That night, the rain finally started.
It was past seven, and I was alone in the apartment. I heard a thunderclap and went over to the living room window. Looking straight down, I could see drops beginning to hit the pavement, and people walking below opening their umbrellas. Our apartment was on the tenth floor, with a view south of the tops of surrounding buildings and open sky above. Lurid purple clouds hung low and thick in the sky, reflecting the lights of the buildings back at me. It felt claustrophobic, like the clouds might strangle me.
Jason’s secretary had left for the day, and he wasn’t picking up in the office or on his cell. It felt like the days right after the Russian woman had come to the party. He’d promised that was over for good. Was he lying? I’d tried to track his phone, with no success. Maybe he was onto me, and my clever little trick, and he’d somehow disabled my ability to track. Or maybe I was being paranoid, and his cell reception was poor simply because of the storm. I left him a pathetic voicemail, begging him to come home for dinner tonight. I wanted to sit him down and figure out what was really going on, and whether this reconciliation was a masquerade. But he remained stubbornly out of reach.
It was hours since I’d interrupted Hannah with that boy and begged her to call me back soon. But so far, nothing. Could she possibly still be with him? Was she avoiding me because she didn’t want to talk about her sex life with her mother? Or was he a psycho, and had he done something to her? I had to stop myself from imagining the worst. The point was, I had too much on my mind to worry about the weather.
An hour later, the rain pounded against the living room windows so loudly that I looked out again. On the street below, people were running for shelter, their umbrellas turned inside out in the wind. Only then did I take seriously what Lynn had said, and bother turning on the television.
The networks were predicting catastrophe. The reporters, in matching jackets, standing in front of swaying trees in the driving rain, in Virginia, along the Chesapeake, at the Jersey shore, talked in urgent voices. Eighty million people in harm’s way. Category Four and strengthening. Landfall projected in mid-Atlantic region by midnight. Mandatory evacuation orders as far north as Cape May. But they always did that, to pump up the ratings. They’d cried wolf so many times that I couldn’t take it seriously.
Then my next-door neighbor from out at the beach called.
Francine was a complainer, but I always took her calls. I had no choice. She was the sort of person who had no problem calling the zoning board on you, or even the cops, if she felt you weren’t taking her concerns seriously.
“Hello?”
“Caroline, this is your neighbor, Francine Eberhardt.”
“Hello, Francine. Are you okay out there in this awful weather?”
“I am not okay. Your burglar alarm has been going off for the past fifteen minutes, and it’s driving me nuts.”
The alarm going off? But I’d never gotten an alert, and I’d paid the bill in full as soon as Jason put money back into the account.
“It can’t be mine. The security company didn’t call me,” I said.
“It’s yours, all right. I should know. I’m right next door, and it’s shrieking.”
“If it is my house, I apologize. The wind must have set it off,” I said.
“It wasn’t the wind. Someone broke in. The front door is wide open.”
The front door had a dead bolt. Unless I’d left the door unlocked, it couldn’t blow open.
“The lights are on, too,” Francine said.
A cold fear rippled through me.
It couldn’t be the housekeeper. She didn’t have a key. Was it possible that, in my frazzled state of mind, I’d left the house without bolting the door or turning off the lights? I wanted very much to believe that, because the alternative was terrifying. The alternative was, somebody broke in. And that somebody was probably Aidan.
“Is there any way you could check on it for me?”
“I’m not going in there. They might still be inside. Besides, the wind is so strong it would knock me down.”
“I’m sure there’s no one in there. I’d give you my alarm code, so you could turn the alarm off and stop the noise.”
“I said no. I’m battening down the hatches, not stepping outside my door till the storm’s over. If you’re smart you’ll get out here yourself and take care of your property before it’s destroyed. But if you can’t be bothered, at least call the alarm company and have them shut off that awful noise.”
She hung up.
I called the burglar alarm company and sat on hold for ten minutes. When I got through, I was told they hadn’t received any alert but that it was possible the phone lines had been damaged by the storm and weren’t transmitting.
“My neighbor says my front door is open. Can’t you send someone to check?” I demanded.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. We are not dispatching technicians at the moment because of the severity of the storm.”
“Then call the police.”
“Our policy is to relay alarms that we receive to local authorities. We have not received an alarm in this case.”
I threw my phone down in frustration. My dream house, that I’d worked and slaved for, that I’d put blood, sweat, and most of my money into, sat directly in the path of a raging hurricane. The front door was wide open, leaving the house exposed to the elements. I wanted to rush out there and do something about it. But if I did, I could be walking into a trap. I had a strange tingling sensation on the back of my neck that I couldn’t ignore. Sometimes paranoia was justified by the facts. Aidan had been stalking me for days now. It wasn’t crazy to think he’d broken into my house. He might be lurking there right this minute, lying in wait to ambush me. I couldn’t take that risk.
But I could call the police, without ever mentioning Aidan’s name. I’d simply report that the alarm had been triggered. They’d have to believe me. If Aidan was in the house, they’d find him, and they’d have no choice but to arrest him, right?
I found the number for the Glenhampton Police Department and dialed.
“Police dispatch,” a woman’s voice answered.
“I’d like to report a break-in at my house.”
“What’s the address?”
I gave it to her.
“Can you see the intruder?”
“No. I’m not at the house. My neighbor called to tell me my burglar alarm is going off.”
“You are not currently the house?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Is anybody else in there?”
“The burglar.”
“Your neighbor saw this individual break in?”
“Not exactly. She heard the alarm go off, and she says the front door is open.”
“Are there signs of forced entry? Broken windows, or the like?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ve got sustained winds over fifty miles per hour and rising. That could account for the open door and the alarm.”
“Maybe, but shouldn’t somebody check it out?”
“All right. Name of the reporting party, please?”
“Me? I’m Caroline Stark.”
“Ms. Stark, I’m radioing this to all patrol officers so if there’s a car in the area, they can swing by and take a look.”
“Can you send somebody over there right away?”
“Ma’am, all vehicles are busy responding to emergencies related to the storm.”
“But this is an emergency. My house is getting robbed.”
“Property crimes come after emergencies that threaten loss of life. Once the other calls are completed, they will turn to this one.”
“But somebody broke into my house.”
“Ma’am, to set your mind at ease, the majority of calls we get about alarms being triggered are false. You got your animals, the wind, systems malfunction. In all likelihood, this is nothing.”
“Really? That’s funny. I’ve heard there’ve been a ton of burglaries in Glenhampton lately, and the police haven’t made a single arrest.”
“Ma’am, your call was sent out, and now I need to take another call,” the dispatcher said, and hung up.
So much for my tax dollars at work.
My phone lit up, and a message from Hannah appeared on the screen.
Hey sorry I hung up on u before, she wrote.
I wanted to yell at her. I wanted information. Who was the boy? What were his intentions? How were his grades? Did he drink or do drugs? How far had they gone? But I restrained myself. If I acted too eager, she’d shut me down.
That’s okay honey. How was your date? I texted back.
Three little dots appeared. She was answering.
Great, Hannah wrote. We hung out for a long time. He’s a little older. Super sensitive and smart. Oh, and he’s gorgeous, check out this selfie we took.
I smiled. If Hannah was happy, then something was going right in the world.
As the photo loaded, I saw her, sitting on the edge of her bed in her dorm room, with the pink and orange tie-dyed bedspread we’d chosen together that matched her pink and orange throw pillows. The so-called smart, sensitive, older guy sat right beside her, his arm thrown loosely around her shoulders. And my heart stopped.
It was Aidan.