Phantoms Part 3

"What could be worse?"

"I don't know. But I ... I feel it. Something worse."

The wind rose up again and rustled the shrubs along the porch.

"Okay," Jenny said. "You wait here while I go have a look at-"

"No," Lisa said quickly. "If you're going in there, so am I."

"Honey, you wouldn't be flaking out on me if you- "

"I'm going," the girl insisted, letting go of Jenny's arm. "Let's get it over with."

They went into the house.

Standing in the foyer, Jenny looked through the open door on the left.

"Vince?"

Two lamps cast warm golden light into every comer of Vince Santini's study, but the room was deserted.

"Angie? Vince? Is anyone here?"

No sound disturbed the preternatural silence, although the darkness itself seemed somehow alert, watchful-as if it were an immense, crouching animal.

To Jenny's right, the living room was draped with shadows as thick as densely woven black bunting. At the far end, a few splinters of light gleamed at the edges and at the bottom of a set of doors that closed off the dining room, but that meager glow did nothing to dispel the gloom on this side.

She found a wall switch that turned on a lamp, revealing the unoccupied living room.

"See," Lisa said, "no one's home."

"Let's have a look in the dining room."

They crossed the living room, which was furnished with comfortable beige sofas and elegant, emerald-green Queen Anne wing chairs. The CD player, tuner, and amplifier were nestled inconspicuously in a corner wall unit. That's where the music had been coming from; the Santinis had gone out and left it playing.

At the end of the room, Jenny opened the double doors, which squeaked slightly.

No one was in the dining room, either, but the chandelier shed light on a curious scene. The table was set for an early Sunday supper: four placemats; four clean dinner plates; four matching salad plates, three of them s.h.i.+ny-clean, the fourth holding a serving of salad; four sets of stainless-steel flatware; four gla.s.ses-two filled with milk, one with water, and one with an amber liquid that might be apple juice. Ice cubes, only partly melted, floated in both the juice and the water. In the center of the table were serving dishes: a bowl of salad, a platter of ham, a potato ca.s.serole, and a large dish of peas and carrots. Except for the salad, from which one serving had been taken, all of the food was untouched. The ham had grown cold. However, the cheesy crust on top of the potatoes was unbroken, and when Jenny put one hand against the ca.s.serole, she found that the dish was still quite warm. The food had been put on the table within the past hour, perhaps only thirty minutes ago.

"Looks like they had to go somewhere in an awful hurry," Lisa said.

Frowning, Jenny said, "It almost looks as if they were taken away against their will."

There were a few unsettling details. Like the overturned chair. It was lying on one side, a few feet from the table. The other chairs were upright, but on the floor beside one of them lay a serving spoon and a two-p.r.o.nged meat fork. A balled-up napkin was on the floor, too, in a corner of the room, as if it had not merely been dropped but flung aside. On the table itself, a salt shaker was overturned.

Small things. Nothing dramatic. Nothing conclusive.

Nevertheless, Jenny worried.

"Taken away against their will?" Lisa asked, astonished.

"Maybe." Jenny continued to speak softly, as did her sister. She still had the disquieting feeling that someone was lurking nearby, hiding, watching them-or at least listening.

Paranoia, she warned herself.

"I've never heard of anyone kidnapping an entire family," Lisa said.

"Well ... maybe I'm wrong. What probably happened was that one of the kids took ill suddenly, and they had to rush to the hospital over in Santa Mira. Something like that."

Lisa surveyed the room again, c.o.c.ked her head to listen to the tomblike silence in the house. "No. I don't think so."

"Neither do I," Jenny admitted.

Walking slowly around the table, studying it as if expecting to discover a secret message left behind by the Santinis, her fear giving way to curiosity, Lisa said, "It sort of reminds me of something I read about once in a book of strange facts. You know-TVtc Bermuda Triangle or a book like that. There was this big sailing s.h.i.+p, the Mary Celeste... this is back in 1870 or around then ... Anyway, the Mary Celeste was found adrift in the middle of the Atlantic, with the table set for dinner, but the entire crew was missing. The s.h.i.+p hadn't been damaged in a storm, and it wans't leaking or anything like that. There wasn't any reason for the crew to abandon her. Besides, the lifeboats were all still there. The lamps were lit, and the sails were properly rigged, and the food was on the table like I said; everything was exactly as it should have been, except that every last man aboard had vanished. It's one of the great mysteries of the sea."

"But I'm sure there's no great mystery about this," Jenny said uneasily. "I'm sure the Santinis haven't vanished forever."

Halfway around the table, Lisa stopped, raised her eyes, blinked at Jenny. "If they were taken against their will, does that have something to do with your housekeeper's death?"

