The fight to breathe had taken everything out of Bex and she slumped. Her cheeks were flushed, and little prickles of heat and sweat beaded at her hairline.
“You going to be okay, honey?” Denise asked.
Bex nodded. “I think I’m going to take a quick shower.” She glanced at the clock. “Is that okay?”
“Of course it is. Just take it easy, and try to get some sleep.”
Bex turned the water on lukewarm, half-certain that the droplets would sizzle on her fiery skin. Instead, she broke out in gooseflesh, her teeth chattering as she let the water pour over her head for what seemed like hours. When she stepped out of the shower, the house around her was uncomfortably still. She knew it had to be her imagination or the whoosh of her own blood pulsing in her ears, but she swore she could hear Denise’s and Michael’s breathing—a steady in-out, in-out—and it felt like the house breathed with them. The walls pulled closer, then pushed out slightly, the whole house a live entity that gave Bex the creeps.
“I’m safe, I’m safe, it’s okay,” Bex chanted as she slipped into a fresh pair of pajamas, hoping for sleepiness that wouldn’t come.
She pushed her hair back and glanced out the sweeping bay window that overlooked the drive and the street out front. The sky had gone from an inky black to a wistful gray blue, almost promising but still shrouded in shadows. One of those shadows—a twitch from it, actually—caught Bex’s eye. A car was parked across the street, one of those ancient sedans that made her think of old cop movies. It could have been the flick of the streetlight or a trick of the dark, but she thought she could see someone sitting in the driver’s seat.
Bex squinted, expecting her imagination was conjuring monsters.
The light didn’t switch, but the shadow did.
Now she could make out hands resting on the top of the steering wheel and the darkened outline of a baseball cap and wide shoulders in the front seat. The driver was leaning forward, head tilted, looking in Bex’s direction.
She dropped onto her hands and knees, heart thundering in her ears. She stayed like that for a quick beat before peeking up again, just enough to glance out and see that the man—she could tell now that the person was a man—was still looking at her window.
He’s probably just a neighbor, Bex scolded herself. And he probably thinks the Piersons are fostering a lunatic child!
She waited for the soft purr of an engine coming to life, something to tell her that the man sitting in his car had been about to go to work on the graveyard shift when he thought he saw something in the neighbor’s window. He would look again, assume it was nothing, then drive his car away, and Bex could be left with her hammering heart and her paranoia.
The engine didn’t sound.
Bex wanted to shrug off the phantom car, but her subconscious kept replaying a scene.
It was from another time, another place.
The smell of pine and moist earth was overwhelming, and Beth Anne didn’t like the way it tickled her lungs when she breathed deeply. She wouldn’t say anything though. She hadn’t seen her daddy in almost two weeks and he was here with her now, just him and her in the woods. They had driven for what seemed like ages, Beth Anne bouncing on the front seat of her daddy’s pickup truck while they loudly sang along to the old songs Daddy liked to listen to. Crooners, he called them, “the ole’ crooners.”
She liked the way the word sounded on her tongue and she repeated it under her breath, wanting to remember everything about the afternoon when it was just her and him: They had stopped at a diner called the Black Bear that Beth Anne had never heard of and was sure no one would ever find. It was at the end of a long, cracked road but they had served her ice-cold sweet tea, and even though the waitress in her pink uniform was flirting with Daddy, she brought Beth Anne a single, perfectly round scoop of white vanilla ice cream when she hadn’t even asked for it.
The waitress had slipped something to her daddy too, something she put in the palm of his hand and that made him smile in a weird way—not the kind of daddy smile that he flashed at Beth Anne. Afterward her daddy sang louder in his deep, smoky voice, until he cranked that old behemoth truck to a stop so quickly it kicked up dust all the way to the windows.
“We’re here, Bethy.”
Beth Anne looked around, sliding her knees underneath her on the hot vinyl seat so she could get a look around. “What are we doing out here?”
“Come on out and see.”
She pushed open the car door and the heat rushed at her. Humidity clung to the trees and their drooping pale-green leaves. It dampened her hair and the skin behind her ears and seemed to push in on her chest. It wasn’t anything Beth Anne didn’t know though. North Carolina could have heavy heat that clung through the dead of fall.
Her father came around the side of the truck, and Beth Anne’s eyes went wide. He was carrying a shotgun.
“We’re going to go hunting.”
Beth Anne blinked. She didn’t want to hunt. She didn’t want to kill anything, ever, not even the ugly black spiders that crawled through the kudzu or poked through the crack in her bedroom window. But she wouldn’t say anything.
Her daddy took her by the hand and suddenly stopped, pulling her quickly down beside him. She loved being close to him, shoulder to shoulder and sharing something mysterious.
“What are we looking for?”
It seemed like hours had passed and Beth Anne was getting bored. The heat was sticky, and mosquitoes the size of biplanes were slamming into her calves and making her itch.
“I’m bored, Daddy.”
He pressed a finger to his lips and shooshed her. Then, “Hunting isn’t quick work, Bethy. It’s not a dumb man’s game. First, you’ve got to watch and get to know your prey. Watch them where they live. You gotta be so quiet they don’t even know you’re there.”
He jutted his stubbled chin forward and Beth Anne saw where he was looking. There was a tiny shift in the tall fescue grass, something low to the ground that stopped, then shifted again. Beth Anne held her breath, her heart starting to beat.
“What is—?”
“Shh.” He held his finger to his lips. “Just watch. Always watch. Longer than you think you should. That way, they won’t even know you’re coming.” He pulled his gun closer to him, leveling it.
Beth Anne turned her eyes back to the twitch in the grass and lost her breath. A rabbit, not much bigger than one of her stuffed animals, scampered toward the clearing. His nose twitched against his nut-brown fur and he pushed back, standing on his haunches, the fur of his belly a pale, pale brown.
“No, Daddy.” Beth Anne’s protest was so soft she wasn’t even sure if she had said it out loud.
Her daddy cradled the butt of the gun and squinted one eye. “Don’t worry, Bethy. He won’t even know what hit him. He’s doing us a favor, and I promise, it won’t bother him none.”
The entire world slowed down. The rabbit’s ears poked straight up. His nose swished back and forth, the tall grass moving around him like ripples in a puddle. The click of the gun’s safety switching off was as loud as the shot.
“Beth Anne!” Her daddy’s voice roared in her already-ringing ears. Her eyes burned. Her nose was assaulted with the wicked stench of hot metal, of exploded gunpowder.
The gun dropped, flattening the grass, and Beth Anne’s daddy grabbed her hands in his, his palms cool against her singed ones.
“NEVER put your hands on the muzzle of a gun, you hear me? You could have gotten us both killed pushing away like that. What were you thinking? Look at your hands. Look at how red your palms are!”
But Beth Anne wouldn’t look at them. Her eyes were stuck on the rabbit as it scampered safely away.
Bex pressed her forehead against the carpet, trying to push the memory out of her mind. Her father had taken her hunting. Her father had told her that killing that rabbit “wouldn’t bother it none.” Bex shuddered. Did that prove anything? Did that prove her father was a murderer?
“Just watch. Always watch…”
Bex clenched her eyes shut and counted slowly until her breathing was at a normal cadence before pushing herself up and glancing out the window. The sedan was gone; the man watching her from the driver’s seat was gone—so why wasn’t the sickening feeling in her gut?