“Isn’t that Miss Kent?” Bennis asked uncertainly.
Geraldine Dart looked suddenly scared to death. “Yes, that is Miss Kent,” she said in a panicky voice. “But I don’t understand—”
“Ger—al—dine,” Tasheba Kent sang out again.
Geraldine Dart rushed out of the room, dropping the flashlights as she went. Gregor followed her. He was followed in turn by the rest of them, led by Bennis. Gregor stopped in the foyer and looked up the stairs. Tasheba Kent had come about a third of the way down from the second floor, and she was still coming. She was dressed in a royal purple negligee with ruffles down the front and royal purple slippers. Her black wig had been pulled haphazardly over her white hair so that it looked like some kind of a lunatic hat. Geraldine Dart seemed frozen at the foot of the stairs. Gregor Demarkian didn’t think he had ever seen anyone look that green.
“Ger—al—diiiiiiiiine,” Tasheba Kent sang out in a long wailing hum.
Then she blinked, and seemed to shrivel. Then she fell. At first she just collapsed against the steps and stayed put. Then she started to roll.
“Oh, my God,” Geraldine Dart said. “Oh, my God. She’s going to break her neck.”
Gregor Demarkian was running for the stairs before he knew it. So was Kelly Pratt. They pushed Geraldine Dart out of the way and bounded up toward Tasheba Kent. They reached out to stop the old woman rolling. She slipped past their hands and went slamming into their legs. Kelly Pratt lost his balance and staggered backward. Gregor had to twist himself into knots to keep his place. He reached out to stop the top half of Tasheba Kent’s body from rolling any farther down the stairs. The bottom half of her was braced against his legs. He got her by the head and felt her wig come off in his hands. Then he reached out and grabbed her again, and this time he got what was left of her skull.
What was left of her skull.
Gregor dropped Tasheba Kent’s head and stepped back a little. Geraldine Dart started to scream.
“Oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God,” Geraldine Dart said.
Gregor leaned down and turned Tasheba Kent’s head over, so that he could get a better look at what had happened to her.
As far as he could tell, someone had taken a large round heavy object and caved in the entire left side of her head.
PART 2
The Demonology of Ice Cream
CHAPTER 1
1
GREGOR KNEW HE HAD been wrong, terribly wrong, about everything that was going on in this house. It had all seemed so simple, and now this woman was lying against his legs, bloody and dead, and nothing made any sense at all. Outside, he could hear the wind. It was whistling through the roof gutters and making windows rattle. Inside, Mathilda Frazier had started crying in a low, steady, unrelentless way. Bennis Hannaford was patting her ineffectually on the back and looking helpless.
Gregor stepped away from the body. It had come to rest. It wasn’t going to roll anymore.
“The first thing we need to do,” he said in a calm, measured voice, “is to find a phone.”
“Right,” Kelly Pratt burst in. “That’s what we need. We need the police.”
“But we’re not going to be able to get the police over here tonight,” Geraldine Dart objected. “The storm will make it impossible.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kelly Pratt snapped. “It’s not much of a storm at all.”
Mathilda Frazier began to cry harder. “It’s just like she said before. It doesn’t have to be much of a storm. All you need is a little rain and wind, and then you’re trapped.”
“Could we at least have some more light in here?” Gregor asked.
This, it turned out, was easy. The chandelier at the top of the stairs was on a dimmer and could be turned up. There were bracket lights on the wall next to the rising staircase. When these were turned on, Gregor knelt down next to the body. He was not a pathologist. There could be a hundred things here he was bound to miss because he didn’t know what to look for. He knew he had to look now, as closely as he could, because if he didn’t he might not be allowed to look once the police arrived on the scene. Even without being a pathologist, the situation looked relatively simple. The crater on the side of Tasheba Kent’s head was at least three inches in diameter and irregularly shaped. Gregor guessed it had been made by a golf club or something like it, with a long handle for leverage and a round thick metal or wooden piece at the end.
A check of Tasheba Kent’s body and face revealed little. The one really disturbing thing was the wig. The old woman had taken her makeup off before she went to bed. There were no bright red and black blotches anywhere on her wrinkled face. Even the blood in the crater was going dirty brown. Underneath the wig, Tasheba Kent’s hair was thick but very white, with that tinge of hard dark yellow the hair of old people sometimes gets. The wig, though. Gregor tapped his fingers against the stair rail, bothered. The wig just did not make sense.