From elsewhere in the large house came a soft thump, as though a heavy object had 
fallen to a carpeted floor.
  Chyna immediately rose from the chair and stood utterly still, expectant.
  Trouble often followed voices raised in one kind of passion or another. Sometimes, 
however, the worst offenses were preceded by calculated silences and stealth.
  She had difficulty reconciling the idea of domestic violence with Paul and Sarah 
Templeton, who had seemed kind and loving toward each other as toward their daughter. 
Nevertheless, appearances and realities were seldom the same, and the human talent for 
deception was far greater than that of the chameleon, the mockingbird, or the praying 
mantis, which masked its ferocious cannibalism with a serene and devout posture.
  Following the stifled cries and the soft thump, silence sifted down like a snowfall. 
The hush was eerily deep, as unnatural as that in which the deaf lived. This was the 
stillness before the pounce, the quietude of the coiled snake.
  In another part of the house, someone was standing as motionless as she herself was 
standing, as alert as she was, intently listening. Someone dangerous. She could sense the 
predatory presence, a subtle new pressure in the air, not dissimilar to that preceding a 
violent thunderstorm.
  On one level, six years of psychology classes caused her to question her immediate 
fearful interpretation of those night sounds, which conceivably could be insignificant, 
after all. Any well-trained psychoanalyst would have a wealth of labels to pin on someone 
who leaped first to a negative conclusion, who lived in expectation of sudden violence.
  But she had to trust her instinct. It had been honed by many years of hard experience.
  Intuitively certain that safety lay in movement, she stepped quietly away from the 
chair at the window, toward the hall door. In spite of the moonglow, her eyes had 
adjusted to darkness during the two hours that she had sat in the lightless room, and now 
she eased through the gloom with no fear of blundering into furniture.
  She was only halfway to the door when she heard approaching footsteps in the 
second-floor hall. The heavy, urgent tread was alien to this house.
  Unhampered by the interminable second-guessing that accompanied an education in 
psychology, reverting to the intuition and defenses of childhood, Chyna quickly retreated 
to the bed. She dropped to her knees.
  Farther along the hall, the footsteps stopped. A door opened. She was aware of the 
absurdity of attributing rage to the mere opening of a door. The rattle of the knob being 
turned, the rasp of the unsecured latch, the spike-sharp squeak of an unoiled hinge-they 
were only sounds, neither meek nor furious, guilty nor innocent, and could have been made 
as easily by a priest as by a burglar. Yet she knew that rage was at work in the night.
  Flat on her stomach, she wriggled under the bed, feet toward the headboard. It was a 
graceful piece of furniture with sturdy galbe legs, and fortunately it didn't sit as 
close to the floor as did most beds. One inch less of clearance would have prevented her 
from hiding under it.
  Footsteps sounded in the hall again. Another door opened. The guest-room door. Directly 
opposite the foot of the bed.
  Someone switched on the lights. Chyna lay with her head turned to one side, her right 
ear pressed to the carpet. Staring out from under the footboard, she could see a man's 
black boots and the legs of his blue jeans below midcalf.
  He stood just inside the threshold, evidently surveying the room. He would see a bed 
still neatly made at one o'clock in the morning, where four decorative needlepoint 
pillows arranged against the headboard.
  She had left nothing on the nightstands. No clothes tossed on chairs. The paperback 
novel that she had brought with her for bedtime reading was in a bureau drawer.
  She preferred spaces that were clean and uncluttered to the point of monastic 
sterility. Her preference might now save her life.
  Again a faint doubt, the acquired propensity for self-analysis that plagued all 
psychology students, flickered through her. If the man in the doorway was someone with a 
right to be in the house-Paul Templeton or Laura's brother, Jack, who lived with his wife 
in the vineyard manager's bungalow elsewhere on the property-and if some crisis was 
unfolding that explained why he would burst into her room without knocking, she was going 
to appear to be a prime fool, if not a hysteric, when she crawled out from under the bed.
  Then, directly in front of the black boots, a fat red dropletanother, and a third-fell 
to the wheat-gold carpet. Plop-plop-plop. Blood. The first two soaked into the thick 
nylon pile. The third held its surface tension, shimmering like a ruby.
  Chyna knew the blood wasn't that of the intruder. She tried not to think about the 
sharp instrument from which it might have fallen.
  He moved off to her right, deeper into the room, and she rolled her eyes to follow him.
  The bed had carved side rails into which the spread was tightly tucked. No overhanging 
fabric obstructed her view of his boots.
  Obversely, without a spread draped to the floor, the space under the bed was more 
visible to him. From certain angles, he might even be able to look down and see a swatch 
of her blue jeans, the toe of one of her Rockports, the cranberry-red sleeve of her 
cotton sweater where it stretched over her bent elbow.
  She was thankful that the bed was queen-size, offering more cover than a single or 
double.
  If he was breathing hard, either with excitement or with the rage that she had sensed 
in his approach, Chyna couldn't hear him. With one ear pressed tightly to the plush 
carpet, she was half deaf. Wood slats and box springs weighed on her back, and her chest 
barely had room to expand to accommodate her own shallow, cautious, openmouth 
inhalations. The hammering of her compressed heart against her breastbone echoed 
tympanically within her, and it seemed to fill the claustrophobic confines of her hiding 
place to such an extent that the intruder was certain to hear.
  He went to the bathroom, pushed open the door, and flicked on the lights.
  She had put away all her toiletries in the medicine cabinet. Even her toothbrush. 
Nothing lay out that might alert him to her presence.
  But was the sink dry? On retiring to her room at eleven o'clock, she had used the 
toilet and then had washed her hands. That was two hours ago. Any residual water in the 
bowl surely would have drained away or evaporated.
  Lemon-scented liquid soap in a pump dispenser was provided at the sink. Fortunately, 
there was no damp bar of soap to betray her.
  She worried about the hand towel. She doubted that it could still be damp two hours 
after the little use she had made of it. Nonetheless, in spite of a propensity for 
neatness and order, she might have left it hanging ever so slightly askew or with one 
telltale wrinkle.
  He seemed to stand on the bathroom threshold for an eternity. Then he switched off the 
fluorescent light and returned to the bed-room.
  Occasionally, as a little girl-and then not so little-Chyna had taken refuge under 
beds. Sometimes they looked for her there; sometimes, though it was the most obvious of 
all hidey-holes, they never thought to look. Of those who found her, a few had checked 
under the bed first-but most had left it for last.
  Another red droplet fell to the carpet, as though the beast might be shedding slow 
tears of blood.
  He moved toward the closet door. Chyna had to turn her head slightly, straining her