Outside, the branches of the oak tree in my front yard brushed up against the small bedroom window. If someone wanted to do so, they could readily climb the tree and enter the house that way. But that window, too, was locked. I had learned my lesson that I only had to be careless once.
And then there was the master bedroom.
I stood in the doorway, hesitating to go inside. When I turned on the overhead light, it flickered, then popped and went out. I swore. I’d need to get Darrell to replace the bulb for me. With no light, I couldn’t see into the shadows. I could cross the carpet to the bathroom and turn on the light there, but the distance across the bedroom felt like miles. A prickling chill of fear went up my back. Darkness was behind me, darkness in front of me.
“Hello?”
I said it out loud, softly, tentatively. There was no answer. Of course not. But what I did hear made me clench my fists until my nails bit into my skin. The wind screeched, wailing like a skeleton trapped in a grave.
It was wind through the crack of an open window.
My legs wouldn’t move. I was frozen where I was. I could have stayed in that doorway forever.
You’re imagining things. You left the window open.
That was what I told myself. I liked cold air at night, and I liked waking up to the chill of the house in the fall. No one could get in there without a lot of trouble. The second-floor window looked out on the backyard, and there were no trees nearby. The only thing on the house wall was a drainpipe, and it would have taken an itsy-bitsy spider to climb up that water spout.
I went to the window. Yes, it was open, just by an inch or two. I threw it wide open and stuck my head out into the breeze, which carried nothing but quiet rain. The yard itself was dark, backing up to the woods. I couldn’t see anything. I closed the window again, but this time I made sure it was shut, and I locked it.
I’d opened it myself last night. I’d simply forgotten to shut it when Darrell woke me up in the early morning. That was the answer.
Wasn’t it?
I went to the bathroom. Brushed my teeth. With the light on, I checked the bedroom closet, to be sure no monsters were hiding there. I didn’t look under the bed, because once I was down on my hands and knees, I didn’t think I could stand up again. However, just to be sure, I found an old tennis ball in my nightstand drawer and rolled it under the bed frame. It came out the other side and bounced against the wall.
No one was there.
I knew what was wrong with me. It was Ajax. The body. The murder. The Ursulina. That was what had me alarmed. That was the bad moon rising.
Even so, I took no chances. When I closed the bedroom door, I took a chair from my makeup table and dragged it across the carpet and wedged it under the doorknob. No one could get in without making a hell of a noise. I also found my handgun on the closet shelf. I always kept the gun loaded and ready. Just in case. For months in the winter and spring, I’d slept with it under my pillow, but sometime during the hot summer, I’d felt confident enough to let it stay in the closet.
Not tonight.
I put it under my pillow again. With that protection in place, some of my anxiety began to ease. I felt a little foolish for letting my imagination run wild.
I began to get undressed. I took off my maternity blouse and bra and threw them into the laundry basket, and I let my oversize jeans fall to the floor, where I stepped out of them. In the closet, I found one of my nightshirts, sized like a bedsheet, and draped it over my body. The flannel was cool and loose.
All that was left were my socks, which always presented the biggest challenge, both on and off. I sat down on the bed and reached for my trusty yardstick, which I slid between my ankle and my left sock. I peeled it off and flicked it in the general direction of the laundry basket. I did the same with my right sock, but it stuck to the end of the yardstick and refused to be flicked. So I retrieved it with my hand.
That was when I noticed something odd.
The bottom of the sock was wet. I hadn’t realized it before, hadn’t noticed the dampness on my foot.
Why was my sock wet?
Yes, I’d gone outside, but the covered porch was dry.
I stared at the bedroom window again.
The rain had been blowing in while I was asleep in the living room. I’d stepped on the wet carpet while I was looking out at the backyard. I pushed myself off the bed and went to the window, and I let out a tiny sigh of relief when I confirmed that the carpet below the sash was damp.
I could even trace the path of my wet footsteps leading to the bathroom and then to the bedroom door, where I’d secured it with the chair.
My footsteps. No one else’s.
I should have left it at that, but I was curious like a cat. I went to the bedroom door and pushed the chair aside, and I opened the door to stare into the cold black maw of the rest of the house. The wooden frame groaned. That was the effect of the wind rattling the walls.
Wasn’t it?
No one was here. I was alone.
I made sure my bare foot was dry. Then I stretched out my toes and slid them along the carpet in front of the bedroom door. To my horror, they came away wet. The carpet outside the room was wet. Damp the way it would be if someone had tracked wet shoes from inside the bedroom.
I closed the door and put the chair back in place under the doorknob.
I got into bed and left the bathroom light on. That night, I kept the gun not under the pillow but in my hand.
I didn’t sleep at all.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Two nights later, I had dinner with Darrell and his family at the 126. It was all-you-can-eat fried chicken night, and hot, greasy chicken legs were one of the more normal things I’d been craving lately.
Ever since my father died, Darrell had sort of adopted me. He’d always treated me like a daughter, but he seemed to make it official at that point. His oldest was just a few years younger than me — she was twenty-four — and he had two younger girls, one who was eighteen, one who was sixteen. I felt honored that they included me as part of their family, since I didn’t really have a family myself. But I also felt guilty, because Darrell had other things to worry about. His wife, Marilyn, was in her early fifties, but it only took one look to realize she wasn’t doing well. She’d been battling lung cancer for two years, and the disease was winning. She was rail thin and pale, and her curly black hair had been replaced by a wig. I could see in Darrell’s face, in his forced smile, that he knew what the future held. He was a strong man, but losing a spouse could bring the strongest of men to their knees.
I didn’t want to add to their burden with any worries of my own, so I pretended as if nothing was wrong with me. We ate chicken, and we laughed. The 126 was a madhouse, as it usually was, raucous and rough. Here, even the best of friends were one bad joke away from a fistfight. The A-Team played on the television over the bar, but no one could hear it, because the jukebox blasted “A View to a Kill” so loudly that you had to shout at the person next to you. There was new artwork on the wall, a huge painting of The Last Supper with Jesus and the Apostles smoking cigarettes and drinking pitchers of beer. Some of the local churchgoers had complained, but at the 126, nobody cared.
I knew everyone there. Norm and Will played rotation at one of the pool tables. Ruby sat at a corner table with her high school friends, her face hard and drawn. Ben Malloy was back in town, going from table to table to talk up his new Ursulina special. The show was scheduled for a prime time debut on the Saturday after Halloween, and Ben had a big party planned at the 126 for the whole town to watch. Everyone was invited. He’d announced a cash prize for the best Ursulina costume, which meant the event was going to be a monster mash.