Ethan slipped quietly into the house. The living room remained still and dark, the only light coming from down the hall.
He crept toward the hall, avoiding the spots of the floor he knew creaked under the carpet. Light poured out of Graham's wide open doorway. The contrast of the darkness in the hall with the blazing light from the bedroom strained Ethan's eyes.
The refrigerator in the kitchen snapped and hummed to life. A clock in the family room ticked away seconds, the sound like a metronome echoing through the stillness.
If he could hear the clock, shouldn't he be able to hear someone in the bedroom? A shuffled foot on the carpet? A congested breath? Even some unconscious buzz of another presence? The silence almost demanded such a sign, yet Ethan heard nothing but the sounds of the slumbering house—the fridge, the clock, the breathy moan of the furnace coming to life in the basement.
He continued down the hall. His palms sweat. He realized he'd even quit breathing, his head buzzing so that he had to stop at the doorway and ease a breath into his lungs, straining against the urge to gasp.
Once he had steadied his breathing, Ethan peered into the bedroom, his heart a thrumming subwoofer in his chest.
Empty.
He exhaled and leaned against the doorjamb, shaking his head. He'd done a good job of spooking himself.
He laughed and started back down the hall to give Graham the all clear when something clanged beneath the floor.
The basement.
Ethan's heart kicked, and all that tension reacquainted itself with every nerve ending in his body. He caught his breath and listened for another sound. He couldn't be sure, but he thought he heard movement almost directly under the floor where he stood.
Now what? This was more than his imagination. Someone was in the house. Call the cops? Confront the intruder himself?
Ethan touched the pocket of his jeans that held his cell phone. The square bulge held little comfort for him. After all the shit the cops had given him, and now he was going to call them over to his house?
That opened up a whole new issue.
What if Graham did have something to do with Alison's murder? What if there was something in the house that might incriminate him? The odds seemed slight, but did he really want to invite police into his home and give them the excuse to search through his things? He knew someone like Staver would take advantage of such a situation.
Another sound came from below, like something scraping against the concrete floor. The basement was unfinished, and Ethan used it primarily for storage and doing the laundry. The best he could tell, it sounded like someone was pushing around boxes down there.
Someone was going through his things? In the basement?
Anything of real value sat in the family room and Ethan's own bedroom. TVs, a DVD player, a stereo system, the cash tucked in a sock and shoved in the back of the bottom dresser drawer. The junk downstairs consisted mostly of sentimental artifacts. Old photographs, knickknacks picked up on vacations and road trips, toys left over from Graham's and Alison's toddler years.
Ethan looked to the floor as if he could see through to whoever invaded his basement.
Another sound, a box tipping over and spilling its contents perhaps.
He crept back down the hall, extra careful with each step because if the intruder stopped his rummaging, he would certainly hear the floorboards groaning above him.
By the time Ethan reached the stairwell to the basement, silence once again owned the house. The clock continued to tick, but the fridge had pumped its necessary cold and now rested. Even the furnace had completed its warm exhale and waited for the thermostat to tell it when to breathe again.
Ethan leaned an ear toward the stairwell, but heard nothing. However, a faint glow from the base of the stairs tickled the shadows on the landing. The intruder had a light on beyond view from the stairwell.
Ethan stepped from the kitchen into the mudroom and peered down the stairs. A host of angled shadows swept across the visible basement floor, cut only by the light emanating from the left side, opposite the laundry area. That would be the corner where Ethan had stacked his storage boxes on metal shelves.
Right before Ethan put his foot on the first step down, he heard another sound from below, a quick flap like the turning of a page.
Ethan froze. Waited.
Another flip, followed by a low chuckle.
Had to be some psycho going through his things down there. Ethan couldn't even begin to guess the type of person that would break into a home, raid old junk, and laugh about it. The guy had to be mad.
With a new sense of the situation, Ethan backed into the kitchen and took a blade from the butcher's block on the counter. Gripping the hilt in his right hand, he aimed the blade in front of him, ready to thrust, and crept into the stairwell and descended into the basement.
Each tiled step made Ethan cringe as it creaked underfoot. He listened for any hint that the intruder sensed his approach, but his blood pulsed in his ears so loudly he couldn't trust his hearing.
He wanted to charge ahead, get this over with, but held back the urge. If the intruder was at all dangerous, Ethan would rather surprise him before he had a chance to fight back.
By the time he reached the bottom of the stairs, his legs ached from the careful stepping, and his knife arm trembled, the blade's tip cutting little circles in the air before him. The plastic hilt felt soft from the heat of his palm and the sweat greased between his fingers.
The wall of the stairwell blocked Ethan's view of the basement's lighted corner. He would have to take two more steps to come around the stairwell and see back to where the intruder lingered.
