The Eyes of Darkness

Chapter One

At six minutes past midnight, Tuesday morning, on the way home from a late rehearsal of her new stage show, Tina Evans saw her son, Danny, in a stranger’s car. But Danny had been dead more than a year.

Two blocks from her house, intending to buy a quart of milk and a loaf of whole-wheat bread, Tina stopped at a twenty-four-hour market and parked in the dry yellow drizzle of a sodium-vapor light, beside a gleaming, cream-colored Chevrolet station wagon. The boy was in the front passenger seat of the wagon, waiting for someone in the store. Tina could see only the side of his face, but she gasped in painful recognition.

Danny.

The boy was about twelve, Danny’s age. He had thick dark hair like Danny’s, a nose that resembled Danny’s, and a rather delicate jawline like Danny’s too.

She whispered her son’s name, as if she would frighten off this beloved apparition if she spoke any louder.

Unaware that she was staring at him, the boy put one hand to his mouth and bit gently on his bent thumb knuckle, which Danny had begun to do a year or so before he died. Without success, Tina had tried to break him of that bad habit.

Now, as she watched this boy, his resemblance to Danny seemed to be more than mere coincidence. Suddenly Tina’s mouth went dry and sour, and her heart thudded. She still had not adjusted to the loss of her only child, because she’d never wanted — or tried — to adjust to it. Seizing on this boy’s resemblance to her Danny, she was too easily able to fantasize that there had been no loss in the first place.

Maybe… maybe this boy actually was Danny. Why not? The more that she considered it, the less crazy it seemed. After all, she’d never seen Danny’s corpse. The police and the morticians had advised her that Danny was so badly torn up, so horribly mangled, that she was better off not looking at him. Sickened, grief-stricken, she had taken their advice, and Danny’s funeral had been a closed-coffin service. But perhaps they’d been mistaken when they identified the body. Maybe Danny hadn’t been killed in the accident, after all. Maybe he’d only suffered a mild head injury, just severe enough to give him… amnesia. Yes. Amnesia. Perhaps he had wandered away from the wrecked bus and had been found miles from the scene of the accident, without identification, unable to tell anyone who he was or where he came from. That was possible, wasn’t it? She had seen similar stories in the movies. Sure. Amnesia. And if that were the case, then he might have ended up in a foster home, in a new life. And now here he was sitting in the cream-colored Chevrolet wagon, brought to her by fate and by—

The boy became conscious of her gaze and turned toward her. She held her breath as his face came slowly around. As they stared at each other through two windows and through the strange sulphurous light, she had the feeling that they were making contact across an immense gulf of space and time and destiny. But then, inevitably, her fantasy burst, for he wasn’t Danny.

Pulling her gaze away from his, she studied her hands, which were gripping the steering wheel so fiercely that they ached.

“Damn.”

She was angry with herself. She thought of herself as a tough, competent, levelheaded woman who was able to deal with anything life threw at her, and she was disturbed by her continuing inability to accept Danny’s death.

After the initial shock, after the funeral, she had begun to cope with the trauma. Gradually, day by day, week by week, she had put Danny behind her, with sorrow, with guilt, with tears and much bitterness, but also with firmness and determination. She had taken several steps up in her career during the past year, and she had relied on hard work as a sort of morphine, using it to dull her pain until the wound fully healed.

But then, a few weeks ago, she had begun to slip back into the dreadful condition in which she’d wallowed immediately after she’d received news of the accident. Her denial was as resolute as it was irrational. Again, she was possessed by the haunting feeling that her child was alive. Time should have put even more distance between her and the anguish, but instead the passing days were bringing her around full circle in her grief. This boy in the station wagon was not the first that she had imagined was Danny; in recent weeks, she had seen her lost son in other cars, in schoolyards past which she had been driving, on public streets, in a movie theater.

Also, she’d recently been plagued by a repeating dream in which Danny was alive. Each time, for a few hours after she woke, she could not face reality. She half convinced herself that the dream was a premonition of Danny’s eventual return to her, that somehow he had survived and would be coming back into her arms one day soon.

This was a warm and wonderful fantasy, but she could not sustain it for long. Though she always resisted the grim truth, it gradually exerted itself every time, and she was repeatedly brought down hard, forced to accept that the dream was not a premonition. Nevertheless, she knew that when she had the dream again, she would find new hope in it as she had so many times before.

And that was not good.

Sick, she berated herself.

She glanced at the station wagon and saw that the boy was still staring at her. She glared at her tightly clenched hands again and found the strength to break her grip on the steering wheel.

Grief could drive a person crazy. She’d heard that said, and she believed it. But she wasn’t going to allow such a thing to happen to her. She would be sufficiently tough on herself to stay in touch with reality — as unpleasant as reality might be. She couldn’t allow herself to hope.

She had loved Danny with all her heart, but he was gone. Torn and crushed in a bus accident with fourteen other little boys, just one victim of a larger tragedy. Battered beyond recognition. Dead.

Cold.

Decaying.

In a coffin.

Under the ground.

Forever.

Her lower lip trembled. She wanted to cry, needed to cry, but she didn’t.

The boy in the Chevy had lost interest in her. He was staring at the front of the grocery store again, waiting.

Tina got out of her Honda. The night was pleasantly cool and desert-dry. She took a deep breath and went into the market, where the air was so cold that it pierced her bones, and where the harsh fluorescent lighting was too bright and too bleak to encourage fantasies.

She bought a quart of nonfat milk and a loaf of whole-wheat bread that was cut thin for dieters, so each serving contained only half the calories of an ordinary slice of bread. She wasn’t a dancer anymore; now she worked behind the curtain, in the production end of the show, but she still felt physically and psychologically best when she weighed no more than she had weighed when she’d been a performer.

Five minutes later she was home. Hers was a modest ranch house in a quiet neighborhood. The olive trees and lacy melaleucas stirred lazily in a faint Mojave breeze.

In the kitchen, she toasted two pieces of bread. She spread a thin skin of peanut butter on them, poured a glass of nonfat milk, and sat at the table.

Peanut-butter toast had been one of Danny’s favorite foods, even when he was a toddler and was especially picky about what he would eat. When he was very young, he had called it “neenut putter.”

Closing her eyes now, chewing the toast, Tina could still see him — three years old, peanut butter smeared all over his lips and chin — as he grinned and said, More neenut putter toast, please.

She opened her eyes with a start because her mental image of him was too vivid, less like a memory than like a vision. Right now she didn’t want to remember so clearly.

But it was too late. Her heart knotted in her chest, and her lower lip began to quiver again, and she put her head down on the table. She wept.

That night Tina dreamed that Danny was alive again. Somehow. Somewhere. Alive. And he needed her.

In the dream, Danny was standing at the edge of a bottomless gorge, and Tina was on the far side, opposite him, looking across the immense gulf. Danny was calling her name. He was lonely and afraid. She was miserable because she couldn’t think of a way to reach him. Meanwhile, the sky grew darker by the second; massive storm clouds, like the clenched fists of celestial giants, squeezed the last light out of the day. Danny’s cries and her response became increasingly shrill and desperate, for they knew that they must reach each other before nightfall or be lost forever; in the oncoming night, something waited for Danny, something fearsome that would seize him if he was alone after dark. Suddenly the sky was shattered by lightning, then by a hard clap of thunder, and the night imploded into a deeper darkness, into infinite and perfect blackness.

Tina Evans sat straight up in bed, certain that she had heard a noise in the house. It hadn’t been merely the thunder from the dream. The sound she’d heard had come as she was waking, a real noise, not an imagined one.

She listened intently, prepared to throw off the covers and slip out of bed. Silence reigned.

Gradually doubt crept over her. She had been jumpy lately. This wasn’t the first night she’d been wrongly convinced that an intruder was prowling the house. On four or five occasions during the past two weeks, she had taken the pistol from the nightstand and searched the place, room by room, but she hadn’t found anyone. Recently she’d been under a lot of pressure, both personally and professionally. Maybe what she’d heard tonight had been the thunder from the dream.

She remained on guard for a few minutes, but the night was so peaceful that at last she had to admit she was alone. As her heartbeat slowed, she eased back onto her pillow.

At times like this she wished that she and Michael were still together. She closed her eyes and imagined herself lying beside him, reaching for him in the dark, touching, touching, moving against him, into the shelter of his arms. He would comfort and reassure her, and in time she would sleep again.

Of course, if she and Michael were in bed right this minute, it wouldn’t be like that at all. They wouldn’t make love. They would argue. He’d resist her affection, turn her away by picking a fight. He would begin the battle over a triviality and goad her until the bickering escalated into marital warfare. That was how it had been during the last months of their life together. He had been seething with hostility, always seeking an excuse to vent his anger on her.

Because Tina had loved Michael to the end, she’d been hurt and saddened by the dissolution of their relationship. Admittedly, she had also been relieved when it was finally over.

