SEVEN

Dunlap stared down at his trembling hands. Everything considered, he was doing very well, he guessed. Oh, sure, he'd started shaking, and his stomach felt like he was going to throw up, but he hadn't thrown up, and although he was sweating, that was maybe from the heat as much as anything. Who's kidding who? The sun is almost down. The air is cooling off. You're sweating for a drink, and buddy, do you need one. There were times when he suspected he would scream. That's just dramatics, he told himself. You were looking for a story. Now you've got it. He was not yet certain what was going on here. Rabies, maybe. Could be something more. Whatever, it was getting out of hand, and if he screwed this story up the way he'd screwed up many others, simply out of weakness, there was no one he could blame except himself. You'll get your drink. Just keep control.

This thing tonight is almost finished.

Is it? Maybe it's just getting started. And he shook his head and gripped the dashboard as the cruiser swerved sharply around the corner, skidding past the swimming pool and up the tree-lined gravel driveway.

He watched as Slaughter grabbed the microphone. "It's Slaughter, Marge. I'm almost there. Make sure you send those other units. What about the ambulance?"

"It's on its way."

"I hope so."

Dunlap focused his gaze down past the trees and toward the park spread out below him-the lake, a stream that twisted toward it, swings and slides, and cages that looked like a zoo, and people down there staring toward the siren. When he glanced ahead, the road curved, and abruptly he could see beyond the trees up to the hilltop, a wide three-story mansion up there, the last rays of the sunset glinting off the windows. The place was old, expensive, of a size that nobody could afford to build these days, the driveway curving past the front porch, columns with a roof above the driveway, like a Southern mansion, showing signs of age though, dark and rough and grainy, somehow very western all the same. He saw the cruiser that had hurried here before them, and another car, civilian, and two officers who stood at the front door, talking to somebody in there.

Slaughter skidded to a stop. Dust cloud settling, Dunlap got quickly out, Slaughter putting on his hat and hurrying before him through the dusk. They reached the front steps. These were stone, and both men rushed up, their footsteps scratching on the stone. The two policemen had already turned to them.

"He's up there on the second level," one of them said.

"Or the third. You're sure he's even up there?" Slaughter asked.

"Talk to these people."

A man was slumped inside the doorway, his shirt and suit a mass of blood, his throat ripped open, his hands clutched at his wound.

"The ambulance," a woman blurted.

"On its way. You're sure he's up there?" Slaughter asked.

"Mr. Cody-this is Mr. Cody-said the boy ran up the stairs as I stopped in the driveway."

"That's your car?"

She nodded.

"Better move it. There'll be a lot of traffic coming up here."

Even as he said that, they turned toward a cruiser speeding up the driveway. Just behind it, siren wailing, came the ambulance.

"Can you walk?"

The man nodded, struggling weakly to get off the floor.

"Here, let me help you. I don't want you in the way if something happens." Slaughter turned to face the two policemen. "Watch those stairs. Make sure the boy doesn't get away." Slaughter held the man and worked with him across the stone porch, then down the steps. Two attendants ran from the ambulance, policemen from the other cruiser running with them.

"Is there any place to get down from the second story?" Slaughter asked the woman who was helping him to move the man out of danger.

"A roof above the servants' quarters in the back. I don't know how he'd jump down and not hurt himself."

"The trees around the house. Are there any he could lean to and climb down?"

"I never thought… I just don't know."

"The back," Slaughter told the two policemen coming toward him. "Make sure no one leaves the building. It's the kid we're looking for."

"The kid?"

Slaughter realized that these two men had not been with him at the boy's house. "Never mind. Just make sure no one leaves. Be careful of the roof above the servants' quarters."

Slaughter gave the injured man to the two men from the ambulance. They stared, and Slaughter looked down at the blood across his own hands and his shirt. "A young boy bit him. That's right, isn't it?" he asked the woman.

She was nodding.

"Bit me," Dunlap heard the injured man repeating, his voice distorted, rasping. Added to what he'd been feeling, Dun-lap was fearful that the jagged throat would do the job and make him sick. He had to glance away.

More sirens, two police cars skidding up the gravel driveway, a dust cloud rising behind them. Slaughter hurried toward them.

Dunlap frowned in the middle of it all. The two men from the ambulance had opened out the back and set the injured man inside. The woman was inside her car and moving it. Slaughter stood between the cruisers, talking to the officers who'd just arrived.

Dunlap turned to face the mansion, squinting through the dusk toward the two policemen at the front door. This was all too much. He was shaking even worse as he walked toward the woman who was getting from her car where she had moved it to the side.

"What is this place?"

"The Baynard mansion."

"Who?"

And Dunlap learned then about Baynard who had been the richest man around here. Back in 1890. "He had cattle all across the valley, and he built this place up here to suit a Southern woman he had married."

There was something automatic in the way she said it, Dunlap thought. As if she'd said it many times before. He listened with wonder as in bits and pieces she explained how Baynard had brought from the South the wood, the furniture, the bushes, everything to make his wife feel more at home. And then his wife had gone back South one summer where she died. Either that, or else she left him, and he lied about her dying.

"No one knows for sure," the woman said. "We've tried to find the record of her death. We never managed. She had reasons if she left him. He was hardly ever home, tending business, working as a senator. Plus, there were rumors about certain kinds of parties on the third floor. But he said she died, and everyone agreed to that, and he came back and never left the house again."

Dunlap was amazed that she seemed more concerned with what she said than with the preparations going on around them. He learned how people said that Baynard wandered through the house for days on end. The cause of death was claimed to be a heart attack, but everyone suspected he just drank himself to death. And one thing more-the rumors that he killed her, that she told him she was leaving, and an overbearing man like him, he flew into such a rage that she was dead before he even knew he'd struck her. Then he hid the body, and he wasted in his grief. At last he killed himself, and people in the family hushed it up.

"But those are rumors, as I said." The woman shrugged. "Nobody ever proved it, though in recent years they looked for her. They never were successful."

"But back in eighteen-ninety… how come you know all about this?"

"I'm a member of the Potter's Field Historical Society."

"I still don't understand."

So she explained. "No one lives here. Baynard had two children. They grew up to manage the estate. Then they had children, and this new set gave the mansion to the county to avoid the taxes. They're not very wealthy now. They live in houses down the hill beside the swimming pool. We've fixed this place up just the way it used to be. The plumbing's from the eighteen-nineties. We even shut the power off. To get around at night, you have to use a flashlight, either that or candles or a lantern if you want to be authentic."