Thorn

Chapter Eleven

"It's nice of you to help out," said Mary Rogers, her blue eyes looking up trustfully at Thorn as he unlocked and opened for her the right-side door of his rented Blazer. Her strong legs in worn blue jeans swung her athletically up into the vehicle. "Robby had to take the Ford," she added, when Thorn had gone round to his own doorway on the driver's side and was climbing in.

"I understand." Thorn first secured his seat belt properly—his sometimes ferocious conflicts with machinery were never his fault—and then put the key into the ignition. Presently he was driving down the swooping ramp from the hotel garage, squinting through sunglasses as he pulled into the city street awash with the molten daylight of late afternoon. The sun itself, he had made sure, was safely behind some buildings. It would not be getting any higher today. Robinson Miller, whose more-or-less gainful employment was with the local Public Defender's office, was working late this evening, visiting on his own time with clients said to be in great need. And a couple of hours ago Mary had received a phone call from the Seabright house. A woman on the staff there, a Mrs. Dorlan, who Mary had apparently got to know during her residence at the mansion, had told her that her remaining belongings were ready to be picked up.

"She sounded sort of in a hurry. Why they're all of a sudden in such a hurry to get rid of the stuff, I don't know. Cleaning house, I guess. But I feel more comfortable going over there if I have someone with me. And you did volunteer earlier."

"I assuredly did." That of course had been before his first visit to the mansion, when he was still looking for an invitation of some kind, any kind, to let him cross the Seabright threshold. But now he welcomed any good reason to be alone with Mary.

She said: "I suppose they'll just have the stuff piled out on the porch. There isn't very much."

Thorn snarled faintly at an errant Volkswagen. "I take it you have not yet told Helen's mother of that strange telephone call?"

"Stephanie's not much of a mother. A nasty thing to say but it's true. Anyway I don't think she'd talk to me. I could write her a note about the call but she'd never believe it."

Thorn did not argue that. "Then I suppose you have not informed the police, either."

Mary was studying him. "No, we haven't. You said something about an official connection that you have. I'd like to know what you found out through that."

"Not much. Confirmation of things you had already told me. No hint that Helen might be still alive." The last sentence seemed to echo in his mind when he had spoken it. But he had settled that.

"Damn." She was obviously disappointed. And worried. "Well. Whoever it was, she didn't sound like she was in any immediate danger. So if it was Helen, I guess she can call home for herself any time she wants to. If it wasn't . . . I can't imagine who it might have been. Or why they'd want to play such a trick."

The rest of the ride out to the wealthy suburbs passed for the most part in silence. This evening no one was manning the mansion's great iron gates. But still the gates were locked.

"I don't understand. They knew I was coming out tonight."

Half a minute of intermittent horn-blowing at last produced a smallish man, in yardworker's clothes, hurrying over the lawns from the direction of the tree-screened house.

"Oh," Mary said. "It's Dorlan." She waved to him through the gate.

The little man, peering from inside, seemed to know Mary too, though he offered no real greeting. "Didn't recognize the car," he mumbled, and set about unlocking the gate and rolling it open by hand.

"Mr. Dorlan, this is Mr. Thorn, a friend of mine. He just came along to give me a hand with the things."

Dorlan, who had not been visible on either of Thorn's previous visits, nodded grudgingly. "I'll just ride up to the house with you and let you in."

"Let us in?" Mary echoed in an uncertain voice.

"They've all moved out," replied Dorlan. There was a kind of grim shyness in his manner, and he did not look directly at either of his visitors. He left them momentarily to shut and lock the gate again, after Thorn had driven the Blazer in.

"Moved out?" Mary asked him blankly when he came back.

"Me and the Missus are the only ones left. We're leaving in the morning. The rest of the staff all got paid off. Mr. and Mrs. Seabright are gone to Santa Fe."

Thorn made a faint hissing noise, almost a sigh. Otherwise he made no comment. The Blazer rolled along the graveled drive with Dorlan perched in the small rear seat. Mary looked vacantly at the house as it appeared from behind the screens of palms and citrus. The portico was empty. "My things?"

"Still inside, up in your old room. They told me to get 'em out on the porch before you come, but I ain't had time."

Thorn stopped near the front of the house. Sunset was still lingering in the second floor's west windows. "The move is permanent?" he asked.

"Far as I know. They want all their mail forwarded. This place is being closed up. Though I hear Ellison's the owner now."