She had lost her child and her husband in the same year, the man first, and then the boy, the son to the grave and the husband to the winds of change. During the twelve years of their marriage, Tina had become a different and more complex person than she’d been on their wedding day, but Michael hadn’t changed at all — and didn’t like the woman that she had become. They began as lovers, sharing every detail of their daily lives — triumphs and failures, joys and frustrations — but by the time the divorce was final, they were strangers. Although Michael was still living in town, less than a mile from her, he was, in some respects, as far away and as unreachable as Danny.

She sighed with resignation and opened her eyes.

She wasn’t sleepy now, but she knew she had to get more rest. She would need to be fresh and alert in the morning.

Tomorrow was one of the most important days of her life: December 30. In other years that date had meant nothing special. But for better or worse, this December 30 was the hinge upon which her entire future would swing.

For fifteen years, ever since she turned eighteen, two years before she married Michael, Tina Evans had lived and worked in Las Vegas. She began her career as a dancer — not a showgirl but an actual dancer — in the Lido de Paris, a gigantic stage show at the Stardust Hotel. The Lido was one of those incredibly lavish productions that could be seen nowhere in the world but Vegas, for it was only in Las Vegas that a multimillion-dollar show could be staged year after year with little concern for profit; such vast sums were spent on the elaborate sets and costumes, and on the enormous cast and crew, that the hotel was usually happy if the production merely broke even from ticket and drink sales. After all, as fantastic as it was, the show was only a come-on, a draw, with the sole purpose of putting a few thousand people into the hotel every night. Going to and from the showroom, the crowd had to pass all the craps tables and blackjack tables and roulette wheels and glittering ranks of slot machines, and that was where the profit was made. Tina enjoyed dancing in the Lido, and she stayed there for two and a half years, until she learned that she was pregnant. She took time off to carry and give birth to Danny, then to spend uninterrupted days with him during his first few months of life. When Danny was six months old, Tina went into training to get back in shape, and after three arduous months of exercise, she won a place in the chorus line of a new Vegas spectacle. She managed to be both a fine dancer and a good mother, although that was not always easy; she loved Danny, and she enjoyed her work and she thrived on double duty.

Five years ago, however, on her twenty-eighth birthday, she began to realize that she had, if she was lucky, ten years left as a show dancer, and she decided to establish herself in the business in another capacity, to avoid being washed up at thirty-eight. She landed a position as choreographer for a two-bit lounge revue, a dismally cheap imitation of the multimillion-dollar Lido, and eventually she took over the costumer’s job as well. From that she moved up through a series of similar positions in larger lounges, then in small showrooms that seated four or five hundred in second-rate hotels with limited show budgets. In time she directed a revue, then directed and produced another. She was steadily becoming a respected name in the closely knit Vegas entertainment world, and she believed that she was on the verge of great success.

Almost a year ago, shortly after Danny had died, Tina had been offered a directing and co-producing job on a huge ten-million-dollar extravaganza to be staged in the two-thousand-seat main showroom of the Golden Pyramid, one of the largest and plushest hotels on the Strip. At first it had seemed terribly wrong that such a wonderful opportunity should come her way before she’d even had time to mourn her boy, as if the Fates were so shallow and insensitive as to think that they could balance the scales and offset Danny’s death merely by presenting her with a chance at her dream job. Although she was bitter and depressed, although — or maybe because — she felt utterly empty and useless, she took the job.

The new show was titled Magyck! because the variety acts between the big dance numbers were all magicians and because the production numbers themselves featured elaborate special effects and were built around supernatural themes. The tricky spelling of the title was not Tina’s idea, but most of the rest of the program was her creation, and she remained pleased with what she had wrought. Exhausted too. This year had passed in a blur of twelve- and fourteen-hour days, with no vacations and rarely a weekend off.

Nevertheless, even as preoccupied with Magyck! as she was, she had adjusted to Danny’s death only with great difficulty. A month ago, for the first time, she’d thought that at last she had begun to overcome her grief. She was able to think about the boy without crying, to visit his grave without being overcome by grief. All things considered, she felt reasonably good, even cheerful to a degree. She would never forget him, that sweet child who had been such a large part of her, but she would no longer have to live her life around the gaping hole that he had left in it. The wound was achingly tender but healed.

That’s what she had thought a month ago. For a week or two she had continued to make progress toward acceptance. Then the new dreams began, and they were far worse than the dream that she’d had immediately after Danny had been killed.

Perhaps her anxiety about the public’s reaction to Magyck! was causing her to recall the greater anxiety she had felt about Danny. In less than seventeen hours — at 8:00 P.M., December 30—the Golden Pyramid Hotel would present a special, invitational, VIP premiere of Magyck!, and the following night, New Year’s Eve, the show would open to the general public. If audience reaction was as strong and as positive as Tina hoped, her financial future was assured, for her contract gave her two and one-half percent of the gross receipts, minus liquor sales, after the first five million. If Magyck! was a hit and packed the showroom for four or five years, as sometimes happened with successful Vegas shows, she’d be a multimillionaire by the end of the run. Of course, if the production was a flop, if it failed to please the audience, she might be back working the small lounges again, on her way down. Show business, in any form, was a merciless enterprise.

She had good reason to be suffering from anxiety attacks. Her obsessive fear of intruders in the house, her disquieting dreams about Danny, her renewed grief — all of those things might grow from her concern about Magyck! If that were the case, then those symptoms would disappear as soon as the fate of the show was evident. She needed only to ride out the next few days, and in the relative calm that would follow, she might be able to get on with healing herself.

In the meantime she absolutely had to get some sleep. At ten o’clock in the morning, she was scheduled to meet with two tour-booking agents who were considering reserving eight thousand tickets to Magyck! during the first three months of its run. Then at one o’clock the entire cast and the crew would assemble for the final dress rehearsal.

She fluffed her pillows, rearranged the covers, and tugged at the short nightgown in which she slept. She tried to relax by closing her eyes and envisioning a gentle night tide lapping at a silvery beach.

Thump!

She sat straight up in bed.

Something had fallen over in another part of the house. It must have been a large object because, though muffled by the intervening walls, the sound was loud enough to rouse her.

Whatever it had been… it hadn’t simply fallen. It had been knocked over. Heavy objects didn’t just fall of their own accord in deserted rooms.

She cocked her head, listening closely. Another and softer sound followed the first. It didn’t last long enough for Tina to identify the source, but there was a stealthiness about it. This time she hadn’t been imagining a threat. Someone actually was in the house.

As she sat up in bed, she switched on the lamp. She pulled open the nightstand drawer. The pistol was loaded. She flicked off the two safety catches.

For a while she listened.

In the brittle silence of the desert night, she imagined that she could sense an intruder listening too, listening for her.

She got out of bed and stepped into her slippers. Holding the gun in her right hand, she went quietly to the bedroom door.

She considered calling the police, but she was afraid of making a fool of herself. What if they came, lights flashing and sirens screaming — and found no one? If she had summoned the police every time that she imagined hearing a prowler in the house during the past two weeks, they would have decided long ago that she was scramble-brained. She was proud, unable to bear the thought of appearing to be hysterical to a couple of macho cops who would grin at her and, later over doughnuts and coffee, make jokes about her. She would search the house herself, alone.

Pointing the pistol at the ceiling, she jacked a bullet into the chamber.

Taking a deep breath, she unlocked the bedroom door and eased into the hall.

Chapter Two

Tina searched the entire house, except for Danny’s old room, but she didn’t find an intruder. She almost would have preferred to discover someone lurking in the kitchen or crouching in a closet rather than be forced to look, at last, in that final space where sadness seemed to dwell like a tenant. Now she had no choice.

A little more than a year before he had died, Danny had begun sleeping at the opposite end of the small house from the master bedroom, in what had once been the den. Not long after his tenth birthday, the boy had asked for more space and privacy than was provided by his original, tiny quarters. Michael and Tina had helped him move his belongings to the den, then had shifted the couch, armchair, coffee table, and television from the den into the quarters the boy had previously occupied.

At the time, Tina was certain that Danny was aware of the nightly arguments she and Michael were having in their own bedroom, which was next to his, and that he wanted to move into the den so he wouldn’t be able to hear them bickering. She and Michael hadn’t yet begun to raise their voices to each other; their disagreements had been conducted in normal tones, sometimes even in whispers, yet Danny probably had heard enough to know they were having problems.

She had been sorry that he’d had to know, but she hadn’t said a word to him; she’d offered no explanations, no reassurances. For one thing, she hadn’t known what she could say. She certainly couldn’t share with him her appraisal of the situation: Danny, sweetheart, don’t worry about anything you might have heard through the wall. Your father is only suffering an identity crisis. He’s been acting like an ass lately, but he’ll get over it. And that was another reason she didn’t attempt to explain her and Michael’s problems to Danny — she thought that their estrangement was only temporary. She loved her husband, and she was sure that the sheer power of her love would restore the luster to their marriage. Six months later she and Michael separated, and less than five months after the separation, they were divorced.