"Maybe. We just don't know enough to say for sure."

Speaking even more quietly than before, Lisa said, "Do you think we ought to have a gun or something?"

"No, no." She looked at the untouched food congealing in the serving dishes. The spilled salt. The overturned chair. She turned away from the table. "Come on, honey."

"Where now?"

"Let's see if the phone works."

They went through the door that connected the dining room to the kitchen, and Jenny turned on the light.

The phone was on the wall by the sink. Jenny lifted the receiver, listened, tapped the disconnect b.u.t.tons, but could get no dial tone.

This time, however, the line wasn't actually dead, as it had been at her own house. It was an open line, filled with the soft hiss of electronic static. The number of the fire department and the sheriff's substation were on a sticker on the base of the phone. In spite of having no dial tone, Jenny punched out the seven digits for the sheriff's office, but she couldn't make a connection.

Then, even as Jenny put her fingers on the disconnect b.u.t.tons to jiggle them again, she began to suspect that someone was on the line, listening to her.

Into the receiver, she said, "h.e.l.lo?"

Far-away hissing. Like eggs on a griddle.

"h.e.l.lo?" she repeated.

Just distant static. What they called "white noise."

She told herself there was nothing except the ordinary sounds of an open phone line. But what she thought she could hear was someone listening intently to her while she listened to him.

Nonsense.

A chill p.r.i.c.kled the back of her neck, and, nonsense or not, she quickly put down the receiver.

"The sheriff's office can't be far in a town this small," Lisa said.

"A couple of blocks."

"Why don't we walk there?"

Jenny had intended to search the rest of the house, in case the Santinis were lying sick or injured somewhere. Now she wondered if someone had been on the telephone line with her, listening on an extension phone in another part of the house. That possibility changed everything. She didn't take her medical vows lightly; actually, she enjoyed the special responsibilities that came with her job, for she was the kind of person who needed to have her judgment, wits, and stamina put to the test on a regular basis; she thrived on challenge. But right now, her first responsibility was to Lisa and to herself. Perhaps the wisest thing to do was to get the deputy, Paul Henderson, return here with him, and then search the rest of the house.

Although she wanted to believe it was only her imagination, she still sensed inquisitive eyes; someone watching ... waiting.

"Let's go," she said to Lisa. "Come on."

Clearly relieved, the girl hurried ahead, leading the way through the dining room and living room to the front door.

Outside, night had fallen. The air was cooler than it had been at dusk, and soon it would get downright cold-forty-five or forty degrees, maybe even a bit colder-a reminder that autumn's tenancy in the Sierras was always brief and that winter was eager to move in and take up residency.

Along Skyline Road, the streetlamps had come on automatically with the night's descent. In several store windows, after-hours lights also had come on, activated by light-sensing diodes that had responded to the darkening world outside.

On the sidewalk in front of the Santinis' house, Jenny and Lisa stopped, struck by the sight below them.

Shelving down the mountainside, its peaked and gabled roofs thrusting into the night sky, the town was even more beautiful now than it had been at twilight. A few chimneys issued ghostly plumes of wood smoke. Some windows glowed with light from within, but most, like dark mirrors, cast back the beams of the streetlamps. The mild wind made the trees sway gently, in a lullaby rhythm, and the resultant susurration was like the soft sighs and dreamy murmurs of a thousand peacefully slumbering children.

However, it wasn't just the beauty that was arresting. The perfect stillness, the silence-that was what made Jenny pause. On their arrival, she had found it strange. Now she found it ominous.

"The sheriff's substation is on the main street," she told Lisa. "Just two and a half blocks from here."

They hurried into the unbeating heart of the town.

5.

Three Bullets A single fluorescent lamp shone in the gloom of the town jail, but the flexible neck of it was bent sharply, focusing the light on the top of a desk, revealing little else of the big main room. An open magazine lay on the desk blotter, directly in the bar of hard, white light. Otherwise, the place was dark except for the pale luminescence that filtered through the mullioned windows from the streetlights.

Jenny opened the door and stepped inside, and Lisa followed close behind her.

"h.e.l.lo? Paul? Are you here?"

She located a wall switch, snapped on the overhead lights-and physically recoiled when she saw what was on the floor in front of her.

Paul Henderson. Dark, bruised flesh. Swollen. Dead.

"Oh, Jesus!" Lisa said, quickly turning away. She stumbled to the open door, leaned against the jamb, and sucked in great shuddering breaths of the cool night air.

With considerable effort, Jenny quelled the primal fear that began to rise within her, and she went to Lisa. Putting a hand on the girl's slender shoulder, she said, "Are you okay? Are you going to be sick?"

