Phantoms

car, half a block away, was a pearl-white Lynx. On the pavement behind it were black skid marks. The Lynx was angled across the street, blocking it. The front end was punched into the side of a yellow Chevy van. There wasn’t a lot of damage because the Lynx had almost braked to a stop before hitting the parked vehicle.
    The driver was a middle-aged man with a bushy mustache. He was wearing cut-off jeans and a Dodgers T-shirt. Jenny knew him, too. Marty Sussman. He had been Snowfield’s city manager for the past six years. Affable, earnest Marty Sussman. Dead. Again, the cause of death was clearly not related to the collision.
    The doors of the Lynx were locked. The windows were rolled up tight, just as they had been on the Cadillac.
    “Looks like they both were trying to escape from something,” Jenny said.
    “Maybe,” Tal said. “Or they might just have been out for a drive or going somewhere on an errand when the attack came. If they were trying to escape, something sure stopped them cold, forced them right off the street.”
    “Sunday was a warm day. Warm but not too warm,” Bryce said. “Not hot enough to ride around with the windows closed and the air conditioner on. It was the kind of day when most people keep the windows down, taking advantage of the fresh air. So it looks to me as if, after they were forced to stop, they put up the windows and locked themselves in, trying to keep something out.”
    “But it got them anyway,” Jenny said.
    It.
     
    Ned and Sue Marie Bischoff owned a lovely Tudor-style home set on a double lot, nestled among huge pine trees. They lived there with their two boys. Eight-year-old Lee Bischoff could already play the piano surprisingly well, in spite of the smallness of his hands, and once told Jenny he was going to be the next Stevie Wonder “only not blind.” Six-year-old Terry looked exactly like a black-skinned Dennis the Menace, but he had a sweet temper.
    Ned was a successful artist. His oil paintings sold for as much as six and seven thousand dollars, and his limited edition prints went for four or five hundred dollars apiece.
    He was a patient of Jenny’s. Although he was only thirty-two and was already a success in life, she had treated him for an ulcer.
    The ulcer wouldn’t be bothering him any more. He was in his studio, lying on the floor in front of an easel, dead.
    Sue Marie was in the kitchen. Like Hilda Beck, Jenny’s housekeeper, and like many other people all over town, Sue Marie had died while preparing dinner. She had been a pretty woman. Not any more.
    They found the two boys in one of the bedrooms.
    It was a wonderful room for kids, large and airy, with bunk beds. There were built-in bookshelves full of children’s books. On the walls were paintings that Ned had done just for his kids, whimsical fantasy scenes quite unlike the pieces for which he was well known: a pig in a tuxedo, dancing with a cow in an evening gown; the interior of a spaceship command chamber, where all the astronauts were toads; an eerie yet charming scene of a school playground at night, bathed in the light of a full moon, no kids around, but with a huge and monstrous-looking werewolf having a grand and giddy time on a set of swings.
    The boys were in one corner, beyond an array of overturned Tonka Toys. The younger boy, Terry, was behind Lee, who seemed to have made a valiant effort to protect his smaller brother. The boys were staring out into the room, eyes bulging, their dead gazes still fixed upon whatever had descended upon them yesterday. Lee’s muscles had locked, so that his thin arms were in the same position now as they had been in the last seconds of his life: raised in front of him, shielding him, palms spread, as if warding off blows.
    Bryce knelt in front of the kids. He put one trembling hand against Lee’s face, as if unwilling to believe that the child was actually dead.
    Jenny knelt beside him.
    “Those are the Bischoffs’ two boys,” she said, unable to keep her voice from breaking. “So now the whole family’s accounted for.”
    Tears were streaming down Bryce’s face.
    Jenny tried to remember how old his own son was. Seven or eight? About the same age as Lee Bischoff. Little Timmy Hammond was lying in the hospital in Santa Mira this very minute, comatose, just as he had been for the past year. He was pretty much a vegetable. Yes, but even that was better than this. Anything was better than this .
    Eventually, Bryce’s tears dried up. There