“Blood. His hands.”
  “Ssshhh. I'll get you out of here.”
  “Stank like blood. Jack's dead. Nina. Everyone."
  Jack, her brother, whom Chyna had not met. Nina, her sister-in-law. Evidently the 
killer had been to the vineyard manager's bungalow before coming to the main house. Four 
dead. There was no help to be found anywhere on the sprawling property.
  Chyna glanced worriedly at the open door, then quickly rose to test the handcuffs on 
Laura's wrists. Securely locked.
  With fettered hands and fettered ankles linked by a chain, Laura was thoroughly 
hobbled. She wouldn't be able to stand, let alone walk.
  Chyna wasn't strong enough to carry her. She saw her reflection in the vanity mirror 
across the room, and she realized with a shock how nakedly her terror was revealed in her 
wrenched face.
  Trying to look more composed for Laura's sake, Chyna stopped beside the bed again and 
murmured almost as softly as her friend had been praying: “Is there a gun?”
  “What?”
  “A gun in the house?”
  “No.”
  “Nowhere in the house?”
  “No, no."
  “Shit.”
  “Jack.”
  “What?”
  “Has one.”
  “A gun? At the bungalow?” Chyna asked.
  “Jack has a gun.”
  Chyna didn't have time to get to the bungalow and back before the killer returned to 
Laura's room. Anyway, more likely than not, he had already found the gun and confiscated 
it. “Do you know who he is?”
  “No.” Laura's sky-blue eyes appeared to darken with despair. “Get out.”
  “I'll find a weapon.”
  “Get out,” Laura whispered more urgently, cold sweat glistening on her brow.
  “A knife,” Chyna said.
  “Don't die for me.” Then, sotto voce, tremulously but fiercely, fiercely she said: 
“Run, Chyna. Oh, God, please run!”
  “I'll be back."
  “Run.”
  
  From outside, a sound arose. A truck engine. Approaching. Astonished, Chyna shot to her 
feet. “Someone's coming. Help's coming.”
  Laura's bedroom was toward the front of the house. Chyna stepped to the nearer of two 
windows, which provided a view of the half-mile driveway leading in from the two-lane 
county road.
  A quarter of a mile away, bright headlights pierced the night. judging by the height of 
the lights from the ground, Chyna concluded that the truck was big.
  How miraculous that anyone would show up at this hour, in this lonely place.
  As a thrill of hope swept through Chyna, she realized that the killer would have heard 
the engine too. The man or men in the truck wouldn't know what trouble they were getting 
into. When they stopped in front of the house, they would be dead men breathing. 
  “Hold on,” she said, touched Laura's damp forehead to reassure her, and then crossed 
the room to the door, leaving her friend under the smug and somber gaze of Sigmund Freud.
  The hallway was deserted. Chyna hurried to the head of the curved stairs, hesitated to 
commit herself to the tenebrous lair below, but then realized that she had nowhere else 
to go. She went down as fast as she dared without the support of the handrail. Staying 
clear of the balustrade. Too exposed there. Close to the wall was better.
  She quickly passed a series of large landscape paintings in ornate frames, which seemed 
almost to be windows on actual pastoral vistas. Earlier, they had been bright and 
cheerful scenes. Now they were ominous: goblin forests, black rivers, killing fields.
  The foyer. An oval area rug on polished oak. Through a closed door to the right was 
Paul Templeton's study. Through the archway on the left was the dark living room.
  The killer could be anywhere. Outside, the roar of the truck grew louder. It was almost 
to the house. The driver would be shot through the windshield the moment that he braked 
to a stop. Or gunned down when he stepped out from behind the steering wheel.
  Chyna had to warn him, not solely for his sake but for her own, for Laura's. He was 
their only hope.
  Certain that the spider-eating intruder was nearby, she expected a savage attack and, 
abandoning caution,flew at the front door. The oval rug rucked beneath her feet, twisted, 
and nearly spun out from under her. She stumbled, reached out to break her fall, and 
slammed both palms flat against the front door.
  Such a noise, hellacious noise, booming through the house, had surely drawn the 
killer's attention away from the approaching truck.
  Chyna fumbled, found the knob, and twisted it. The door was unlocked. Gasping, she 
pulled it open.
  A cool breeze out of the northwest, faintly scented by freshly turned vineyard earth 
and fungicide, whistled through the bare limbs of the maple trees that flanked the front 
walkway. Snuffling like a pack of hounds, it rushed past her into the foyer as she 
stepped out onto the front porch.
  The truck had already passed the house and was heading away from her. It would come 
around for a second approach on the end-loop of the driveway, which was wide enough to 
accommodate produce haulers in the harvest season, and park facing out toward the county 
road. But it wasn't a truck after all. A motor home. An older model with rounded lines, 
well kept, forty feet long, either blue or green. Its chrome glimmered like quicksilver 
under the late-winter moon.
  Amazed that she had not yet been stabbed or shot or struck from behind, glancing back 
at the open front door where the killer hadn't yet appeared, Chyna headed for the porch 
steps.
  The motor home rounded the end of the loop, beginning to turn toward her. Its twin 
beams swept across the Templetons' barn and other outbuildings.
  Larch and maple and evergreen shadows fled before the arcing headlights. They flickered 
darkly through the trellis at the end of the porch, along the white balustrade, across 
the lawn and the stone walkway, stretching impossibly, swooping into the night as if 
trying frantically to tear free of the trees that cast them.
  The deep quiet in the house, the lack of lights downstairs, the killer's failure to 
attack her as she escaped, the timely arrival of the motor home-suddenly all of those 
things made chilling sense. The killer was driving the motor home. “No."
  Chyna swiftly retreated from the porch steps and scrambled back into the foyer.
  At her heels, the headlights came all the way around the end of the driveway loop. They 
pierced the trellis grid, projecting geometric patterns across the porch floor and the 
front wall of the house.
  She closed the door and fumbled for the big lock above the knob. Found the thumb-turn.