From the Corner of His Eye

he could stop her, whether he had intended to stop her or not, and she engaged the deadbolt lock.
        Beveled, crackled, distorted, divided into petals and leaves, Deed's face beyond the lead-ad glass, as he leaned closer to try to peer inside, was the countenance of a dream demon swimming up out of a nightmare lake.
        Agnes ran to the kitchen, where she had been working when the doorbell rang, packing boxes of groceries to be delivered with the honey-raisin pear pies that she and Jacob had baked this morning.
        Barty's bassinet was beside the table.
        She expected him to be gone, snatched by an accomplice who had come in the back way while Deed had distracted her at the front door.
        The baby was where she had left him, sleeping serenely.
        To the windows, then, drawing all the blinds securely down. And still, irrationally, she felt watched.
        Trembling, she sat beside the bassinet and gazed at her baby with such love that the force of it ought to have rocked him awake.
        She expected Deed to ring the doorbell again. He did not.
        "Imagine me thinking you'd be gone," she said to Barty. "Your old mum is losing it. I never made a deal with Rumpelstiltskin, so there's nothing for him to collect."
        She couldn't kid herself out of her fear.
        Nicholas Deed was not the knave. He had already brought all the ruin into their lives that he was going to bring.
        But a knave there was, somewhere, and his day would come.
        To avoid making Maria feel responsible for the dire turn of mood when red aces weft followed by disturbing jacks, Agnes had pretended to take her son's card-told fortune lightly, especially the frightful part of it. In fact, a coldness had twisted through her heart.
        Never before had she put faith in any form of prognostication. In the whispery falling of those twelve cards, however, she heard the faint voice of truth, not quite a coherent truth, not as clear a message as she might have wished, but a murmur that she couldn't ignore.
        Tiny Bartholomew wrinkled his face in his sleep.
        His mother said a prayer for him.
        She also sought forgiveness for the hardness with which she had treated Nicholas Deed.
        And she asked to be spared the visitation of the knave.

Chapter 39
        
        THE DEAD DETECTIVE, grinning in the moonlight, a pair of silvery quarters gleaming in the sockets once occupied by his eyes.
        This was the image that plied the turbulent waters of Junior Cain's imagination when he sailed out of the driver's door and came around to face the Studebaker, his heart dropping like an anchor.
        His dry tongue, his parched mouth, his desiccated throat felt packed fall of sand, and his voice lay buried alive down there.
        Even when he saw no cop cadaver, no ghoulish grin, no two-bit eyes, Junior was not immediately relieved. Warily, he circled the car, expecting to find the detective crouching and poised to spring.
        Nothing.
        The dome light was on in the car, because the driver's door was standing open.
        He didn't want to lean inside and peer over the front seat. He had no weapon. He would be unbalanced, vulnerable.
        Still cautious, Junior approached the back door, the window. Vanadium's body lay on the car floor, wrapped in the tumbled blanket.
        He had not heard the lawman rising up with malevolent intent, as he had imagined. The body had simply rolled off the backseat onto the floor during the too-sharp 180-degree turn.
        Briefly, Junior felt humiliated. He wanted to drag the detective out of the car and stomp on his smug, dead face.
        That would not be a productive use of his time. Satisfying, but not prudent. Zedd tells us that time is the most precious thing we have, because we're born with so little of it.
        Junior got in the car once more, slammed the door, and said, "Panfaced, double-chinned, half-bald, puke-collecting creep."
        FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE 213
        Surprisingly, he received a lot of gratification from voicing this insult, even though Vanadium was too dead to hear it.
        "Fat-necked, splay-nosed, jug-eared, ape-browed, birth marked freak."
        This was better than taking slow deep breaths. Periodically, on the way to Vanadium's house, Junior spat out a string of insults, punctuated by obscenities.
        He had time to think of quite a few,