His next move would depend on how far back in the basement the intruder stood. The basement wrapped around both sides of the stairwell in a U-shape, the back wall sat about twenty yards from the foot of the stairs. Ethan had metal shelves lining the back wall and a section of the outside wall of the stairwell.
It was possible Ethan would peek around the corner and come face-to-face with the intruder. It was equally possible that the intruder hung by the shelves in the back. If he was rummaging through those shelves, that would put his back to Ethan, but it would also put a good deal of open space between them for Ethan to sneak across.
He thought about Graham waiting in the car. If Ethan botched this, that would leave Graham vulnerable. Again, he considered calling the police.
He adjusted his grip on the knife.
The intruder was obviously caught up in whatever he had found among Ethan's things. Even if Ethan couldn't cross the distance between them without detection, his sudden presence would take the man off guard. Ethan would still have the initiative.
He took the first step, his body making the decision before his mind. Rather than stepping immediately out into the open, he leaned forward, bracing himself with his free hand on the railing inside the stairwell. He kept the knife ready at his side and peeked around the corner.
The intruder sat on a box he had pulled from one of the shelves, facing toward Ethan. He flipped through a spiral-bound notebook, reading, but he must have glimpsed movement in his periphery because he immediately looked up and spotted Ethan peeking around the corner.
The intruder smiled. “You wrote poetry?”
Years had passed since Ethan last saw this man, but his voice was unmistakable. Ethan staggered out from cover of the stairwell, gaping at his old friend and former brother-in-law.
Lazaro's eyes flicked down. “What's with the blade?”
Ethan looked at the knife in his hand. “I thought you were an intruder.” He shook his head. “You are an intruder. What the hell are you doing breaking into my house, going through my things?”
“Killing time waiting for you.” Lazaro folded the cover of the notebook back and stood, waving the pad in Ethan's direction. “This is some jacked up shit you got written in here.”
“I don't know why you're here, Laz, but I'd like you to leave.”
“Jeeze, man. You have gotten cold. Rain was right.”
“That's what this is about, huh? She send you over here to give me shit for what I said to her?”
“No, man. She didn't want me coming anywhere near you. I came on my own.”
Ethan lifted the knife slightly. “I don't want any trouble.”
Lazaro put a hand over his heart. “I come in peace, bro. I swear to you.”
“You'll have to forgive me if I find that hard to believe, seeing as you broke into my home.”
“I didn't hurt nothing.”
“You got me and my kid shaken up pretty good.”
“Graham? Is he upstairs?”
“He's outside, waiting in the car because we thought we had a burglar.”
“I didn't gank a thing.”
“That's not the point, Laz.” He didn't bother trying to explain. Sometimes Lazaro did things, no thought behind it whatsoever. Try to corner him, get a reason for his behavior, and Ethan was liable to end up having to use the knife after all.
“What do you want?”
“I'm visiting.”
“Visiting?”
“Rain told me she saw you and got me thinking about old times.”
Old times. Like they used to hang out at the malt shop after school or sneak into R-rated movies rather than boost cars and shake down kids at school for their lunch money.
“Last I heard, you did time.”
He shrugged. “Short stint. Nothing serious.”
“What'd you do?”
“I don't even remember. Look, you want to give me a beer and we'll chat upstairs? Bring the kid in?”
“I'm in no mood to chat. Not with you.”
“Thought you broke up with Rain, not me. Just 'cause I'm her brother don't mean we can't still be friends.”
“That has nothing to do with it, and you know it.” Although Ethan wasn't so sure Lazaro did know it. Ethan would never make the mistake of labeling Lazaro as stupid. He had seen the man use his wits to get out of some of the tightest spots. Still, Lazaro tended to create his own reality, ignoring what he didn't want to acknowledge and drawing his own conclusions based on a crooked logic only Lazaro himself could decipher.
“Look, I'm sorry I broke in. I thought it would be kinda funny, you know? And I didn't want to wait out in the cold. I didn't know when you'd get back.”
Ethan didn't bother arguing that Lazaro could have called first, or come back later. He stayed on message to make sure Lazaro knew he was serious.
“Time to go, Laz.”
He turned around and headed upstairs without waiting to see if Lazaro followed, but heard Lazaro's footsteps on the stairs behind him.
Ethan returned the knife to the butcher block and continued on to the front door. He was about to turn to further encourage Lazaro's departure, but the sight of the empty driveway stopped him.
He stepped outside, gaping at where he had left the car. He staggered to the driveway and looked up toward the garage to see if, for some reason, Graham had pulled the car up.
He hadn't.
Ethan looked both ways along the street, saw a number of vehicles parked along the curb, but no sign of his own.
Behind him, the storm door creaked open and slammed shut.
“Where's the kid?” Lazaro asked from the porch.
“I don't believe this.” Ethan shuffled to the end of the driveway like a reanimated corpse searching for its lost grave. “He stole my car.”