One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 70

Along the county road, lush meadows trembled in the wind, but no crop circles or elaborate designs formed in the grass as Preston passed.

The sky lowered steadily, as portentous as those in numerous films about alien contact, but no mother ship materialized out of the ominous clouds.

Preston’s quest for a close encounter would not end here in Idaho, as he had hoped. Indeed, he might spend the remaining years of his life traveling in search of that transcendent experience, seeking the affirmation that he believed ETs would give him.

He was patient. And in the meantime, he had useful work — which continued now with the Hand.

Aware that the clock was ticking off her last days, the Hand had begun to seek a way out of her trap. She had developed an unexpected bond with the Slut Queen and the ditzy aunt, had extracted the knife in her mattress only to find Tetsy’s penguin, and had then developed strategies to fight or evade Preston when he came for her.

He knew all this because he could read her journal.

The coded shorthand that she had invented for her writings was clever, especially for one so young. If she had been dealing with someone other than Preston Maddoc, her secrets would not have been plumbed.

Being a highly respected intellectual with friends and admirers in many academic disciplines, in several major universities, he had connected with a mathematician named Trevor Kingsley, who specialized in cryptography. More than a year ago, that codemaker— and breaker — had employed sophisticated encryption-analysis software to decipher the Hand’s journal.

Having been provided with a transcription of one full page from the journal, Trevor expected to get the job done in fifteen minutes, because that was the average time required to crack any simple code devised by anyone lacking significant education in various branches of higher mathematics; by comparison, more ingeniously composed systems of encryption required days, weeks, even months to penetrate. Instead of fifteen minutes, using his best software, Trevor required twenty-six, which impressed him; he wanted to know the codemaker’s identity.

Preston couldn’t understand what was so impressive about the code having resisted analysis for just an additional eleven minutes. He withheld the Hand’s name and made no mention of her relationship to him. He professed to have found the journal on a park bench and to have developed a keen curiosity about it because of its mysterious-looking contents.

Trevor also said that the text on the sample page was “amusing, acerbic but full of gentle humor.” Preston had read it several times, and although he was relieved to discover that nothing in it required him to paste patches on his original park-bench story, he hadn’t been able to find anything to smile about. In fact, using the translation bible that Trevor provided, Preston secretly studied the entire journal — a few pages every morning when Leilani showered, odd bits and pieces as other opportunities arose — and found not one amusing line, cover to cover. In the year since, continuing to sneak peeks at the girl’s self-important scribblings, he’d not been charmed into even a faint smile by any of her observations in subsequent entries. In fact, she’d revealed herself to be a disrespectful, mean-spirited, ignorant little smartass who was as ugly inside as out. Evidently, Trevor Kingsley had a degenerate sense of humor.

These past few days, as the journal entries revealed that the Hand was scheming to save herself, Preston made careful preparations to overcome her resistance with ease when he was ready to take her to a suitably secluded killing ground. He didn’t know when and in what circumstances he might need to overpower her, and while he hadn’t any concern that she could effectively resist him, lie didn’t want to give her a chance to scream and perhaps draw the attention of someone who would intervene on her behalf.

Since Friday, when they had driven east from California, he’d been carrying a folded, one-quart Hefty OneZip plastic bag in the left back pocket of his pants. The bag could be closed airtight by means of a small plastic slide-seal device built into it. Inside the OneZip was a washcloth saturated in a homemade anesthetic that he had produced by combining carefully measured quantities of ammonia and three other household chemicals. In his life’s work, he had used this concoction to assist in a few suicides. When inhaled, it caused instantaneous collapse into unconsciousness; sustained application resulted in respiratory failure and in the rapid destruction of the liver. He intended to use this anesthetic only to ensure against resistance and induce unconsciousness, because as a killing weapon, it was too merciful to excite him.

Nun’s Lake lay one mile ahead.