To the bedroom.

It all came back to the bedroom, he thought.

The place was in darkness. When he groped to flick the switch on the wall and achieved no result, he realized that the crash he had heard was the room’s floor lamp being smashed.

The room’s silence unnerved him.

“Where is she?” Jennifer asked from the corner on Coltrane’s right.

“I don’t know. My eyes haven’t adjusted to the darkness. I-”

A heavy object struck him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, aggravating the agony in his shoulder. Dizzied by pain, he fell against a bureau, grabbed it for support, and touched a camera he had set there.

“Are you okay?” Jennifer whispered from the darkness to his right.

“No, I’ve been-”

Another object walloped against the wall near where Jennifer had spoken. “Where the hell is she throwing from?”

“I don’t know,” Coltrane said. “She’s wearing white. Even in the darkness, we ought to be able to see her.”

“She was wearing white.”

Coltrane didn’t understand the remark. Crouching, he grasped the camera.

Outside, the sirens grew closer, louder.

Across the room, he saw what looked like a single pulse from a firefly. The spark came and went so suddenly, he wondered if his eyes were playing tricks on him, baffled until he remembered Tash’s problem with static electricity. Readying the camera, he aimed it toward where he had seen the spark, activated the flash, and pushed the shutter button.

The stab of light caught her in midmotion, crawling toward the open door to the balcony. Because the flash was directed away from him, it didn’t hurt his eyes and presumably Jennifer’s as much as it did Tash’s. She winced, her hand raised to protect her vision. At once it was dark again, and Tash scurried toward the balcony as Jennifer leapt from her hiding place. Jennifer’s cryptic remark that Tash wasn’t wearing white any longer now made sense – because her white dress had been torn from her. She was naked, her sleek tan body hard to see in the darkness. Jennifer’s own clothes had been torn, a sleeve of her navy blazer ripped off, the buttons of her silk blouse yanked open.

She caught up to Tash on the balcony, and Tash’s supple body fought back in a way reminiscent of a feral cat. She was clawing, twisting, lunging, spitting, streaks of blood suddenly appearing on Jennifer’s cheeks.

“Bitch!” Jennifer screamed, the ferocity of her attack increasing.

The flames from the bottom level lit up the night. Smoke rose toward the struggling figures, and from behind. The stairway filled with a haze that drifted into the bedroom.

As Jennifer lunged in a fury, Tash sidestepped, shouldered Jennifer against the railing, grabbed her feet, and upended her, throwing her over the side.

32

COLTRANE’S HEART STOPPED.

With a shock, it restarted, urging him toward the railing. Jennifer had gripped the railing as Tash flipped her over, and now Jennifer dangled, straining to hang on as Tash pounded at her fingers and tried to peel them off. Below, flames roared from both levels, and the swimming pool didn’t extend to this side – beneath the flames, there was only a tiled patio.

“No!” Thrusting Tash aside, Coltrane reached his good arm toward Jennifer to pull her up.

The punch to his wounded shoulder drove him nearly insane with anguish. Seeing Tash try to hit him a second time, he managed to block the blow, but not without further pain to his wound.

“I can’t hold on!” Jennifer shouted.

But Coltrane couldn’t pull her up. He had to let go and defend himself against Tash, who lifted a heavy flowerpot to throw at him as she had at Walt. The effort to raise the pot above her head tilted her off balance, and when Coltrane pushed her as hard as he could, she hit the railing, so top-weighted that when he slammed her shoulders, she, too, went over the side.

Jennifer jerked. “She grabbed me! I can’t hang on!”

In a rush, Coltrane leaned over the side and slung his good arm under Jennifer’s chest, straining to support her weight. Below her, he saw Tash dangling from Jennifer’s ankles, the flames from both levels roaring up at her. Losing his hold, desperate, he tested his wounded arm, using it to try to pull Jennifer up. Blood pulsed. His injured muscle failed.

“No!” He strained harder with his good arm, feeling Jennifer slip. All the while, he stared down at Tash, who clawed her way up Jennifer’s legs, almost to her knees.

Coltrane wept with the effort to keep Jennifer from falling.

Tash groped higher.

Jennifer jerked her right leg free and kicked.

Tash reached up.

Jennifer kicked again.

“Why… don’t… you” – Jennifer kicked harder, and Coltrane couldn’t help thinking about Walt’s last words to Tash and where Tash’s mother had said she wanted her – “go… to… hell.”

As Coltrane felt Jennifer slipping away from him, Jennifer gave one last kick, and Tash lost her grip, screaming, plummeting into the flames below. The roar of the fire was so intense that Coltrane couldn’t hear the impact of her body hitting the patio two levels down.

Jennifer felt weightless. “Hang on to me! Don’t let go!”

“I’m trying as hard as I can!”

Jennifer pulled herself toward him. “My shoes are on fire!”

She struggled upward, Coltrane lifting, and abruptly they were sprawled on the balcony, Coltrane ignoring the sharp misery of his wound, burning his hands as he yanked off Jennifer’s smoking shoes and threw them away.

But flames filled the stairway to the bedroom. So weak that they could hardly walk, they wavered toward the section of the balcony farthest from the flames. From there, they had a view of the flashing lights of emergency vehicles in front of the house, of the crowd that had gathered and firefighters spraying water at the blaze.

A woman in the crowd shouted, “My God, someone’s up there!”

Two firemen stared toward the upper balcony, turned off the hose they had trained on the house, and ran toward the ladder truck, raising it to save the two figures they had seen.

EPILOGUE

FIRE PURIFIES, but how, Coltrane wondered, can you incinerate your mind? The increasing traumas of the previous two months had so numbed him that only after surviving the final horror did he begin to understand the full extent of his psychic damage. The rational part of him had grieved over the murders of his two closest friends and of his grandparents, but the irrational part, he came to realize, had never acknowledged that those murders had occurred, that those loved ones were lost to him forever. Those conflicting parts seemed to be reacting to separate universes, and in one of those universes, the murders couldn’t possibly have occurred, just as Coltrane couldn’t possibly have been hunted by Dragan Ilkovic. So, if those events couldn’t have occurred, they hadn’t occurred. Otherwise, he would surely have gone insane.

Dragan Ilkovic had seemed the epitome of evil, but then Coltrane had encountered Tash Adler, her malignance existing on such an unimaginably primal level that it had shocked away the numbness created by what Ilkovic had done to him. He wept without warning. He couldn’t sleep for fear of nightmares. He needed all his concentration to explain repeatedly to the police and the fire investigators what had happened in his house that night and the events that had led up to it.

When you reach absolute bottom, Coltrane told himself, when you can’t possibly fall any further and deeper, you have to start climbing. In that way, Tash had done him a favor. By setting fire to the house that had once belonged to Rebecca Chance and Randolph Packard, she had destroyed part of a festering past that had taken possession of him.

Similarly, the money with which Coltrane had purchased the house was his only legacy from his hated father, and although Coltrane’s insurance company would reimburse him for the devastation of the property, he had the sense that the money had been cleansed, that the legacy, too, had been destroyed in the fire. He planned to give some of it to Greg’s widow and the rest to various charities. He refused to rebuild the house. He put the lot up for sale.