Breathless

with the riddled door, from a high shelf, Henry took down two extra pillows and two spare blankets. With these, he could create the illusion of a sleeper, under the covers.
    Approaching the bed, he saw the gloves.
    The pillows and blankets fell from his arms.
    On the chenille spread lay the pair of leather work gloves that Jim had worn to chop wood. They hadn’t been there before. They were saturated with blood. The blood had leached into the chenille.

Twenty-four

C ammy Rivers in her kitchen, in the ceaseless throbbing shadow of the light-drunk moth, eliminated protozoan diseases as possible causes of the behavior of the animals at High Meadows Farm.
    She seemed to be left with only the possibility that a toxic substance or a drug had been administered to the Thoroughbreds and their pets. The method of delivery would most likely have been through accidentally or intentionally contaminated food.
    The different species—horses, goats, dogs—would not have been fed the same things. Even some of the horses might have been on diets different from the others. Consequently, the contamination surely would have been intentional.
    This explanation struck her as melodramatic and implausible. But she had no other avenue to explore.
    Although she was old-fashioned in her approach to research, preferring books to Internet sources that more often contained misinformation, the time had come to go downstairs to the computer.The large number of drugs with their lengthy lists of side effects and the even larger number of natural and man-made toxins could be considered and eliminated only with the use of carefully composed search strings.
    As she pushed her chair away from the table and got to her feet, the wall phone rang. She plucked the handset from the cradle: “Cammy Rivers.”
    “Hey, Doc,” Grady Adams said, “hope I didn’t wake you.”
    “It’s not even ten-thirty yet, Grady.”
    “Well, I know you get up early. Listen, could you maybe come out here?”
    “What—now?”
    “That’s what I’m hoping.”
    “Tell me nothing’s wrong with Merlin.”
    She had given Grady the wolfhound as a puppy almost three years earlier.
    “No, no, he’s fit enough, you could saddle him up and ride him. There’s this other thing.”
    “What thing?”
    “This thing—I want you to take a look at it. At them. Bring your bag, whatever you need, ’cause you might want to examine them.”
    “They have a name?”
    “That’s just it—I don’t think they do. I’ve never seen anything like them. Right now, they’re chasing Merlin around the room, and he loves it.”
    “I have to ask you, furniture guy—you been breathing too many shellac fumes?”
    “Maybe I have. Maybe I’ve been drinking the stuff.”

Twenty-five

A fter finding the blood-soaked gloves, shotgun at the ready, Henry Rouvroy searched the house, found no one, then searched it again, with the same result.
    The chair still braced the cellar door. The front door remained locked, as did the back door between the kitchen and the rear porch.
    The explanation became obvious. The enemy possessed a key. No doubt he took it off either Jim’s corpse or Nora’s.
    While Henry had sat at the dinette table, listening for sounds in the basement, drinking dismal wine that might as easily have been pressed from plastic grapes as from real ones, his tormentor used a key to come in quietly through the front door. He left the bloody gloves on the bed, gloves he had worn while moving the bodies, and he left by the way he entered, locking up after himself.
    Henry could see how it was done, but he couldn’t understand
why
.
    Earlier, this kind of prankish behavior seemed to indicate thathis tormentor must have an adolescent sense of humor. With so much at stake, however, and with every prank performed at a mortal risk, such behavior was unreasonable if not irrational.
    If someone in Washington had become aware of Henry’s theft even as he had been industriously embezzling, if that person monitored him to discover the extent of his larceny and to determine his ultimate intentions, and if that person had either followed him to Jim’s farm or been waiting here for his arrival, common sense argued that Henry should have been killed, shot in the back of the head, before he even realized anyone had become aware of his thievery and his plans to make the farm his redoubt.
    Evidently, his tormentor wanted more from him than his money and the farm. He tried to imagine what that