Mary opened the door and hopped out briskly. "Well, I'm just as glad. I don't want to look at him again. At any of them."

Thorn got out too, followed by Dorlan, who was now looking intently at the taller man, as if fascinated despite himself. Dorlan yawned suddenly. "Damn tired," he complained. "Worked all day. No friggin' air conditioning this afternoon. Power's off in the main house already."

"Very tiring," agreed Thorn. "You will be glad to get to sleep." He extended a hand, palm up, while Mary watched in growing puzzlement.

"I'll say." Dorlan fumbled a set of keys loose from a chain at his belt, and handed them over. He yawned again, and tottered to the portico, where he leaned against one of its imitation Doric columns. A moment later he sat down. His eyes had closed.

"Oh dear," said Mary, and fell silent, forgetting whatever comment she had been about to make. A large mastiff had just appeared at the corner of the house. From her days in residence she remembered the beast as an unpleasant and dangerous watchdog. It was staring at them intently and a low vibration of warning issued from its throat.

"Quiet," said Thorn softly. Mary had no doubt that he was talking to her, but instantly the dog's growling trailed off. It leaned forward, as if about to charge, or topple, in their direction. Then somehow there was a change of plan. The great head, ears askew, turned away from them. The dog sniffed the gathering dusk. Then it turned round twice in place, scratched at an ear, and lay down peacefully.

A faint snore arose from Dorlan, who sat leaning against his post. Mary looked from one phenomenon to the other, and seemed to be trying to think of some suitable comment. She was evidently unable.

Keys jingled briskly in Thorn's fingers. "Come. I should like to see the room you occupied." He unlocked the great front door and pushed it open, and like some old courtier bowed Mary in ahead of him. She found herself accepting the bow as something perfectly natural.

The house was filled with what felt like an unnatural heat—it was only the day's heat that had crept in through fallen defenses, Mary realized, but it felt strange in rooms where she had never known anything but cool comfort. Out of habit she flicked a light switch in the cavernous great hall—nothing happened, of course. But enough daylight remained to see that a start had been made at covering up furniture, getting the place ready for some extended period of inoccupancy.

With Thorn at her side Mary crossed the great, silent hall, heading away from the study and the elevator, toward the foot of the broad main stairway. But when she reached the stair she stopped. "I haven't been back here since—that night. Oh, I came back once with the police, re-enacting what I could remember for them. But . . ."

"But it all comes back to you much more strongly now."

"Yes, you're right, it does." She shivered.

"Good. Very good. Shall we go up?"

Mary wanted to protest that it was not very good at all, that she was growing frightened. But she would not be a coward. She would get her property that she had come here for, and then she would leave, if possible before the darkness thickened any further. She started up the shadowed stair. Thorn's feet, closely following, were inaudibly light.

As I was going up the stair

I met a man who wasn't there . . .

How did it go? Something like that, anyway. Actually she was quite glad for his tall, silent presence. It was not this man she feared. She hadn't realized, or had lately forgotten, that when she lived here she had felt real fear of certain other people in the house. In her imagination she could see Ellison Seabright now at the head of the stairs, as he had been standing on that night, looking down at her . . . and behind Ellison, another and truly terrifying figure that came and went before Mary knew who it was, and maybe she didn't want to know . . . even only in her imagination.

She half-stumbled near the top of the stairs, and Thorn's hand came to support her elbow neatly. "Thank you," Mary murmured. "God, yes, you were right. How it all comes back . . ."

"Your bedroom," said Thorn, interrupting a silent pause, "must have been down this corridor, on the right."

"Yes. But how did you know?"

Thorn was pacing slowly away, not answering. He reached a door and pushed it open, and stood in the hallway inspecting the dim interior thoughtfully.

"That wasn't mine."

"Delaunay's."

"How could you have known?" She came up beside Thorn; the room he was gazing into was so dark it was impossible to see anything. "Oh, of course, some of the magazines published plans of the whole layout, didn't they? There was so much publicity. I'm glad that's finally beginning to be over."

"What was Delaunay like?" Thorn was looking into the room as if to read its very shadows.

"Oh . . . big. Not quite as big as Ellison, and five years older, but there was a fairly strong resemblance. Physically, I mean, of course, that's all. Del was a kind old man, shy of publicity. He was always kind to me, anyway. He came here from Australia when he was very young. He still had something Aussie, as he called it, in his speech at times. He and Ellison had the same father, different mothers."

"How was the family wealth amassed?"

