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games.
    She smiled, remembering. “You asked me what machine I would choose to be if I could be any machine in the world. Weird.”
    “The last woman who answered that question said she’d be a Rolls Royce and go to all the best places. But you said you’d be some piece of medical equipment that saves lives.”
    “Was that a good answer?”
    “At the time,” Max said, “it sounded phony. But now I know what you are, and I realize you were serious.”
    “And what am I?”
    “The kind of person who always asks for whom the bell tolls—and always cries buckets at even slightly sad movies.”
    She sipped her wine. “I played the game right back at you that night, asked you what machine you’d be. Remember?”
    Max nodded. He pushed his unfinished sandwich aside, picked up his wine. “I said I’d be a computer dating service so I could hook you up with me.”
    She laughed girlishly. “I liked it then, and I like it now. It was a surprise finding a romantic under that big tough exterior.”
    Max leaned across the table, spoke softly. “Know what machine I’d be tonight?” He pointed to the colorfully lighted juke box at the far end of the bar. “I’d be that music machine. And no matter what buttons people pushed, I’d play love songs for you.”
    “Oh, Max, that’s positively saccharine.”
    “But you like it.”
    “I love it. After all, I’m the lady who cries buckets at even slightly sad movies.”

5
    THE NIGHTMARE WOKE her, but the dream continued. For a minute after she rose up in fear from her pillows, colorful snatches of the nightmare swam in the air before her. Ethereal snapshots. Blood. Shattered bodies. Broken skulls. They were more vivid than any visions she’d ever known.
    The shadows of the hotel room settled over her once more. When she grew accustomed enough to the darkness to see the outlines of the furniture, she got up.
    The room was a carousel. She reached out for a brass pole that wasn’t there, for something to steady her.
    When she regained her balance, she went into the bathroom. She didn’t close the door because she worried she might wake Max. For the same reason, she didn’t use the main light. Instead, she turned on the much dimmer, orange-filtered heat lamp.
    In that eerie light her mirror image disturbed her: dark rings around the eyes, skin slack and damp. She was used to a reflection that was the envy of most women: silky black hair, blue eyes, fine features, a flawless complexion. Now the person looking back at her seemed a stranger, an alien.
    She felt personally threatened by what she had seen. The dead bodies in the nightmare were the first parts of a chain in which she might be the final link.
    She drew a glass of cold water, drank it, then another. The tumbler rattled against her teeth. She had to use both hands to hold it.
    Each time she shut her eyes, she saw the same remnant of the nightmare. A dark-haired girl with one blue eye gazing sightlessly at the ceiling. The other eye swollen in a macabre wink. Face torn, bruised, misshapen.
    Worst of all, Mary felt that if the blood were swabbed from that face, and if its smashed features were restored, she would know it at once.
    She put the glass down, leaned against the sink.
    Who? she thought. Who was that girl?
    The distorted face would not resolve itself.
    As if she craved more fear than the dream had given her, she remembered the psychopath who had died that same night: his twisted features ; his marble-chip teeth ; his hands pressed to the squad car windows ; his whispery voice, cool as cellar air when he spoke her name.
    He had been an omen, a warning to her.
    But an omen of what?
    There might be nothing mysterious about his knowing her name. He could have heard she was in town, even though that information was limited to a select few. He might have recognized her from the photograph that accompanied her column, although the picture was not a good one and was six years old. That was Alan’s