In a Heartbeat by Elizabeth Adler Page B

side. “I’m driving,” she said, and there was something about the way she said it, a kind of scared urgency, that had Harriet out and into the passenger’s seat before she could even question the safety of a woman with a recent concussion, medicated, and wounded, in charge of a car.
    “Tell me this is a play and I’m acting and you are dreaming and let’s just go home,” she pleaded as Mel whizzed around a traffic circle heading north out of Charleston. “Anyway, where are we going now?”
    “Where d’you think?” Mel put her foot to the metal as she left the traffic behind and hit the beach road. She was in a hurry, she had to see for herself. She had to prove that it had really happened.
    She stomped hard on the brake, though, when the bridge came into view. It was out of the water again, the pavement was cracked and crumbling at the sides, and most of the posts were missing. And there was a large sign that said CAUTION, BRIDGE IMPASSABLE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
    “Well, that’s that,” Harriet said thankfully. This whole thing was getting a little out of hand, and anyhow she wasn’t sure she wanted to go looking for murder victims.
    “No it isn’t.” Mel put her foot down again and rolled onto the flimsy bridge. “I’ve driven across this in worse conditions, and at least this time I’m not in a sixteen-wheeler in a hurricane and I can see what I’m doing.”
    Harriet held her breath, one hand on the door handle, ready to bail out, the other covering her eyes, as Mel maneuvered the little car gently over the bumps and holes. “Just don’t tell me we have to do that again on the way back.” Harriet’s usually forceful voice was weak. “I don’t think I could take it.”
    “Then you’ll just have to swim. This is the only way in and out. Oh, look, there it is. You see, Harr, I was right.”
    Mel’s triumphant yell faded. The
Psycho
house looked immaculate, serene. The tamed ocean lapped sedately at the rocks, and the sun shone. It didn’t look the least bit like Norman Bates’s place.
    “You mean this is it? The House of Horrors.” Harriet laughed in relief. “God, I was expecting Dracula or something.”
    But Mel was already out and up the steps, standing on the porch, her finger on the bell. Harriet got out and leaned against the car, watching her. Waiting.
    Nothing happened, the house was empty. And this time the door was locked.
    “Damn,” Mel grumbled, trying it again. “Damn, damn, gosh darn and drat!”
    Harriet giggled. “Well really, Miss Southern Belle, I don’t think your mama would approve of suchlike cusswords.”
    But Mel was already circling the porch, pressing her nose against the windows, shading her eyes against the reflection with her hands. “This is it,” she yelled, waving an urgent arm for Harriet. “Here’s the room, the library. This is where I saw the body, I remember it exactly. . . .”
    Harriet peered through the window. It looked quite normal to her, nothing out of place, no pools of blood. “So where’s the body, Mel?” she asked finally. “Where is this so-called killer?
Who
is he?”
    “I don’t know.” Mel shook her head, totally bewildered. “I just don’t know. All I know is I’m not crazy, but this will surely drive me crazy if I don’t find out.”
    She slumped onto the porch steps, elbows on her knees, head in her hands, staring at the blacktop driveway over which she had crawled, and from which she had been abducted. She remembered the killer hauling her into the cab, her fighting him, scratching his face, jamming her fingers in his eyes . . . and the brutal blow to her face that had sent her sliding onto the floor of the cab, dopey with pain.
    But not so dopey that she had not heard what he said. “He made a telephone call,” she remembered. “After he hit me, he called someone. He told them Ed Vincent wasn’t there, but he would get him next time.” Her blue eyes rounded with alarm, she grabbed Harriet by the shoulders.