"I'm not really sure. Somewhere a couple of generations back, I guess. Del built up the fortune even more during his lifetime. He never seemed to me to be the tycoon type, you know, mean, aggressive, a go-getter. But I guess things could have been different when he was young." Mary seemed about to add something but then decided against it. Thorn thought that for once her mouth closed prematurely.

"What?" he prompted.

"I . . . well, I shouldn't say it. But sometimes I wondered about him."

"Oh? In what way?"

"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."

The other gunman gestured and prodded Mary ahead of him, toward the descending stairs. Turning briefly, a few steps down, Mary saw that Ellison and Stephanie had come out of their rooms and were watching. They had stopped as if the first sight of the gunmen had petrified them in their tracks. One of the masked men had turned round too, and was motioning silently for Ellison and Stephanie to follow—keeping them, Mary thought, in sight, away from telephones.

As Ellison obeyed, advancing slowly, he moved into a patch of security light from one of the hall windows and Mary got a look at his face. It was a good look.

She was prodded again, and turned, proceeding down the stairs.

At the foot of the stairs, on the floor of the great hall, some of the household staff were assembled, as for a called meeting. Not pausing in his slow descent, the man who was pointing a gun at Mary raised his voice, including them all as he recited a small speech.

"You'll be hearing from us about Delaunay Seabright. Getting him back is gonna cost you a lot of money. But this woman here"—a gun barrel poked Mary's back—"is just insurance. Now get this clear. I don't want to see police cars following us—we'll leave her brains on the pavement for them to run over. I don't want to see or hear no choppers overhead—they'll see us put her out of the car doing eighty. We got high explosives out there in our truck too—if worst comes to worst we'll go that way, and take both these people with us. We got all the cards. That girl on the floor upstairs is there because she ran, she panicked, and to show that we mean business.

"Got all that? Remember? Don't forget to explain it all to the pigs when you call 'em in."

Mary had turned her head slightly again. Ellison Seabright understood, all right. All too well, as Mary saw. Oh, Ellison's face was controlled, but Ellison's face knew. He was frightened, perhaps, but neither surprised or terrorized. When one of the masked gunmen looked at him, he nodded, twice, and that was the only objective sign of his complicity in the plot that Mary had been able to name to the police later. Other people probably nodded, too. But as she watched him there grew in Mary the incommunicable certainty of his guilt. He had known all along that his brother was going to be kidnapped tonight, and Ellison was very glad beneath his fright.

Mary and Delaunay went helplessly the rest of the way down the stairs, passing among the motionless, helpless servants to the great front door. Now in an alcove at the far side of the great hall one man of the household staff was observed in the act of trying to pick up a phone.

"Put it down, you, put it down! Or we kill her right here, and take one of you in her place."

The butler put it down.

Then Mary, Delaunay, and the two kidnappers had passed through the front door and were outside. The great dogs were still savaging the air with their noise, fenced away (by sheer accident, it was later testified) where they could not get at the marauders. The night was a warm one for so early in the spring. On the gravel drive there waited in darkness a late model pickup truck with an elongated cab containing a rear seat. The vehicle was tall as a Blazer, with high road clearance, standing on grotesquely rugged all-terrain tires. Mary was prodded up into the back seat, then pushed down into a crouching position on the floor between the front seat and the back. Her whole body was forced into the narrow space where people riding in the rear seat would ordinarily have some trouble fitting in their legs and feet. The cab was broad, the front seat evidently had plenty of room for three, big Del included. A burlap cloth, under the circumstances an effective blind, was thrown over Mary. Doors slammed. Then one of the abductors, leaning back from the front seat in what must have been a strained position, dug a gunbarrel joylessly into her elevated rump.

"No jokes, Seabright. You understand that? I'll blow her ass right off."

"I understand."

The truck's engine roared. Gravel flew up from the drive to bang the fenders. In moments they were on paved road, having passed through a front gate that was obviously being held open somehow. Almost from the very start of the ride, Mary lost track of where they were. Different types of pavement roared under the rough, speeding tires, but she could not think coherently to tell what the changes signified. Now they must be on some main highway, for speed was constant. The heavy-duty shock absorbers in this off-road vehicle made even the highway ride a relatively rough one, kept death's obscene metal organ jiggling against her body. From time to time there was a little talk of some kind among the three men; Mary could hear murmuring but in the roar of rough tires and racing engine she could not understand a word.

