Strangers

appliances. Beyond that was a serving pantry, then the dining room. The light from the kitchen did not reach that far, so he decided to risk turning on lights as he went.
        In the living room, he stood very still again, listening.
        Nothing. The silence was deep and heavy, as in a tomb.
        

        
        When Brendan Cronin entered the Blocks' kitchen after rising late and taking a long hot shower, he found little Marcie coloring moons and murmuring eerily to herself. He thought of how he had mended Emmeline Halbourg with his hands, and he wondered if he could cure Marcie's psychological obsession by the application of that same psychic power. But he dared not try. Not until he learned to control his wild talent, for he might do irreparable harm to the girl's mind.
        Jack and Jorja were finishing omelets and toast, and they greeted him warmly. Jorja wanted to make breakfast for Brendan, too, but he declined. He only wanted a cup of coffee, black and strong.
        As Jack ate, he examined four handguns that were lying on the table beside his plate. Two of them were Ernie's. Jack had brought the other two with him from the East. Neither Brendan nor anyone else referred to the firearms, for they knew their enemy might be listening right now. No point revealing the size of their arsenal.
        The guns made Brendan nervous. Maybe because he had a prescient feeling that the weapons would be used repeatedly before day's end.
        His characteristic optimism had left him, largely because he had not dreamed last night. He'd had his first uninterrupted sleep in weeks, but for him that was no improvement. Unlike the others, Brendan had been having a good dream every night, and it had given him hope. Now the dream was gone, and the loss made him edgy.
        "I thought it would be snowing by now," he said as he sat down at the table with a cup of coffee.
        "Soon," Jack said.
        The sky looked like a great slab of dark-gray granite.
        

        
        Ned and Sandy Sarver, serving as the second team of outriders, had driven into Elko to rendezvous with Jack, Jorja, and Brendan at the Arco Mini-Mart at four in the morning, then had cruised around town until seven-thirty, by which time some of those back at the Tranquility would have set out on their tasks for the day. They returned to the motel at eight o'clock, ate a quick breakfast, and went back to bed to get a few more hours of rest in order to cope with the busy day ahead.
        Ned woke after little more than two hours, but he did not get out of bed. He lay in the dimness of the motel room for a while, watching Sandy sleep. The love he felt for her was deep and smooth and flowing like a great river that could bear them both away to better places and times beyond all the worries of the world.
        Ned wished he was as good a talker as he was a fixer. Sometimes he worried that he had never been able to tell her exactly how he felt about her. But when he tried to put his sentiments into words, he either became tongue-tied or heard himself expressing his emotions in hopelessly inarticulate sentences and leaden images. It was good to be a fixer, with the talent to repair everything from broken toasters to broken cars to broken people. Yet sometimes, Ned would have traded all his mending skills for the ability to compose and speak one perfect sentence which would convey his deepest feelings for her.
        Now, watching her, he realized that she was no longer sleeping. "Playing possum?" he asked.
        She opened her eyes and smiled. "I was scared, the way you were watching me, that I was going to get eaten alive, so I played possum."
        "You look good enough to eat; that's for sure."
        She threw aside the covers and, naked, opened her arms to him. They fell at once into the familiar silken rhythms of love-making at which they had become so sensuously adept during the past year of her sexual awakening.
        In the afterglow, as they lay side by side, holding hands, Sandy said, "Oh, Ned, I'must be the happiest woman on earth. Since I met you down in Arizona all those years ago, since you took me under your wing, you've made me very happy, Ned. In fact, I'm so crazy-happy now that if God struck me dead this minute, I wouldn't complain."
        "Don't say that," he told her sharply. Rising up on one elbow, leaning over her, looking down at her, he said, "I don't like you saying-that.