“Yes, sweetie, that’s the plan. Go ahead.”

At first she thinks something is wrong, that the boy has somehow contrived to turn on a recording. Up until now he’s always played with the headphones on, for himself alone, and therefore she hadn’t been exposed to his skill level. She’d been expecting something childlike, precocious and cute, perhaps, but childlike. There’s nothing childish about what emerges from the keyboard speakers. The sonata, composed by Mozart in the nineteenth year of his life, begins simply, a slow, almost waterlike trickle of notes. Light, graceful, haunting. There’s something of a melancholy waltz about the melody, which yearns to turn and pirouette up through the scale. And yet there’s none of that oom-pa-pa beat of the waltz. Instead it slowly builds in complexity, touching and rising like a butterfly sampling ascending blossoms.

She’s so mesmerized by the sound emerging from those small hands, by the contrast of his fierce concentration with the clear, contemplative beauty of the music itself, that she almost fails to react when Kidder opens the door.

“I’ll be damned,” he says, chuckling, all agog at the boy. “It really is you.”

Joey never hesitates. He keeps playing as Kathy steps out from behind the open door, swinging for the fences. At the very last moment Kidder turns toward her, having sensed something, but the hunk of wood connects with back of his skull and he falls to the floor with a guttural sigh.

“Joey! Now!”

The little boy abandons his keyboard without a backward glance and runs to her, taking her outstretched hand.

Run, run, run.

No thinking, only running. Up the basement stairs, through the house and out into the night, the little boy keeping up with her, his short legs pumping, not a sound out of him. A glance shows Joey’s eyes as big as silver dollars. He may be only five years old but it’s obvious he knows the stakes, knows his life depends on getting away from the bad man, the monster man.

Keys.

The thought of keys hits her like a stab wound in the guts, stops her in her tracks, bending her over. Keys, damn it! That was part of her plan. Knock Kidder out, search his pockets for car keys, gate keys, whatever keys might be useful. And yet as soon as he’d gone down, his eyes rolling back, the instinct to flee had been overwhelming. What if he woke up and grabbed her by the neck? He’d kill her with his bare hands and Joey would be next.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should have kept beating him with the two-by-four, but she’d been so terrified that she’d dropped the weapon after the one hit. Dropped it like it was burning her hands. Shane would have made sure. He’d have tied the bad guy up while he had the chance. She’d thought of that when escape was still in the planning stages, couldn’t find any rope, but Shane would have made do somehow, he’d have ripped up sheets or found some clever way to neutralize the enemy. Killed him only if absolutely necessary because Randall Shane had rules about things like that.

“Run, Mommy!” Joey screams. “Don’t stop!”

The boy urging her to keep moving before the monster in the basement wakes up.

They run together, into the darkness, moist grass under their feet. He called me Mommy, she thinks, and it pleases her. Not that she has any illusions about a happy ending that would let her keep the boy. No, he has to be returned to his real mother, that’s what will make this right, what will make her time on earth worth living. That’s what Stacy wants her to do, looking down from heaven. That’s the only thing that makes sense, as to why she’s been left behind. To do this, exactly this.

The big house, a shingled mansion, rises against the dark sky, a great hulking shadow of high peaked roofs and gables. Beyond that, as she recalls from a single glimpse on the day she arrived, is a sandy dune of beach grass, a rocky shoreline, the sea. Somewhere to the right of the big house is a long curving driveway that joins the main road. They have to get there, to the main road, and without a car—keys! keys!—they’ll have to do it on foot.

What she can’t recall is how far it is to the next house. Are there normal houses in the area, or are they all unoccupied mansions? What she wants, of course, is a door to bang on, some kind stranger who will take them in, call the police.

The guest cottage where they’ve been held hostage is something like a hundred yards from the main house, no more than that, surely, but at night, under a cloudy sky, it seems much farther, more perilous. The ground uneven under their feet, tripping them up. Bushes and hedges looming, making it difficult to judge distance. Rather than stumble, Kathy slows them both to a hurried walk as they approach what must be the edge of the property. They’ve crossed some sort of transition. Her feet detect gravel. Then, suddenly obvious, an eight-foot chain-link fence. Not metal-colored but something darker, green perhaps, to make it blend into the landscaping, which it certainly has done.

A fence never figured into her plans. She hadn’t noticed a fence when they first came to the property. How could she have missed it? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Shane would be tearing the chain link from the posts, utilizing his great strength and the leverage of his long arms. All she and Joey can do, find some way around it, or over it. Could the boy climb the links? Is he strong enough to pull himself up and over the fence? Can she push him somehow and then get over the top herself?

Kathy reaches out with her left hand, intending to grasp the chain and give it an experimental tug. A hot blue spark, big as a glowing softball, arcs from the fence to her hand. The voltage knocks her to the ground, into the big nothing of the deepening darkness.

Joey starts to cry.

Chapter Forty-Six

When the Scurry Time Is Here

Morning finds us fifty miles to the northeast on a perfect summer day. High thin clouds, glorious sunlight. Everything sparkling, the world alive and breathing. But not everybody’s happy.

“I don’t like it,” says Jack Delancey.

“Your concern is noted,” Naomi says. “We’ll be fine, won’t we, Alice?”

“Totally,” I say. “If the son of a bitch tries to torture us I’ll tie his shoelaces together.”

“I’m serious,” Jack says. “I saw what they did to Milton.”

“And if something goes wrong you’ll come to our rescue, just as you did for him.”

“That was sheer luck. I happened to be in the right place at the right time. You can’t count on a thing like that.”

“Certainly I can,” Naomi says. “That’s why I hired you in the first place.”

Jack’s a pretty smart guy, and knows when the argument has been lost. He grunts unhappily, but he puts the car in gear and steers us over the quaint little bridge onto the island of New Castle, in the live free or die state of New Hampshire. Anyhow, that’s what it says on the local license plates. Live free or die. Which I have always assumed had something to do with the state not having income taxes or sales taxes, until Naomi corrects me. Dates from the Revolutionary War, and Patrick Henry vowing to give him liberty or give him death. Whatever, upon crossing the bridge we’ve entered an enclave of the wealthy, a small, tidy oceanfront village of multimillionaire estates built tight up against the Atlantic shore. The sea visible here and there through gaps between the old colonial homes. Lighthouses, a harbor, a few sleek sailboats bracing in the wind. A postcard home: dear mom, if we win the lottery I want to live here, please.