With heartfelt fervor she recited prayers, and fragments of prayers, that yesterday she would not have been able to remember. The ride remained continuously fast; there was little traffic to contend with in these lost hours of the morning, and as far as Mary could tell there were no pursuers either.

In Mary's original experience the ride had been mercilessly long, containing lifetimes of terror. But duration in this reliving was somehow modified, her time in the back seat cut short. Moving cautiously in her cramped, aching position, she registered the fact that at some recent time the gunbarrel had been removed from her flank. She tilted her head under the burlap, enough to see that dawn had begun to filter into the cab. By now the truck had slowed somewhat from its headlong highway rush. It seemed to be jouncing at thirty miles an hour or so over an unpaved road.

The vehicle, without slowing, turned rather sharply. It slowed down, then, and turned again, with a shifting of gears. The men in front had been silent now for a long time. Now Mary felt a perceptible tilting. The road must be climbing rather steeply. Turning, climbing, shifting, went on for another unmeasurable time. Mary was taken completely by surprise when brakes brought the vehicle to a halt and the engine was turned off.

She didn't try to move immediately; she wasn't sure she would be able. The door behind her opened, and cold air rushed into the cab along with the new day's light. Now her burlap cover was pulled off. Groaning, she tried to rise on her numbed arms and legs.

She was alone in the truck. The men had got out already and were standing together just outside. Del's head was bowed, his gray hair disheveled. The vehicle had been parked on a steep slope, so it looked almost in danger of tipping sideways. It stood on a segment of primitive road, whose ruts were cut so deeply as to be impassable to an ordinary car. On all sides grew tall trees, the vague shade of their needled branches dimming the predawn whiteness of the sky. One of the masked men, standing just outside the downhill door, reached to take Mary by the arm as soon as she had risen halfway on her deadened limbs. He half-helped, half-pulled her out.

The other gunman stood patiently pointing his long-barreled weapon right at the midsection of Delaunay Seabright, whose hands, Mary now saw, had been bound behind him. Del had raised his head and was looking at Mary. Across some tremendous gulf, as it seemed to her. The man who held her arm dragged her away from the truck. Her legs were barely functional. They crossed a space of thin tree growth that could hardly be called a clearing, and approached a small, weathered cabin that Mary did not see until it was only twenty feet away.

"Mary," Del called after her in a hollow voice. "Chin up. You'll get out of this."

She glanced back at him, but could think of nothing to call out in return. One of her bare feet trod on a patch of hard-frozen snow. They were somewhere high in the mountains, toward Flagstaff. The cabin was almost invisible under the tall pines and fir. Its door squeaked loudly in the still mountain air as the man with Mary yanked it open. Darkness still ruled inside, and when the door shut again behind her, full night had returned. There seemed to be no windows in the rude shack, no openings at all besides the single door. She stumbled ahead across an earthen floor, trying to make her legs start working properly, rubbing her arms. Near one wall her feet found stones suggesting the remnants of a hearth. She bent, groping, to discover a fireplace of sorts, a chimney. The aperture was much too small for her to think of trying to force herself inside.

Suddenly the door behind her was opened again, letting in some light. One of the masked men, wearing a holstered pistol and carrying a hunting knife along with some lengths of cord, came in. He said nothing. Repressing an urge to struggle, to scream pointlessly, Mary let him tie her hands behind her back, her ankles firmly together.

When the job of binding her was done, tightly, the man went out again and vanished from sight somewhere, leaving the door open. Standing in the middle of the cabin floor, she could see just the rear end of the truck, protruding from behind a thick double tree-trunk. Delaunay was standing near the large tree. His robe was open in front, so he must be cold in his pajamas. His hands were still behind his back, and his ankles had been tied now too, so that when he turned toward Mary and the cabin the movement was an awkward shuffle. The second masked demon was still looking over Del's shoulder from behind.

"Mary?" Del called again. "Are you all right?" The real concern in his voice was plain.

"So far," Mary managed to get out. It seemed that under present conditions such trivia as wrenched joints, numbed limbs, chills, and nervous exhaustion did not deserve notice.

The man standing behind Del poked him with something, making him sway forward. Then he inched a little closer to the cabin in his bound-ankle shuffle. He cleared his throat. "Mary, they tell me the plan is this. You are to be left here, tied up but unharmed. They'll phone the police and tell them where you can be found. Returning you safely in this way is meant to show that I'll be safely returned, too, as soon as the ransom's paid. Details about the ransom will be passed along soon. Right?" Del turned his head to ask the question; the mask behind him nodded.

