Intensity

and Sarah's room was spacious. A sitting area included a pair of armchairs and footstools facing a fireplace. Bookshelves crammed with hardcovers flanked the mantel, their titles lost in shadows.
        The nightstand lamps were colorfully patterned ginger jars with pleated shades. One of them was aglow; crimson streaks and blots stained its shade.
        Chyna stopped well short of the foot of the bed, already close enough to see too much. Neither Paul nor Sarah was there, but the sheets and blankets were in tangled disarray, trailing onto the floor on the right side of the bed. On the left, the linens were soaked with blood, and a wet spray glistened on the headboard and in an arc across the wall.
        She closed her eyes. Heard something. Spun around, crouching in expectation of an assault. She was alone.
        The noise had always been there, a background hiss-patter-splash of falling water. She hadn't heard it on entering the room, because she had been deafened by bloodstains as loud as the angry shouting of a maddened mob.
         Synesthesia . The word had stuck with her from a psychology text, more because she thought it was a beautiful arrangement of syllables than because she expected ever to experience it herself. Synesthesia: a confusion of the senses in which a scent might register as a flash of color, a sound actually might be perceived as a scent, and the texture of a surface under the hand might seem to be a trilling laugh or a scream.
        Closing her eyes had blocked out the roar of the bloodstains, whereupon she had heard the falling water. Now she recognized it as the sound of the shower in the adjoining bathroom.
        That door was ajar half an inch. For the first time since she had entered from the hallway, Chyna noticed the thin band of fluorescent light along the bathroom jamb.
        When she looked away from that door, reluctant to confront what might wait beyond it, she spotted the telephone on the right-hand nightstand. That was the side of the bed without blood, which made it more approachable for her.
        She lifted the handset from the cradle. No dial tone. She had not expected to hear one. Nothing was ever that easy.
        She opened the single drawer on the nightstand, hoping to find a handgun. No luck.
        Still certain that her only hope of safety lay in movement, that crawling into a hole and hiding should always be the strategy of last resort, Chyna had gone around to the other side of the king-size bed before she quite realized that she had taken a first step. In front of the bathroom door, the carpet was badly stained.
        Grimacing, she went to the second nightstand and eased open the drawer. In the mortal fall of light, she discovered a pair of reading glasses with yellow reflections in the half-moon lenses, a paperback men's adventure novel, a box of Kleenex, a tube of lip balm, but no weapon.
        As she closed the drawer, she smelled burned gunpowder underlying the hot-copper stench of fresh blood.
        She was familiar with that odor. Over the years, more than a few of her mother's friends either had used guns to get what they wanted or had been at least fascinated by them.
        Chyna had heard no shots. The intruder evidently had a weapon with a sound suppressor.
        Water continued to cascade into the shower beyond the door. That susurrous splash, though soft and soothing under other circumstances, now abraded her nerves as effectively as the whine of a dentist's drill.
        She was sure that the intruder wasn't in the bathroom. His work here was done. He was busy elsewhere in the house.
        Right this minute she was not as frightened of the man himself as she was of discovering exactly what he had done. But the choice before her was the essence of the entire human agony: not knowing was ultimately worse than knowing.
        At last she pushed open the door. Squinting, she entered the fluorescent glare.
        The roomy bath featured yellow and white ceramic tile. On the walls at chair-rail height and around the edges of the vanity and lavatory counters ran a decorative tile band of daffodils and green leaves. She had expected more blood.
        Paul Templeton was propped on the toilet in his blue pajamas. Lengths of wide strapping tape across his lap fixed him to the bowl. More tape encircled both his chest and the toilet tank, holding him upright.
        Through the semitransparent bands of