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burners, use that to start the fire.”
    “Just don’t light up anything else on the way.”
    He fetched a couple of sheets of newspaper, rolled them up as he moved into the kitchen to turn on the stove burner.
    Shelby picked up the martini pitcher, started to pour her glass full again.
    And all the lights went out.

T H R E E
    M ACKLIN STOOD BLINKING IN the sudden blackness. He heard Shelby suck in her breath, the clatter of the pitcher as she set it down hard on the countertop. “Shel? You okay?”
    “Don’t worry, I’m not going to panic.”
    “Power’ll probably come right back on.”
    She didn’t say anything.
    He groped his way around the wet bar, saying, “There’s a flashlight in the closet there—”
    “I know, I saw it. The batteries better be good.”
    She moved away from him, sideways to the closet. With the lights off, the furious whistling, rattling sounds of the storm seemed magnified. A power outage … just what they didn’t need right now.
    A blade of light slashed through the dark, carving out whitish jigsaw pieces as Shelby swung it up and around toward him. “We’d better go sit down,” she said.
    He followed her across the living room to the couch. She laid the flashlight on an end table and left it burning, so that the beam made a stationary white circle on the fireplace bricks. He knew she’d had a small scare. She was a borderline nyctophobe; had insisted on sleeping with a night-light on the entire time they’d been married. He suspected that one of the reasons she’d become an EMT was that it was a job requiring a certain amount of night work—her way of battling the demon.
    They sat listening to the wind and rain, waiting. Minutes ticked away—five, ten. He wanted to say something, couldn’t think of anything that she’d want to hear. He settled for putting a hand on her leg, giving it a gentle squeeze; the muscles and tendons were taut. Shelby’s gaze remained fixed on the white circle.
    The silence thickened between them until he couldn’t stand it any longer. “You get occasional power failures in remote areas like this,” he said. “But they don’t usually last very long.”
    “Unless the storm knocks down power lines.”
    He had no answer for that.
    “It’s cold in here again,” she said. “Another hour and it’ll be like a meat locker.”
    “There’s always bed, blankets, and body heat.”
    No answer from her this time.
    “What do you want to do then? Drive back to Seacrest, take a room in one of those B&Bs?”
    “The power’ll be out there too. If we had matches for a fire, candles—” She broke off and then said, “Maybe we can borrow some.”
    “Where? Seacrest?”
    “The neighbors to the north. I’m pretty sure I saw lights through the trees when we arrived.”
    “Probably security lights.”
    “We can go find out, can’t we? It’s better than sitting here freezing. If nobody’s home, we’ll drive into the village.”
    In the bedroom they each held the torch while the other put on rain gear. Outside, Jay lighted their run to the carport. The storm created wildly gyrating shapes of the pines to the north, but just before he clambered in behind the Prius’s wheel he saw the shimmers of light in that direction.
    The narrow lane was carpeted with pine needles and wind-torn branches, one of the branches large enough that Macklin had to ease out around it at a crawl. The stand of trees that separated Ben’s property from the one on this side was a couple of hundred yards in length; after two-thirds of that distance, it thinned out and ended at a high fence that extended out to the bluff’s edge and continued parallel to the road. Above the fence he could see the upper part of the house, portions of tall dark windows and angled roofline; the pale haze of light came from below. Wood smoke bellowed out of a stone chimney and was immediately shredded and whipped away by the swirling wind.
    Shelby said, “Definitely somebody home.”
    “They