26

Hiding in the bathroom, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, Amity felt stupid and inadequate and scared. Snowball must have sensed her fear, for he shivered continuously as she held him in her cupped hands.

The key to everything lay on the counter beside the nearby sink, and she wasn't going to let the adventurous mouse anywhere near it.

"This is all because of you," she told him, though she knew that was unfair. One of the good things about a mouse was that he wasn't as perceptive as a dog; he didn't know when you were unjustly chastising him or that you were chastising him at all.

In fact, this was entirely her fault, really and truly, because she had wanted to see her mother and have a chance to bring Michelle back to this world. If she could have done that—wow—it would have been like raising Lazarus, except that her mother wasn't dead like Lazarus, and except that Lazarus was a man who was brought back to life with a miracle, while her mother was a woman who would have been brought back by science, not by anyone supernatural. Actually, now that she had a moment to think about it, the Lazarus analogy made no sense, and she felt even more stupid and inadequate because she had entertained it even for a moment.

Her fear was increasing, too, because every second without Daddy was another second in which he might be killed. He was her world. If he died, she couldn't go on, she really couldn't, because what happened to him would be her fault. She wouldn't kill herself or anything like that, because suicide was wrong. She would just become anorexic and wither away, until she was skin and bones, until she was dust that a cold wind would blow into Hell. If Hell existed. She was of two minds about that.

Daddy had been gone almost a minute. Hell was right here. She'd already spent almost a minute in Hell.