“No ticks, no fleas – she can’t have been roaming around fields and woods more than a day or so, probably a lot less than that.”
“When Merlin and I saw them in the meadow this afternoon, they were romping as if they’d just been set free. Maybe they were.”
“No papillomas or cysts,” Cammy reported.
She raised her hand to her face and found that no offensive odor had been transferred from the white fur to her skin. Leaning forward, she put her nose to Puzzle’s ventral coat.
“She smells fresh, as if she was just groomed.”
Feeling ignored, Merlin dropped the toy duck and thrust his big head into the moment, resting his chin on Puzzle’s chest, rolling his eyes at Cammy.
Before Cammy could pet the dog, Puzzle took Merlin’s muzzle in both hands and began to massage his face with her small fingers, which was his favorite form of attention.
“Look,” Cammy whispered, as if a loud word would break the spell.
“I see.”
“Shouldn’t she be at least a little afraid of such a big dog?”
“I don’t think she’s afraid of anything,” Grady said. “I don’t think … well, I don’t think she even knows she should be afraid of some things.”
“What an odd idea.”
He frowned. “Yeah. Isn’t it? But there’s something about these two … something makes me think maybe they’ve never known real fear.”
Watching Puzzle stroke the wolfhound’s face, Cammy said, “If true, that would be the biggest difference about them. Everything alive knows fear.”
Leaving the cushions in disarray, Riddle sprang down from the sofa and, as if having noticed it only now, scurried to a Stickley desk that Grady had made during the first few months after his return to the mountains. It was a lovely walnut piece with hammered-copper hardware, ornamented with inlaid pewter.
Riddle sat on his hindquarters and with one finger repeatedly flicked the dangling copper pull on the right-hand door, which rang musically against the escutcheon plate.
In Cammy’s lap, Puzzle pushed Merlin aside and raised her head far enough to see what her companion might be doing.
Riddle turned his head to look at her.
For a moment, Puzzle held his stare.
Riddle moved to the left-hand door and flicked the dangling pull as he had flicked the first. Again, he turned his head toward Puzzle.
As before, she met his stare, and after a hesitation, he turned away from the desk.
By some subtle expression or even more subtle gesture that Cammy failed to register, they seemed to have communicated with each other regarding the desk.
Grady appeared to have the same impression. “What was that about?”
Riddle scampered to the purple bunny, snatched it with his teeth, raced out of the living room, into the vestibule, and up the stairs, squeaking the toy as he went.
Game for a chase, Merlin pursued him.
In the bedroom closet, Henry Rouvroy listened for movement in the house and tried not to think about the body lying on its side in the bed. It was not a real body, only a dummy constructed of pillows and blankets, a deception that he had created himself, that and only that, that and nothing more.
No one could have entered the house, jammed the components of the faux body under the bed, and slipped beneath the covers, taking the place of the fake sleeper. Henry would have heard. He would have encountered the intruder in the act.
Of course, after arranging the bed, he spent as much as half an hour in the bathroom, scrubbing grime from under his fingernails. Standing at the sink, he had his back to the door and could not see the bedroom.
Thereafter, during his final search of the house, he stood for a long time at the cellar door, studying the light that leaked beneath it, listening for any sound from below. In that position, he would have known if someone tried to come in by the back door, but he would not have been aware of an intruder entering by the front.
“Ridiculous,” Henry hissed in the dark closet where once Nora’s clothes had hung.
His faceless tormentor was bold but not reckless. No adversary this clever would make himself vulnerable by taking the place of the dummy.
Only a lunatic would pull such a stunt, a lunatic or someone who had no fear of death because …
“Don’t go there,” he muttered.
Because he had already thought faceless tormentor, his line of thinking progressed as inevitably as an avalanche. His brother, Jim, was faceless because he’d been shot in the face, and Jim had no fear of death because he was already dead.
Logic like that would have gotten Henry hooted out of the Harvard debating society.
To get his mind off this absurd line of speculation, he tried to picture his favorite female TV chef spread-eagled on the bed, tied to the four posts, prominent features of her naked body pinched by wickedly designed clamps, a choke chain around her neck.
He thought of himself as a highly imaginative person. Therefore, he was dismayed to discover that he couldn’t conjure in his mind satisfying scenes of sadistic sex without an image of the desired woman in front of him.
He couldn’t very well sit sentinel in the closet with a TV tuned to the Food Network and expect that an intruder wouldn’t notice him. Besides, the house had no television.
If his primary entertainment in the years to come was to be a woman in the potato cellar, he had better keep more than one chained down there. To ensure against boredom, he ought to construct a couple of additional cells and keep a variety of women at the ready.
Once he sold all the noxious chickens or otherwise disposed of the gabbling creatures, he might insulate the chicken coop and turn that into a series of cells, as well. And the barn. The horse stalls could be easily retrofitted as cells, and the big building offered plenty of room for additional penitentiary units, as many as he had the energy and time to build.
Henry thought how cozy he would feel on a winter night, going to bed here in the house with the knowledge that in the barn were penned and shackled a herd of beautiful women, with perhaps a barn cat to keep them company, each of them snug in a sleeping bag, in the straw, and dreaming about her turn with the master. On wintry mornings, he would lead his choice through the snow to the house, where she would cook breakfast, something that a cow could never do, and while he ate, she would sit naked at the table and tell him all of the latest gossip among the girls. After breakfast, he would use her, savage her, and kill her or not, depending on his mood.
Although he was a young and virile man at thirty-seven, he was not inexhaustible. In addition to food and drink, he had better lay in a couple of thousand tablets of Viagra. The drug would probably remain potent if he vacuum-packed the pills in groups of ten and kept them in the freezer. That would work unless civilization entirely collapsed and power companies were unable to function. Fortunately, Jim had a propane-powered backup generator with half a dozen tanks of fuel already on hand. If Henry added to the propane supply and if he used the generator only for essential maintenance like keeping the Viagra freezer operating in warm weather, he would be happy here on the farm for a long, long time.
Unless, even now, dead Jim was out there in the generator shed, sabotaging the machinery.
“What the hell is the matter with me?” Henry asked the darkness, and at once wished that he hadn’t spoken, for fear he