Mr. Murder

mouth.
        They hugged but briefly.
        Carrying the Mossberg, she went through the porch door, down the steps, across the shallow yard, past the BMW, and into the woods without looking back, worried that he would become aware of the depth of her fear and insist on dragging her back into the cabin.
        Under the Quonset curve of sheltering evergreen boughs, the wind sounded hollow and distant except when she passed beneath a couple of flue-like openings that soared all the way up to the blind sky.
        Pummeling drafts shrieked down those passages, as cold as ectoplasm and as shrill as banshees.
        Although the property sloped, the ground beneath the trees was easy to traverse. Underbrush was sparse due to a lack of direct sun light.
        Many trees were so old that the lowest branches were above her head, and the view between the thick trunks was unobstructed all the way out to the county road.
        The soil was stony. Tables and formations of granite broke the surface here and there, all ancient and smooth.
        The formation she had pointed out to Marty was halfway between the cabin and the county road, only twenty feet upslope from the driveway.
        It resembled a crescent of teeth, blunt molars two to three feet high, like the fossilized dental structure of a gentle herbivorous dinosaur much larger than any ever before suspected or imagined.
        Approaching the granite outcropping, in which shadows as dark as condensed pine tar pooled behind the "molars," Paige suddenly had the feeling that the look-alike was already there, watching the cabin from that hiding place. Ten feet from her destination, she halted, skidding slightly on the carpet of loose pine needles.
        If he was actually there, he would have seen her coming and could have killed her any time he wished. The fact that she was still alive argued against his presence. Nevertheless, as she tried to get moving again, she felt as if she had plunged to the bottom of a deep ocean trench and was struggling to make progress against the resisting mass of an entire sea.
        Heart pounding, she circled the crescent formation and slipped into its shadowed convexity from behind. The look-alike wasn't waiting for her.
        She stretched out on her stomach. In her dark-blue ski jacket with the hood covering her blond hair, she knew that she was as good as invisible among the shadows and against the dark stone.
        Through gaps in the stone, she could monitor the entire length of the driveway without raising her head high enough to be seen.
        Beyond the shelter of the trees, the storm swiftly escalated into a full-scale blizzard. The volume of snow coming down into the driveway between flanking stands of trees was so great that it almost seemed as if she was looking into the foaming face of a waterfall.
        Her ski jacket kept her upper body warm, but her jeans couldn't ward off the penetrating cold of the stone on which she lay. As body heat leached away, her hip and knee joints began to ache. She wished she were wearing insulated ski pants, and she realized she should have at least brought a blanket to put between herself and the granite.
        Under the influence of the building gale, the highest branches of the firs and pines creaked like scores of doors easing open on rusty hinges.
        Not even the muffling boughs of the evergreens could soften the rising voice of the wind.
        The gradually dimming light of the day's last hour was the steely shade of ice on a winter pond.
        Every sight and sound was cold and seemed to exacerbate the chill that pressed into her from the granite. She began to worry about how long she could hold out before she would need to return to the cabin to get warm.
        Then a deep-blue Jeep station wagon came uphill on the county road and made a hard, sharp turn into the driveway. It looked like the Jeep that belonged to Marty's parents.
        Rheostat at seven degrees. South from Mammoth Lakes, through billowing curtains of snow, through whirling snowdevils, through torrents and lashes and blasts and cataracts and airborne walls of snow, along a highway barely defined beneath the deepening mantle, passing slow-moving traffic at high speed, flashing his headlights to encourage obstructionists to pull over and let him go by, even passing a county snowplow and a cinder-spreading truck crowned with yellow and red emergency beacons that