Now, anxious to complete her search for the burglar — who was beginning to look as imaginary as all the other burglars she had stalked on other nights — she opened the door to Danny’s bedroom. She switched on the lights and stepped inside.

No one.

Holding the pistol in front of her, she approached the closet, hesitated, then slid the door back. No one was hiding there, either. In spite of what she had heard, she was alone in the house.

As she stared at the contents of the musky closet — the boy’s shoes, his jeans, dress slacks, shirts, sweaters, his blue Dodgers’ baseball cap, the small blue suit he had worn on special occasions — a lump rose in her throat. She quickly slid the door shut and put her back against it.

Although the funeral had been more than a year ago, she had not yet been able to dispose of Danny’s belongings. Somehow, the act of giving away his clothes would be even sadder and more final than watching his casket being lowered into the ground.

His clothes weren’t the only things that she had kept: His entire room was exactly as he had left it. The bed was properly made, and several science-fiction-movie action figures were posed on the deep headboard. More than a hundred paperbacks were ranked alphabetically on a five-shelf bookcase. His desk occupied one corner; tubes of glue, miniature bottles of enamel in every color, and a variety of model-crafting tools stood in soldierly ranks on one half of the desk, and the other half was bare, waiting for him to begin work. Nine model airplanes filled a display case, and three others hung on wires from the ceiling. The walls were decorated with evenly spaced posters — three baseball stars, five hideous monsters from horror movies — that Danny had carefully arranged.

Unlike many boys his age, he’d been concerned about orderliness and cleanliness. Respecting his preference for neatness, Tina had instructed Mrs. Neddler, the cleaning lady who came in twice a week, to vacuum and dust his unused bedroom as if nothing had happened to him. The place was as spotless as ever.

Gazing at the dead boy’s toys and pathetic treasures, Tina realized, not for the first time, that it wasn’t healthy for her to maintain this place as if it were a museum. Or a shrine. As long as she left his things undisturbed, she could continue to entertain the hope that Danny was not dead, that he was just away somewhere for a while, and that he would shortly pick up his life where he had left off. Her inability to clean out his room suddenly frightened her; for the first time it seemed like more than just a weakness of spirit but an indication of serious mental illness. She had to let the dead rest in peace. If she was ever to stop dreaming about the boy, if she were to get control of her grief, she must begin her recovery here, in this room, by conquering her irrational need to preserve his possessions in situ.

She resolved to clean this place out on Thursday, New Year’s Day. Both the VIP premiere and the opening night of Magyck! would be behind her by then. She’d be able to relax and take a few days off. She would start by spending Thursday afternoon here, boxing the clothes and toys and posters.

As soon as she made that decision, most of her nervous energy dissipated. She sagged, limp and weary and ready to return to bed.

As she started toward the door, she caught sight of the easel, stopped, and turned. Danny had liked to draw, and the easel, complete with a box of pencils and pens and paints, had been a birthday gift when he was nine. It was an easel on one side and a chalkboard on the other. Danny had left it at the far end of the room, beyond the bed, against the wall, and that was where it had stood the last time that Tina had been here. But now it lay at an angle, the base against the wall, the easel itself slanted, chalkboard-down, across a game table. An Electronic Battleship game had stood on that table, as Danny had left it, ready for play, but the easel had toppled into it and knocked it to the floor.

Apparently, that was the noise she had heard. But she couldn’t imagine what had knocked the easel over. It couldn’t have fallen by itself.

She put her gun down, went around the foot of the bed, and stood the easel on its legs, as it belonged. She stooped, retrieved the pieces of the Electronic Battleship game, and returned them to the table.

When she picked up the scattered sticks of chalk and the felt eraser, turning again to the chalkboard, she realized that two words were crudely printed on the black surface:

She scowled at the message.

She was positive that nothing had been written on the board when Danny had gone away on that scouting trip. And it had been blank the last time she’d been in this room.

Belatedly, as she pressed her fingertips to the words on the chalkboard, the possible meaning of them struck her. As a sponge soaked up water, she took a chill from the surface of the slate. Not dead. It was a denial of Danny’s death. An angry refusal to accept the awful truth. A challenge to reality.

In one of her terrible seizures of grief, in a moment of crazy dark despair, had she come into this room and unknowingly printed those words on Danny’s chalkboard?

She didn’t remember doing it. If she had left this message, she must be having blackouts, temporary amnesia of which she was totally unaware. Or she was walking in her sleep. Either possibility was unacceptable.

Dear God, unthinkable.

Therefore, the words must have been here all along. Danny must have left them before he died. His printing was neat, like everything else about him, not sloppy like this scrawled message. Nevertheless, he must have done it. Must have.

And the obvious reference that those two words made to the bus accident in which he had perished?

Coincidence. Danny, of course, had been writing about something else, and the dark interpretation that could be drawn from those two words now, after his death, was just a macabre coincidence.

She refused to consider any other possibility because the alternatives were too frightening.

She hugged herself. Her hands were icy; they chilled her sides even through her nightgown.

Shivering, she thoroughly erased the words on the chalkboard, retrieved her handgun, and left the room, pulling the door shut behind her.

She was wide awake, but she had to get some sleep. There was so much to do in the morning. Big day.

In the kitchen, she withdrew a bottle of Wild Turkey from the cupboard by the sink. It was Michael’s favorite bourbon. She poured two ounces into a water glass. Although she wasn’t much of a drinker, indulging in nothing more than a glass of wine now and then, with no capacity whatsoever for hard liquor, she finished the bourbon in two swallows. Grimacing at the bitterness of the spirits, wondering why Michael had extolled this brand’s smoothness, she hesitated, then poured another ounce. She finished it quickly, as though she were a child taking medicine, and then put the bottle away.

In bed again she snuggled in the covers and closed her eyes and tried not to think about the chalkboard. But an image of it appeared behind her eyes. When she couldn’t banish that image, she attempted to alter it, mentally wiping the words away. But in her mind’s eye, the seven letters reappeared on the chalkboard: NOT DEAD. Although she repeatedly erased them, they stubbornly returned. She grew dizzy from the bourbon and finally slipped into welcome oblivion.

Chapter Three

Tuesday afternoon Tina watched the final dress rehearsal of Magyck! from a seat in the middle of the Golden Pyramid showroom.

The theater was shaped like an enormous fan, spreading under a high domed ceiling. The room stepped down toward the stage in alternating wide and narrow galleries. On the wider levels, long dinner tables, covered with white linen, were set at right angles to the stage. Each narrow gallery consisted of a three-foot-wide aisle with a low railing on one side and a curving row of raised, plushly padded booths on the other side. The focus of all the seats was the immense stage, a marvel of the size required for a Las Vegas spectacular, more than half again as large as the largest stage on Broadway. It was so huge that a DC-9 airliner could be rolled onto it without using half the space available — a feat that had been accomplished as part of a production number on a similar stage at a hotel in Reno several years ago. A lavish use of blue velvet, dark leather, crystal chandeliers, and thick blue carpet, plus an excellent sense of dramatic lighting, gave the mammoth chamber some of the feeling of a cozy cabaret in spite of its size.

Tina sat in one of the third-tier booths, nervously sipping ice water as she watched her show.

The dress rehearsal ran without a problem. With seven massive production numbers, five major variety acts, forty-two girl dancers, forty-two boy dancers, fifteen showgirls, two boy singers, two girl singers (one temperamental), forty-seven crewmen and technicians, a twenty-piece orchestra, one elephant, one lion, two black panthers, six golden retrievers, and twelve white doves, the logistics were mind-numbingly complicated, but a year of arduous labor was evident in the slick and faultless unfolding of the program.

At the end, the cast and crew gathered onstage and applauded themselves, hugged and kissed one another. There was electricity in the air, a feeling of triumph, a nervous expectation of success.

Joel Bandiri, Tina’s co-producer, had watched the show from a booth in the first tier, the VIP row, where high rollers and other friends of the hotel would be seated every night of the run. As soon as the rehearsal ended, Joel sprang out of his seat, raced to the aisle, climbed the steps to the third tier, and hurried to Tina.

“We did it!” Joel shouted as he approached her. “We made the damn thing work!”

Tina slid out of her booth to meet him.

“We got a hit, kid!” Joel said, and he hugged her fiercely, planting a wet kiss on her cheek.

She hugged him enthusiastically. “You think so? Really?”

“Think? I know! A giant. That’s what we’ve got. A real giant! A gargantua!”

“Thank you, Joel. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“Me? What are you thanking me for?”

“For giving me a chance to prove myself.”

