Just After Sunset(22)
"Nicole," she said. "Her name was Nicole."
Naming the dead girl seemed to bring Em back to herself a little. Now the idea of trying to get the butcher knife out from under him seemed like madness. The part of herself that sometimes talked in her father's voice was right-just staying in the same room with Pickering was pressing her luck. Which left leaving. Only that.
"I'm going now," she said. "Do you hear me?"
He didn't move.
"I've got the meat fork. If you come after me, I'll stab you with it. I'll...I'll poke your eyes out. What you want to do is stay right where you are. Have you got that?"
He didn't move.
Emily backed away from him, then turned and left the kitchen by the door on the other side of the room. She was still holding the bloody chair arm.
8. There was a photograph on the wall by the bed.
It was the dining room on the other side. There was a long table with a glass top. Around it were seven red maple chairs. The spot where the eighth belonged was vacant. Of course. As she studied the empty place at the "mother" end of the table, a memory came to her: blood blooming in a tiny seed pearl below her eye as Pickering said, Okay, good, okay. He had believed her when she said only Deke could know she might be inside the Pillbox, so he had thrown the little knife-Nicole's little knife, she had thought then-into the sink.
So there had been a knife to threaten him with all along. Still was. In the sink. But she wasn't going back in there now. No way.
She crossed the room and went down a hall with five doors, two on each side and one at the end. The first two doors she passed were open, on her left a bathroom and on her right a laundry room. The washing machine was a top loader, its hatch open. A box of Tide stood on the shelf next to it. A bloodstained shirt was lying halfway in and halfway out of the hatch. Nicole's shirt, Emily was quite sure, although she couldn't be positive. And if it was hers, why had Pickering been planning to wash it? Washing wouldn't take out the holes. Emily remembered thinking there had been dozens, although that surely wasn't possible. Was it?
She thought it was, actually: Pickering in a frenzy.
She opened the door beyond the bathroom and saw a guest room. It was nothing but a dark and sterile box starring a king bed so stringently neat, you could no doubt bounce a nickel on the counterpane. And had a maid made up that bed? Our survey says no, Em thought. Our survey says no maid has ever set foot in this house. Only "nieces."
The door across from the guest room gave way to a study. It was every bit as sterile as the room it faced across the hall. There were two filing cabinets in one corner. There was a big desk with nothing on it but a Dell PC hooded with a transparent plastic dust cover. The floor was plain oak planks. There was no rug. There were no pictures on the wall. The single big window was shuttered, admitting only a few dull spokes of light. Like the guest room, this place looked dim and forgotten.
He has never worked in here, she thought, and knew it was true. It was stage dressing. The whole house was, including the room from which she had escaped-the room that looked like a kitchen but was actually an operating theater, complete with easy-clean counters and floors.
The door at the end of the hall was closed, and as she approached it, she knew it would be locked. She would be trapped at the end of this corridor if he entered it from the kitchen/dining-room end. Trapped with nowhere to run, and these days running was the only thing she was good at, the only thing she was good for.
She hitched up her shorts-they felt like they were floating on her now, with the back seam split open-and grasped the knob. She was so full of her premonition that for a moment she couldn't believe it when the knob turned in her hand. She pushed the door open and stepped into what had to be Pickering's bedroom. It was almost as sterile as the guest room, but not quite. For one thing, there were two pillows instead of just one, and the counterpane of the bed (which looked like a twin of the guest-room bed) had been turned back in a neat triangle, ready to admit the owner to the comfort of fresh sheets after a hard day's work. And there was a carpet on the floor. Just a cheap nylon-pile thing, but wall-to-wall. Henry no doubt would have called it a Carpet Barn special, but it matched the blue walls and made the room look less skeletal than the others. There was also a small desk-it looked like an old school desk-and a plain wooden chair. And although this was pretty small shakes compared to the study setup, with its big (and unfortunately shuttered) window and expensive computer, she had a feeling this desk had been used. That Pickering sat there writing longhand, hunched over like a child in a country schoolroom. Writing what she did not like to think.
The window in here was also big. And unlike the windows in the study and the guest room, it wasn't shuttered. Before Em could look out and see what lay beyond, her attention was drawn to a photograph on the wall by the bed. Not hung and certainly not framed, only tacked there with a pushpin. There were other tiny holes on the wall around it, as if other pictures had been pinned there over the years. This one was a color shot with 4-19-07 printed digitally in the right corner. Taken by an old-fashioned camera rather than a digital one, by the look of the paper, and not by anyone with much flair for photography. On the other hand, perhaps the photographer had been excited. The way hyenas might get excited, she supposed, when sundown comes and there's fresh prey in the offing. It was blurry, as if taken with a telephoto lens, and the subject wasn't centered. The subject was a long-legged young woman wearing denim shorts and a cropped top that said BEER O'CLOCK BAR. She had a tray balanced on the fingers of her left hand, like a waitress in a jolly old Norman Rockwell painting. She was laughing. Her hair was blond. Em couldn't be sure it was Nicole, not from this blurred photo and those few shocked instants when she had been looking down at the dead girl in the trunk of the Mercedes...but she was sure. Her heart was sure.