Del went on: "Neither you nor I have seen these men's faces, Mary. We've hardly heard them speak. Neither of us will be able to identify them. So, I believe them when they say they'll let me go as soon as they're paid. Now I want you to emphasize that, to everyone, when you're set free. Will you do that?"

Set free. Set free. Mary could hardly hear or understand another word beyond those two. Del was staring at her strangely. With a great effort she finally managed to make her brain function, and her tongue. "Tell everyone you believe you will be released. If the ransom's paid. Yes, yes, I will."

"Please do, Mary. They also say they'll kill me if the ransom isn't paid, and I believe them about that, too. Is that all?" The two masked men were both standing with Del now; he looked at them, one after the other, and received a single nod.

Del nodded toward Mary. "You're going to have to do something to protect her from the cold. It'll be hours."

One of the men moved away, toward the half-visible truck. A truck door opened and closed. He came back, bearing an armload of blankets; rough, brown, army-surplus-looking things. He draped them wordlessly round Mary's shoulders, front and back. As long as she did not move much, they should remain. Then he went out of the cabin again and with his companion took hold of Del.

They dragged him off among the concealing trees, out of sight toward the truck. The last words that she heard from Del were: "It'll be warmer, Mary, when the sun gets up. Hang on. Help will come."

Could it be that she had never said goodbye to Del at all? Had never given any last words of encouragement to that old man who had done so much for her. She had heard the truck doors opening and closing, once again. And then, moments later, the totally unexpected blast.

* * *

Mary had collapsed onto the earth floor, groaning, at the explosion. Something terrible was happening again, though she could not at first grasp what. The brief thudding of debris upon the cabin roof kept her crouched down. One piece hit so hard that dust and fine fragments fell from the inside of the crude roof. She huddled there for an endless time, in a dazed state approaching madness.

Light grew slowly outside the cabin door, which had been blocked open with a piece of branch. Day had come officially. Birds started to sing at last. Mary could smell the burning, and she could hear the faint crackle if she listened. The woods were wet, almost dripping, branches decked with late spring snow, or else they might have gone right up. Gas burned, rubber burned, other things burned and she could smell them when the breeze blew some of the smoke toward the cabin.

When finally she began to try to look out of the cabin door, she could no longer see the pickup anywhere as an integral object. Only debris, unidentifiable pieces of this and that, lay within Mary's field of vision outside the cabin.

After a time she painfully dragged herself, losing some blankets in the process, over to the door. From there she could see more. There lay a fender. One of the truck's wheels had come to a stop against the cabin wall.

After another time she raised her eyes. On the other side of the semi-clearing, Del's robe was draped between two high branches of a Ponderosa pine. The robe sagged like a laden hammock. There was no sign of Del's head or hands or feet, but the robe was certainly not empty . . .

. . . and the scene of the cabin and the wreckage began to vanish. This vanishment was a process as intermittent as the disappearance of the lights of a house passed on the road at night behind a long screen of trees.

On the road at night. Driving a lonely road, while slowly and surely things seen passed away.

Driving, riding, along a desert road, with her head slumped on a shoulder that gave her, oh, such a marvelous feeling of security . . .

She was back in the jouncing truck again, but no it was not the truck this time thank God it was the Blazer, and Mary was upright in the right front seat. Ahead of her the headlights speared continuously along a curve of high desert road, narrow unpaved road with bear grass and cactus along its sides. There were no other lights to be seen, in all the midnight land about.

She had gone to the Seabright house, to pick up her things, with Thorn . . .

Thorn.

He was driving, and he glanced sideways at her for a moment, mildly, as the weight of her head came fully up off his shoulder.

She drew a hard breath.

"Softly, Mary. Gently! It is all right. You were remembering some unpleasant things."

"I was . . . I was right there . . ."

"No, you were not there tonight. I had started to drive in the direction of the cabin, the place where the explosion happened. But it proved unnecessary to take you there. Everything worked, you were able to tell me all en route. So we are now heading back toward Phoenix—that pleasant glow in the sky ahead is from the city's lights. We shall be there in a couple of hours."

A couple of hours. She yearned for the lovely city. She felt weak inside, as though recovering from an illness. Loneliness and night and disorientation overcame her. She had never felt so far from home in all her life. She had never understood before how runaways must really feel.

