Free Wake Up to Murder by Day Keene Page A

hadn’t been able to recognize the living-room door. It was another huge mirror set flush with the wall. Kendall was certainly nuts about seeing his own reflection. So he was a good-looking man. He wasn’t that good-looking.
    The lad who’d taught the class in Abnormal and Criminal Psychology had given us a name for that, too. He’d called it a Narcissus complex, explaining that a good many men who were chasers were really emotionally immature, and every time they stayed with a woman they were, psychologically, doing it to themselves. Could be. But it didn’t make sense to me, any more than traumatic amnesia.
    I pushed the mirror door open and walked into the living room. Mantin hadn’t gone away. I tried to find a phone. I couldn’t. If there was a phone in the living room, it was disguised as something else or hidden behind a panel.
    I squatted beside Mantin’s body and looked across it at the gun. Picking up the gun had been a bad mistake. Wiping it clean of all fingerprints would be as bad. Either way I had a lot of explaining to do.
    I lifted my eyes from the gun and sat on my heels a long moment, looking through the glass wall at the lights of Sun City across the bay. That was where I lived. That was where I belonged. Yesterday morning I had gone to work. Nothing to distinguish the morning from any of a hundred others. Now all this had happened.
    I realized, suddenly, that it had been a long time since May had said,
‘I’m coming up there.’
    The downstairs door was open. She’d had plenty of time to climb the stairs in the open well. I got up off my heels, walked out into the hall and opened one of the opaque glass doors.
    May wasn’t on the stairs or at the bottom of the unroofed well. I called, “May!” sharply.
    My voice filled the well. There was no answer. The short hairs on the back of my neck came alive and began to crawl. I walked three steps down the stairs. As my foot touched the fourth stair, the light over the door went out. Then the indirect light in the well. Then the light shining against the opaque glass behind me. Squeezing me in darkness. As if someone was pulling the circuits in the fuse box, one by one.
    I slipped my gun from my pocket and stood with my left foot lower than my right, my back pressed to the wall, trying to see by starlight. I heard a door open in the bottom of the well, but I couldn’t see anyone.
    “You, down there,” I called hoarsely. “Answer, or I’ll shoot!”
    The only sound was the shrill of the cicadas and the tree frogs outside the screen door. I stayed with my back against the wall, trying to spot a deeper blob of black in the blackness of the well. I couldn’t. A cloud had sailed over the moon and there wasn’t enough starlight.
    I was afraid to call again. Sweat beading my face, I unlaced one of my shoes, the simple ritual taking a long time. Then the gun in my hand lifted, ready to shoot at the fire flash, I tossed the shoe into the well.
    There was a thud of leather on flagging. Nothing more. No one shot at the shoe.
    I waited a long moment. Then I slipped out of my other shoe and crept down the stairs in my socks, afraid for myself, but more afraid for May.
    I tried to see through the dark. I couldn’t. I could look up and see stars, but the bottom of the well was filled with thick, hot night. And fear.
    My hand was so wet with sweat I was afraid I’d drop the gun. I could hear the pound of my heart. My breathing bothered me. It was a dead giveaway. I was breathing entirely too loud. You couldn’t miss it.
    Whoever had been at the bottom of the well wasn’t there any more. He had climbed the lefthand stairs, crossed in front of the opaque doors and was now on the stairs behind me, breathing in my ears.
    I turned on the stairs, too late. The blow smashed my head into the wall. The gun flew out of my hand and over the wrought-iron railing. I heard the butt crash on the flagging below.
    An explosion rocked the well. Lead whined around the wall.