Intensity

stopped in front of the house, they would be dead men breathing.
        "Hold on," she said, touched Laura's damp forehead to reassure her, and then crossed the room to the door, leaving her friend under the smug and somber gaze of Sigmund Freud.
        The hallway was deserted.
        Chyna hurried to the head of the curved stairs, hesitated to commit herself to the tenebrous lair below, but then realized that she had nowhere else to go. She went down as fast as she dared without the support of the handrail. Staying clear of the balustrade. Too exposed there. Close to the wall was better.
        She quickly passed a series of large landscape paintings in ornate frames, which seemed almost to be windows on actual pastoral vistas. Earlier, they had been bright and cheerful scenes. Now they were ominous: goblin forests, black rivers, killing fields.
        The foyer. An oval area rug on polished oak. Through a closed door to the right was Paul Templeton's study. Through the archway on the left was the dark living room.
        The killer could be anywhere.
        Outside, the roar of the truck grew louder. It was almost to the house. The driver would be shot through the windshield the moment that he braked to a stop. Or gunned down when he stepped out from behind the steering wheel.
        Chyna had to warn him, not solely for his sake but for her own, for Laura's. He was their only hope.
        Certain that the spider-eating intruder was nearby, she expected a savage attack and, abandoning caution, flew at the front door. The oval rug rucked beneath her feet, twisted, and nearly spun out from under her. She stumbled, reached out to break her fall, and slammed both palms flat against the front door.
        Such a noise, hellacious noise, booming through the house, had surely drawn the killer's attention away from the approaching truck.
        Chyna fumbled, found the knob, and twisted it. The door was unlocked. Gasping, she pulled it open.
        A cool breeze out of the northwest, faintly scented by freshly turned vineyard earth and fungicide, whistled through the bare limbs of the maple trees that flanked the front walkway. Snuffling like a pack of hounds, it rushed past her into the foyer as she stepped out onto the front porch.
        The truck had already passed the house and was heading away from her. It would come around for a second approach on the end-loop of the driveway, which was wide enough to accommodate produce haulers in the harvest season, and park facing out toward the county road. But it wasn't a truck after all. A motor home. An older model with rounded lines, well kept, forty feet long, either blue or green. Its chrome glimmered like quicksilver under the late-winter moon.
        Amazed that she had not yet been stabbed or shot or struck from behind, glancing back at the open front door where the killer hadn't yet appeared, Chyna headed for the porch steps.
        The motor home rounded the end of the loop, beginning to turn toward her. Its twin beams swept across the Templetons' barn and other outbuildings.
        Larch and maple and evergreen shadows fled before the arcing headlights. They flickered darkly through the trellis at the end of the porch, along the white balustrade, across the lawn and the stone walkway, stretching impossibly, swooping into the night as if trying frantically to tear free of the trees that cast them.
        The deep quiet in the house, the lack of lights downstairs, the killer's failure to attack her as she escaped, the timely arrival of the motor home-suddenly all of those things made chilling sense. The killer was driving the motor home.
        " No ."
        Chyna swiftly retreated from the porch steps and scrambled back into the foyer.
        At her heels, the headlights came all the way around the end of the driveway loop. They pierced the trellis grid, projecting geometric patterns across the porch floor and the front wall of the house.
        She closed the door and fumbled for the big lock above the knob. Found the thumb-turn. Engaged the heavy deadbolt.
        Then she realized her mistake. The front door had been unlocked because the killer had gone out that way. If he found it locked now, he would know that Laura wasn't the only person alive in the house, and the hunt would begin.
        Her sweaty fingers slipped on the brass thumb-turn, but the bolt snapped open with a hard clack .
        Earlier, he must have