“Hey, I did you no favors, kid. You worked your butt off. You earned every penny you’re gonna make out of this baby, just like I knew you would. We’re a great team. Anybody else tried to handle all this, they’d just end up with one goddamn big mishkadenze on their hands. But you and me, we made it into a hit.”

Joel was an odd little man: five-feet-four, slightly chubby but not fat, with curly brown hair that appeared to have frizzed and kinked in response to a jolt of electricity. His face, which was as broad and comic as that of a clown, could stretch into an endless series of rubbery expressions. He wore blue jeans, a cheap blue workshirt — and about two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of rings. Six rings bedecked each of his hands, some with diamonds, some with emeralds, one with a large ruby, one with an even larger opal. As always, he seemed to be high on something, bursting with energy. When he finally stopped hugging Tina, he could not stand still. He shifted from foot to foot as he talked about Magyck!, turned this way and that, gestured expansively with his quick, gem-speckled hands, virtually doing a jig.

At forty-six he was the most successful producer in Las Vegas, with twenty years of hit shows behind him. The words “Joel Bandiri Presents” on a marquee were a guarantee of first-rate entertainment. He had plowed some of his substantial earnings into Las Vegas real estate, parts of two hotels, an automobile dealership, and a slot-machine casino downtown. He was so rich that he could retire and live the rest of his life in the high style and splendor for which he had a taste. But Joel would never stop willingly. He loved his work. He would most likely die on the stage, in the middle of puzzling out a tricky production problem.

He had seen Tina’s work in some lounges around town, and he had surprised her when he’d offered her the chance to co-produce Magyck! At first she hadn’t been sure if she should take the job. She was aware of his reputation as a perfectionist who demanded superhuman efforts from his people. She was also worried about being responsible for a ten-million-dollar budget. Working with that kind of money wasn’t merely a step up for her; it was a giant leap.

Joel had convinced her that she’d have no difficulty matching his pace or meeting his standards, and that she was equal to the challenge. He helped her to discover new reserves of energy, new areas of competence in herself. He had become not just a valued business associate, but a good friend as well, a big brother.

Now they seemed to have shaped a hit show together.

As Tina stood in this beautiful theater, glancing down at the colorfully costumed people milling about on the stage, then looking at Joel’s rubbery face, listening as her co-producer unblushingly raved about their handiwork, she was happier than she had been in a long time. If the audience at this evening’s VIP premiere reacted enthusiastically, she might have to buy lead weights to keep herself from floating off the floor when she walked.

Twenty minutes later, at 3:45, she stepped onto the smooth cobblestones in front of the hotel’s main entrance and handed her claim check to the valet parking attendant. While he went to fetch her Honda, she stood in the warm late-afternoon sunshine, unable to stop grinning.

She turned and looked back at the Golden Pyramid Hotel-Casino. Her future was inextricably linked to that gaudy but undeniably impressive pile of concrete and steel. The heavy bronze and glass revolving doors glittered as they spun with a steady flow of people. Ramparts of pale pink stone stretched hundreds of feet on both sides of the entrance; those walls were windowless and garishly decorated with giant stone coins, a gushing torrent of coins flooding from a stone cornucopia. Directly overhead, the ceiling of the immense porte cochere was lined with hundreds of lights; none of the bulbs were burning now, but after nightfall they would rain dazzling, golden luminosity upon the glossy cobblestones below. The Pyramid had been built at a cost in excess of four hundred million dollars, and the owners had made certain that every last dime showed. Tina supposed that some people would say this hotel was gross, crass, tasteless, ugly — but she loved the place because it was here that she had been given her big chance.

Thus far, the thirtieth of December had been a busy, noisy, exciting day at the Pyramid. After the relative quiet of Christmas week, an uninterrupted stream of guests was pouring through the front doors. Advance bookings indicated a record New Year’s holiday crowd for Las Vegas. The Pyramid, with almost three thousand rooms, was booked to capacity, as was every hotel in the city. At a few minutes past eleven o’clock, a secretary from San Diego put five dollars in a slot machine and hit a jackpot worth $495,000; word of that even reached backstage in the showroom. Shortly before noon, two high rollers from Dallas sat down at a blackjack table and, in three hours, lost a quarter of a million bucks; they were laughing and joking when they left the table to try another game. Carol Hirson, a cocktail waitress who was a friend of Tina’s, had told her about the unlucky Texans a few minutes ago. Carol had been shiny-eyed and breathless because the high rollers had tipped her with green chips, as if they’d been winning instead of losing; for bringing them half a dozen drinks, she had collected twelve hundred dollars.

Sinatra was in town, at Caesar’s Palace, perhaps for the last time, and even at eighty years of age, he generated more excitement in Vegas than any other famous name. Along the entire Strip and in the less posh but nonetheless jammed casinos downtown, things were jumping, sparking.

And in just four hours Magyck! would premiere.

The valet brought Tina’s car, and she tipped him.

He said, “Break a leg tonight, Tina.”

“God, I hope so.”

She was home by 4:15. She had two and a half hours to fill before she had to leave for the hotel again.

She didn’t need that much time to shower, apply her makeup, and dress, so she decided to pack some of Danny’s belongings. Now was the right time to begin the unpleasant chore. She was in such an excellent mood that she didn’t think even the sight of his room would be able to bring her down, as it usually did. No use putting it off until Thursday, as she had planned. She had at least enough time to make a start, box up the boy’s clothes, if nothing else.

When she went into Danny’s bedroom, she saw at once that the easel-chalkboard had been knocked over again. She put it right.

Two words were printed on the slate:

A chill swept down her back.

Last night, after drinking the bourbon, had she come back here in some kind of fugue and…?

No.

She hadn’t blacked out. She had not printed those words. She wasn’t going crazy. She wasn’t the sort of person who would snap over a thing like this. Not even a thing like this. She was tough. She had always prided herself on her toughness and her resiliency.

Snatching up the felt eraser, she vigorously wiped the slate clean.

Someone was playing a sick, nasty trick on her. Someone had come into the house while she was out and had printed those two words on the chalkboard again. Whoever it was, he wanted to rub her face in the tragedy that she was trying so hard to forget.

The only other person who had a right to be in the house was the cleaning woman, Vivienne Neddler. Vivienne had been scheduled to work this afternoon, but she’d canceled. Instead, she was coming in for a few hours this evening, while Tina was at the premiere.

But even if Vivienne had kept her scheduled appointment, she never would have written those words on the chalkboard. She was a sweet old woman, feisty and independent-minded but not the type to play cruel pranks.

For a moment Tina racked her mind, searching for someone to blame, and then a name occurred to her. It was the only possible suspect. Michael. Her ex-husband. There was no sign that anyone had broken into the house, no obvious evidence of forced entry, and Michael was the only other person with a key. She hadn’t changed the locks after the divorce.

Shattered by the loss of his son, Michael had been irrationally vicious with Tina for months after the funeral, accusing her of being responsible for Danny’s death. She had given Danny permission to go on the field trip, and as far as Michael was concerned, that had been equivalent to driving the bus off the cliff. But Danny had wanted to go to the mountains more than anything else in the world. Besides, Mr. Jaborski, the scoutmaster, had taken other groups of scouts on winter survival hikes every year for sixteen years, and no one had been even slightly injured. They didn’t hike all the way into the true wilderness, just a reasonable distance off the beaten path, and they planned for every contingency. The experience was supposed to be good for a boy. Safe. Carefully managed. Everyone assured her there was no chance of trouble. She’d had no way of knowing that Jaborski’s seventeenth trip would end in disaster, yet Michael blamed her. She’d thought he had regained his perspective during the last few months, but evidently not.

She stared at the chalkboard, thought of the two words that had been printed there, and anger swelled in her. Michael was behaving like a spiteful child. Didn’t he realize that her grief was as difficult to bear as his? What was he trying to prove?

Furious, she went into the kitchen, picked up the telephone, and dialed Michael’s number. After five rings she realized that he was at work, and she hung up.

In her mind the two words burned, white on black: NOT DEAD.

This evening she would call Michael, when she got home from the premiere and the party afterward. She was certain to be quite late, but she wasn’t going to worry about waking him.

She stood indecisively in the center of the small kitchen, trying to find the willpower to go to Danny’s room and box his clothes, as she had planned. But she had lost her nerve. She couldn’t go in there again. Not today. Maybe not for a few days.

Damn Michael.

In the refrigerator was a half-empty bottle of white wine. She poured a glassful and carried it into the master bath.

She was drinking too much. Bourbon last night. Wine now. Until recently, she had rarely used alcohol to calm her nerves — but now it was her cure of first resort. Once she had gotten through the premiere of Magyck!, she’d better start cutting back on the booze. Now she desperately needed it.

She took a long shower. She let the hot water beat down on her neck for several minutes, until the stiffness in her muscles melted and flowed away.

