People who couldn't tell them apart were housed in rooms with padded walls, tended by nurses with fixed smiles and soft voices. Let it in.
She disengaged the lock, turned the knob, hesitated. Let it in.
Exasperated with herself, she yanked open the door. She'd forgotten the stairwell lights would be off. That narrow shaft was windowless, no ambient light leached into it from outside. The red radiance in the bedroom was too weak to cross the threshold.
She stood face-to-face with perfect darkness, unable to tell if anything loomed on the upper steps or even on the landing immediately before her. Out of the gloom wafted the repulsive odor that she'd eradicated two days before with hard work and ammonia water, not strong but not as faint as before, either: the vile aroma of rotting meat.
Maybe she had only dreamed that she'd awakened but was still in the grip of the nightmare. Her heart slammed against her breastbone, her breath caught in her throat, and she groped for the light switch, which was on her side of the door. If it had been on the other side, she might not have had the courage to reach into that coiled blackness to feel for it.
She missed it on the first and second tries, dared not look away from the darkness before her, felt blindly where she recalled having seen it, almost shouted at Toby to wake up and run, at last found the switch-thank God-clicked it. Light. The deserted landing. Nothing.there. Of course. What else?
Empty steps curving down and out of sight. A stair tread creaked below. Oh, Jesus. She stepped onto the landing. She wasn't wearing slippers. The wood was cool and rough under her bare feet. Another creak, softer than before.
Settling noises. Maybe. She moved off the landing, keeping her left hand against the concave curve of the outer wall to steady herself.
Each step that she descended brought a new step into view ahead of her.
At the first glimpse of anyone, she would turn and run back up the stairs, into Toby's room, throw the door shut, snap the dead bolt in place. The lock couldn't be opened from the stairwell, only from inside the house, so they would be safe. From below came a furtive click, a faint thud-as of a door being pulled shut as quietly as possible.
Suddenly she was less disturbed by the prospect of confrontation than by the possibility that the episode would end inconclusively. Needing to know, one way or the other, Heather shook off timidity. She ran down the stairs, making more than enough noise to reveal her presence, along the convex curve of the inner wall, around, around, into the vestibule at the bottom. Deserted. She tried the door to the kitchen.
It was locked and required a key to be opened from this side. She had no key. Presumably, an intruder would not have one, either.
The other door led to the back porch. On this side, the dead bolt operated with a thumb-turn. It was locked. She disengaged it, pulled open the door, stepped onto the porch. Deserted. And as far as she could see, no one was sprinting away across the backyard. Besides, although an intruder would not have needed a key to exit by that door, he would have needed one to lock it behind him, for it operated only with a key from the outside.
Somewhere an owl issued a mournful interrogative. Windless, cold, and humid, the night air seemed not like that of the outdoors but like the dank and ever so slightly fetid atmosphere of a cellar. She was alone.
But she didn't feel alone.
She felt watched… "For God's sake, Heth," she said, "what the hell's the matter with you?" She retreated into the vestibule and locked the door. She stared at the gleaming brass thumb-turn, wondering if her imagination had seized on a few perfectly natural noises to conjure a threat that had even less substance than a ghost.
The rotten smell lingered. Yes, well, perhaps the ammonia water had not been able to banish the odor for more than a day or two. A rat or another small animal might be dead and decomposing inside the wall. As she turned toward the stairs, she stepped in something. She lifted her left foot and studied the floor. A clod of dry earth about as large as.a plum had partially crumbled under her bare heel. Climbing to the second floor, she noticed dry crumbs of earth scattered on a few of the treads, which she'd failed to notice in her swift descent. The dirt hadn't been there when she finished cleaning the stairwell on Wednesday. She wanted to believe it was proof the intruder existed.
More likely, Toby had tracked a little mud in from the backyard. He was usually a considerate kid, and he was neat by nature, but he was, after all, only eight years old.
Heather returned to Toby's room, locked the door, and snapped off the stairwell light. Her son was sound asleep. Feeling no less foolish than confused, she went down the front stairs, directly to the kitchen.
If the repulsive smell was a sign of the intruder's recent presence, and if the slightest trace of that stink hung in the kitchen, it would mean he had a key with which he'd entered from the back stairs. In that case she intended to wake Jack and insist they search the house top to bottom-with loaded guns.
The kitchen smelled fresh and clean. No crumbles of dry soil on the floor, either. She was almost disappointed. She was loath to think that she'd imagined everything, but the facts justified no other interpretation. Imagination or not, she couldn't rid herself of the feeling that she was under observation. She closed the blinds over the kitchen windows. Get a grip, Heather thought. You're fifteen years away from the change of life, lady, no excuse for these weird mood swings. She had intended to spend the rest of the night reading, but she was too agitated to concentrate on a book. She needed to keep busy. While she brewed a pot of coffee, she inventoried the contents of the freezer compartment in the side-by-side refrigerator.
There were half a dozen frozen dinners, a package of frankfurters, two boxes of Green Giant white corn, one box of green beans, two of carrots, and a package of Oregon blueberries, none of which Eduardo Fernandez had opened and all of which they could use. On a lower shelf, under a box of Eggo waffles and a pound of bacon, she found a Ziploc bag that appeared to contain a legal-size tablet of yellow paper. The plastic was opaque with frost, but she could vaguely see that lines of handwriting filled the first page. She popped the pressure seal on the bag-but then hesitated.
Storing the tablet in such a peculiar place was tantamount to hiding it.
Fernandez must have considered the contents to be important and extremely personal, and Heather was reluctant to invade his privacy.
Though dead and gone, he was the benefactor who had radically changed their lives, he deserved her respect and discretion. She read the first few words on the top page-My name is Eduardo Fernandez- and thumbed through the tablet, confirming it had been written by Fernandez and was a lengthy document. More than two thirds of the long yellow pages were filled with neat handwriting. Stifling her curiosity, Heather put the tablet on top of the refrigerator, intending to give it to Paul Youngblood the next time she saw him. The attorney was the.closest thing to a friend that Fernandez had known and, in his professional capacity, was privy to all the old man's affairs. If the contents of the tablet were important and private, only Paul had any right to read them.
Finished with the inventory of frozen foods, she poured a cup of fresh coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and began to make a list of needed groceries and household supplies. Come morning, they would drive to the supermarket in Eagle's Roost and stock not only the refrigerator but the half-empty shelves of the pantry. She wanted to be well prepared if they were cut off by deep snow for any length of time during the winter.
She paused in her listmaking to scribble a note, reminding Jack to schedule an appointment next week with Parker's Garage for the installation of a plow on the front of the Explorer. Initially, as she sipped her coffee and composed her list, she was alert for any peculiar sound. However, the task before her was so mundane that it was calming, after a while, she could not sustain a sense of the uncanny.