The Husband

eyes.
    "They pretended they didn't know what happened to John Knox, but at least one of them had to know, all right, and probably both."
    In a room nearby are two dead men. She didn't hear gunfire. Maybe he slit their throats.
    She can picture his pale hairless hands wielding a straight razor with the grace of a magician rolling coins across his knuckles.
    Holly has grown accustomed to the manacle on her ankle, to the chain that connects her to a ringbolt in the floor. Suddenly she is again acutely aware that she is not only imprisoned in a room with no windows but also is limited to the portion of the room that the chain permits her to reach.
    He says, "I would have been next, and they would have done a two-way split."
    Five people had planned her kidnapping. Only one remains.
    If he touches her, there is no one to respond to her scream. They are alone together.
    "What happens now?" she asks, and at once wishes that she hadn't.
    "I'll speak to your husband at noon, as scheduled. Anson will have fronted him the money. Then it's up to you."
    She parses his third sentence, but it's a dry lemon from which she can't squeeze any juice. "What do you mean?"
    Instead of answering her question, he says, "As part of a church festival, a small carnival comes to Penasco, New Mexico, in August."
    She has the crazy feeling that if she snatches off his knitted ski mask, there will be no features to his face other than the beryl-blue eyes and the mouth with yellow teeth and sore lips. No eyebrows, no nose, no ears, the skin as smooth and featureless as white vinyl.
    "Just a Ferris wheel and a few other rides, a few games—and last year a fortuneteller."
    His hands swoop up to describe the shape of the Ferris wheel but then come to roost on his thighs.
    "The fortuneteller calls herself Madame Tiresias, but of course that is not her real name."
    Holly is squeezing the medallion so tightly in one hand that her knuckles ache and the raised image of the saint is no doubt impressed in her palm.
    "Madame Tiresias is a fraud, but the funny thing is, she has powers of which she's unaware."
    He pauses between each statement as if what he has said is so profound that he wants her to have time to absorb it.
    "She would not have to be a fraud if she could recognize what she really is, and I intend to show her this year."
    Speaking without a tremor in her voice requires self-control, but Holly brings him back to the question he would not answer: "What did you mean—then it will be up to me?"
    When he smiles, part of his mouth disappears from the horizontal slit in the mask. This makes his smile seem sly and knowing, as if no one's secrets are safe from him.
    "You know what I mean," he says. "You're not Madame Tiresias. You have full knowledge of yourself."
    She senses that if she denies his assertion, she will test his patience and perhaps make him angry. His soft voice and his gentle manner are sheep's clothing, and Holly does not want to poke the wolf beneath the fleece.
    "You've given me so much to think about," she says.
    "I am aware of that. You've been living behind a curtain, and now you know there's not just a window under it, but a whole new world beyond."
    Afraid that one wrong word will shatter the spell that the killer has cast over himself, Holly says only, "Yes."
    He rises to his feet. "You have some hours yet to decide. Do you need anything?"
    A shotgun, she thinks, but she says, "No."
    "I know what your decision will be, but you need to reach it on your own. Have you ever been to Guadalupita, New Mexico?"
    "No."
    His smile curves up behind the slit in the black mask. "You will go there, and you will be amazed."
    He follows his flashlight, leaving her alone in darkness.
    Gradually Holly realizes that the wind is still blowing hard. From the moment he'd told her that he killed the other kidnappers, the wind had vanished from her consciousness.
    For a while she has heard only his voice. His sinuous, insidious voice.
    She has not even heard her heart, but she hears it now and feels it, too, shaking the cage of ribs against which it pounds.
    The baby, tiny ball of cells, is now bathed in the fight-or-flight chemicals that her brain has ordered released into her blood. Maybe that isn't so bad. Maybe it's even good. Maybe being marinated in that flood will make Baby Rafferty, him or her, tougher than would otherwise be the case.
    This is a world that increasingly requires toughness of good people.
    With the Saint Christopher medal,