All Night Long

address?” she asked, expecting Herb to refuse.
    To her amazement, Herb shrugged and hauled out an aging cardboard file. “Don’t see any harm in it.
    Not exactly confidential information now that Miss Webb’s dead. No one living there, far as I know.”
    He rummaged through a pile of invoices and worksheets for a moment and then selected one. “Her e go. End of Pine Lane. No number. It’s the only house on the road.”

    Irene felt as though all the air had been sucked out of the room. She had to swallow two or three times before she could speak.
    “Pine Lane?” The words emerged in a high, creaky falsetto that she hardly recognized as her own voice. “Are you certain?”
    “Yep. I remember it was a mite hard to find. Took a couple of wrong turns before I got to it. Pine Lan s one of those private little gravel-tops that run down to the water off the main road.
    Dozens of them scattered around the lake. Half aren’t even marked.”
    “Yes, I know,” Irene whispered.
    He squinted at her, concerned. “Look here, if it’s important I can write it down for you.”
    “No, thanks.” She plucked the key from his palm. “That won’t be necessary. I appreciate your time,
    Mr. Porter.”
    “No problem.” Herb leaned his elbows on the grimy glass counter and shook his head sadly. “Just a real shame about Miss Webb. Why do you suppose a pretty lady like that would take her own life?”
    “That,” Irene said, “is a very good question.”
    It took a great deal of concentration, but somehow she made it outside without losing it. She managed to get behind the wheel of the compact and pull out of the tiny parking lot in front of Porter Lock & Key. She drove slowly through town.
    When she was beyond the cluster of shops, restaurants and gas stations that made up the heart of Kirbyville, she turned into a small, secluded picnic area and parked.
    She got out and walked down t he water’s edge.
    For a long time she simply stood there, gazing at the restless lake. Gradually the shaky sensation an he sick sense of dread began to subside.
    When she could think clearly again, she forced herself to confront the question that was screaming and moaning in her brain like a demented ghost.
    There was only one house on Pine Lane, at least there had been only one seventeen years earlier. I as the house in which she had been raised, the house in which she had found her parents dead o he kitchen floor.

Thirty-Six
    She took the long way back to Dunsley, following the narrow, two-lane road that wound around th im of the south end of the lake. She told herself that she needed time to think. But she knew, deep inside, that what she was really trying to buy was a little more time before she went back to Dunsle o face the house of blood and darkness that had haunted her dreams for seventeen years.
    The big silver SUV with the heavily tinted windows appeared in her rearview mirror just as she started into the most isolated section of the old road. The vehicle came out of the last turn with unnerving speed.
    The sight of the silver SUV so close behind her jolted her into a sudden awareness of how slowly sh as moving. The absence of other traffic on the road combined with her dark musings had caused he o drift into another zone. She had been driving on autopilot. This was a twisty two-lane road tha llowed very few places to pass slow-moving vehicles. Folks got mad when you drove it too slowly.
    Only tourists made that mistake.
    She straightened hastily in the seat and put her foot down more firmly on the accelerator, sending the compact into the next series of turns at a brisk clip. But when she rechecked the mirror she saw tha he SUV had not fallen back. It was closing fast.
    Whoever he was, she had annoyed him, she thought. He was determined to punish her for the offens f slow driving by pushing her hard. Just what she needed, a short-tempered idiot with a royal case of road rage.
    A little chill of fear flickered through her. The section of road on which she was traveling hugged th op of the cliffs. It could be dangerous. Her father had come home on more than one occasion, wear nd grim, to report to her mother that one of the locals had gotten drunk and gone through the guardrail into the deep waters of the lake. Several years earlier in her endless, restless, obsessive research into the past, she had learned that Bob Thornhill had suffered his fatal heart attack and gone off the cliffs into the lake near here.
    The SUV bore