iron and started up the driveway, the air's eighteen-degree temperature burning her nostrils and lungs.
The baby was crying again. The sound roused Mary from a dream of a castle on a cloud, and set her teeth on edge. It had been a good dream, and in it she'd been young and slim and her hair had been the color of the summer sun. It had been a dream that she hated leaving, but the baby was crying again. Babies were killers of dreams, she thought as she sat up in bed. Her dream had been to place the baby in Lord Jack's hands, and see him smile like a blaze of beauty. Lord Jack would love her again, and everything would be right with the world.
But Lord Jack wasn't here. He hadn't been at the weeping lady. Lord Jack wasn't coming for her. Not now. Not ever.
The baby was crying, a sound that razored her brain. She stood up, a well of despair, and she felt the old familiar rage begin to steam from the pores of her flesh.
"Hush," she said. "Drummer, hush." He wouldn't obey. His crying was going to wake the neighbors, and then the pigs might come calling. Why did the babies always try to betray her like this? Why did they take her love and twist it into hateful knots? What good was Drummer now if Lord Jack didn't want him? Drummer was a piece of crying flesh that had no purpose, no reason for being. She hated him at that moment because she realized what she'd done to bring him to Lord Jack. Now it was all over, and Lord Jack would never set eyes on the wailing rag.
"Won't you stop crying?" she asked Drummer as she sat on the narrow bed in the dark. She spoke in a quiet voice. Drummer gurgled and cried louder. "All right," Mary said, and she stood up. "All right, then. I'll make you stop."
She switched on the lights in the kitchenette. Then she turned on one of the stove's burners and swiveled its dial to high.
Laura walked slowly up the front steps of Bedelia Morse's house. A clay cat was crouched near the door, and dead leaves scuttled across the porch. Laura reached out and tried the doorknob, gently working it from side to side. Locked. She retreated from the door, went back down the stairs again and around to the rear of the house. Her fingers, clenched so hard on the tire iron, were stiffening up with the cold. There was a one-car garage and a larger stone outbuilding, its door sealed with a padlock and chain, where Laura assumed the pottery work was done. Strange clay sculptures stood amid the barren trees like alien plant life; Laura couldn't see them now, in the dark, but they'd been apparent when she and Mark had gone back there on their initial visit Saturday. All kinds of clay geegaws – bird feeders, mobiles, and other things not so readily identifiable – dangled on wires from the tree limbs. It was obvious that Bedeüa Morse – or Diane Daniells, as she called herself now – had thrown herself heart and soul into the work she'd begun as a member of Mark's commune. Laura went to the back door, her shoes crunching on dead branches and leaves, and she tried this doorknob as well.
It turned easily. Laura's heart kicked again. She ran her hand over the door and found that one of its small rectangular panes of glass had been removed. Not broken, because there were no shards. Removed, as with a glass cutter.
She opened the door and stood on the threshold. Off in the woods somewhere, an owl spoke to the moon. The cold wind hissed through the trees and made the clay ornaments clink and clatter on their wires. She shivered involuntarily, and she stood in the doorway trying to see through the dark. Nothing in there but shapes upon shapes. She and Mark had looked through the door's panes on Saturday and seen a kitchen with a table and a single chair in the middle of the room. On Saturday, the door had had all its panes of glass, and it had been securely locked.
Her heart pounding, Laura lifted the tire iron and walked into the house.
Mary picked up the baby. Her touch was rough. The infant's crying broke, faltered, and began to climb in volume again, a thin, high whine that Mary could not abide. "STOP IT!" she shouted into his reddened, squawling face. "STOP IT, YOU LITTLE SHIT!"
The baby cried on. Mary almost choked on a scream of rage. How could she have been so stupid to believe that Lord Jack had written the message? To believe that he wanted her and the baby after all these years? To believe that he cared? No one cared. No one. She had stolen this child and blown her disguise, had put herself in mortal danger from the pigs of the Mindfuck State… and all for Edward Fordyce's traitorous book about the Storm Front.
She would deal with Edward before she left. She would make herself put a bullet between his eyes and dump his body in a garbage can. But right now there was the baby, crying his head off. Drummer, she thought, and she sneered. "You want to cry?" She shook him. "You want to cry?" Shook him harder. His crying became a shriek. "Okay, I'll make you cry!"
She took him into the kitchenette, where the burner glowed fiercely red and its heat rose up in a shimmer. The baby was trembling, still wailing, legs trying to thrash. She didn't need the little bastard. Didn't need Lord Jack. Didn't need anyone. She would make Drummer stop crying, make him obey her, and then she'd leave what remained of him for the pigs and the woman named Laura Clayborne. Then she would go underground again, deep underground, where nothing and no one could touch her, and she would turn her back for the last time on the idiot's dream of love and hope.
"Cry!" she shouted. "Cry! Cry!"
And she grasped the back of the baby's head and pressed his face toward the red burner.
In the dark, Laura listened. The boom of her heart and the roar of her breathing got in the way. Get out, she told herself. You don't belong here. You're a long way from home, and you've gone too far. If a burglar was ransacking Bedelia Morse's house, that was his business. But she didn't leave, and her fingers groped for a light switch. Her hand hit something that jingled merrily and made her jump a foot in the air. Another damned pottery mobile. She was making more noise than a marching band.
In another moment she found a light switch, and she turned it on.
A warm breath washed against her neck.
She spun around, to the right, and looked into the face of the man who was standing there. She opened her mouth to scream. A black-gloved hand rose up, fast as a cobra's head, and clamped her mouth shut before the scream could get out.
The baby's face was almost on the burner. He was still wailing, stubbornly, and Mary braced for the scream of agony.
A scream came.
"NO!"