“Then what is it about?” Kevin asked. He eased his right foot inside the door and stepped fully into the house. As he did, the man pulled Virginia Ayers an equivalent distance back down the hallway. The intruder was being careful to maintain a safe distance from Kevin, a precaution that struck Cait as utterly unnecessary. As long as that razor-sharp blade remained pressed to Virginia’s throat, there was nothing Kevin or anyone else could do. It would take but one flick of the man’s wrist and Cait’s mother would bleed out within minutes.
“What is it about? It’s about her,” he answered, directing the business end of the knife at Cait for just a second. At that moment she thought it looked more like a dagger than a knife.
“Cait?” Kevin answered in surprise. It was clearly not what he had expected to hear.
“That’s her name? Cait? What a pretty name. A pretty name for a pretty girl. A pretty, bad girl. A pretty, bad girl who’s going to suffer.”
In that instant everything clicked in Cait’s mind. The phone call on the plane. Her mother’s sudden, unexpected change of heart. The plea to return immediately. The man had been here, brandishing his knife, injuring her fingers badly enough to make them bleed, forcing her to bring Cait and Kevin back here. What she didn’t understand was why.
Kevin continued to move slowly and unthreateningly forward until he stood next to Cait. She knew he was trying to place his body between her and the lunatic with the knife, partly to put himself in a position to help Virginia, but mostly to remove Cait from as much of the danger as possible. “What has Cait done that requires her to suffer?” He kept his tone conversational, like two neighbors discussing the weekend’s football matchups.
The man shook his head. “Step away from the door and close it behind you. There’s no need for the entire neighborhood to witness our little get-together, not that anyone’s out there to see it anyway.”
Kevin once again took Cait’s elbow, this time moving her one step to the left. He reached back with his foot and pushed the door shut. It closed with a thunk of finality and she knew this was going to be bad. This was going to be very bad.
CHAPTER 36
Maizie Adams had lived in Everett her entire life, the last forty-five years of it right here in Granite Circle. She had moved in when the neighborhood was still nearly brand-new, buying the only house she would ever own with her husband Roger, a printing press operator at the Boston Globe.
Roger had worked long hours, doing the dirty, messy work of putting out a newspaper back in the days when each page was laid out by hand, decades before the process was simplified by the advent of computer programming. In those days it took a team of professionals hours to get it right. Roger would come home exhausted in the middle of the night while the rest of the city slept, his hands and arms stained with ink halfway up to the elbow, the day’s edition ready to go.
Then he suffered a massive stroke and, unable to work, found himself relegated to the Barcalounger in the cramped living room, oxygen tank at his side, a once-proud man slipping farther and farther into depression, his life eventually flickering out one night while Maizie slept on the couch next to him.
“Natural causes,” the doctor had called it, but Maizie recognized that diagnosis for what it was: a steaming pile of crap. Roger had given up on living, unable to do the job he loved, unable to provide for the woman he loved, unable to find the will to continue breathing.
Maizie buried her husband and then soldiered on alone, missing him but knowing he was better off now, wherever he was. She took a job for the first time in her life, working for a short while as a medical transcriptionist, eventually quitting when she came to the realization she had no real use for the money she was earning. Roger’s pension from the Globe, along with the small annuity from some long-ago investments, was more than enough to heat the house and buy the groceries and pay the property taxes. Maizie didn’t need any more than that.
Now in her early eighties, Maizie Adams’s days were mostly spent puttering around her house, watching her soaps and cleaning. Rare was the day when the carpet wasn’t vacuumed at least three times, the dishes weren’t washed after every meal, and the furniture went undusted.
She also maintained a healthy interest in the comings and goings of her neighbors. None of the other houses were occupied by the same people who had lived in them back in 1968, when the Adamses had moved in; in fact, most of the homes in Granite Circle had been sold several times over as families moved into these starter homes, made their mortgage payments for a few years, and then moved up to bigger and more expensive places in bigger and safer neighborhoods.
But none of that mattered to Maizie. In fact, in some ways she thought it was good. New families meant new routines to observe, new quirks to discover, new people with whom to familiarize herself.
For example, Victoria Ayers, in Number Seven, the house located directly across the circle from Maizie’s, had been living in her home since 1983, and she was a strange case. Her husband was long gone, having died in a suspicious manner—Maizie suspected he may have killed himself, but wasn’t sure—close to a quarter-century ago, and Victoria was nearly as reclusive as Maizie herself, although somewhat younger. She didn’t look younger, Maizie thought, but she was.
Maizie could count the number of times Victoria had received guests since her husband died on one hand, which made the last two days’ flurry of activity so noteworthy. Yesterday a young couple had visited, arriving by taxicab and spending a couple of hours inside the house. Then they had left after a strained exchange on the front porch. Maizie’s eyesight was failing rapidly, along with most of her other senses, but the awkwardness of their departure had been clear even to her, watching from her living room at least a hundred feet across Granite Circle.
Then, today, a young man had arrived, pulling into the driveway in his own car, knocking on the door and entering the house after a short conversation. Maizie had been watching closely and darned near called the police then. She would have sworn the young man had half forced his way in, sticking his shoe in the doorway and pushing his way inside like a bull in a china shop.
She had almost called the police, but not quite. The whole thing happened so quickly and was over so fast that she immediately began to question what she had seen. After all, her eyesight wasn’t what it used to be and although Everett could be a dangerous city at times, especially if you didn’t know where you were going and ended up in the wrong section of town, this neighborhood was pretty safe most of the time.
So Maizie had let it go, ignoring the feeling of unease worming its way through her intestines, blaming it on the undercooked chicken breast she had eaten for lunch. But then, just a few minutes ago, the couple from yesterday had shown up again. Three separate callers in two days!
One caller was practically unheard of for Virginia Ayers, but three? Never. Something was definitely going on.
And things had only gotten more perplexing. The front door swung open wide at their arrival and Maizie was certain she had seen the young man who had (maybe) forced his way inside standing behind the door, in the shadows of the hallway, like he was trying to stay out of sight. Then the young couple had stood at the door for a few seconds before beginning to back away. They had suddenly changed their minds and entered. Then the door had slammed closed.