What the Night Knows by Dean Koontz

from a wall rack, he hung his raincoat on a hook.
    Now that he was home, where life made sense and the madness of the world did not intrude, the events at the Lucas place seemed to have been dreamed more than experienced. He reached into his sport-coat pocket, half expecting the tiny silver bells would not be there.
    As his fingers found the small box from Piper’s Gallery, three knocks and three more issued from the farther end of the garage, from beyond the parked cars. Sharp, insistent, the rapping knuckles of an impatient visitor at a door.
    In spite of fluorescent panels, shadows swagged here and there. None moved or resolved into a figure.
    Directly overhead, the rapping came again. John looked at the plastered ceiling, startled—then relieved. Just air bubbles knocking through a copper water line, rattling the pipe against a joist.
    From a pocket of the hanging raincoat, he retrieved the six cookies that Marion Dunnaway had presented to him in a OneZip bag.
    He unlocked an inside door and stepped onto the landing at the foot of the back stairs. The lock engaged automatically behind him.
    The door at the top opened on Nicolette’s large studio. Working on a painting, her back toward him, she didn’t know he had arrived.
    Girlishly slim, brown hair almost black and tied in a ponytail, barefoot, wearing tan jeans and a yellow T-shirt, Nicky worked with the litheness and physical charm of a dancer between dances.
    John smelled turpentine and under it the fainter scent of stand oil. On a small table to the right of Nicky, from an insulated mug, the aromas of black tea and currants rose on ribbons of steam.
    The same table supported a vase of two dozen so-called black roses that were in fact dark red, darker than a corrupted vermilion pigment in the process of reverting to a black form of mercuric sulfide. The striking flowers had no scent that he could detect.
    When painting, Nicky always kept roses nearby, in whatever color her mood required. She called them humility roses, because if she became too impressed with any canvas on her easel—which could lead to a sloppiness born of pride—she needed only to study a rose in full bloom to remind herself that her work was a pale reflection of true creation.
    Her current project was a triptych, three large vertical panels, a scene that reminded John of Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street: Rainy Weather , though her painting depicted neither Paris nor rain. Caillebotte’s masterly work was an inspiration for her, but she had her own style and subject matter.
    John liked to watch his wife at moments she thought herself unobserved. When she lacked all self-awareness, her characteristic ease of action and elegant posture were so pure and unaffected that she became the essence of grace, and so beautiful.
    This time, his belief that he had arrived with perfect stealth proved wrong when she said, “What have you been staring at so long—the painting or my ass? Be careful what you answer.”
    “You look so delectable in those jeans,” he said, “it’s amazing you’ve painted something that could be equally mesmerizing.”
    “Ah! You’re as smooth as ever, Detective Calvino.”
    He went to her and put a hand on her shoulder. She turned her head, leaned back, and he kissed her throat, the delicate line of her jaw, the corner of her mouth.
    “You’ve been eating coconut something,” she said.
    “Not me.” He dangled the bag of cookies in front of her. “You could smell them through an airtight seal?”
    “I’m starved. I came up here at eleven, never stopped for lunch. This bitch”—she indicated the triptych—“wants to break me.”
    Occasionally, when a picture proved a special challenge to her talent, she referred to it as either a bitch or a bastard. She could not explain why, in her mind, each painting had a specific gender.
    “A lovely army nurse baked these for the kids. But I’m sure they’ll share.”
    “I’m not so sure, the little fiends. Why are