Bill Pronzini: The Lighthouse

She tried the doorknob. Locked. And the door itself was solid oak, hung on heavy iron hinges. She glanced to the left, where a big curtained window overlooked the porch. She could smash it, climb inside, use the phone No. The sound of shattering glass was loud and would carry a good distance. Besides, it would take time to remove enough glass to get inside without badly cutting herself. And she had no idea where Cassie kept her phone, how the house was laid out; she would have to turn on a light to find out. And if the shattering glass didn’t alert Reese, the light probably would.

Do something! she told herself. You can’t keep crouching here on the porch. Go out on the road, run for the next house? No. The nearest house was another fifth of a mile away and she would be exposed out on the road, with no place to hide. Where then?

The garage? she thought. Was it possible there was a telephone in Cassie’s garage? Not likely; but some people kept phones in garages. Or spare keys to the house. Or maybe she’d gone out with somebody else and her car was there…

Alix hurried down the steps, ran to the cypress windbreak. Beyond, the sagging roofline of the garage stood outlined against the gray-black sky. The garage had big double doors, but they were exposed, and even if they were unlocked they might make noise when she tried to open them. But on one side… was that a regular door? Yes; and it hung partway open.

She dashed from the shelter of the trees, not chancing another look around. Ran through the narrow opening of the door and stumbled, catching for balance at the frame. It was unrelievedly black inside the garage, and the air was musty-redolent of dry rot, motor oil, and something organic like fertilizer. She stood with her hand against the splintery frame, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the deeper black. And when they did, she made out the humpbacked shape of Cassie’s old car.

She rushed toward it, bumping against what felt like a pile of cordwood, dislodging one of the pieces so that it clattered dully on the floor-a sound that wouldn’t carry much beyond the confines of the garage. When she yanked open the driver’s door, the dome light came on. That allowed her to see that the ignition was empty. But she’d expected that; what she had to look for was one of those little magnetic spare-key boxes that people kept under dashes or inside tire wells or behind bumpers.

She crawled in behind the wheel, bent forward to search beneath the dash. As she did so, something on the floor caught her eye-a flash of bright color against the worn rubber floor mat. Then the color registered as electric-blue, and she stared at the object, identified it as a long piece of leather tipped with beads.

Her skin prickled with sudden cold. She reached down, felt under the seat, unhooked the leather from where it was jammed on the height-adjustment lever. Held it up to the pale dome light.

An Indian headband.

Mandy Barnett’s headband, missing from the wildly disheveled red curls when she had found the girl’s body.

She felt her lips part, form the word “Oh,” but heard no sound. She raised her eyes, stared out at the hood of the car. She couldn’t tell the color in the gloom, but she remembered it was an olive color. Dark-green. And Sinclair had told her it was a dark-green car that had run Mandy and her bicycle off the road…

The silence in the garage seemed to hum around her. She could hear her own breath coming in short, swift intakes. Her hand, clutching the headband, grew moist.

There was no way the headband could have come to be there unless it had been carried in by Mandy’s murderer. Carried unwittingly, no doubt, caught in a pocket or a trouser cuff or on some other article of clothing. And it had lain unnoticed for days-until now.

“Cassie?” she said aloud. “Dear Lord, Cassie?”

And yet the evidence in her hand seemed irrefutable-one nightmare piled on top of another.

It was Cassie Lang who had strangled Mandy Barnett.

He saw her crossing from the trees alongside the Lang woman’s house to the garage nearby.

The sight of her moving silhouette brought him up short, flattened his lips against his teeth. He was back in the trees maybe a hundred yards away, just about to come out of them, frustrated as hell because it seemed she’d got clean away after he’d chased her all that distance from the lighthouse-on foot, in the van once he’d pulled Hod out of it, on foot again, seeing her, losing her in the trees and fog, seeing her, losing her… Christ! Scared, too, by then, because what if she got to a phone or woke somebody up and told them?

But now… now he’d seen her again, knew right where she was: inside that garage, went right inside that garage. Hadn’t roused nobody at the house; it was still dark. Nobody home. Nobody around anywhere. Went into the garage to hide, maybe. Or look for a weapon or the Lang woman’s car. Well, she wouldn’t find nothing in there, least of all a place to hide. All she’d find, pretty soon, was him.

He left the woods, moving slow, watching the side door, thinking about what he was going to do when he got in there with her, feeling the excitement build again down low in his belly. Oh, he wanted her bad, real bad. And the queer thing was, he knew the Springfield did too, like it was telling him so, like it was something alive and hungry in his hands.

He was ready-the air hose connected to both the diaphone and the compressor, the cotton in one hand, the pillows and blankets in the other. All that remained was to swaddle and insulate himself against the noise and vibration, lie on the floor, reach out a hand to open the air valve on the compressor. He was ready.

And he couldn’t do it. No matter what happened here, he couldn’t do it. Not because of what it might do to him; because of what it would surely do to the light, the Fresnel lens.

A hell of a thing to be worrying about at a time like this, and yet the thought of destroying all those carefully cut and polished prisms and bull’s-eyes had been like a canker all along, paining him, filling him with revulsion. It would be like willfully destroying a rare painting or sculpture, something old and beautiful and virtually irreplaceable. In a fundamental way it would reduce him to the level of those animals down below. Fighting them, hurting them, wasn’t worth the price of the Fresnel, and it wasn’t worth the price of his own humanity. There had to be another way.

He threw the bedding down, turned to the window glass again. The pain behind his eyes was worsening, not to the critical point yet but not far from it either. He pressed his forehead against the chilled glass, squinting, blinking, trying to bring the grounds and the terrain beyond into focus.

Somebody was running on the road.

Not toward the lighthouse; away from it. A man. One of the invaders? He couldn’t tell, couldn’t see clearly enough. Running… why?

His vision cleared completely for a few seconds, the way it did at intervals, and he realized the van was gone. Reese’s van, the one they’d all come in. It had been parked out there beyond the fence; he’d seen it earlier. Now it was gone.

And the man was running… running away, was that it? One drunken vigilante giving up his act of terrorism?

Or was he running after something, someone?

Alix, he thought.

He peered harder through the glass. Couldn’t see anything in the distance; the clarity was gone as suddenly as it had come and the distance was just a blur. The running man had become part of the blur: gone.

Jan struggled to think logically. Alix had been gone at least half an hour, more like an hour; the running man couldn’t be chasing her, not after all this time. But the van… how long had it been gone? He didn’t know, couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen it.