Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

But the video failed to support that theory. No one came out of the master suite until Ryan himself appeared again, this time wearing a bathrobe over his pajamas, hurrying to the stairs and ultimately to this room in which he now studied the security recording.

His search of the suite, following the discovery of the heart pendant, had been thorough. He had not missed any place where even a small child could have hidden.

Now he accessed the recording made by the camera that covered the third-floor deck outside the master-suite retreat, and studied the same time period. A single deck lamp provided enough light for the night-vision camera to present a picture nearly as bright as one taken during the day. No one departed by that door or by one of those two windows, either.

When he reviewed the recording of the other master-level deck, he saw no one come out of the door or out of the windows that opened directly off the bedroom.

No one had left the suite, but no one had been there when he searched every niche of the place.

Judging by the evidence, the gold pendant must have materialized magically on the pillow.

What appeared to be magical, however, must be always and only an ordinary event rendered enigmatic by the lack of one crucial fact.

Ryan racked his brain to think of what that fact might be, but both reason and imagination failed him.

Frustrated, about to switch off the monitor, he decided to have a look at the recordings made at twilight, the previous day, on the south lawn, when he had been reading in the solarium and had discovered he was under observation. Two cameras covered that area.

The system stored all of these recordings for thirty days, then dumped them unless otherwise instructed.

The first camera, mounted on the house, provided approximately the view that Ryan would have had from his armchair. It presented now the clotted gray goose-down sky, the drizzle, the solemn trees, the slithering fog, the saturated yard across which the hooded trespasser had glided.

He ran the scene beginning prior to the onset of twilight, and watched as the watery light drained from the day. Night came, but the intruder did not.

Disbelieving, having fast-forwarded through the recording, Ryan watched it again, but in real time, which seemed interminable. Sky, rain, trees, fog, inconstant light fading to darkness-but no visitor either ominous or otherwise.

The second south-lawn camera was mounted on a limb of an Indian laurel, covering some of the same ground from a different angle. The three deodar cedars, from the shadows of which the hooded figure had made its second appearance, were central to this view.

Through the fading light, into darkfall, no phantom glided forth from beneath the majestic drooping boughs of the cedars.

The previous evening, damn it, he had seen something . He had not merely hallucinated the figure. It was neither a trick of rain and fog nor a reflection on the window glass of some palm or fern in the solarium. He’d seen someone in a hooded raincoat, maybe a woman, moving and wet and real.

The watcher in the rain was as real as the candy hearts, as real as the gold heart pendant that lay now…

Where?

On the nightstand. Yes. After holding it by the chain and seeing the inscription, he put it on the nightstand. Later, after finding the cellophane bag of candy in the panic room, he had put that on the nightstand, as well.

Ryan switched off the monitor, locked the cabinet, left the storage room, locked the door, and returned to the master suite, overcome by a grim expectation.

On the nightstand stood only the lamp and the clock. The bag of candy and the pendant were gone.

A frantic but exhaustive search of the master suite turned up neither item.

When, last of all, he opened the safe with the new combination that he had recently programmed, the pendant and candy hearts were not in there, either. And like the ammunition before it, the pistol had been taken.

Because the master suite was not secure, Ryan could not assume that he would be safe when sleeping.

He considered spending the night in one of the guest quarters or bedding down in an unlikely place, such as the laundry. But if he was not safe in this third-floor redoubt, no haven existed anywhere within these walls.

Briefly he considered decamping to a hotel, but indignation at these violations of his privacy swiftly swelled into a righteous anger. He had not lived through a heart transplant only to run like a frightened child from a tormentor whose pranks were sophisticated in execution but insipid in concept, the kind of psycho-movie crap that made teenage girls scream in terror and delight.

Denied a gun, he went into the retreat to choose a knife.

The under-counter refrigerator contained not only soft drinks and bottled water, but also items on which he sometimes snacked: a variety of cheeses, a few pieces of fresh fruit.

A drawer in the bar cabinet contained utensils, including flatware and knives. There were a paring knife to peel the fruit, a standard kitchen knife with an eight-inch blade, and a more pointed knife with a serrated edge.

He chose the kitchen knife and returned with it to the bedroom. He placed it under the pillow beside his, on which Samantha had not rested her head in a long time.

Reclining against his mound of pillows, he switched on the TV but pressed MUTE. He watched a sitcom that was no funnier silent than it would have been with sound.

His mind relentlessly circled a disturbing corollary. If people were conspiring to torment and possibly to harm him now, then the conspiracy he had suspected before his transplant, which eventually he had pretty much dismissed as imaginary, had almost surely been real.

An element of that conspiracy had been the possibility that his cardiomyopathy had been the consequence of poisoning. So if he had been poisoned then, he should assume that he would be poisoned again, that his new heart would be destroyed like his first.

If that was true, he probably had been poisoned already. Trusting his new staff, he had eaten and drunk what they served.

He wondered how long after poisoning the heart-muscle damage manifested.

Of course the staff might be innocent. If some stranger could come and go from the house at will, undetected, the ingredients of Ryan’s meals might have been poisoned without the involvement of the Amorys or their assistants.

An alternative assumption and corollary demanded consideration. If the perceived conspiracy and poisoning before his transplant had been imagined, then the current incidents might be imagined, too.

Indeed, he had nothing-not the raincoat-hooded presence on video, not the pendant, not the candy-to prove that any of these recent, taunting incidents had occurred.

Before his transplant, he had been on three medications that Dr. Gupta prescribed. Post-surgery, he took twenty-eight. If a drug or combination of drugs could, as a side effect, induce paranoid delusions and hallucinations, he was at greater risk now than he’d been a year previous.

But he knew that he was not delusional. He knew he was not.

Simmering anger instead of fear, determination to be the hunter instead of the prey, kept Ryan’s mind circling around the puzzle in an alternately widening and shrinking gyre, circling in search of a single loose thread that when plucked would unravel the mystery into truth.

Bafflement hardened into frustration, until he wanted to scream to vent his exasperation. Instead, he picked up Samantha’s book for distraction.

Earlier in the day, he had reached the twenty-seventh of sixty-six chapters in his third reading of the novel. Now, within a single paragraph, Sam’s prose again bewitched him.