After the shower, the chilled wine further relaxed her body, although it did little to calm her mind and allay her anxiety. She kept thinking of the chalkboard.

Chapter Four

At 6:50 Tina was again backstage in the showroom. The place was relatively quiet, except for the muffled oceanic roar of the VIP crowd that waited in the main showroom, beyond the velvet curtains.

Eighteen hundred guests had been invited — Las Vegas movers and shakers, plus high rollers from out of town. More than fifteen hundred had returned their RSVP cards.

Already, a platoon of white-coated waiters, waitresses in crisp blue uniforms, and scurrying busboys had begun serving the dinners. The choice was filet mignon with Bernaise sauce or lobster in butter sauce, because Las Vegas was the one place in the United States where people at least temporarily set aside concerns about cholesterol. In the health-obsessed final decade of the century, eating fatty foods was widely regarded as a far more delicious — and more damning — sin than envy, sloth, thievery, and adultery.

By seven-thirty the backstage area was bustling. Technicians double-checked the motorized sets, the electrical connections, and the hydraulic pumps that raised and lowered portions of the stage. Stagehands counted and arranged props. Wardrobe women mended tears and sewed up unraveled hems that had been discovered at the last minute. Hairdressers and lighting technicians rushed about on urgent tasks. Male dancers, wearing black tuxedos for the opening number, stood tensely, an eye-pleasing collection of lean, handsome types.

Dozens of beautiful dancers and showgirls were backstage too. Some wore satin and lace. Others wore velvet and rhinestones — or feathers or sequins or furs, and a few were topless. Many were still in the communal dressing rooms, while other girls, already costumed, waited in the halls or at the edge of the big stage, talking about children and husbands and boyfriends and recipes, as if they were secretaries on a coffee break and not some of the most beautiful women in the world.

Tina wanted to stay in the wings throughout the performance, but she could do nothing more behind the curtains. Magyck! was now in the hands of the performers and technicians.

Twenty-five minutes before showtime Tina left the stage and went into the noisy showroom. She headed toward the center booth in the VIP row, where Charles Mainway, general manager and principal stockholder of the Golden Pyramid Hotel, waited for her.

She stopped first at the booth next to Mainway’s. Joel Bandiri was with Eva, his wife of eight years, and two of their friends. Eva was twenty-nine, seventeen years younger than Joel, and at five foot eight, she was also four inches taller than he was. She was an ex-showgirl, blond, willowy, delicately beautiful. She gently squeezed Tina’s hand. “Don’t worry. You’re too good to fail.”

“We got a hit, kid,” Joel assured Tina once more.

In the next semicircular booth, Charles Mainway greeted Tina with a warm smile. Mainway carried and held himself as if he were an aristocrat, and his mane of silver hair and his clear blue eyes contributed to the image he wished to project. However, his features were large, square, and utterly without evidence of patrician blood, and even after the mellowing influences of elocution teachers, his naturally low, gravelly voice belied his origins in a rough Brooklyn neighborhood.

As Tina slid into the booth beside Mainway, a tuxedoed captain appeared and filled her glass with Dom Pérignon.

Helen Mainway, Charlie’s wife, sat at his left side. Helen was by nature everything that poor Charlie struggled to be: impeccably well-mannered, sophisticated, graceful, at ease and confident in any situation. She was tall, slender, striking, fifty-five years old but able to pass for a well-preserved forty.

“Tina, my dear, I want you to meet a friend of ours,” Helen said, indicating the fourth person in the booth. “This is Elliot Stryker. Elliot, this lovely young lady is Christina Evans, the guiding hand behind Magyck!”

“One of two guiding hands,” Tina said. “Joel Bandiri is more responsible for the show than I am — especially if it’s a flop.”

Stryker laughed. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mrs. Evans.”

“Just plain Tina,” she said.

“And I’m just plain Elliot.”

He was a rugged, good-looking man, neither big nor small, about forty. His dark eyes were deeply set, quick, marked by intelligence and amusement.

“Elliot’s my attorney,” Charlie Mainway said.

“Oh,” Tina said, “I thought Harry Simpson—”

“Harry’s a hotel attorney. Elliot handles my private affairs.”

“And handles them very well,” Helen said. “Tina, if you need an attorney, this is the best in Las Vegas.”

To Tina, Stryker said, “But if it’s flattery you need — and I’m sure you already get a lot of it, lovely as you are — no one in Vegas can flatter with more charm and style than Helen.”

“You see what he just did?” Helen asked Tina, clapping her hands with delight. “In one sentence he managed to flatter you, flatter me, and impress all of us with his modesty. You see what a wonderful attorney he is?”

“Imagine him arguing a point in court,” Charlie said.

“A very smooth character indeed,” Helen said.

Stryker winked at Tina. “Smooth as I might be, I’m no match for these two.”

They made pleasant small talk for the next fifteen minutes, and none of it had to do with Magyck! Tina was aware that they were trying to take her mind off the show, and she appreciated their effort.

Of course no amount of amusing talk, no quantity of icy Dom Pérignon could render her unaware of the excitement that was building in the showroom as curtain time drew near. Minute by minute the cloud of cigarette smoke overhead thickened. Waitresses, waiters, and captains rushed back and forth to fill the drink orders before the show began. The roar of conversation grew louder as the sounds ticked away, and the quality of the roar became more frenetic, gayer, and more often punctuated with laughter.

Somehow, even though her attention was partly on the mood of the crowd, partly on Helen and Charlie Mainway, Tina was nevertheless aware of Elliot Stryker’s reaction to her. He made no great show of being more than ordinarily interested in her, but the attraction she held for him was evident in his eyes. Beneath his cordial, witty, slightly cool exterior, his secret response was that of a healthy male animal, and her awareness of it was more instinctual than intellectual, like a mare’s response to the stallion’s first faint stirrings of desire.

At least a year and a half, maybe two years, had passed since a man had looked at her in quite that fashion. Or perhaps this was the first time in all those months that she had been aware of being the object of such interest. Fighting with Michael, coping with the shock of separation and divorce, grieving for Danny, and putting together the show with Joel Bandiri had filled her days and nights, so she’d had no chance to think of romance.

Responding to the unspoken need in Elliot’s eyes with a need of her own, she was suddenly warm.

She thought: My God, I’ve been letting myself dry up! How could I have forgotten this!

Now that she had spent more than a year grieving for her broken marriage and for her lost son, now that Magyck! was almost behind her, she would have time to be a woman again. She would make time.

Time for Elliot Stryker? She wasn’t sure. No reason to be in a hurry to make up for lost pleasures. She shouldn’t jump at the first man who wanted her. Surely that wasn’t the smart thing to do. On the other hand, he was handsome, and in his face was an appealing gentleness. She had to admit that he sparked the same feelings in her that she apparently enflamed in him.

The evening was turning out to be even more interesting than she had expected.

Chapter Five

Vivienne Neddler parked her vintage 1955 Nash Rambler at the curb in front of the Evans house, being careful not to scrape the whitewalls. The car was immaculate, in better shape than most new cars these days. In a world of planned obsolescence, Vivienne took pleasure in getting long, full use out of everything that she bought, whether it was a toaster or an automobile. She enjoyed making things last.

She had lasted quite a while herself. She was seventy, still in excellent health, a short sturdy woman with the sweet face of a Botticelli Madonna and the no-nonsense walk of an army sergeant.

She got out of the car and, carrying a purse the size of a small suitcase, marched up the walk toward the house, angling away from the front door and past the garage.

The sulfur-yellow light from the street lamps failed to reach all the way across the lawn. Beside the front walkway and then along the side of the house, low-voltage landscape lighting revealed the path.

Oleander bushes rustled in the breeze. Overhead, palm fronds scraped softly against one another.

As Vivienne reached the back of the house, the crescent moon slid out from behind one of the few thin clouds, like a scimitar being drawn from a scabbard, and the pale shadows of palms and melaleucas shivered on the lunar-silvered concrete patio.

Vivienne let herself in through the kitchen door. She’d been cleaning for Tina Evans for two years, and she had been entrusted with a key nearly that long.

The house was silent except for the softly humming refrigerator.

Vivienne began work in the kitchen. She wiped the counters and the appliances, sponged off the slats of the Levolor blinds, and mopped the Mexican-tile floor. She did a first-rate job. She believed in the moral value of hard work, and she always gave her employers their money’s worth.

She usually worked during the day, not at night. This afternoon, however, she’d been playing a pair of lucky slot machines at the Mirage Hotel, and she hadn’t wanted to walk away from them while they were paying off so generously. Some people for whom she cleaned house insisted that she keep regularly scheduled appointments, and they did a slow burn if she showed up more than a few minutes late. But Tina Evans was sympathetic; she knew how important the slot machines were to Vivienne, and she wasn’t upset if Vivienne occasionally had to reschedule her visit.

