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tempted her to believe that the intruder had gone. This was a temptation best resisted.
    Forward, then, through the paper arbor of printed roses to the half-open door of the master suite. Hesitating there. On the brink.
    When she found whatever waited to be found, all her illusions of order and stability might dissolve. The truth of life might then reassert itself, after ten years during which she had diligently denied it: chaos, like the flow of a stream of mercury, its course unpredictable.
    The man in the blue jeans and black boots might have returned to the master suite after leaving the guest room, but more likely not. Other amusements in the house would no doubt be more appealing to him.
    Fearful of lingering too long in the hall, she sidled across the threshold, without pushing the door open wider.
    Paul and Sarah’s room was spacious. A sitting area included a pair of armchairs and footstools facing a fireplace. Bookshelves crammed with hardcovers flanked the mantel, their titles lost in shadows.
    The nightstand lamps were colorfully patterned ginger jars with pleated shades. One of them was aglow; crimson streaks and blots stained its shade.
    Chyna stopped well short of the foot of the bed, already close enough to see too much. Neither Paul nor Sarah was there, but the sheets and blankets were in tangled disarray, trailing onto the floor on the right side of the bed. On the left, the linens were soaked with blood, and a wet spray glistened on the headboard and in an arc across the wall.
    She closed her eyes. Heard something. Spun around, crouching in expectation of an assault. She was alone.
    The noise had always been there, a background hiss-patter-splash of falling water. She hadn’t heard it on entering the room, because she had been deafened by bloodstains as loud as the angry shouting of a maddened mob.
    Synesthesia.
The word had stuck with her from a psychology text, more because she thought it was a beautiful arrangement of syllables than because she expected ever to experience it herself. Synesthesia: a confusion of the senses in which a scent might register as a flash of color, a sound actually might be perceived as a scent, and the texture of a surface under the hand might seem to be a trilling laugh or a scream.
    Closing her eyes had blocked out the roar of the bloodstains, whereupon she had heard the falling water. Now she recognized it as the sound of the shower in the adjoining bathroom.
    That door was ajar half an inch. For the first time since she had entered from the hallway, Chyna noticed the thin band of fluorescent light along the bathroom jamb.
    When she looked away from that door, reluctant to confront what might wait beyond it, she spotted the telephone on the right-hand nightstand. That was the side of the bed without blood, which made it more approachable for her.
    She lifted the handset from the cradle. No dial tone. She had not expected to hear one. Nothing was ever that easy.
    She opened the single drawer on the nightstand, hoping to find a handgun. No luck.
    Still certain that her only hope of safety lay in movement, that crawling into a hole and hiding should always be the strategy of last resort, Chyna had gone around to the other side of the king-size bed before she quite realized that she had taken a first step. In front of the bathroom door, the carpet was badly stained.
    Grimacing, she went to the second nightstand and eased open the drawer. In the mortal fall of light, she discovered a pair of reading glasses with yellow reflections in the half-moon lenses, a paperback men’s adventure novel, a box of Kleenex, a tube of lip balm, but no weapon.
    As she closed the drawer, she smelled burned gunpowder underlying the hot-copper stench of fresh blood.
    She was familiar with that odor. Over the years, more than a few of her mother’s friends either had used guns to get what they wanted or had been at least fascinated by them.
    Chyna had heard no shots. The intruder evidently had a