2010
The drive from Bader and Duke Design to my father’s home in Round Hill takes thirty-five minutes and I usually listen to pop music to lift my mood as I drive, but I’m so anxious right now that I forget to turn on the radio. I can’t get “Ann Smith” out of my head. I keep glancing in my rearview mirror to see if I’m being followed. Maybe I returned to work too soon. Took on too much. Maybe the woman is no threat at all and it’s simply that I’ve come to see life itself as a threat. I never feel safe anymore. Worse, I never feel as though the people I love are safe. My dreams, when I can sleep, are filled with blood and death. I know tonight’s dream will be even worse. How am I going to get that bizarre woman out of my head? I shudder when I think of her mentioning Rainie. I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to my daughter.
The police hadn’t seemed all that concerned about “Ann Smith,” but they hadn’t been in the room with the woman. They hadn’t felt her malignant presence, how she seemed to study me from behind her mirrored glasses as though she wanted to memorize every detail of my face. How she knew about Jackson’s death. It would be one thing if she were just some nut threatening to kill someone. Somehow, though, she knew about my life. Did she mention Rainie by name? I don’t think so. I’d remember if she had. But she knows that my daughter and I live in Round Hill and that we’ll soon be moving into the new house at the end of Shadow Ridge Lane. And as if she’d crawled inside my head, she even knew how I feel about the new neighborhood these days: All those trees suck the breath out of you, she said. Yes, that’s exactly right.
I make the left turn onto Round Hill Road, then another left on Painter Lane, and the house I grew up in is ahead on my right. Rainie and I moved in with my father the week after Jackson died as we waited for the Shadow Ridge house to be completed. Most of my high school friends have left Round Hill and the few who remain are busy with their own families. I need Daddy now, the comfort of him, in a way I haven’t since I was a child. The move’s turned out to be a good one for all three of us. Daddy’s been lonely since Mom died, shortly before Rainie was born, and Rainie’s given him a new reason for getting up in the morning. But change is coming. Daddy’s downsizing. He’s selling our old family home and will soon move into a two-bedroom condo on the other side of town. My old house has sold, my furniture moved to storage. And now the new house is ready for Rainie and me. There’s no going back to the way things used to be.
I pull into the driveway of my childhood home and park next to my father’s black pickup. I still miss seeing my mother’s silver Toyota next to his truck. My heart still hurts when I think that she never got to meet her granddaughter. I hate that I can’t call her for advice when Rainie runs a fever or skins a knee. I’m only now getting used to being in our old house without her.
The house is big, baby blue with white trim and a wraparound porch. The perimeter of the yard is dotted with mature dogwoods and redbuds, and in the spring, the beauty is breathtaking. I put aside memories of my mother for now, and my heart rate slows as I lift my briefcase and purse from the passenger seat. Rainie and I are safe here. The red-haired woman said nothing about this house, about knowing that Rainie and I live here right now, so I feel a cocoon of safety surround me as I get out of the car.
I can tell that Daddy mowed the lawn this morning, the wide stripes of green a giveaway. At sixty-seven, he still mows it himself even though he could afford to have someone else do it. He still slithers through the crawl space to check the foundation and gets up on the roof to repair the shingles. I wish he wouldn’t do that. I know now how quickly an accident can happen. He still walks five miles every morning before breakfast, as he did during the thirty years he was Round Hill’s mayor. Even the day after Mom died, he was out there, nodding hello to everyone, stopping only long enough to accept condolences as he made his usual trek through our small town and into the countryside and back again. People like Reed Miller, and he likes them back. He’ll easily make new friends in the condo complex.
I hear yelps of joy coming from the backyard as I quietly close my car door, and I smile to myself as I walk around the side of the house, my mood lifting. Standing silently at the rear corner of the house, I watch Daddy and Rainie in the yard, where he’s spotting her as she climbs the jungle gym. He’s created a veritable playground for her back here, and fortunately the family buying his house was happy to find the jungle gym and swings and sliding board already in place for their own kids.
“Mama!” Rainie suddenly spots me, and Daddy helps her off the jungle gym so she can run to me. She always hugs me as if she hasn’t seen me in days instead of hours and I bend low to wrap my arms around her and breathe in the scent of sun in her hair.
“How was your day, love?” I ask her.
She looks over her shoulder at her grandfather. “Gramps made me Mickey Mouse grilled cheese.”
“Oh, I bet that was delicious!” I rest my hand on her head, on her sun-warmed hair, nearly as dark as mine.
“Can he make it for dinner, too?” she asks, looking up at me with Jackson’s warm brown eyes.
“If he’s willing,” I say. “But we need to have some vegetables with it to make us strong and healthy.”
“Right.” She nods. “Carrots.” The only vegetable she likes.
“Carrots,” I agree.
“Let’s go see the new house when you get home tomorrow afternoon,” Daddy says as we clean the kitchen after dinner. “I know you haven’t felt like going over there, but we really should make sure it’s ready for your furniture to arrive on Saturday. Make sure the workers have taken care of the punch list.”
“Sure,” I say, but my anxiety level climbs another notch at the thought of moving. I remind myself that we’ll be less than two miles away from our safe haven with my father, and once he moves, Rainie will still spend her afternoons with him. The condo complex has a playground and even a pool. We’ll still have dinner with him occasionally. The only change will be that Rainie and I will sleep in the new house. I shudder at the thought of the dark woods. Ours will be the only completed house on the street so far. The construction crew, many of whom knew and respected Jackson, thought they were doing me a favor by working overtime after his death. “A gift for you,” one of them said. The house took my husband from me. It doesn’t feel like a gift.
Daddy knows how I feel. He rests a hand on my shoulder. “It’s going to be fine, Kayla,” he says, and I nod. He thinks I just need time. Maybe I do, but I don’t think I will ever be able to live in the house without thinking These are the windows Jackson special-ordered, or This is the quartzite we argued over and Jackson let me win, or This is the color Jackson chose for the foyer.
“A weird thing happened today,” I say, as I dry the last plate. I speak quietly, although Rainie is in the living room and I can hear her giggling over a video she’s watching. I tell him about the red-haired woman and he frowns when I get to the part about her knowing that Jackson died and that we’re about to move into the house in Shadow Ridge.
“Well,” he says, “a lot of that information was in the paper after the accident.”
“I know, but what does it matter to her? Why did she seek me out? Who does she want to kill?”
“Can it just be that she’s crazy and talking through her hat?” he suggests. “Nothing more than that?”
“It’s even scarier to me if she’s crazy,” I say. “If she’s crazy, there’s no way of predicting what she’ll do.”
He smiles at me with the calmness I usually love about him, but which is bugging me at the moment. I want him to take this seriously. “Well,” he says, “I’ll keep my eyes open and my wits about me. And you do the same.”