The Darkest Evening of the Year

vacation.’ Which means new name, new look, and he’ll do it right.”
    “They got off easy.”
    “I’ll check the Expedition. Maybe they’re not dead on the floor. Maybe he just wounded them for us.”
    “I’m sick of this place.”
    “We’ll go to the desert.”
    “I hate the gulls and the damp.”
    “You’ll like the desert.”
    “Not with Piggy.”
    Her elegant fingers move across the blades on the table, but she seems unable to decide upon a favorite.
    He says, “You want to do her tonight?”
    She nods. “Tonight.”
    “How?”
    “Hard, the little freak. Real hard.”
    She leaves the room without a scalpel.

 
    Chapter
64
    D aylight had begun to fail; and the white mist silvered.
    After they had gone twenty yards north, staying pack-close in the fog, Amy and Brian followed Nickie downslope, sixty or eighty yards, out of the trees, onto open ground.
    At a distance stood a door in the fog, dimly defined by light in a room beyond.
    Out of pistol range, a woman came through the door, carrying something, turned west, and at once vanished in the murk.
    “Vanessa,” Brian whispered.
    As the sky tarnished and the silvering mist developed a darker patina, the automated-lighthouse program engaged. The lantern room high in the night brightened with a thousand watts of halogen glare. The rays were reflected by the prismatic rings of the Fresnel lens, amplified, concentrated, and beamed out into the Pacific.
    Apart of Amy was in the past, on another coast, where the sweep of such a light had been the sharp scythe of Death. And a vision of aftermath flashed through her mind, Nickie dead at her father’s hand.
    Her heart, so steady through so much, steady even through the killing of the shooter, slammed now, and her soaring blood pressure muffled her hearing until she stretched her jaw, cracked her ears.
    Brian said, “Wait,” but she ran toward the lighted door, which was already fading in a thicker current of fog.
    High overhead, the bright signal swept 360 degrees. It seemed to pulse as it passed out of each quadrant of its arc and into the next.
    The fog—an optical construct with a million lenses, a billion bevels, infinite prisms—stole a minute fraction of the beam and shattered it through the night. From the dark trough of each pulse the fog took shadows, which chased the phantasms of light, which in turn chased the shadows.
    She had never seen this phenomenon before and supposed it must be particular to this Fresnel lens, this landscape, and the unique nature of this fog.
    At the periphery of vision, figures leaped, flew, fell. They were shadows from the lantern room, the consequence of the arc pulse, not cast by anything at ground level, though something malevolent and real might be moving in their cover. They chased directly in front of her eyes, too, and frequently flew up from the ground, as if they were dark gulls.
    By the time she reached the building with the open door, the fast-waltzing dancers of shadow and light inspired dizziness that turned her in a half-circle with her last two steps. She found the wall with a soft thump.
    Nickie followed at her heels, Brian close behind, and the dog padded past her, along the wall to the doorway, into the light.
    Trusting the golden’s nose, Amy boldly followed, and found herself at the threshold of a garage. The place seemed deserted.
    “She might come back,” Brian whispered.
    “Then kill her.”
    Amy started west, in the direction the woman had gone, but Brian grabbed her arm. He wanted her to be less reckless, to keep in mind the danger of blundering into a murderous burst of gunfire.
    She didn’t want to waste time, but instead of pulling away from him, she turned, face close to his in the whirling harlequin parade, and whispered fiercely, “They’re killing Hope.”
    This was not a fear, but a presentiment, not merely the dread of failing another child, but a knowledge that came to her from wherever this new Nickie had come.
    Indeed, the dog was trotting west, receding into the fog, and now both Amy and Brian ran after her.
     

     
    Cautious in this treacherous weather, carrying an eight-battery flashlight with a five-inch lens, Harrow crosses the slippery rock formations to the oval yard, searching for the Expedition.
    He is accustomed to the disco dazzle that the great signal light generates in certain fog conditions. In fact, he is weary of it. He, too, is ready for the desert.
    The SUV hit the Montezuma pine, skinned