One Door From Heaven

was unnerved that he knew the Bible well enough to recall such an apt but obscure passage. This erudition suggested that he might be an adversary even more clever and resourceful than she'd expected. Also, clearly, she impressed him as being such a negligible threat that he believed he could mock her with impunity.
        Flushed with humiliation, Micky went to the dresser, confirming that Maddoc had turned back the concealing yellow sweater and had found the two bottles of lemon-flavored vodka.
        She removed the bottles from the drawer. One was full, the seal unbroken. The sight of it gave her a sense of power, of control; to an impoverished and improvident spirit, an untapped bottle seemed to be a bottomless fortune, but it was really fortune's ruin. After her binge the previous night, little remained in the second container.
        In the kitchen, Micky switched on the light above the sink and emptied both bottles into the drain. The fumes-not the lemony aroma, but the quasi-aphrodisiacal scent of alcohol-enflamed more than one appetite: for drink, for oblivion, for self-destruction.
        After she dropped the two empties in the trash can, her hands shook uncontrollably. They were damp, too, with vodka.
        She breathed the evaporating spirits rising from her skin, and then pressed her cool hands to her burning face.
        Into her mind came an image of the brandy that Aunt Gen kept in a kitchen cupboard. Following the image came the taste, as real as if she'd taken a sip from a full snifter.
        "No."
        She understood too well that the brandy wasn't what she wanted, nor the vodka; what she really sought was an excuse to fail Leilani, a reason to turn inward, to retreat beyond the familiar drawbridge, up to the ramparts, behind the battlements of her emotional fortress, where her damaged heart wouldn't be at risk of further wounds, where she could live once more and forever in the comparatively comfortable suffering of isolation. Brandy would give her that excuse and spare her the pain of caring.
        When she turned away from the cupboard where the brandy waited, leaving the door unopened, she went to the refrigerator, hoping to satisfy her thirst with a Coca-Cola. But this was less a thirst than a hunger, a ravenous clawing in the gut, so she plucked a cookie from the ceramic bear whose head was a lid and whose plump body was a jar. On further consideration, she carried the bear and all its contents to the table.
        Sitting down to Coke and cookies, feeling like an eight-year-old girl, confused and afraid as she had so often been back then, seeking solace from the sugar demon, the first unsettling thing she noticed was the plate beside the candleholders. The gift plate that she had piled with cookies and taken next door earlier in the evening. Mad-doc had returned it empty, washed.
        Arrogance again. If Micky hadn't awakened in time to see him leave, she might have guessed who had searched her dresser drawers and turned out the contents of her purse, but she couldn't have been certain that her guess was correct. By leaving the plate, Maddoc had made it clear that he wanted her to know who the intruder had been.
        This was a challenge and an act of intimidation.
        More disturbing than the plate returned was the penguin taken. The two-inch figurine, from the collection of a dead woman, had been standing on the kitchen table, among the small colored glasses that held half-melted candles. Maddoc must have seen it when he put down the plate.
        Whatever suspicions he'd harbored about Leilani's relationships with Micky and with Aunt Gen had been confirmed and had surely grown darker when he'd discovered the penguin.
        The dropping sensation in the stomach, the tightening in the chest, the lightheadedness familiar from the sudden speedy plunge of a roller coaster afflicted her now, as she sat dead still on the kitchen chair.

Chapter 47
        
        ALTHOUGH POLLY wasn't a Pollyanna, she liked most people she met, made friends easily, and seldom made enemies, but when the service-station attendant came up to her, grinning like a jack-in-the-box jester with a ticklish spring up its butt, saying, "Hi, my name's Earl Bockman and my wife's Maureen, we own this place, been here twenty years," she made an immediate judgment that he wasn't going to be one of the people she liked.
        Tall, pleasant in appearance, his breath smelling of