Weakness turned her back toward childhood. She was a bad girl, and she wept now, for all the sins of her past life. For infatuation and sex in Idaho. For broken promises. For living with Robby, endangering his immortal soul. Was it really his idea or hers that they should not get married?

Thorn glanced at her again. "Ah. You are experiencing a common reaction to the experience you have just been through. It will pass. Presently you will feel much better."

"What experience have I been through? What have you done to me?" The words came out in a snuffle.

"What have I done? Very little. Ah, here we are. I must obtain some petrol."

In half a minute the deep invisibility of the night gave forth a small, almost abandoned looking gas station into the headlights. Thorn could hardly have seen the place before the headlights picked it out; he must, thought Mary, vaguely be familiar with this road. Anyway, the place was certainly closed, utterly dark and still.

Thorn pulled in, though, and up to the gas pumps, and turned off his engine as confidently as if he had seen some of those television-commercial attendants cartwheeling out to give him service. When the headlights went out, Mary saw that a thick crescent of desert moon had risen, to make the setting a ghostly stage.

"I shall be only a moment," Thorn said from just outside the vehicle, and slammed the door carelessly behind him.

Mary was not going to offer any comments on the practicality of trying to get gas here tonight; not now, and not to Thorn. With great relief, though, she found some of her mental strength returning. All right, she had done some things in her life that were wrong, but nothing all that terrible. Even when she closed her eyes again, Thorn's face seemed to hang before them. It wasn't his fault that she felt lousy. He understood. And he didn't want her to cry, to suffer.

For some reason, what Thorn wanted had suddenly become important to her. Even more important than—than—was it really love that she knew with Robby, after all?

She opened her eyes again, just in time to see her companion vanish beside the silent station. Yes, vanish was the right word, though the building was near, and the moonlight fairly bright, it seemed that he had just disappeared.

Mary waited quietly, wondering if the owner perhaps lives somewhere in back, and had heard the car door slam—

And Thorn was back again, even as he had gone, standing now beside the gas pumps with keys jingling in his hand. He was rattling them impatiently against a pump, with a muttering of what sounded like Latin oaths.

Mary said, through her partially rolled-down window: "You hypnotized me, didn't you? We were at the house . . ."

"Your property that we went to retrieve is all in the rear seat. This damnable device will not . . . ah."

Very faintly, there came the sound of small motors, electricity.

Mary turned to look into the rear seat of the Blazer even as the dim figure outside began to pump gas into its tank. There were here familiar string-tied boxes, one of them unopened since Chicago. There was the small, battered spare suitcase that she had all but forgotten. Things she evidently didn't really need. All her essential stuff was now at Robby's house.

"Thank you," she called out softly, turning back to the window.

"It is I who should thank you. You have been of considerable help."

"How?"

He didn't answer. The desert here was high enough so that the night had grown quite cool. Mary breathed deeply of its coolness, meanwhile listening to a distant owl. Her thoughts were ready to go with the bird, fly through the night. Sadness was rapidly being replaced by a fierce though quiet elation.

When Thorn had finished filling the tank, he came like a conscientious attendant to treat the windshield with a squeegee no one had bothered to lock away. That task complete, he vanished again in the direction of the building. This time Mary made a more intense effort to watch closely. But this time too Thorn simply disappeared.

Then abruptly he was standing at the driver's door again, opening it to get in. I don't believe this, Mary thought, feeling delighted, as by some stage magician's cleverness.

"You had to go back in to return the keys," she remarked cheerfully.

"And to leave payment." His voice seemed to chide her gently for having omitted anything so important. "Not, of course, at the outrageous rates listed on these signs."

"Oh, of course not." Was this really her, so eager to be agreeable?

He was now seated beside her, with the door closed. Looking at her. But for the moment he made no move to start the engine.

Something in the way he looked at her made Mary sigh faintly and lean back in her seat. "You were right," she said. "It was hard to go through that, but now somehow I feel sure those dreams aren't going to bother me any more."

"I trust that they will not."

The moonlight was silver and strange. Mary had the feeling that she had never really looked at moonlight closely before.

Again she was the one to break the silence. "I have the feeling,'' she announced, "that when you kiss me I'm going to enjoy it very much."

One of his eyebrows went up. "Then I must seem churlish indeed to delay. But I would like to find a better place than this."

Thorn turned the key in the ignition. He was immune to personal fear, but not to horror. And he supped full on horror in the next moment, when he heard the strange reaction, and sensed the hellish fire of the bomb blast, blowing backward and upward at him from the engine.