One Door From Heaven

could recite its dialogue word for word. Occasionally Sinsemilla enjoyed the gorefest with him; admiration for this documentary had been the animating spirit behind her road-kill photography.
        After being compelled to watch a few minutes of Faces of Death, Leilani had struggled free of Sinsemilla's arms and thereafter had refused even to glance at it again. What fascinated the pseudofather and the hive queen only sickened Leilani. More than nausea, however, the video inspired such pity for the real dead and dying people shown on screen that after viewing but three or four minutes of it, she'd taken refuge in the water closet, muffling her sobs in her hands.
        Sometimes Preston called Faces of Death a profound intellectual stimulant. Sometimes he referred to it as avant-garde entertainment, insisting that he wasn't titillated by its content but was creatively intrigued by the high art with which it explored its grisly subject.
        In truth, even if you were only nine going on ten, you didn't have to be a prodigy to understand that this video did for the doom doctor exactly what the racy videos produced by the Playboy empire did for most men. You understood it, all right, but you didn't want to think about it often or deeply.
        The theme music quieted as Preston adjusted the volume. He liked it low, for he was more attuned to images than to cries of pain and anguish.
        Leilani waited.
        Ghost light under the door, pale spirits fluttering.
        She shuddered when at last she became convinced that this wasn't merely a trick to catch her unaware. Love-or what passed for love aboard the Fair Wind-was in full bloom.
        Boldly Leilani went into the galley, switched on the sink light that earlier Preston had switched off, and opened the cutlery drawer. After extracting the paring knife from inside her mattress, he hadn't returned it to the collection. Gone also were the butcher knife, the carving knife, the bread knife-in fact, all the knives. Gone.
        She opened the drawer that contained their flatware. Teaspoons, tablespoons, and serving spoons were arrayed as always they had been. The steak knives were gone. Though too dull to be effective weapons, the table knives had been removed, as well. The forks were missing.
        Drawer to drawer, door to door, around the small galley, no longer caring if Preston caught her in the search, Leilani sought something that she could use to defend herself.
        Oh, yes, of course, with a rasp or a file, as per a thousand prison movies, you could reshape the handle of an ordinary teaspoon until it acquired a killing point, until one edge gleamed as sharp as a knife. Maybe you could do the work secretly even in the confines of a motor home, and do it although your left hand was a stumpy little, twisty little, half-baked muffin lump. But you couldn't do it if you didn't have a rasp or a file.
        By the time she opened the last drawer, checked the final cabinet, and inspected the dishwasher, she knew that Preston had removed every object that might serve as a weapon. He had also purged the galley of every tool-equivalent to a rasp or file-that might be employed to transform an ordinary object into a lethal instrument.
        He was preparing for the end game.
        Maybe they would cross into Montana after visiting the alien-healed fruitcake in Nun's Lake. Or maybe Preston would forgo the satisfying symmetry of burying her with Luki, and would simply kill her in Idaho.
        After years in these close quarters, the galley was as familiar to her as any place on earth, and yet she felt as lost as she might have felt if she'd abruptly found herself in the depths of a primeval forest. She turned slowly in a circle, as though bewildered by a dark forbidding woods, seeking a promising path, finding none.
        For so long, she had been operating under the belief that she wouldn't be in serious jeopardy until her tenth birthday drew near, that she had time to plan an escape. Consequently, her mental file of survival schemes was thin, although not empty.
        Even before Leilani's appeal to the waitress at lunch, Preston had changed his timetable. The proof was in the missing knives, which he must have removed from the motor home during the night, before he had driven Leilani and Sinsemilla to the garage early this morning and had brought them aboard the Fair Wind.
        She wasn't ready to make a break for