Vivienne was a nickel duchess. That was the term by which casino employees still referred to local, elderly women whose social lives revolved around an obsessive interest in one-armed bandits, even though the nickel machines were pretty much ancient history. Nickel duchesses always played the cheap slot machines — nickels and dimes in the old days, now quarters — never the dollar- or five-dollar slots. They pulled the handles for hours at a time, often making a twenty-dollar bill last a long afternoon. Their gaming philosophy was simple: It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, as long as you stay in the game. With that attitude plus a few money-management skills, they were able to hang on longer than most slot players who plunged at the dollar machines after getting nowhere with quarters, and because of their patience and perseverance, the duchesses won more jackpots than did the tide of tourists that ebbed and flowed around them. Even these days, when most machines could be played with electronically validated value cards, the nickel duchesses wore black gloves to keep their hands from becoming filthy after hours of handling coins and pulling levers; they always sat on stools while they played, and they remembered to alternate hands when operating the machines in order not to strain the muscles of one arm, and they carried bottles of liniment just in case.

The duchesses, who for the most part were widows and spinsters, often ate lunch and dinner together. They cheered one another on those rare occasions when one of them hit a really large jackpot; and when one of them died, the others went to the funeral en masse. Together they formed an odd but solid community, with a satisfying sense of belonging. In a country that worshiped youth, most elderly Americans devoutly desired to discover a place where they belonged, but unlike the duchesses, many of them never found it.

Vivienne had a daughter, a son-in-law, and three grandchildren in Sacramento. For five years, ever since her sixty-fifth birthday, they had been pressuring her to live with them. She loved them as much as life itself, and she knew they truly wanted her with them; they were not inviting her out of a misguided sense of guilt and obligation. Nevertheless, she didn’t want to live in Sacramento. After several visits there, she had decided that it must be one of the dullest cities in the world. Vivienne liked the action, noise, lights, and excitement of Las Vegas. Besides, living in Sacramento, she wouldn’t be a nickel duchess any longer; she wouldn’t be anyone special; she would be just another elderly lady, living with her daughter’s family, playing grandma, marking time, waiting to die.

A life like that would be intolerable.

Vivienne valued her independence more than anything else. She prayed that she would remain healthy enough to continue working and living on her own until, at last, her time came and all the little windows on the machine of life produced lemons.

As she was mopping the last corner of the kitchen floor, as she was thinking about how dreary life would be without her friends and her slot machines, she heard a sound in another part of the house. Toward the front. The living room.

She froze, listening.

The refrigerator motor stopped running. A clock ticked softly.

After a long silence, a brief clattering echoed through the house from another room, startling Vivienne. Then silence again.

She went to the drawer next to the sink and selected a long, sharp blade from an assortment of knives.

She didn’t even consider calling the police. If she phoned for them and then ran out of the house, they might not find an intruder when they came. They would think she was just a foolish old woman. Vivienne Neddler refused to give anyone reason to think her a fool.

Besides, for the past twenty-one years, ever since her Harry died, she had always taken care of herself. She had done a pretty damn good job of it too.

She stepped out of the kitchen and found the light switch to the right of the doorway. The dining room was deserted.

In the living room, she clicked on a Stifel lamp. No one was there.

She was about to head for the den when she noticed something odd about four framed eight-by-ten photographs that were grouped on the wall above the sofa. This display had always contained six pictures, not just four. But the fact that two were missing wasn’t what drew Vivienne’s attention. All four of the remaining photos were swinging back and forth on the picture hooks that held them. No one was near them, yet suddenly two photos began to rattle violently against the wall, and then both flew off their mountings and clattered to the floor behind the beige, brushed-corduroy sofa.

This was the sound she had heard when she’d been in the kitchen — this clatter.

“What the hell?”

The remaining two photographs abruptly flung themselves off the wall. One dropped behind the sofa, and the other tumbled onto it.

Vivienne blinked in amazement, unable to understand what she had seen. An earthquake? But she hadn’t felt the house move; the windows hadn’t rattled. Any tremor too mild to be felt would also be too mild to tear the photographs from the wall.

She went to the sofa and picked up the photo that had dropped onto the cushions. She knew it well. She had dusted it many times. It was a portrait of Danny Evans, as were the other five that usually hung around it. In this one, he was ten or eleven years old, a sweet brown-haired boy with dark eyes and a lovely smile.

Vivienne wondered if there had been a nuclear test; maybe that was what had shaken things up. The Nevada Nuclear Test Site, where underground detonations were conducted several times a year, was less than a hundred miles north of Las Vegas. Whenever the military exploded a high-yield weapon, the tall hotels swayed in Vegas, and every house in town shuddered a little.

But, no, she was stuck in the past: The Cold War was over, and nuclear tests hadn’t been conducted out in the desert for a long time. Besides, the house hadn’t shuddered just a minute ago; only the photos had been affected.

Puzzled, frowning thoughtfully, Vivienne put down the knife, pulled one end of the sofa away from the wall, and collected the framed eight-by-tens that were on the floor behind it. There were five photographs in addition to the one that had dropped onto the sofa; two were responsible for the noises that had drawn her into the living room, and the other three were those that she had seen popping off the picture hooks. She put them back where they belonged, then slid the sofa into place.

A burst of high-pitched electronic noise blared through the house: Aiii-eee… aiii-eee… aiii-eee…

Vivienne gasped, turned. She was still alone.

Her first thought was: Burglar alarm.

But the Evans house didn’t have an alarm system.

Vivienne winced as the shrill electronic squeal grew louder, a piercing oscillation. The nearby windows and the thick glass top of the coffee table were vibrating. She felt a sympathetic resonance in her teeth and bones.

She wasn’t able to identify the source of the sound. It seemed to be coming from every corner of the house.

“What in the blue devil is going on here?”

She didn’t bother picking up the knife, because she was sure the problem wasn’t an intruder. It was something else, something weird.

She crossed the room to the hallway that served the bedrooms, bathrooms, and den. She snapped on the light. The noise was louder in the corridor than it had been in the living room. The nerve-fraying sound bounced off the walls of the narrow passage, echoing and re-echoing.

Vivienne looked both ways, then moved to the right, toward the closed door at the end of the hall. Toward Danny’s old room.

The air was cooler in the hallway than it was in the rest of the house. At first Vivienne thought that she was imagining the change in temperature, but the closer she drew to the end of the corridor, the colder it got. By the time she reached the closed door, her skin was goose-pimpled, and her teeth were chattering.

Step by step, her curiosity gave way to fear. Something was very wrong here. An ominous pressure seemed to compress the air around her.

Aiii-eee… aiii-eee…

The wisest thing she could do would be to turn back, walk away from the door and out of the house. But she wasn’t completely in control of herself; she felt a bit like a sleepwalker. In spite of her anxiety, a power she could sense — but which she could not define — drew her inexorably to Danny’s room.

Aiii-eee… aiii-eee… aiii-eee…

Vivienne reached for the doorknob but stopped before touching it, unable to believe what she was seeing. She blinked rapidly, closed her eyes, opened them again, but still the doorknob appeared to be sheathed in a thin, irregular jacket of ice.

She finally touched it. Ice. Her skin almost stuck to the knob. She pulled her hand away and examined her damp fingers. Moisture had condensed on the metal and then had frozen.

But how was that possible? How in the name of God could there be ice here, in a well-heated house and on a night when the outside temperature was at least twenty degrees above the freezing point?

The electronic squeal began to warble faster, but it was no quieter, no less bone-penetrating than it had been.

Stop, Vivienne told herself. Get away from here. Get out as fast as you can.

But she ignored her own advice. She pulled her blouse out of her slacks and used the tail to protect her hand from the icy metal doorknob. The knob turned, but the door wouldn’t open. The intense cold had caused the wood to contract and warp. She put her shoulder against it, pushed gently, then harder, and finally the door swung inward.

Chapter Six

Magyck! was the most entertaining Vegas show that Elliot Stryker had ever seen.

The program opened with an electrifying rendition of “That Old Black Magic.” Singers and dancers, brilliantly costumed, performed in a stunning set constructed of mirrored steps and mirrored panels. When the stage lights were periodically dimmed, a score of revolving crystal ballroom chandeliers cast swirling splinters of color that seemed to coalesce into supernatural forms that capered under the proscenium arch. The choreography was complex, and the two lead singers had strong, clear voices.

The opening number was followed by a first-rate magic act in front of the drawn curtains. Less than ten minutes later, when the curtains opened again, the mirrors had been taken away, and the stage had been transformed into an ice rink; the second production number was done on skates against a winter backdrop so real that it made Elliot shiver.

Although Magyck! excited the imagination and commanded the eye, Elliot wasn’t able to give his undivided attention to it. He kept looking at Christina Evans, who was as dazzling as the show she had created.

