The Menace Within

to bed in her tiny guest room. She said, leaving the door propped wide so that the child could not wake to darkness but only a golden twilight, “They’re all gone, Rosie, they really are.”
And presently, to Justin in the living room, “I know he won’t come back, but will you stay?”
Justin simply looked at her.
Late in the morning, Amanda learned that a button corresponding to the others on Ellie Peale’s bloodied shirt had been disinterred from one of the split seats in Claude Eggen’s van. Astonishingly, he and the man she could never think of as anything but Peter Dickens were half brothers. Had the mere fact of looks been a leverage, growing over the years?
She put that firmly out of her mind, and went with Justin to see her aunt, bringing nightgowns and bed jackets, books and cologne, flowers and liqueur-centered cherries. Mrs. Balsam’s brilliant eyes, no longer burning with messages but absorbed with the process of recovery, went from one face to the other. She still could not manage many sounds, but she said what was unmistakably intended to be, “Good.”
The team of men going meticulously through her house had discovered the trap door to the bomb shelter under the apparently unflawed carpeting in the area described to them. Amanda had firmly declined an invitation to go down the ladder; illogical although she knew it to be, it seemed to her that little wisps of horror might still linger there.
“Shelter?” she said later to Justin, who was scrupulously measuring for glass to be replaced in the patio door. “Shelter?”
Justin studied her, let his steel tape whistle back into place, and clipped on the Afghan’s leash—not easy, because with friends restored she was a silky and importunate bustle. He was aware of the dark breath of last night touching Amanda. He said conversationally, “Do you realize that without even being married yet we have acquired a child and a dog?”
Rosie, still hollow-eyed but engrossed in a banana of which Apple wanted a piece, swiveled her great gaze briefly back and forth.
“Working models only,” said Amanda.