door and step into his arms.
  Screw it. She put her hand on the knob, turned it cautiously, and winced as the spring 
latch scraped softly out of its notch. At least the hinges were lubricated and silent.
  Even in the inkiness to which her vision had not totally readapted, she could see that 
no one was waiting for her. She stepped out of her room and soundlessly pulled the door 
shut.
  The guest quarters were off the shorter arm of the L-shaped upstairs hall. To her right 
were the back stairs, which led down to the kitchen. To her left lay the turn into the 
longer arm of the L.
  She ruled out the back stairs. She had descended them earlier in the evening, when she 
and Laura went out to walk the vineyards. They were wooden and worn. They creaked and 
popped. The stairwell acted as an amplifier, as hollow and efficient as a steel drum. 
With the house so preternaturally silent, it would be impossible to creep down the back 
stairs undetected.
  The second-floor hall and the front stairs, on the other hand, were plushly carpeted.
  From around the corner, somewhere along the main hallway, came a soft amber glow. In 
the wallpaper, the delicate pattern of faded roses appeared to absorb the light rather 
than reflect it, acquiring an enigmatic depth that it had not previously possessed.
  If the intruder had been standing anywhere between the junction of the hallways and the 
source of the light, he would have cast a distorted shadow across that luminous paper 
garden or on the wheatgold carpet. There was no shadow.
  Keeping her back close to the wall, Chyna edged to the corner, hesitated, and leaned 
out to scout the way ahead. The main hallway was deserted.
  Two sources of faint amber light relieved the gloom. The first came from a half-open 
door on the right: Paul and Sarah's suite. The second was much farther down the hallway, 
past the front stairs, on the left: Laura's room.
  The other doors all seemed to be closed. She didn't know what lay beyond them. Perhaps 
other bedrooms, a bath, an upstairs study, closets. Although Chyna was most drawn to-and 
most afraid of-the lighted rooms, every closed door was also a danger.
  The unplumbable silence tempted her to believe that the intruder had gone. This was a 
temptation best resisted.
  Forward, then, through the paper arbor of printed roses to the half-open door of the 
master suite. Hesitating there. On the brink.
  When she found whatever waited to be found, all her illusions of order and stability 
might dissolve. The truth of life might then re-asserL nseu, arcer ren years auring 
wnicii sne tiact diligently denied it: chaos, like the flow of a stream of mercury, its 
course unpredictable.
  The man in the blue jeans and black boots might have returned to the master suite after 
leaving the guest room, but more likely not. Other amusements in the house would no doubt 
be more appealing to him.
  Fearful of lingering too long in the hall, she sidled across the threshold, without 
pushing the door open wider.
  Paul and Sarah's room was spacious. A sitting area included a pair of armchairs and 
footstools facing a fireplace. Bookshelves crammed with hardcovers flanked the mantel, 
their titles lost in shadows.
  The nightstand lamps were colorfully patterned ginger jars with pleated shades. One of 
them was aglow; crimson streaks and blots stained its shade.
  Chyna stopped well short of the foot of the bed, already close enough to see too much. 
Neither Paul nor Sarah was there, but the sheets and blankets were in tangled disarray, 
trailing onto the floor on the right side of the bed. On the left, the linens were soaked 
with blood, and a wet spray glistened on the headboard and in an arc across the wall.
  She closed her eyes. Heard something. Spun around, crouching in expectation of an 
assault. She was alone.
  The noise had always been there, a background hiss-patter-splash of falling water. She 
hadn't heard it on entering the room, because she had been deafened by bloodstains as 
loud as the angry shouting of a maddened mob.
  Synestbesia. The word had stuck with her from a psychology text, more because she 
thought it was a beautiful arrangement of syllables than because she expected ever to 
experience it herself. Synesthesia: a confusion of the senses in which a scent might 
register as a flash of color, a sound actually might be perceived as a scent, and the 
texture of a surface under the hand might seem to be a trilling laugh or a scream.
  Closing her eyes had blocked out the roar of the bloodstains, whereupon she had heard 
the falling water. Now she recognized it as the sound of the shower in the adjoining 
bathroom.
  That door was ajar half an inch. For the first time since she had entered from the 
hallway, Chyna noticed the thin band of fluorescent light along the bathroom jamb.
  When she looked away from that door, reluctant to confront what might wait beyond it, 
she spotted the telephone on the right-hand nightstand. That was the side of the bed 
without blood, which made it more approachable for her.
  She lifted the handset from the cradle. No dial tone. She had not expected to hear one. 
Nothing was ever that easy.
  She opened the single drawer on the nightstand, hoping to find a handgun. No luck.
  Still certain that her only hope of safety lay in movement, that crawling into a hole 
and hiding should always be the strategy of last resort, Chyna had gone around to the 
other side of the king-size bed before she quite realized that she had taken a first 
step. In front of the bathroom door, the carpet was badly stained.
  Grimacing, she went to the second nightstand and eased open the drawer. In the mortal 
fall of light, she discovered a pair of reading glasses with yellow reflections in the 
half-moon lenses, a paperback men's adventure novel, a box of Kleenex, a tube of lip 
balm, but no weapon.
  As she closed the drawer, she smelled burned gunpowder underlying the hot-copper stench 
of fresh blood.
  She was familiar with that odor. Over the years, more than a few of her mother's 
friends either had used guns to get what they wanted or had been at least fascinated by 
them.
  Chyna had heard no shots. The intruder evidently had a weapon with a sound suppressor.
  Water continued to cascade into the shower beyond the door. That susurrous splash, 
though soft and soothing under other circumstances, now abraded her nerves as effectively 
as the whine of a dentist's drill.
  She was sure that the intruder wasn't in the bathroom. His work here was done. He was 
busy elsewhere in the house.
  Right this minute she was not as frightened of the man himself as she was of 
discovering exactly what he had done. But the choice before her was the essence of the 
entire human agony: not knowing was ultimately worse than knowing.
  At last she pushed open the door. Squinting, she entered the fluorescent glare.
  The roomy bath featured yellow and white ceramic tile. On the walls at chair-rail 
height and around the edges of the vanity and lavatory counters ran a decorative tile 
band of daffodils and green leaves. She had expected more blood.
  Paul Templeton was propped on the toilet in his blue pajamas. Lengths of wide strapping 
tape across his lap fixed him to the bowl. More tape encircled both his chest and the