She watched the performers intently, unaware of his gaze. A flickering, nervous scowl played across her face, alternating with a tentative smile that appeared when the audience laughed, applauded, or gasped in surprise.

She was singularly beautiful. Her shoulder-length hair — deep brown, almost black, glossy — swept across her brow, feathered back at the sides, and framed her face as though it were a painting by a great master. The bone structure of that face was delicate, clearly defined, quintessentially feminine. Dusky, olive complexion. Full, sensuous mouth. And her eyes… She would have been lovely enough if her eyes had been dark, in harmony with the shade of her hair and skin, but they were crystalline blue. The contrast between her Italian good looks and her Nordic eyes was devastating.

Elliot supposed that other people might find flaws in her face. Perhaps some would say that her brow was too wide. Her nose was so straight that some might think it was severe. Others might say that her mouth was too wide, her chin too pointed. To Elliot, however, her face was perfect.

But her physical beauty was not what most excited him. He was interested primarily in learning more about the mind that could create a work like Magyck! He had seen less than one-fourth of the program, yet he knew it was a hit — and far superior to others of its kind. A Vegas stage extravaganza could easily go off the rails. If the gigantic sets and lavish costumes and intricate choreography were overdone, or if any element was improperly executed, the production would quickly stumble across the thin line between captivating show-biz flash and sheer vulgarity. A glittery fantasy could metamorphose into a crude, tasteless, and stupid bore if the wrong hand guided it. Elliot wanted to know more about Christina Evans — and on a more fundamental level, he just wanted her.

No woman had affected him so strongly since Nancy, his wife, who had died three years ago.

Sitting in the dark theater, he smiled, not at the comic magician who was performing in front of the closed stage curtains, but at his own sudden, youthful exuberance.

Chapter Seven

The warped door groaned and creaked as Vivienne Neddler forced it open.

Aiii-eee, aiii-eee…

A wave of frigid air washed out of the dark room, into the hallway.

Vivienne reached inside, fumbled for the light switch, found it, and entered warily. The room was deserted.

Aiii-eee, aii-eee…

Baseball stars and horror-movie monsters gazed at Vivienne from posters stapled to the walls. Three intricate model airplanes were suspended from the ceiling. These things were as they always had been, since she had first come to work here, before Danny had died.

Aiii-eee, aiii-eee, aiii-eee…

The maddening electronic squeal issued from a pair of small stereo speakers that hung on the wall behind the bed. The CD player and an accompanying AM-FM tuner and amplifier were stacked on one of the nightstands.

Although Vivienne could see where the noise originated, she couldn’t locate any source for the bitterly cold air. Neither window was open, and even if one had been raised, the night wasn’t frigid enough to account for the chill.

Just as she reached the AM-FM tuner, the banshee wail stopped. The sudden silence had an oppressive weight.

Gradually, as her ears stopped ringing, Vivienne perceived the soft empty hiss of the stereo speakers. Then she heard the thumping of her own heart.

The metal casing of the radio gleamed with a brittle crust of ice. She touched it wonderingly. A sliver of ice broke loose under her finger and fell onto the nightstand. It didn’t begin to melt; the room was cold.

The window was frosted. The dresser mirror was frosted too, and her reflection was dim and distorted and strange.

Outside, the night was cool but not wintry. Maybe fifty degrees. Maybe even fifty-five.

The radio’s digital display began to change, the orange numbers escalating across the frequency band, sweeping through one station after another. Scraps of music, split-second flashes of disc jockeys’ chatter, single words from different somber-voiced newscasters, and fragments of commercial jingles blended in a cacophonous jumble of meaningless sound. The indicator reached the end of the band width, and the digital display began to sequence backward.

Trembling, Vivienne switched off the radio.

As soon as she took her finger off the push switch, the radio turned itself on again.

She stared at it, frightened and bewildered.

The digital display began to sequence up the band once more, and scraps of music blasted from the speakers.

She pressed the ON-OFF bar again.

After a brief silence, the radio turned on spontaneously.

“This is crazy,” she said shakily.

When she shut off the radio the third time, she kept her finger pressed against the ON-OFF bar. For several seconds she was certain that she could feel the switch straining under her fingertip as it tried to pop on.

Overhead, the three model airplanes began to move. Each was hung from the ceiling on a length of fishing line, and the upper end of each line was knotted to its own eye-hook that had been screwed firmly into the dry wall. The planes jiggled, jerked, twisted, and trembled.

Just a draft.

But she didn’t feel a draft.

The model planes began to bounce violently up and down on the ends of their lines.

“God help me,” Vivienne said.

One of the planes swung in tight circles, faster and faster, then in wider circles, steadily decreasing the angle between the line on which it was suspended and the bedroom ceiling. After a moment the other two models ceased their erratic dancing and began to spin around and around, like the first plane, as if they were actually flying, and there was no mistaking this deliberate movement for the random effects of a draft.

Ghosts? A poltergeist?

But she didn’t believe in ghosts. There were no such things. She believed in death and taxes, in the inevitability of slot-machine jackpots, in all-you-can-eat casino buffets for $5.95 per person, in the Lord God Almighty, in the truth of alien abductions and Big Foot, but she didn’t believe in ghosts.

The sliding closet doors began to move on their runners, and Vivienne Neddler had the feeling that some awful thing was going to come out of the dark space, its eyes as red as blood and its razor-sharp teeth gnashing. She felt a presence, something that wanted her, and she cried out as the door came all the way open.

But there wasn’t a monster in the closet. It contained only clothes. Only clothes.

Nevertheless, untouched, the doors glided shut… and then open again…

The model planes went around, around.

The air grew even colder.

The bed started to shake. The legs at the foot rose three or four inches before crashing back into the casters that had been put under them to protect the carpet. They rose up again. Hovered above the floor. The springs began to sing as if metal fingers were strumming them.

Vivienne backed into the wall, eyes wide, hands fisted at her sides.

As abruptly as the bed had started bouncing up and down, it now stopped. The closet doors closed with a jarring crash — but they didn’t open again. The model airplanes slowed, swinging in smaller and smaller circles, until they finally hung motionless.

The room was silent.

Nothing moved.

The air was getting warmer.

Gradually Vivienne’s heartbeat subsided from the hard, frantic rhythm that it had been keeping for the past couple of minutes. She hugged herself and shivered.

A logical explanation. There had to be a logical explanation.

But she wasn’t able to imagine what it could be.

As the room grew warm again, the doorknobs and the radio casing and the other metal objects quickly shed their fragile skins of ice, leaving shallow puddles on furniture and damp spots in the carpet. The frosted window cleared, and as the frost faded from the dresser mirror, Vivienne’s distorted reflection resolved into a more familiar image of herself.

Now this was only a young boy’s bedroom, a room like countless thousands of others.

Except, of course, that the boy who had once slept here had been dead for a year. And maybe he was coming back, haunting the place.

Vivienne had to remind herself that she didn’t believe in ghosts.

Nevertheless, it might be a good idea for Tina Evans to get rid of the boy’s belongings at last.

Vivienne had no logical explanation for what had happened, but she knew one thing for sure: She wasn’t going to tell anyone what she had seen here tonight. Regardless of how convincingly and earnestly she described these bizarre events, no one would believe her. They would nod and smile woodenly and agree that it was a strange and frightening experience, but all the while they would be thinking that poor old Vivienne was finally getting senile. Sooner or later word of her rantings about poltergeists might get back to her daughter in Sacramento, and then the pressure to move to California would become unbearable. Vivienne wasn’t going to jeopardize her precious independence.

She left the bedroom, returned to the kitchen, and drank two shots of Tina Evans’s best bourbon. Then, with characteristic stoicism, she returned to the boy’s bedroom to wipe up the water from the melted ice, and she continued housecleaning.

She refused to let a poltergeist scare her off.

It might be wise, however, to go to church on Sunday. She hadn’t been to church in a long time. Maybe some churching would be good for her. Not every week, of course. Just one or two Masses a month. And confession now and then. She hadn’t seen the inside of a confessional in ages. Better safe than sorry.

Chapter Eight

Everyone in show business knew that non-paying preview crowds were among the toughest to please. Free admission didn’t guarantee their appreciation or even their amicability. The person who paid a fair price for something was likely to place far more value on it than the one who got the same item for nothing. That old saw applied in spades to stage shows and to on-the-cuff audiences.

But not tonight. This crowd wasn’t able to sit on its hands and keep its cool.

The final curtain came down at eight minutes till ten o’clock, and the ovation continued until after Tina’s wristwatch had marked the hour. The cast of Magyck! took several bows, then the crew, then the orchestra, all of them flushed with the excitement of being part of an unqualified hit. At the insistence of the happy, boisterous, VIP audience, both Joel Bandiri and Tina were spotlighted in their booths and were rewarded with their own thunderous round of applause.

