Chapter Twenty-Six

Darrell dropped me back home after dark. I was exhausted, and although I hadn’t told him, I was having sharp pains in my belly as well as a constant dull ache in my lower back. I didn’t know if I was experiencing premature labor pains or if it was something else. Maybe it was just the stress of the day. I went inside and turned on the lights, and then I kicked off my shoes and settled into the living room sofa to see if the pains went away. In a few minutes, they did. I began to feel better.

I thought about putting on a record, or playing my guitar, but at that moment, I didn’t want to do anything that involved getting off the sofa. I was able to reach the phone, and I wondered for the thousandth time about calling Tom Ginn to tell him about my pregnancy. But no. If I heard his voice, I’d want to see him again. I’d probably fall in love with him again. As tempting as that was, there were too many complications to let it happen.

The house was warm. Or maybe it just felt that way to me, because my metabolism was out of whack. The heat and the tiredness of the day made my eyes blink shut. My head fell back against the sofa cushions, and I slept. I had disturbing dreams of being ten years old again, of running through the woods with an invisible monster in the darkness behind me. I kept calling for help, from my father, from my brother, from Darrell, from Tom. No one came to rescue me. I woke up with a start just as I felt the beast’s claws on my skin.

The house was definitely not warm anymore. My unreliable furnace had gone out while I slept. I sat on the sofa, trembling with chill. I checked my watch and saw that I’d missed the whole evening. It was just after midnight.

Around me, something felt wrong. I didn’t know what it was. Call it an instinct. A sensation of dread, as if my nightmare had followed me into real life. Except when I studied the room, I saw nothing to explain it. Everything looked the same.

But something was different.

What?

I struggled my way off the sofa and stood up. Outside, the street was dark. My neighbors were asleep. A fall rain had begun, and the wind blew wet leaves from the big oak tree onto the windows. I checked to make sure that the windows were locked, which they were. I still did that every day, part-habit, part-precaution. I always kept the front door locked, too.

Or had I forgotten tonight?

I returned to the foyer and checked. The door was locked, as it should have been. I opened it and stepped onto the covered porch in my stockinged feet. The rain made a gentle, steady music on the overhang and in the street beyond. The rain on fall nights could last for hours. I listened. I eyed the shadows. I smelled the air for something other than peaty dampness, like a cigarette, or car exhaust, or gasoline. But the entire neighborhood felt normal, a night like any other.

Inside, I locked the door again, but my nervousness refused to go away. If anything, it grew worse. I went to each of the downstairs rooms and checked the other windows, but they were locked, too. So was the door to the backyard. The basement had a dead bolt that was undisturbed, and when I put my ear to the door, I heard nothing. It seemed impossible that anyone could have gotten inside without me being aware of it. And yet that was what I felt.

A presence.

I switched off the downstairs lights and went upstairs. There were only two bedrooms. The smaller room was where I put everything that didn’t fit in the rest of the house, so it was a mess. Eventually, I had plans to make it into your room, but for the time being, you were going to stay in the master bedroom with me. I already had a crib in the corner, and people had been giving me clothes and supplies for weeks.

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.