Phantoms

cats. Most likely, it wasn’t anything at all. We’re keyed up. Our nerves are wound tight.” She sighed. “Let’s go see if the rear door of the bakery is open. That’s what we came back here to check out—remember?”
    They headed toward the rear of Lieberman’s Bakery, but they glanced repeatedly behind them, at the mouth of the covered passage.
    The service door at the bakery was unlocked, and there was light and warmth beyond it. Jenny and Lisa stepped into a long, narrow storage room.
    The inner door led from the storage room to the huge kitchen, which smelled pleasantly of cinnamon, flour, black walnuts, and orange extract. Jenny inhaled deeply. The appetizing fragrances that wafted through the kitchen were so homey, so natural, so pungently and soothingly reminiscent of normal times and normal places that she felt some of her tension fading.
    The bakery was well-equipped with double sinks, a walk-in refrigerator, several ovens, several immense white enamel storage cabinets, a dough-kneading machine, and a large array of other appliances. The middle of the room was occupied by a long, wide counter, the primary work area; one end of it had a shiny stainless-steel top, and the other end had a butcher’s-block surface. The stainless-steel portion—which was nearest the store-room door, where Jenny and Lisa had entered—was stacked high with pots, cupcake and cookie trays, baking racks, bundt pans, regular cake pans, and pie tins, all clean and bright. The entire kitchen gleamed.
    “Nobody’s here,” Lisa said.
    “Looks that way,” Jenny said, her spirits rising as she walked farther into the room.
    If the Santini family had escaped, and if Jakob and Aida had been spared, perhaps most of the town wasn’t dead. Perhaps—
    Oh, God.
    On the other side of the piled cookware, in the middle of the butcher’s-block counter, lay a large disk of pie dough. A wooden rolling pin rested on the dough. Two hands gripped the ends of the rolling pin. Two severed, human hands.
    Lisa backed up against a metal cabinet with such force that the stuff inside rattled noisily. “What the hell is going on? What the hell ?”
    Drawn by morbid fascination and by an urgent need to understand what was happening here, Jenny moved closer to the counter and stared down at the disembodied hands, regarding them with equal measures of disgust and disbelief—and with fear as sharp as razor blades. The hands were not bruised or swollen; they were pretty much flesh-colored, though gray-pale. Blood—the first blood she had seen so far—trailed wetly from the raggedly torn wrists and glistened in streaks and drops, midst a fine film of flour dust. The hands were strong; more precisely—they had once been strong. Blunt fingers. Large knuckles. Unquestionably a man’s hands, with white hair curled crisply on the backs of them. Jakob Liebermann’s hands.
    “Jenny!”
    Jenny looked up, startled.
    Lisa’s arm was raised, extended; she was pointing across the kitchen.
    Beyond the butcher’s-block counter, set in the long wall on the far side of the room, were three ovens. One of them was huge, with a pair of solid, over-and-under, stainless-steel doors. The other two ovens were smaller than the first, though still larger than the conventional models used in most homes; there was one door in each of these two, and each door had a glass portal in the center of it. None of the ovens was turned on at the moment, which was fortunate, for if the smaller ones had been in operation, the kitchen would have been filled with a sickening stench.
    Each one contained a severed head.
    Jesus.
    Ghastly, dead faces gazed out into the room, noses pressed to the inside of the oven glass.
    Jakob Liebermann. White hair spattered with blood. One eye half shut, the other glaring. Lips pressed together in a grimace of pain.
    Aida Liebermann. Both eyes open. Mouth gaping as if her jaws had come unhinged.
    For a moment Jenny couldn’t believe the heads were real. Too much. Too shocking. She thought of expensive, lifelike Halloween masks peering out of the cellophane windows in costume boxes, and she thought of the grisly novelties sold in joke shops—those wax heads with nylon hair and glass eyes, those gruesome things that young boys sometimes found wildly amusing (and surely that’s what these were)—and, crazily, she thought of a line from a TV commercial for cake mixes— Nothin’ says lovin’ like somethin’ from the oven!
    Her heart