Mr. Murder

Probably not."
        Another hesitation. "Will we be going to school again ever?"
        "Well, sure, of course."
        She stared at him for too long, then nodded and went into the bathroom.
        Her question rattled Marty. He wasn't sure if she was merely fantasizing about a life without school, as most kids did now and then, or whether she was expressing a more genuine concern about the depth of the trouble that had rolled over them.
        He had heard the television come on in the other room while he had been sitting on the edge of the bed with Charlotte, so he knew Paige was awake. He got up to go say good morning to her.
        As he was approaching the connecting door, Paige called to him.
        "Marty, quick, look at this."
        When he hurried into the other room, he saw her standing in front of the TV. She was watching an early-morning news program.
        "It's about us," she said.
        He recognized their own home on the screen. A woman reporter was standing in the street, her back to the house, facing the camera.
        Marty squatted in front of the television and turned up the sound.
        "… so the mystery remains, and the police would very much like to talk to Martin Stillwater this morning…"
        "Oh, this morning they want to talk," he said disgustedly.
        Paige shushed him.
        "… an irresponsible hoax by a writer too eager to advance his career, or something far more sinister? Now that the police laboratory has confirmed the large amount of blood in the Stillwater house is indeed of human origin, the need for the authorities to answer that question has overnight become more urgent."
        That was the end of the piece. As the reporter gave her name and location, Marty registered the word "LIVE" in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. Although the four letters had been there all along, the importance of them hadn't registered immediately.
        "Live?" Marty said. "They don't send reporters out live unless the story's ongoing."
        "It is ongoing," Paige said. She was standing with her arms folded across her chest, frowning down at the television. "The lunatic is still out there somewhere."
        "I mean, like a robbery in progress or a hostage situation with a SWAT team waiting to storm the place. By TV standards, this is boring, no action, no one on scene to shove a microphone at, just an empty house for visuals. It's not the kind of story they use for a live spot, too expensive and no excitement."
        The broadcast had gone back to the studio. To his surprise, the anchorman wasn't one of the second-string newsreaders from a Los Angeles station, who would ordinarily have pulled duty on an early morning program, but a well-known network face.
        Astonished, Marty said, "This is national. Since when does a breaking-and-entry report rate national news?"
        "You were assaulted too," Paige said.
        "So what? These days, there's a worse crime than this every ten seconds somewhere in the country."
        "But you're a celebrity."
        "The hell I am."
        "You may not like it, but you are."
        "I'm not that much of a celebrity, not with only two paperback bestsellers. You know how hard it is to get on this program for one of their chat segments, as an invited guest?" He rapped a knuckle against the face of the anchorman on the screen. "Harder than getting an invitation to a state dinner at the White House! Even if I hired a publicist who'd sold his soul to the devil, he couldn't get me on this program, Paige. I'm just not big enough. I'm a nobody to them."
        "So… what're you saying?"
        He went to the window that provided a view of the parking lot, and parted the draperies. Pale sunlight. Steady traffic out on Pacific Coast Highway. The trees stirred lazily in the mildest of on-shore breezes.
        Nothing in the scene was threatening or unusual, yet it seemed ominous to him. He felt that he was looking out at a world that was no longer familiar, a world changed for the worse. The differences were indefinable, subjective rather than objective, perceptible to the spirit more than to the senses but nonetheless real. And the pace of that dark change was accelerating. Soon the view from this room or any other would be, to him, like something seen through the porthole of a spacecraft on a far alien planet which superficially resembled his own world but which was, below- its