"Well . . . just that I didn't think he could have been as nice to everyone as he was to me. He was just a little bit too good. Oh, that's a rotten thing for me to say after he was so generous to me and all. But you know what I mean?"
Thorn nodded encouragingly. "Perhaps I do."
Once over the hump, Mary plunged on. "Look, I've known one or two people, in religious orders, who I thought were really saintly. It's not all that common there, believe me. But there were one or two who I wouldn't be surprised if they were canonized someday. They were really good. They had a, a kind of joy about them. Well, I never felt like that about Del. He went through all the motions of being very good, with me at least, playing the role of this extremely nice old man. But . . ." Mary, with a helpless gesture, despaired of saying it just right.
"But," supplied Thorn, "he could have been acting."
Mary sighed and moved away from Del's room, going down the corridor, her steps picking up briskness as she went. "It's wrong of me to talk like that. He really gave me that Verrocchio."
"Did he, indeed? Then where is it?"
But Mary had been distracted. Halfway to her old room, walking the thickly padded, silent carpet, her steps moved irregularly to one side, as if in some involuntary reaction.
Thorn took her again by the elbow, gently stopping her forward progress. "Where did you find the murdered girl?"
Mary had backed up against the wall and was staring at the floor just in front of her feet. Now her voice was a mere whisper. "Her legs were stretched out in this direction. Like she had been running, and then was shot from behind, and just fell forward, you know? But she must have been turning her head to look behind her just as she was shot, because her face caught it. The whole front part of her head was . . . I couldn't have identified her face, no one could. But otherwise it looked like Helen. She had on a white robe of Helen's, and there weren't any other young girls around. At least not as far as I knew."
"Annie Chapman?"
Mary tried to read Thorn's eyes; he had taken off his sunglasses at last, but the dim light made it hard. She said: "That's the name that . . . the girl on the phone mentioned. I swear to you I never heard of any Annie Chapman, not until we got that crazy call. I've been racking my brain trying to remember, and the name means nothing. But since then I've been thinking . . ."
"Yes?"
"Well, maybe Delaunay wasn't as good, as perfect, as he let on to me. And I know he was involved with trying to help runaways; or he told me he wanted to get involved with it anyway—"
"What are you trying to say, Mary?"
"Well. Maybe—ordinarily he'd have told me, or Helen would have told me, if they were giving shelter to some other kid. But maybe, well, maybe he—just had a girl in his room for the night."
"I suppose it would not be terribly surprising." Thorn sounded faintly, fondly amused. "Men of good repute have done even stranger and more wicked things than that."
"I know," Mary agreed uncertainly. She was looking down at the carpet again. "She—the girl, whoever it was—was lying right about here. Somehow they've cleaned up all the bloodstains. The white robe she was wearing had fallen open, and I could see she didn't have anything underneath it. Helen told me once that she had taken to sleeping that way, in the raw, ever since she'd been on the road."
"Mary, I would like to hear your story of that night from the beginning. According to the news accounts—were they at all accurate?"
"Pretty much, I guess." Mary's brashness had been fading steadily. Her voice was now almost a child's.
"According to them you heard noise, ran from your room, and came upon the dead girl. What happened next?"
"I—it's hard for me—"
"Go back and start again, Mary. You were asleep."
The pattern in the carpet before her eyes was being melted by the onrush of night outside the windows, disappearing into darkness. She didn't want the fixed pattern to go. She held onto it desperately, resisting the voice of Thorn.
"I want you to go back and start again, Mary. Go back—"
In sudden fear, Mary turned toward him. Her hands folded themselves like the hands of a woman praying, or diving into deep water, and in a moment she had completed a soft lunging motion that brought her face into secure hiding against his chest. "Hold me," she murmured.
His hands held her, and they were warm. But his voice was inexorable. "Go back. You were asleep."
I can't do it. Her protest was silent, but vehement as any shout, and she knew that it was heard.
"I will help you. You are under my protection now. I would not ask it if it were not important. Will you not help me to find out the truth about Helen?"
Mary dared not open her eyes. If she looked up her eyes might meet his.
"Go through it all. Once more, with my help, through it all, and that will make an end to it. An end to the bad dreams that now plague you almost every night."
Surprise tricked Mary into looking up. "How did you know that?"
His eyes were hard to see. But it was hard to look away from them again.
"No," Mary said once more. But she knew that the force of her protest was failing.
* * *
Mary was sleeping, something she still did most comfortably and deeply in her old nun-pajamas. And even as she slept it seemed to her (though with some fitfully active portion of her mind she simultaneously knew better) that Thorn was unreal, that his talk in the dark mansion with her was nothing but a fading dream. A dream from which she would presently awake, to find herself in her own sun-lit room, the bedroom next to Helen's. When Mary awoke it would be cheerful morning, and she would be surrounded and defended by all the safe wealth of the Seabright house . . .
. . . and into her sleep there tore a fist of shotgun noise. The roar slammed against her bedroom door from the outside, jarring Mary instantly awake. Her eyes flew open to register dark midnight, only accented by the pale dial of the bedside clock.
Whatever that slam of sound had been, it must mean that something was terribly wrong. Adrenalin propelled Mary out of bed, grabbing in reflex for the red robe that lay as usual over a nearby chair. One arm in a sleeve of the robe, struggling to sleeve the other, she flung open her bedroom door and ran out into the hallway. Here the darkness was less intense; as usual some muted illumination was coming in through the hall windows from the security lights that ringed the exterior of the house. Somewhere out there now the mastiff, and another watchdog, were raging futilely.
A few steps down the hall, a white bundle lay on the floor. Mary ran to it, and stopped when one of her bare toes touched warm stickiness on the carpet.
Vaguely she was aware of sniffing the unfamiliar stink of burnt explosive. She could see the white thing on the floor quite plainly now, but in a state of new shock she was still trying to make sense of the world in which this white murdered thing could have existence. There were urgent human voices, not far away, saying—Mary could not quite make out what. She hardly raised her eyes. She still had not moved when vague figures walking the darkness, two coming from her right, one from her left, closed in to bracket her. A ski-masked man standing at her left was pointing a long-barreled firearm of some kind right at her midsection. Mary's belly shrank toward her backbone.
Delaunay Seabright, also in robe over pajamas, slippers on his feet, was standing at Mary's right. Another ski-masked man was holding the muzzle of another, shorter weapon against the back of Delaunay's head.
"Mary," Delaunay said. There was only a small tremor in his voice, which was basically calm and careful. "Mary? Do what they say."
"Oh. Uh."
"Mary. Listen to me. Keep control of yourself."
To this at last she gave some kind of an assent.
As if he had been waiting to see what her reaction would be, the masked man holding his gun at Del's uncombed gray head now spoke for the first time: "Move along."