Lisa seemed to be trying hard not to gag. Finally she shook her head. "No. I w-won't be sick. I'll be all right. L-let's get out of here."

"In a minute," Jenny said. "First I want to take a look at the body."

"You can't want to look at that."

"You're right. I don't want to, but maybe I can get some idea what we're up against. You can wait here in the doorway."

The girl sighed with resignation.

Jenny went to the corpse that was sprawled on the floor, knelt beside it.

Paul Henderson was in the same condition as Hilda Beck. Every visible inch of the deputy's flesh was bruised. The body was swollen: a puffy, distorted face; the neck almost as large as the head; fingers that resembled knotted links of sausage; a distended abdomen. Yet Jenny couldn't detect even the vaguest odor of decomposition.

Unseeing eyes bulged from the mottled, storm-colored face. Those eyes, together with the gaping and twisted mouth, conveyed an unmistakable emotion: fear. Like Hilda, Paul Henderson appeared to have died suddenly-and in the powerful, icy grip of terror.

Jenny hadn't been a close friend of the dead man's. She had known him, of course, because everyone knew everyone else in a town as small as Snowfield. He had seemed pleasant enough, a good law officer. She felt wretched about what had happened to him. As she stared at his contorted face, a rope of nausea tied itself into a knot of dull pain in her stomach, and she had to look away.

The deputy's sidearm wasn't in his holster. It was on the floor, near the body. A 9mm pistol.

She stared at the gun, considering the implications. Perhaps it had slipped out of the leather holster as the deputy had fallen to the floor. Perhaps. But she doubted it. The most obvious conclusion was that Henderson had drawn the pistol to defend himself against an attacker.

If that were the case, then he hadn't been felled by a poison or a disease.

Jenny glanced behind her. Lisa was still standing at the open door, leaning against the jamb, staring out at Skyline Road.

Getting off her knees, turning away from the corpse, Jenny crouched over the weapon for long seconds, studying it, trying to decide whether or not to touch it. She was not as worried about contagion as she had been immediately after finding Mrs. Beck's body. This was looking less and less like a case of some bizarre plague. Besides, if an exotic disease was stalking Snowfield, it was frighteningly virulent, and Jenny almost surely was contaminated by now. She had nothing to lose by picking up the pistol and studying it more closely. What most concerned her was that she might obliterate incriminating fingerprints or other important evidence.

But even if Henderson had been murdered, it wasn't likely that his killer had used the victim's own gun, conveniently leaving fingerprints on it. Furthermore, Paul didn't appear to have been shot; on the contrary, if any shooting had been done, he was probably the one who had pulled the trigger.

She picked up the gun and examined it. The magazine had a ten-round capacity, but three rounds were missing. The sharp odor of burnt gunpowder told her that the weapon had been fired recently; sometime today; maybe even within the past hour.

Carrying the pistol, scanning the blue tile floor, she rose and walked to one end of the reception area, then to the other end. Her eye caught a glint of bra.s.s, another, then another: three expended cartridges.

None of the shots had been fired downward, into the floor. The highly polished blue tiles were unmarred.

Jenny pushed through the swinging gate in the wooden railing, moving into the area that TV cops always called the "bull pen." She walked down an aisle between facing pairs of desks, filing cabinets, and work tables. In the center of the room, she stopped and let her gaze travel slowly over the pale green walls and the white acoustic-tile ceiling, looking for bullet holes. She couldn't find any.

That surprised her. If the gun hadn't been discharged into the floor, and if it hadn't been aimed at the front windows-which it hadn't; no broken gla.s.s-then it had to have been fired with the muzzle pointing into the room, waist-high or higher. So where had the slugs gone? She couldn't see any ruined furniture, no splintered wood or torn sheet-metal or shattered plastic, although she knew that a 9mm bullet would do considerable damage at the point of impact.

If the expended rounds weren't in this room, there was only one other place they could be: in the man or men at whom Paul Henderson had taken aim.

But if the deputy had wounded an a.s.sailant-or two or three a.s.sailants-with three shots from a police handgun, three shots so squarely placed in the a.s.sailant's body trunk that the bullets had been stopped and had not pa.s.sed through, then there would have been blood everywhere. But there wasn't a drop.

Baffled, she turned to the desk where the gooseneck fluorescent lamp cast light on an open issue of Time. A bra.s.s nameplate read SERGEANT PAUL J. HENDERSON. This was where he had been sitting, pa.s.sing an apparently dull afternoon, when whatever happened had ... happened.

Already sure of what she would hear, Jenny lifted the receiver from the telephone that stood on Henderson's desk. No dial tone. Just the electronic, insect-wing hiss of an open line.