Sarabeth lay face-down next to the bed. Her nightgown had been twisted up around her torso. Above the naked swell of her buttocks, her hands were blue-white and swollen. Her wrists had been tied together with what looked like packing twine. A strip of the bed’s top sheet had been torn off and used to lash her ankles together. Her shoulders were pressed against the carpet at such an unnatural angle that I knew in that first glance she was dead. A pair of scissors rested on the pillow. Surrounding them, and scattered across the bed were thick locks of brown hair that had been hacked from her head. Her face wasn’t recognizable. Every bone in it looked like it had been broken. It was a distorted blue and purple mask with a broken red O for a mouth. The backs of her legs were covered with long red cuts.
A very calm little voice in my head said don’t touch anything, Lance. I agreed with it. I realized that at some point my knees had given out. I was kneeling on the floor now, near her body, not knowing how I had gotten there. I reached out toward her with a numb, shaking hand.
There was a tiny click behind me like a door opening, and the sound of running feet. I twisted halfway around and something hit me. A blast of white and blue exploded in my head. I could hear feet running, and the slam of a door a hundred miles away. And then, nothing — a loud rushing nothing like a wave.
I woke to a close-up of clean white carpet. There was a whistling roar in my head, as if I was holding a seashell to my ear. For a long, merciful minute I couldn’t remember where I was or how I had arrived there. The back of my head seemed to be lying somewhere behind me in little pieces. The rest of me floated in liquid. If I concentrated, I could feel my hand clenching and unclenching, but it seemed like someone else’s hand, or like it was connected to me with only the finest of wires. After a while the pieces of my head came back together, and I was able to lift it off the carpet. And then I saw her lying there, and it hit me like the first time. Sarabeth was dead.
I pushed myself to my feet. A bolt of pain shot through my head. White and blue stars flashed across my vision. My knees threatened to give out again. I lurched out of the bedroom, running into the doorway and into the living room. I didn’t want to see what was left of her. I grabbed the handle of the front door, struggling with it. I was finally able to throw it open. I stumbled out of the house into the blinding wash of Southern California sunlight, feet tripping over the brick steps. I should have been screaming — inside, I was screaming, I could hear it in my ears, hear it pushing at the inside of my skull, but it would not make itself heard. I caught a foot on a rough edge of brick and fell, twisting around and watching myself fall as if out of the sky. I landed on my back in the sharp, grudging arms of the massive bird of paradise plant that dominated the house’s front yard. The yellow-beaked, purple-tongued flowers swayed crazily over me, jabbing and pecking at one another and at the dirty-blue sky. I lay unmoving, staring up at them blankly. The hot air hummed with violence. The distant traffic on Foothill Boulevard was a bass-line of malice. A plane climbed, buzzing into the wide bowl of blue. My eyes locked onto it and watched it go. The angles of the violated foliage under my back jabbed at me, but I didn’t want to get up. The scream inside my skull had faded, and was replaced by a tiny, gibbering echo — like a termite, chewing at the wood of my brain. There is a dead woman in that house, it said. And she was your last chance to find it. She was your last chance to fill the gap, Lance. She was it. I shook my head and it stopped.
And then a realization hit me — so hard that I choked on it, turned over, racked by coughing, and with a convulsive effort, freed myself from the crumpled plant and stood unsteadily in the middle of the lawn. I clenched my fists until I could feel the bones creaking. “You led him right to her,” I said to nobody, to the sky. “You brought him to her doorstep.”