Tina was on an adrenaline high, grinning, breathless, barely able to absorb the overwhelming response to her work. Helen Mainway chattered excitedly about the spectacular special effects, and Elliot Stryker had an endless supply of compliments as well as some astute observations about the technical aspects of the production, and Charlie Mainway poured a third bottle of Dom Pérignon, and the house lights came up, and the audience reluctantly began to leave, and Tina hardly had a chance to sip her champagne because of all the people who stopped by the table to congratulate her.

By ten-thirty most of the audience had left, and those who hadn’t gone yet were in line, moving up the steps toward the rear doors of the showroom. Although no second show was scheduled this evening, as would be the case every night henceforth, busboys and waitresses were busily clearing tables, resetting them with fresh linen and silverware for the following night’s eight o’clock performance.

When the aisle in front of her booth was finally empty of well-wishers, Tina got up and met Joel as he started to come to her. She threw her arms around him and, much to her surprise, began to cry with happiness. She hugged him hard, and Joel proclaimed the show to be a “gargantua if I ever saw one.”

By the time they got backstage, the opening-night party was in full swing. The sets and props had been moved from the main floor of the stage, and eight folding tables had been set up. The tables were draped with white cloths and burdened with food: five hot hors d’oeuvres, lobster salad, crab salad, pasta salad, filet mignon, chicken breasts in tarragon sauce, roasted potatoes, cakes, pies, tarts, fresh fruits, berries, and cheeses. Hotel management personnel, showgirls, dancers, magicians, crewmen, and musicians crowded around the tables, sampling the offerings while Phillippe Chevalier, the hotel’s executive chef, personally watched over the affair. Knowing this feast had been laid on for the party, few of those present had eaten dinner, and most of the dancers had eaten nothing since a light lunch. They exclaimed over the food and clustered around the portable bar. With the memory of the applause still fresh in everyone’s mind, the party was soon jumping.

Tina mingled, moving back and forth, upstage and downstage, through the crowd, thanking everyone for his contribution to the show’s success, complimenting each member of the cast and crew on his dedication and professionalism. Several times she encountered Elliot Stryker, and he seemed genuinely interested in learning how the splashy stage effects had been achieved. Each time that Tina moved on to talk to someone else, she regretted leaving Elliot, and each time that she found him again, she stayed with him longer than she had before. After their fourth encounter, she lost track of how long they were together. Finally she forgot all about circulating.

Standing near the left proscenium pillar, out of the main flow of the party, they nibbled at pieces of cake, talking about Magyck! and then about the law, Charlie and Helen Mainway, Las Vegas real estate — and, by some circuitous route, superhero movies.

He said, “How can Batman wear an armored rubber suit all the time and not have a chronic rash?”

“Yeah, but there are advantages to a rubber suit.”

“Such as?”

“You can go straight from office work to scuba diving without changing clothes.”

“Eat takeout food at two hundred miles an hour in the Batmobile, and no matter how messy it gets — just hose off later.”

“Exactly. After a hard day of crime-fighting, you can get stinking drunk and throw up on yourself, and it doesn’t matter. No dry-cleaning bills.”

“In basic black he’s dressed for any occasion—”

“—from an audience with the Pope to a Marquis de Sade memorial sock hop.”

Elliot smiled. He finished his cake. “I guess you’ll have to be here most nights for a long time to come.”

“No. There’s really no need for me to be.”

“I thought a director—”

“Most of the director’s job is finished. I just have to check on the show once every couple of weeks to make sure the tone of it isn’t drifting away from my original intention.”

“But you’re also the co-producer.”

“Well, now that the show’s opened successfully, most of my share of the producer’s chores are public relations and promotional stuff. And a little logistics to keep the production rolling along smoothly. But nearly all of that can be handled out of my office. I won’t have to hang around the stage. In fact, Joel says it isn’t healthy for a producer to be backstage every night… or even most nights. He says I’d just make the performers nervous and cause the technicians to look over their shoulders for the boss when they should have their eyes on their work.”

“But will you be able to resist?”

“It won’t be easy staying away. But there’s a lot of sense in what Joel says, so I’m going to try to play it cool.”

“Still, I guess you’ll be here every night for the first week or so.”

“No,” she said. “If Joel’s right — and I’m sure he is — then it’s best to get in the habit of staying away right from the start.”

“Tomorrow night?”

“Oh, I’ll probably pop in and out a few times.”

“I guess you’ll be going to a New Year’s Eve party.”

“I hate New Year’s Eve parties. Everyone’s drunk and boring.”

“Well, then… in between all that popping in and out of Magyck!, do you think you’d have time for dinner?”

“Are you asking me for a date?”

“I’ll try not to slurp my soup.”

“You are asking me for a date,” she said, pleased.

“Yes. And it’s been a long time since I’ve been this awkward about it.”

“Why is that?”

“You, I guess.”

“I make you feel awkward?”

“You make me feel young. And when I was young, I was very awkward.”

“That’s sweet.”

“I’m trying to charm you.”

“And succeeding,” she said.

He had such a warm smile. “Suddenly I don’t feel so awkward anymore.”

She said, “You want to start over?”

“Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night?”

“Sure. How about seven-thirty?”

“Fine. You prefer dressy or casual?”

“Blue jeans.”

He fingered his starched collar and the satin lapel of his tuxedo jacket. “I’m so glad you said that.”

“I’ll give you my address.” She searched her purse for a pen.

“We can stop in here and watch the first few numbers in Magyck! and then go to the restaurant.”

“Why don’t we just go straight to the restaurant?”

“You don’t want to pop in here?”

“I’ve decided to go cold turkey.”

“Joel will be proud of you.”

“If I can actually do it, I’ll be proud of me.”

“You’ll do it. You’ve got true grit.”

“In the middle of dinner, I might be seized by a desperate need to dash over here and act like a producer.”

“I’ll park the car in front of the restaurant door, and I’ll leave the engine running just in case.”

Tina gave her address to him, and then somehow they were talking about jazz and Benny Goodman, and then about the miserable service provided by the Las Vegas phone company, just chatting away as if they were old friends. He had a variety of interests; among other things he was a skier and a pilot, and he was full of funny stories about learning to ski and fly. He made her feel comfortable, yet at the same time he intrigued her. He projected an interesting image: a blend of male power and gentleness, aggressive sexuality and kindness.

A hit show… lots of royalty checks to look forward to… an infinity of new opportunities made available to her because of this first smashing success… and now the prospect of a new and exciting lover…

As she listed her blessings, Tina was astonished at how much difference one year could make in a life. From bitterness, pain, tragedy, and unrelenting sorrow, she had turned around to face a horizon lit by rising promise. At last the future looked worth living. Indeed, she couldn’t see how anything could go wrong.

Chapter Nine

The skirts of the night were gathered around the Evans house, rustling in a dry desert wind.

A neighbor’s white cat crept across the lawn, stalking a wind-tossed scrap of paper. The cat pounced, missed its prey, stumbled, scared itself, and flashed lightning-quick into another yard.

Inside, the house was mostly silent. Now and then the refrigerator switched on, purring to itself. A loose windowpane in the living room rattled slightly whenever a strong gust of wind struck it. The heating system rumbled to life, and for a couple of minutes at a time, the blower whispered wordlessly as hot air pushed through the vents.

Shortly before midnight, Danny’s room began to grow cold. On the doorknob, on the radio casing, and on other metal objects, moisture began to condense out of the air. The temperature plunged rapidly, and the beads of water froze. Frost formed on the window.

The radio clicked on.

For a few seconds the silence was split by an electronic squeal as sharp as an ax blade. Then the shrill noise abruptly stopped, and the digital display flashed with rapidly changing numbers. Snippets of music and shards of voices crackled in an eerie audio-montage that echoed and re-echoed off the walls of the frigid room.

No one was in the house to hear it.

The closet door opened, closed, opened…

Inside the closet, shirts and jeans began to swing wildly on the pole from which they hung, and some clothes fell to the floor.

The bed shook.

The display case that held nine model airplanes rocked, banging repeatedly against the wall. One of the models was flung from its shelf, then two more, then three more, then another, until all nine lay in a pile on the floor.

On the wall to the left of the bed, a poster of the creature from the Alien movies tore down the middle.

The radio ceased scanning, stopping on an open frequency that hissed and popped with distant static. Then a voice blared from the speakers. It was a child’s voice. A boy. There were no words. Just a long, agonized scream.

The voice faded after a minute, but the bed began to bang up and down.

The closet door slammed open and shut with substantially more force than it had earlier.

Other things began to move too. For almost five minutes the room seemed to have come alive.

And then it died.

Silence returned.

The air grew warm again.

The frost left the window, and outside the white cat still chased the scrap of paper.